Apartment in Athens (2 page)

Mrs. Helianos' subsequent evocation of the Fates, “the frightful trio,” ties her inexorably to Greek myth and Greek drama, even as it lays the groundwork for her evolution into one of literature's most unlikely heroines, possessed of a resilience, a resourcefulness, and a courage that surprise even her.

The novel may have surprised Wescott as well. Describing his own oeuvre in 1942, he characterized himself as an autobiographical writer, noting:

Considered in retrospect, this cool self-appraisal is as startling for its lack of foresight as for its honesty: clearly Wescott did not see
Apartment in Athens
coming. Yet the strengths to which he admits here—the feel for family life (
The Grandmothers
), not to mention the rare talent for delineating the complexities of intimacy (“A Visit to Priapus”)—are displayed with as much virtuosity in this novel as in any of his earlier fictions. Among other things,
Apartment in Athens
is a portrait in miniature (more powerful for its restraint, more disturbing for its reticence) of two particular cultures and one particular war, yet if the novel succeeds on these terms, it is to a great extent because it keeps its attention so rigorously fixed on the private ruination of one not very happy family and one not terribly successful marriage. The “nightmare of Greece in general” gives the Helianoses'

Meanwhile in the foreground humans suffer and love until suffering becomes quotidian, and love of questionable worth. No resolution is offered, and hope is withheld so judiciously that one cannot help but leave the novel saddened, chastened, and a little afraid.

Also in awe—both of Mrs. Helianos and her creator. Though not as fine a novel as
The Pilgrim Hawk, Apartment in Athens
is both a more severe and a more compassionate one. With its portrayal of a world remote from Wescott's own (and from the first person singular), it provides eloquent testimony not only to the endurance of his vision, but to its breadth.

—D
AVID
L
EAVITT

TO MY BROTHER'S WIFE

A
LL THIS HAPPENED TO A GREEK FAMILY NAMED
Helianos.

Nikolas Helianos was part-owner and editor of a reputable publishing house in Athens; a middle-aged man with a wife a little older than himself, and a ten-year-old daughter and a twelve-year-old son. They had lost another son of nineteen or twenty, Cimon, in the battle of Mount Olympos in April, 1941. A brother of Mrs. Helianos' had also made his home with them; but when the invaders reached Athens he disappeared or fled, they had no notion where.

The invasion of course was ruinous for publishers —the firm of Helianos had not a chance, as it was small and conservative, specializing in schoolbooks and scholarly treatises—and although Mrs. Helianos had inherited a little income, their standard of living had to be reduced to bare necessity. With the two young men gone, their dwelling in the suburb of Psyhiko was larger than they needed; so they moved into an apartment vacated by Helianos' chief printer, four pleasant but small rooms in the center of town.

Naturally they were not a happy family, but they had good hearts, and did their best to console each other in their bereavement and impoverishment. Helianos was not quite what one thinks of as a typical Athenian, but rather like some Frenchman of the superior middle class, such as a college professor or a civil servant; soft-spoken, with a mind perhaps over-cultivated, discursive and discerning, seeing both sides of a thing. He was a small man, with sloping shoulders, with no paunch but no waistline either. He had a cheerful look, in spite of something heavy and drooping about his face. He had fine friendly eyes. Even in the lean years, 1941, 1942, 1943, he still kept his stoutness, formed by years of good nourishment and good life.

Mrs. Helianos, who had been beautiful in her girlhood, with the wide eyes and pouting lips and strong rotund throat of the women of antiquity, suffered from heart-trouble, to which was added a certain hypochondria; and she had grown indolent and stout. A shadowy freckle had strewn itself throughout her ivory skin. Her mouth drew down tight, and her eyes protruded and had pouches under them. She was an orphan, adopted and very indulgently educated by two uncles who were wealthy merchants. Helianos, taking up where they had left off, had gone on spoiling her. It made everything more troubling and difficult for her when the bad time began. The first year of the disaster of Greece seemed to bring out only the weaknesses of her character.

Their twelve-year-old, Alex, was a bright but strange little boy. He had great over-excited eyes, a nose straight from his forehead, turned-up lips, and a precocious fixed hard expression; but if you looked at him or spoke to him, his lips parted, his eyes danced. He had adored his elder brother, and when the war began, only hoped that it would go on a long time, until he grew old enough to enlist in the army. He had taken the news of his brother's death on Mount Olympos very quietly, but after that, when Greece no longer had a proper army, he began to talk only of growing strong enough to kill at least one German, himself, without waiting to grow up. Every few days he asked his parents whether in their estimation he had grown taller or gained weight; and many of his games were tests of his strength, experiments, for vengeance's sake.

In fact he was not strong. His father was afraid that he had inherited the mediocre health which ran in Mrs. Helianos' family. Although they had somewhat more to eat than the average household in Athens, he seemed to be shrinking, not growing; and between his sharp hipbones he was developing the little pot-belly of famine.

His ten-year-old sister Leda had the physical stamina that he lacked, but the Helianos' worried about her too, because her mind was backward. She had never been a clever child, though they had thought nothing of it until after the fall of Greece. Then in the terrible year her infant character took on a strange aspect, as if she drew all the confusion and intimidation in with her breath, absorbed it through the pores of her skin in an unwholesome damp or an icy chill.

Although she had that pearly white skin which had been a feature of her mother's loveliness in her girlhood, Leda was not pretty. Her teeth grew too far forward, and her cheekbones were too high under her eyes. But the great pity was her expression or lack of expression. Sometimes, when something went wrong, or when she could not understand what was happening, her sensitive but passive face made one shiver. It merely shrank and hung heavy like the loose petals of a large flower.

She never wanted to play with anyone except her brother, and rarely spoke, sitting and watching things without a word for hours at a time. Whatever was said to her or done for her she accepted indifferently, and gave no sign of devotion to either of her parents. Only Alex found the way to her small heart.

When their various relatives came to visit them, Helianos would remark, “Leda is more like a daughter-in-law than a daughter.”

It was the kind of delicate, obscure joke that he liked to make, in his low voice with his clever smile. And there was truth in it: the delicate boy and the sleepy-headed little girl were like a bride and groom in a fairy-tale, diminutive, uncanny, one as bewitched as the other.

Chattering by the hour, Alex confided to Leda all his fantasy of taking revenge on some German, often with extreme passion, with details of childish atrocity. It frightened her but because it was he, and she so loved the sound of his voice, her dull chubby face would light up with blissful attention.

Mrs. Helianos thought that Alex should be punished for his wild talk, not only because of its bad effect on Leda but for his own sake and for their sake: his long-suffering parents! War was not for children. She wanted her children to think of it as it might be of illness in the family, or bankruptcy, or an earthquake or a flood; with no one to blame. She could not imagine where Alex got his vengeful notions. If he went on harping on the war in this way of his, daydream and melodrama, sooner or later he would feel that he must do something in fact, to make his dreams come true. And as he was not capable of anything, he would fail and be caught by the Germans and be punished in the German way. Had they not suffered enough?

Helianos only shook his head dubiously, refusing to discipline his silly son. As a matter of fact Alex's cruel patriotic make-believe did not depress Leda so much as her mother's fuss and foreboding. Children are somewhat immune to their own level of cruelty. . . She overheard a part of the argument her parents had about this, and started to cry in her silent, passive fashion. There was an affinity between Mrs. Helianos and Leda, somehow closer than their affection: the anxious motherly imagination reflecting itself in the little one as if it were a dark cloud over a small stagnant pool.

One afternoon in the summer of 1941 Leda had an adventure. Alex was absent, taking a message to one of his father's friends; and Leda went out and down the street to a vacant lot where he had promised to meet her and play with her. Presently Alex came back alone, asking, “Mother, where is Leda? Where is Leda?”

An hour later Leda returned, like a small sleep-walker; and for two and a half days she would not, or could not, move or speak or eat or sleep. She sat no matter where all day long, and when her mother picked her up and put her to bed, lay all night long, breathing with her mouth open and staring straight ahead, as though her eyes were of marble. The family physician, Dr. Vlakos, whom Mrs. Helianos summoned on the second day, could not explain her condition. On the third day, a chance remark of Alex's having aroused her, she resumed her poor listless existence as usual, but would never tell what had frightened her.

Although they were newcomers in that part of town and Mrs. Helianos did not know or care to know many of her neighbors, now she went among them to investigate the mystery of Leda. At last she found one whose small daughter, younger than Leda but not so sensitive or secretive, had gone along in search of Alex that afternoon. This is what had happened: another neighbor's child had misinformed them as to the direction of Alex's errand. They had strayed into a side-street near the municipal market where, earlier in the day, there had been a gathering of hungry Athenians to protest against some new ruling or new deprivation. The German military police had arrived, chosen to regard it as a riot, and fired upon it to disperse it. Eight or ten bodies lay on the pavement, machine-gunned, some with grimacing faces, all with grimacing bodies, rags of flesh in ragged clothing. There was a sickening wall against which some had been knocked, and as they fell they had soiled it, sprinkled it, painted it. Only one living being was there, when the two little girls in their confusion wandered up: a young German on sentry-duty, who paid no attention for a while, then shouted at them to run away, for God's sake!

The neighbor's child, having narrated this historic scene to her parents at the time it happened, now repeated it all to Mrs. Helianos. Leda on the other hand still would not answer their questions, or Alex's either; but Mr. and Mrs. Helianos thought it unlikely that she had forgotten it or ever would. She had a kind of placidity, never the least hysterical alarm or panic; but there was something always weighing upon her thought, oppressing her spirit, as if the thick little skull were too tight for the melancholy mind.

Mr. and Mrs. Helianos themselves could never forget the loss of their elder son, their Cimon, who from the day of his birth to the day of his death had been perfectly healthy and intelligent and promising. But, as Greeks having a natural realism and a sense of the absoluteness of death, they somewhat closed their minds to this; at least they kept silent for each other's sake. There was heartbreak enough in having to bring up the two living offspring in this evil time, poor inferior offspring; which they discussed by the hour.

There was also the troubling subject of Mrs. Helianos' brother. “Probably he too is dead,” she would say; but neither of them really believed it.

“Oh, he will turn up one of these mornings, when we least expect him,” Helianos would answer, “perhaps in peril, perhaps in disgrace.”

He had never thought highly of his brother-in-law; a cynical and sycophantic youth, in his estimation. Before the war he had held a good government job under Metaxas, and belonged to a reactionary club where he talked the platitudes of those days, against the parliamentary form of government. Helianos, recalling all this, wondered if he might not have gone over to the enemy in some capacity. He had heard that they were eager to have some knowledgeable Greeks on their side.

Mrs. Helianos fiercely defended her brother against her husband's ill opinion; and in their fond but uneasy relationship of late, this had been the worst disagreement and the strangest issue. For Helianos felt that in her heart of hearts she would have been willing to have his worst suspicions confirmed. She wanted to believe in secret what she would not have him believe or speak of: that her brother had come to terms with the Germans somehow. She had reached that point of the sorrow of war when nothing matters except the survival of one's loved ones.

The Helianos family had always been liberals, and now two or three had become heroes with great prestige in the eyes of all the rest—notably the leader of a band of saboteurs and snipers who troubled the Germans incessantly, a cousin named Petros Helianos— and none of them had ever approved of those wealthy merchants who were Mrs. Helianos' uncles. As for her young brother, they were more than suspicious, they were convinced: he was alive somewhere, collaborating with the enemy somehow; and they half blamed Helianos for having married into such a family.