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perched on sheer cliffs, around hairpin turns and through tiny villages scattered like pebbles, until the asphalt ends in a bone-rattling path leading ever higher, through the hiding places of mountain goats and wild boar, to the edge of the timberline where the gray slate roofs of Lia become visible nestled among the scrub pine and holm oak of my village.
    Bare light bulbs now hang inside the stone huts, testament to the power lines that reached Lia in 1965, but from the road—another recent incursionof civilization—the village still looks as primitive as the day I walked out of it thirty-three years ago.
    As I drove past the Church of Aghia Paraskevi (St. Friday) on the easternmost boundary of the village, the grizzled shepherds surrounded by their goats and the black-clad grandmothers bent under loads of kindling shouted greetings to me.
    The pleasure of these familiar sights dissolved when I noticed the stooped, white-haired figure of Christos Skevis at work in his yard. In 1948, when my mother and the others were killed, Skevis was one of the villagers who methodically went around to the houses of the victims and stole the last remaining pieces of food from the survivors, among them my fourteen-year-old sister.
    In those climactic days of the war, close relatives and neighbors turned against us. The handful of villagers who had the courage to speak up for my mother at her trial and who tried to console my sister after her execution were not the ones we had always considered our friends. In some cases her defenders were well-known Communists, but they transcended political beliefs and fear for their own safety because they refused to speak against innocent people. But for the most part, our neighbors avoided or betrayed my mother in hope of improving their own chance of survival.
    As I drove toward the central square, I kept hearing over the sound of the car’s engine a phrase that my sister and my father had repeated a hundred times:
“Tin fagane i horiani”
—“It was the villagers who devoured her.” To my family, the Communist guerrillas like Katis were an impersonal act of God, unleashed on our village by war, like a plague. It was our neighbors whom they held responsible for my mother’s death; the villagers who whispered secrets to the security police and testified against her at the trial.
    This was something I had to resolve: perhaps the villagers really were more culpable for her death than the men who passed the sentence and fired the bullets. I wondered if something about my mother incited the people of Lia to offer her up like a sacrificial lamb. Or perhaps the villagers had only been manipulated by the guerrillas, who exploited their moral weaknesses, petty jealousies and fears, because the guerrillas wanted my mother killed for some political purpose. What was the real reason that she was executed?
    The beauty of the village all around me, the familiar tang of wood smoke and the music of goats’ bells in the air, seemed to refute my suspicions. I passed through the square and stopped near the western boundary of Lia. I left the car at the foot of the path that led up the mountain toward our old neighborhood and the Church of St. Demetrios.
    It was August 6, the feast day of the Transfiguration, one of the three times a year when the church was used for a service. As I climbed, I saw elderly worshipers approaching from all directions.
    The sun was high, but inside, the church was dark and filled with shadowyfigures in somber clothing. The gnarled faces and the gold of the ancient carved altar screen shone in the candlelight. I stood for a while outside the church door beneath the cypress trees, listening to the priest’s chanting and the indistinct voice of an old woman who was seated cross-legged next to a recent grave, carrying on a conversation with the dead.
    The door to the ossuary stood open, but I didn’t go in. I knew that none of the answers I needed would be found inside the wooden box