Apartment in Athens (23 page)

Meanwhile what a blessing it had been to know it fairly well; to be able to follow the long obscure dispute of the officers about herself, to read Kalter's farewell letter! She happened to close her eyes just then and to her surprise, found that she could see the letter in her mind's eye exactly and entirely: the shape of the paragraphs on the paper, the forceful but jerky German script running down hill, even a blot or two, as if he had shed tears upon the ink when it was wet. She re-read it like that, imprinted or as it were photographed in her mind: word for word, beginning with the absurd formality,
Much esteemed friend and fellow-officer
, including the fatal paragraph that she had been a fool not to read in the first place, ending with the French word:
Adieu
.

She re-opened her eyes, shook her head, did not like it; but still there it was: not a daydream or a delusion but a type of memory, a new faculty that the terrible day had developed in her. All spring, especially in Helianos' absence, she had been amazed at the retentiveness of her mind, increased now by this little silly miracle.

How she despised that letter! Even her thirteen-year-old Alex had never dramatized himself as the tragic major did in it. She imagined him sitting there composing the stately false phrases; then laying down his pen and taking up his pistol and with his own blood instead of the ink-pot, writing his eternal damnation so much more plainly. Sitting like Almighty God in judgment upon himself with Helianos' father's old armchair for his judgment-seat; spilling his life's blood all over Helianos' scholarly desk as if it were an orgy, drunk on his death-wish; leaving himself as a mess for other people to clean up. . . She was the cleaner-up, it then occurred to her. She would put that off until tomorrow, and she would need someone to help her.

Whereupon in spite of herself her imagination wandered in a kind of funeral march for that insolent creature in whose death she had every reason to rejoice. It passed for a moment very muffled and shadowy in her thought. Then she realized what it was: it was the sound of her own heavy pulse and weary breath and throbbing headache. However, because death is the only absolute equality among human beings on earth, even the ignoblest and the most welcome instance of it deserves a little ceremonious thought. She was willing to mourn him in that sense, as abstract man; certainly not as an individual man, for there had been neither greatness nor goodness in him.

Then a great sound of trampling and shuffling came from the corridor, a good many men, with that peculiar low sweet tone of voice which the deadness of the dead seems to inspire in everyone, even Germans; and a solemn knocking and bumping and clumsiness as they brought the corpse around narrowly from the sitting-room door into the corridor and down it, away, away forever.

The instant it began Alex started to his feet and toward the kitchen-door, to watch it; and Leda, unusually alert, also rose and started after him. Mrs. Helianos managed to catch him by the arm and to hold him back; how often, how often, that had been her maternal function! But now she was tired out, and with Leda misbehaving along with him, it was too great an effort; and then it occurred to her that she need not rely on main force alone this time.

“No, Alex, no,” she said. “There will be nothing to see now. They have him covered up on the stretcher. I dare say they have taken one of my good sheets to cover him with.”

“Mother, what is a stretcher? I want to see what it looks like.”

“It is a sort of little light portable cot with handles at each end,” she answered. “But Alex, if they see us peering down the corridor, it will anger them again, they will come and worry me to death again. You have grown up, my Alex, and you must think of things like this, cleverly, as grown-ups do.”

She decided that she might as well tell him the whole story. “Alex, they accused me of killing Kalter. I expected them to arrest me and take me to prison. What would have become of you then, alone, with Leda to look after, I cannot imagine! Dear, do you remember that old major who lives with the Macedonian couple, the one who accused you of stealing the dog-food?”

He made a sound that was half a laugh, half a snarl. “Of course, Mother. I will avenge you if he arrests you.”

“No, no, it is the other way around, it was he who prevented the other officer from arresting me. He gave me the benefit of the doubt; and here I am, you see, as free as a bird.

“He is a comical old man; he would have made you laugh. He spoke of how nicely we wrapped the food up in little packages and delivered them every evening; he seemed grateful to us. He has promised to protect us, and perhaps he will help to get your father out of prison.”

“Mother, do you believe him?”

“I don't know, I don't know. They talk nonsense a good deal of the time, Germans. We shall have to wait and see. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, as your father used to tell us.”

After a pause Alex said, “Anyway, I am glad you told me, Mother. I want to behave well, the way you ask me to, and it's easier for me when I know things.”

They sat in silence for a while, all three tired out. Now there was no more tramp of Germans, no movement of death, in the corridor. Not one of them had come back to the kitchen to bid her good-bye. On the whole, all things considered, Mrs. Helianos thought, they had been fairly good to her. She really did not know how good or how bad. She would have to wait and see it manifested in her own grim life in the next few months, one way or the other.

The children on the cot beside her were whispering, that is, Alex was whispering, close to Leda's ear, very softly; something evidently not intended for his mother's ear. But she leaned a little nearer to them, over them; she held her breath and listened. “Maybe Father escaped from prison and climbed up from the street to the balcony outside the major's room and shot him through the window,” he whispered.

Mrs. Helianos drew back a bit in order to see his face. The imaginary gleam in his eyes was heavenly; the false conviction in the dramatically hissed sentence, fantastic. Oh, he was mad, this beloved son of hers, mad; And Leda, her little subnormal daughter, believed every word, with her too simple smile like some loose flower smiling at the sunlight, and whispered to him to tell it all over again; and he did.

Then, for a thrilling unreasoning moment, Mrs. Helianos herself believed it, she wanted to believe it. She rose and started out of the kitchen toward the balcony to see if there was any evidence of Helianos' having been there.

But of course she stopped herself after a few steps in the corridor, and came back, disappointed, alarmed about herself again; perhaps she was going mad. If this lunatic war with its constant coincidences and mystifications went on long enough, it would drive her mad.

So once more for a moment, but abjectly, hanging her head, almost ashamed to go back into the kitchen and sit down beside her children, she took stock of herself. She was dead-tired and her nerves were in bad order. She had a bad heart, a broken heart; literally and figuratively broken, literally and figuratively bad. All her introspection since they took Helianos away had been bad for her; and in any case in his absence she was only half herself, half a human being.

She need not have worried; there was no real weakness in her. The years of lunatic war and the shocking blows just lately, had only worn her down to rock-bottom where there was no use in her worrying about herself, illness or wellness, madness or not-madness; where it scarcely mattered. Not even Helianos' absence, not even the Germans—dead but still deadly Kalter, and the other living major who perhaps in his way was worse, who certainly mystified her more—none of it had really incapacitated her for what she had to do; just now, for example, a little more housewifery and motherhood until the day was done.

Back in the kitchen she began preparing an evening meal of sorts; and she persuaded Alex and Leda to help her, and she kept talking to them, trying to calm them and to distract them from what had happened. She inquired what they had seen in the street by the playground while they were waiting for her; what they were planning to do next day; what their favorite games were at the moment, and which neighbors' children they liked to play with. But she was not surprised at their scarcely replying to any of this; their jaded minds wandered.

So she did something that as it happened she had never done before; she told them two or three of the simpler myths of antiquity. She could not think of another sort of story to interest them, and she felt that this would please her antiquity-loving Helianos.

She told them about the bed of the brigand of Eleusis, Procrustes; how, when it was a tall traveler who lay on it he cut his legs off, when it was a short traveler he stretched them, so that it was a perfect fit for all who came, willy-nilly. She said that it was her own folding cot there in the kitchen which reminded her of this. She and their father were so uncomfortable together on it that she was afraid they might wake up one morning and find themselves misshapen forever.

This amused Alex intensely; and for a joke he slipped around behind her and whisked up her skirt and pretended to have discovered that she had a crooked leg. She gave him a make-believe slap for this, and smiled at him.

Then she told them about the day-mare, or demon of midday; the ancient personification of sunstroke. She confessed that one day she herself had been seized by it, standing too long at the kitchen-window in the blaze of summer, and suddenly losing her wits for a moment, suddenly talking nonsense at the top of her voice, weeping about nothing, and cursing no one in particular. She warned them against it: when noon came they were not to play games in the middle of the street but to keep back on the sidewalk where the buildings cast a shadow, and above all they were never to take naps in the sun.

Evidently Alex found it hard to imagine her falling into any such disorder as she described; he gave her a skeptical look. As for that warning which was the moral of the story as she told it, they had heard it every day or every other day all summer long all their lives; and he assured her that as a matter of fact they never forgot it; and he informed her of their favorite shadowy place, in what was left of the stairway and cellar-way of the ruined building adjacent to their playground.

Then he wanted to know whether a midday demon was the same thing as a Fury, and whether it might have been a Fury that had caused their German to kill himself.

No, she said; the Furies pursued men for the crimes they had committed against others, especially against anyone near and dear to them, such as father or mother or brother or sister. The rage against yourself, the sickness of yourself, which prompted suicide, was a far more evil thing, she explained; and as for the punishment of the Germans for the harm they had done others, that had not started yet.

Suddenly she observed how Leda was shivering, as if in a fever, with her eyes closed and her fists clenched; and she realized that these were worse tales than Alex ever told her; and she was ashamed. So she took the little one and put her to bed, and lay down there beside her and caressed her until she fell asleep, then fell asleep herself; and that night Alex slept on the cot of Procrustes.

I
T TOOK AN ENTIRE DAY TO CLEAN UP THE SITTING ROOM
to Mrs. Helianos' satisfaction, with the help of a neighbor woman. Alex insisted on accompanying them as, with two poor scrub-brushes—the neighbor woman having brought along her own—an assortment of rags, a broken broom, and a pail of water, they entered the fatal chamber. He promised to compensate for his curiosity by being a real help. Mrs. Helianos was pleased to observe that it disappointed her young romantic. There was no profusion of gore, nor charnel odor, nor anything worth his asking for and keeping as a souvenir.

Lieutenant Frieher's henchmen evidently had been careful and skillful. For example, they had managed to get the big body lifted down from the armchair, couched on the stretcher, without drops of blood on the floor. The neighbor woman commented upon this. Alex wanted to know how they had managed it: had they swaddled the head in cloths, or would it have ceased to bleed by that time? For which ghoulish curiosity of course he was reproved by his mother.

One henchman, a good German indeed, had wiped off the desk-top. However, a little of the German life-blood was dried into the grain of the wood, which required a prolonged scrubbing. A worn old leatherette blotter-holder once dear to Helianos bore a stain. Mrs. Helianos decided to throw it away, and the less squeamish neighbor woman asked to have it, forestalling the words on Alex's lips by two seconds. Under the desk there was a bad, small, still sticky puddle.

They had removed all the late major's modest martial belongings from the desk and the chest of drawers and the closet. The more removal the mistress of the house noted, the better she liked it. They had observed a certain probity in not taking what was not his, except for an old valise which happened to have been left on the highest shelf of his closet. It was marked with her name but no doubt they really needed it, for odds and ends that could not be fitted into Kalter's bags; and she did not begrudge it for so good a riddance of such bad rubbish, as she expressed it to the neighbor woman. She could not see that they had overlooked anything, except his telephone and his reading-lamp. She resolved to have the former taken out with the least possible delay; and she compromised as to the latter, that is, she wanted it and kept it. After all, she said, in Helianos' vein of humor, reading was a good thing in itself.

Meanwhile Leda in the other room, Mrs. Helianos thought, probably was pining away. Alex had ceased to enjoy himself, and his assistance was slight; so she excused him from it. Then the two women talked at their ease. Grateful for neighborliness, and anxious not to fall into any of her own way of thought in the circumstances, the proud merchant's daughter and publisher's wife expressed herself to her neighbor in a much more commonplace way than was her wont. On the whole she did keep from the indulgence of her imagination. She did not flinch or romanticize or exaggerate, even when actually on her knees under the fatal desk with her hands in the slightly reddened scrubbing water—except once, when she recalled something Helianos had told her: the belief of horrible ancient Greeks that having killed a man, the thing to do was to lick up a little of his blood and spit it out, to prevent his soul from pursuing you later on. She quite wisely reflected that a precaution as extreme as this must not have reassured anyone much; and in any case there was no easy way of putting the Germans off one's track.