Apartment in Athens (28 page)

Finally, for the last flight of stairs, the neighbor woman picked Leda up and carried her, although she was burdensome and although she kicked. In spite of the sorrowful emergency this made Alex laugh. He took her from the arms of neighborliness into his arms of extreme kinship; and very soon she calmed down, and then turned and gave him a smile of uncanny contentment. Obviously she knew that she had done an extraordinary thing and the right thing.

Afterward the neighbor woman described the little one's startling arrival in search of her. Evidently memory and instinct had brought her wild small feet straight to the right block, the right cluster of old tenement-buildings; but then she did not know which house, which doorway, which stairway. So there in the street she screamed, “Maria's mother! Maria's mother!”

Maria was the name of the little girl who had accompanied her to the massacre, who had died more than a year ago. Another neighbor came and cleverly made out what Mrs. Helianos' poor child wanted, and led her to Maria's mother's door. There Leda had explained the emergency quite clearly, except for punctuation of tears and panting, “My mother fainted, my father is dead, my mother is dying!”

B
UT MRS. HELIANOS LAY AT DEATH'S DOOR THREE DAYS
. Old Dr. Vlakos came morning and evening. The neighbor woman stayed in the apartment, and proved to be a competent nurse as well as an energetic housekeeper and a kindly nursemaid. She slept in the single bed with Leda, and, poor lone female, doubtless enjoyed having her dead daughter's little simple-minded friend to fuss over. Apparently Leda's miraculous effort had tired her, but that was all; she did not fall into her apathy or her tearfulness.

Alex was not happy to have the neighbor woman living with them. As it seemed to him her presence was too commonplace and cheerful for this turning point in their lives. But he kept a sufficient civility. As he well knew, he could not have managed his little household by himself. He obliged her to help him move his cot back to the kitchen, and oddly enough, made her promise not to tell his mother.

On the fourth day Dr. Vlakos told Mrs. Helianos that she was out of danger. As to her heart-trouble and her general health, if she would stay in bed a fortnight and rest, she would not be much the worse for the shock and tragedy of her husband's death. Before long she would be able to live as before, to keep her house and go marketing and do the cooking, and care for the children.

When he had given the good news and departed, she reminded herself that—while her lot in the last two years, her fate in the war, had been hellish indeed, like other people's—still a portion of a kind of good luck had been mixed in with the rest. In the next few days as she lay there, presumed to be resting, she counted certain of her blessings.

For example, how fortunate it had been for her to have had, in the series of violences of those months of May and June, some practice in extreme emotion! Even Helianos' preliminary absence, while he lived and she hoped: now that his absence was forever she had to admit that it had been a blessing. Her mind, without knowing it, without admitting that she knew it, had had time to take in the possibility of his never returning and to adjust itself a little: so that it did not take her by surprise and kill her.

Vlakos wanted her not to talk. She had nothing to tell the good neighbor woman in any case. She began talking to herself in her old way. Now nothing about herself would ever surprise her, she thought; and then heard her own whisper, “I know myself well, my strength and my weakness, my good qualities and my faults. I am still alive; here I lie sick; I have lost my conceit; I have forgiven myself. But without Helianos to give me a sense of my importance with his love, I am of no interest to myself; and in the circumstances that is a blessing.”

How fortunate she had been, in that the news of Helianos' death had been a divided blow. Half of the great pain had been only in her imagination: this had saved her life. Her body had borne half the brunt of her sorrow: that had saved her sanity.

Then, having lost interest, she ceased to whisper in soliloquy; she spoke to Helianos instead.

“Helianos,” she whispered, “let me not be too sure of myself, especially as to my sanity. Without you to warn me or comfort me, your steadying influence, I must be careful. I will be careful. For years I have worried you in this way, even when I was fairly young and our life was not so bad; now I am older and my life is worse. Forgive me, Helianos, for worrying you about nothing. You will have to forgive me if I go mad now, when I have good reason to.”

Then she quickly fell asleep. A poignant thought of Helianos often swept her away to some dream in which there was a chance of her forgetting that she had lost him.

When she woke she said, “Helianos was a proud man; he would have been ashamed of me if I had lost my mind. No matter now, he will never know it.

“But shame on me for saying: no matter!” she added almost aloud. “In spite of death there is a point of pride; and so long as I feel obliged to live, I shall have, I ought to have, a sense of duty. Helianos' widow is not to play the fool even in grief. Helianos' children's mother must keep her wits about her, for their sake.”

It seemed a good thing to talk to herself like this. She thought it would arouse her courage to get up soon and resume her life, her half-life. She could not lie there much longer. She had a great deal to do in the next few days or the next week or two. She began making plans, with a sense that they might cover all the remainder of her days; she might not have any life beyond what she saw so clearly.

In her planning and looking ahead naturally she addressed herself to Helianos her husband: she had done so always. “Helianos,” she whispered, “I am in trouble with that major, the one you do not know, the one with the dog, the one with a golden eye and a mouth like a piece of broken whip, the likable one. He is coming to see me one of these days, and I am afraid.

“He is coming, coming, to ask me to inform against your cousins, Petros and Giorges and even Demos, your old rascal. Demos said that you refused to answer their questions in prison. I will refuse too, I promise. I do not know what they will do to me if I refuse. I am not afraid.

“But if it comes to that, if I too must be a martyr to keep our Greek secrets, then I want all your family to know what is happening. If they are concerned about me it will help me to bear it well. I want them to be grateful to me if I do bear it well. Perhaps they will be sorry for me if it is more than I can bear.

“Yes, Helianos, I know, you told me, Petros is the head of the family now that you are dead. I will tell my trouble to Petros.

Then she forgot all about that matter of von Roesch for the time being; and when she next found energy to whisper, it was about the less desperate aspect of her mission to Petros.

“My dearest, forgive me for tearing up a part of your letter. I was lonely. I was jealous of your addressing it to Petros. There was no farewell to me in it. It was the political part that I hated. All my life I have hated what I could not understand.

“But do not mind, dear, it is no matter. I know it by heart. I can close my eyes and read the small torn pieces, and open my eyes and copy them for Petros. I will give him all your letter, although it is the only thing I have on earth that I love. I will explain it to him if he is not as intelligent as you think. I understand it now.

“I will tell him our story. Perhaps it will interest him. He is a fighter, and I think he must know only those lives that he is fighting with. Whereas our life, though a poor thing, is what he is fighting for.

“If it interests him, and he has time to sit and listen, I will tell it all. I will remember to put in the little things to make it interesting: the borrowed bed, the old dog eating our dinner, the child sucking its own blood, the perilous window, the lost key, the major's dead brain like a tongue stuck out down his dimpled chin, the blaze of summer in the major's dead eye, the cup of water spilled in my face on the floor in the corridor, the fish-hook hooked in my breast, the children when I had to use them to walk with like crutches.

“That is the kind of little thing that you used to put in your stories, Helianos, to make them interesting. Sometimes I can discover some such thing for myself, now that you are dead. Whenever you came home, you had some story to tell me; which is a good trait in a husband. I love you.”

Sometimes the neighbor woman heard her whispering and, not unamiably, laughed at her for it. It was well that she was a little deaf; she would have misunderstood everything. Now she happened to hear the words, “I love you,” and she shed tears, which embarrassed Mrs. Helianos.

Vlakos had asked the neighbor woman to keep the children out of the sick-room, and it was a part of Alex's grievance against her: she enforced the doctor's orders in a way which seemed to him loud and presumptuous. One afternoon, in spite of her, he slipped in. She came hopping after him in half a minute, all righteous indignation.

He appealed then to the sick woman herself: “Mother, she says that it is too soon for you to see me. Tell her that it is not so. I will be cheerful. I will behave well.”

It happened to be an afternoon of pain; Vlakos and the neighbor woman were right; it was too soon. Sickly, she began to try to tell him so. It might hurt his feelings badly if she had succeeded. But she was unable to speak: her lips broke and shook, her voice frayed away.

Alex stood staring. He heard her wordless mumble, and he saw how she looked: her ivory skin now a kind of soiled pallor like a mushroom; and under her eyebrows the hollows strung with little wrinkles in which her eyes burned and turned; and her mouth pulled down as if by an ugly finger in each corner; and her hair in dark serpentine locks upon her temples, not one gray hair.

Alex turned then and asked the neighbor woman to excuse him and with a manner of pitiful good sense, left the room. In spite of her sickness and her emotion his mother observed how he had grown up in those few days, as if they were weeks or months.

When she woke a little later in the afternoon, she found herself whispering to him: “Forgive me, forgive me, Alex. I forgot about Cimon, I burdened you with Leda, I could not bear to see or hear your hatred. I have had to learn it all the hard way.

“Alex, do not expect too much of me from now on. Your father was a tree and I was his vine. They have cut the tree and taken it away. Therefore I am misshapen, wound around the space, stretched out toward nothing, half on the ground.”

Toward the end of the week Demos came to see her again. Alex let him in, but Dr. Vlakos happened to be there and at first would not admit him to the sickroom. In general he wanted his patient to have no conversation at this stage of her illness; and in particular he despised Demos as a pro-German. The neighbor woman came into the sitting room then, with a broom in her hand whether by chance or for effect; and added a certain hue and cry to the doctor's remarks, broom up in front of the bedroom door.

Finally Mrs. Helianos uttered feeble cries from her bed, and by pretending to lose her temper, which would have been bad for her, got Vlakos' permission to confer with her cousin-in-law upon an urgent family matter having to do with Helianos' death for five minutes, only five minutes.

Demos was sorry and indeed embarrassed to find her so ill, but they had no time to waste on that subject. He wanted to know whether she had seen von Roesch. The report was that he had returned to Athens; whereupon he had vanished into thin air; and Demos for one did not trust him.

Then Mrs. Helianos told him she wanted to see Petros, Petros.

He replied that they expected him to come into the city any day now, certainly within a week.

She pointed to the drawer in the night-table where she kept the keys to the apartment-building and the apartment itself, and made him put them in his pocket for Petros, so that if it suited him he could come in the middle of the night. She slept lightly; it would not frighten her.

“What do you want to see Petros for? Why isn't it enough for you to see me? It's safer to see me.”

“My poor Demos,” she whispered back, “you are not intellectual enough to advise me. Neither are you man enough to stir up my courage. You know, you know all that.”

“Ay, my cousin, you are sharp. Do you mean to make us all jump, now that you have von Roesch up your sleeve? What have you to do with Petros, if you please?”

Naturally she said nothing about the story of their lives, or Helianos' letter, or a matter still more romantic that she had in mind. She said that she wanted Petros to tell her what to say to von Roesch. It might be possible to turn the tables on von Roesch somehow. She wanted to give him false information, useless to him, disadvantageous to him, or even fatal if they had good luck. If he intended to use her as bait in his trap to catch any of them, well, then, let him beware! For she intended to take the trap and change it and re-set it for him to be caught himself. Perhaps Petros or some other important Greek would let her make a rendezvous for him somewhere, as it were to be captured by von Roesch's men; where a sufficient number of Greeks could lie in ambush for the would-be capturers. “I think this a good idea,” she whispered, “but I know nothing, I cannot work it out in detail. Petros will know everything; and there never has been a Helianos who lacked imagination: even you do not lack that, Demos.”

He said, “You are mad, my cousin! You are as mad as your young Alex, as mad as your little Leda. You are a terrible family. Your Nikolas had no sense of self-preservation whatever. Now it appears that you have none either. You frighten me.”

But in his old loose woman-crazy eyes she saw a shrewdness and an admiration that she took for a good omen. Then Dr. Vlakos opened the door and would not be denied. Demos had to go, but in his pocket were the keys.

Suddenly it occurred to her that if Petros approved of her plan, it would mean pretending to be pro-German. Then she would be teamed up with Demos, misunderstood and condemned by the family as he was: the broken widow with the old libertine. Helianos was a proud man, and she was glad that he would never hear of this. But in the present plight of Greeks, she reminded herself, they must not be proud.