Apartment in Athens (24 page)

This neighbor woman was the one whose small daughter had wandered with Leda past the municipal market into the side street heaped with slaughter; long ago, when Leda had her first bad attack of apathy. Meanwhile the daughter had died, the husband also, and the lone creature was extremely poor; but in spite of tragedy she had a happy nature, thoughtless and energetic. She was a tiny peaked woman with strong hands and absurd great feet.

She asked innumerable questions about Kalter's departing this life, questions almost as shocking as Alex's; and Mrs. Helianos shrank from them, wanting to forget, forget! But with the kind and effective help she was getting, she could not fail to answer. Then she found that it did her good to talk to this unimaginative, unintimate person. So she went on and gave a version of the whole story, the entire year, and managed to cheapen it and belittle it, to disinfect and disenthrall her memory somewhat. At one point and another as she told it, the neighbor woman would throw back her head and laugh: a clear, fearless, useless woman's laughter like a bell. It made Kalter's victim and narrator shiver a little but it pleased her.

When they got around to the adjoining bedroom Mrs. Helianos was pleased to find that they had not commandeered any of her bedclothes for a winding sheet. Only someone had flung himself down on top of the bed and dirtied the coverlet with his boots: perhaps Frieher while waiting for the stretcher-bearers; perhaps Kalter himself at some point in his suicidal agony. Someone had smoked a cigar; there were ashes in odd places.

She found that the mere scrubbing of the blood did not content her. She wished to eradicate everything having to do with Kalter alive as well as Kalter dead; the least residue or reminder of the entire year. She attacked every little dust with her broken broom as if it were ghostly; she shivered at his fingerprints and footprints, as you might say, his spoor. Thus by easy stages she and the neighbor woman undertook a kind of general housecleaning. There was no necessity for it except in spite and as a ritual. She and Helianos had gone over the apartment thoroughly during Kalter's absence in April: how long ago that seemed!

Next day the kind strong-handed clumsy-footed one came back with another neighbor, and helped Mrs. Helianos with something that was a great pleasure, the changing of the beds all around: the double bed into Kalter's bedroom where it belonged, Kalter's bed and the kitchen-cot into the children's bedroom side by side. Alex declared that the cot was perfectly comfortable. Perhaps, his mother thought, this was some fancy derived from the legend of Procrustes. In spite of his stunted growth he was precocious; now there was a decided shadow of little hairs on his lip. So perhaps he was glad to have any old bed to himself; perhaps it troubled him to lie beside Leda although she was so familiar and unattractive.

The double bed was one of the oldest pieces of furniture in the apartment, brought in from Psyhiko; and the dearest. Cimon had been born in it. Mrs. Helianos was deeply moved to be back in it although oddly, in its wide and reminiscent space, she did not miss Helianos as badly as she had done on the sagging truckle-bed where he had made her uncomfortable the night through, all year long. Back where she belonged, the first night, she dreamed that she was a widow, but it was a kind of abstract foolish plot with no affecting particulars, no furnishings of everyday reality. It bore little resemblance to her life, except that, as she was a wife, she might indeed be widowed. The foolish part was that the dream-husband in question was someone she had never known; and therefore there was no melancholy or warning in her dream-bereavement.

Then one afternoon to her surprise one of the Helianos cousins came to call on her. It was not one of the heroes; it was the opposite. It was Demos, the black sheep of the family; an unkempt, emaciated, sallow, small old fellow who had wasted all his inheritance on discreditable women, and borrowed from everyone for years. A number of his male relatives had always been indulgent toward him because he told funny stories. But ever since the occupation of Athens he had been in disgrace. He promptly made friends with all sorts of German officers and went about with them in the most obviously friendly spirit in public places. His own amorousness had abated, no doubt, as he was well on in years and not in perfect health; but he had not lost interest, and he had a great acquaintance and competence in female in circles. Therefore it was presumed that he made himself agreeable to his new friends as a pander.

The respectable women of the family had been vexed by him for years. It was almost a gratification to have him seem guilty of something worse than his lifelong untidiness, ribald small talk, obscure libertinage, so that at last they could speak their minds about him without their husbands' calling them prudes. He did not ask any of the husbands for financial help any more; and while that was a good thing in a way, as they were no longer well off, they had to admit that it aroused their darkest suspicions.

Nevertheless Mrs. Helianos felt glad to see him. None of the patriot Helianos' had called on her since her husband's imprisonment. They were a discreet family, they had to be now, with prices on so many of their heads. Perhaps they thought that in poor cousin Nikolas' plight at present, a display of their sympathy might impress the Germans unfavorably and make matters worse for his anxious wife. But with a point of pride and womanly inconsistency, she resented this discretion a little; she remembered how in 1941 she and Helianos had been criticized as to their patriotism; she welcomed Demos the more warmly. To his surprise and indeed her own, she kissed him on both his unpleasant old pale cheeks.

It was not his intention to come in and sit down. There on the threshold, he turned his worn-out hat upside down and took out from beneath the greasy hat-band a small package or wad of little papers, saying, “This, dear cousin, is a letter from your husband.”

She gave a cry and snatched it from him and began to question him.

“No, I will not tell you how I came by it,” he said. “Neither are you to mention to anyone that you have received it. Now good-bye!”

Whereupon he turned and opened the door and started away.

But in her great emotion she grasped his old hand and drew him back inside and went on with her questions, until with a sudden assumption of absurd dignity and ferocity he exclaimed, “Dear Cousin, hush! I must go, immediately. Stop holding my hand, stop asking me things.”

“Demos, you're as bad as some German militaryman, with your stop this and stop that. I want you to tell me the news of Helianos. I will not let you go.”

“I will be as German and military as I please. You shall not bully me, I tell you. I have run risks enough for you two.”

Then with his watery eyes slipped down a little amid crow's-feet, he fixed her with a great glance, as it were a concentration of his will power. “And not one word to a living soul!” he said, and lifted his forefinger to his lips in the gesture of keeping secrets, keeping silence.

“Don't you see, the role I have assumed in this damned war depends on my not having anything to do with the rest of you, all you patriots! I spend my life with Germans,” he added, with a very cynical and ancient chuckle. “Germans, Germans, morning, noon, and night!

“You must understand. Your husband is a good fellow and all that; we were great friends when he was a boy. But about this trouble he has got into now, and his arrest and imprisonment, the attitude I take is the German attitude. I may tell you that your husband himself understands this perfectly. Good-bye.”

In the old-fashioned manner he clasped her hand and lifted it to his loose mouth, and began to depart once more. But then he cried, “Oh, dear, oh, dear,” and turned back to her.

“How rattlepated I am! I've forgotten what I came for. Your blessed letter was just by the way. I came to give you a bit of a warning. Now, is there anyone else in the apartment? Where can we sit down comfortably for a minute?”

So at last she led him into the sitting room; but as it turned out he gave her no news of Helianos.

“A German named von Roesch, an old major: do you know the man I mean?” he asked.

“I certainly do. He came here on Saturday.”

“Oh, he did, did he? Well, I know him, and I had a conversation with him yesterday about our Nikolas. I assured him that he is as innocent and well disposed toward the Germans as I am, which was not a really dishonest way to put it; just misleading!

“Of course the Helianos' have a great reputation, a bad reputation. It does not seem to surprise the Germans that there should be one pro-German in the family, myself; my well-known vices all my life having brought me to it. But two of us, your Nikolas tagging along after me, is perhaps a little more than they can swallow. Old von Roesch gave me a look, I tell you; suspicious! I suppose they will catch on to me one day.”

Thus Mrs. Helianos learned that Demos was a hero too. Would wonders never cease, never cease? she murmured to herself.

“He told me how his friend Kalter came to his sticky end. I never knew Kalter; a bit too strait-laced for my friends, I gather. Now tell me, when was it that he did himself in; was it Friday?”

“Saturday, Saturday afternoon,” Mrs. Helianos answered.

“Oh, Saturday; Saturday was the twelfth. . . Ay, ay, he mustn't have been pleasant to live with all year, that one! It's a comfort not to have him around any more, alive and kicking—though, I must say, evidently he resolved to make a nuisance of himself after his death as well.”

Mrs. Helianos did not want to hear all this talk of Kalter. She began to regret having urged Demos to stay and talk to her. She wanted to be left alone with the letter from Helianos, the strange letter. She had unfolded it a little while he was talking: bits and pieces all covered with a minuter version of Helianos' dear script than she had ever seen before; prisoner's script. She held it in the palm of her hand on her lap, where she could steal glances at it. She did not want to be impolite to old Demos, as he had so kindly and perhaps dangerously brought it to her.

“You know, dear cousin, you are extremely lucky not to have been involved in that affair of Kalter's death yourself,” he went on. “He more or less pointed an accusing finger at you, so von Roesch told me; an accusing dead finger!”

In illustration of which he pointed waveringly at her.

“Yes, von Roesch explained it to me too. Kalter left a letter there on Helianos' desk.” She pointed back over her shoulder at the desk. “In it he gave all his reasons for killing himself; but he also suggested that some German bigwig named Sertz be notified, so that it should be made to appear that we had killed him.”

“That was it, that was the idea!” Demos said. “Sertz is a fiend, I may tell you. Von Roesch went to him and threatened to testify in your behalf.”

“He promised me he would. And, you know, Demos, I heard him arguing about it with Sertz's young lieutenant; he thought I did not understand German. It was a kind of blackmail; von Roesch has some evidence of their dishonesty, bribes and so on.”

“Ay, so that was the way of it,” Demos cried gleefully. “Thank you for telling me that, dear. How clever of you to find that out! I knew they had it in for each other. Rivals, and opposite types: the old Junker versus the young up-and-coming Nazi.”

She hated this chatter about Kalter and von Roesch and Sertz, all fiends. She was prepared to endure whatever they might still do to her but she would not bore herself to death thinking of them in advance. She pressed Helianos' letter to her bosom and stood up.

But then Demos said, “So now you have von Roesch after you, dear Cousin,” in a small sorry frightening voice. “That's what I came to warn you about.”

So she sat down again, and asked him not to hint and joke, but to tell her the worst at once, and clearly, because she was a woman, not very brave or very clever.

“Well, you see, von Roesch is firmly persuaded that your spirit is broken, my dear. Is it?”

“No, it is not,” she replied simply.

“That's good,” he said. “Anyway, you're going to have to see more of von Roesch, perhaps a good deal more. Not right away; he went off to Constantinople on some mission this morning. He'll be away about a fortnight. Then he will call on you, to pay his respects and express his sympthy about Helianos' being in prison and so on. Then he will ask you to give him some information about the rest of the Helianos family.

“Do you see what I mean, dear Cousin?” he asked earnestly.

“God help me, yes, I see,” she answered.

“Yes, you're in a fix, and you hold some of the rest of us in the hollow of your hand. As it seemed to me our best bet was to explain it to you and put it up to you. Try, dear Cousin, do try not to give von Roesch information. Talk nonsense to him. Think up things to tell him, make a game of it.”

He spoke very rapidly, with his dissipated but sharp eyes glancing up, glancing down; his old fingers weaving around and around the brim of his hat.

“Don't underestimate him. He's very keen against us Greeks. Not cruel like Sertz but more intelligent. He'd be the boss here, probably, only his politics aren't right just now.”

“Also he is indiscreet,” Mrs. Helianos interrupted. “It was foolish to let me overhear everything he said to Sertz's lieutenant.”

“Perhaps he liked you. Perhaps he was showing off for you,” Demos said with a smile.

Mrs. Helianos blushed.

“In any case he wanted you to think that he liked you. You see, he and Sertz have a quite different policy. Sertz is a really vain brute. All he thinks of is quantity of victims, not quality. Therefore it would have meant something to him to catch even you, if you don't mind my saying so, my dear. . .

“Von Roesch has more sense. He doesn't believe in victimizing women and children. What he believes in is using them for pawns and as bait. Perhaps he was indiscreet intentionally, to show you how far he was prepared to go for you; how he defied his fellow-officers for you. He means to arouse your feeling of gratitude, so that you will confide the family secrets to him. I suppose you'd better let him think that you are grateful.”