Apartment in Athens (6 page)

So he disagreed with his wife as to the nature of Alex's changed, chastened spirit; he told her so. It was not reasonableness and realism, he said, it was the grave reality developing for him. It was not a wise renunciation of vengeance but the natural gestation of it, getting ready for it. He had it on the tip of his tongue to point out to her that even in looks, the boy was rather like his fierce cousins, not at all like her clever vanished brother—but he refrained from that. Although he argued as gently as possible and left her brother out of it, the subject of Alex always made her cry.

Oh, he had no fatherly illusions; his Alex was an unfortunate, perverse, quivering, stunted little fellow. Still, he decided, there was life in him, life and ferocity, and he was growing up! He was a brave small boy who, when his time came, if he survived the famine, might well commit some exploit against the oppressors of Greece.

The thought frightened him almost as it did Mrs. Helianos; and it increased his melancholy realization that as an oppressed Greek, an avenger, he himself was good for nothing. But at the same time he felt a little prouder of himself, a little less ashamed of himself, as a father. It buoyed up his self-respect just when everything seemed hopeless. He ceased to talk about this to his frightened wife, but she sensed what he had in mind. She still thought him dead wrong but she did not mind, if it made him happier.

Leda, too, was fascinated by Captain Kalter, and she soon lost all her fear of him; then little by little, to her parents' dismay, began to show signs of liking him. When she heard his step outside the front door, his key in the keyhole, she would slip quickly into the corridor and stand smiling up at him, seductive, like a tiny courtesan. Sometimes she took his hand, or reached out her small grimy hand to give his fine uniform a sort of envious, luxury-loving stroke. Meanwhile she seemed to grow less fond of her brother. Perhaps she was disappointed in him, now that he no longer entertained her with terrible stories. Perhaps he had noticed her friendliness toward the captain before anyone else did, and scolded her. Mr. and Mrs. Helianos did not know what to make of it. Was there more cleverness in her retarded little mind than they had given her credit for? Was she seductive in order to be on the safe side, in the terrible vague anxiety of infancy, in self-defense? Whatever it was, to some extent, with reservations, it worked. Little Leda was the only one of them, and probably the only Athenian in Athens, the only Greek in Greece, whom the captain regarded with favor.

Before dinner, when in the weariness of his day's work he stretched out in his armchair, with Helianos kneeling and removing his boots, he would ask Leda what she had done all day. She was never able to answer but she invariably smiled. After breakfast, as they all stood at the front door to hear his last-minute instructions, sometimes he would give her a little pat on the head with his gloved hand. He never did it ungloved; and upon one occasion he called Mrs. Helianos' attention to this point and sarcastically explained it: the child's hair was in a miserable tangle harboring lice, and there were some scabs on her scalp as well. The foolish woman allowed herself to be provoked by this, bursting into tears, and giving all her excuses for not taking proper care of her children; for which in his grim way he teased her. Perhaps Leda, in her chronic daydream, did not realize what they were talking about. She took no notice of her mother's weeping but still gazed up at the sarcastic German with her blissful simple expression.

Helianos, thinking it over, decided that this new enthusiasm of Leda's was a good thing. “Of course it shocks us,” he said to Mrs. Helianos, “but we must look at it from the poor child's standpoint. She has scarcely taken any pleasure or even any interest in her poor life, from the day she was born, has she? I cannot begrudge her any kind of happiness that may happen to her, according to her nature. It is a strange nature. I used to think that perhaps her love of Alex was something like incest. Now perhaps this, you might say, is a kind of treason. But it does not matter, she is an innocent.”

It was his way of talking which Mrs. Helianos never quite understood. “One should not expect too much of one's children,” she said, humbly.

It is true that in all our human attachments based on nothing but blood-relationship there are strict limitations, inherent disappointments. For their chief comfort Mr. and Mrs. Helianos had to turn back to that intimacy between themselves which, in the beginning at least, had been based on passionate love. In the ordinary way the Greek husband, even at the time of passion, maintains his male aloofness away from domestic affairs. But now that the housekeeping was so far beyond Mrs. Helianos' strength and competence, and Helianos had to help her more and more, and they were together morning, noon, and night as they had never been in their youth, they were like an old team of horses broken to double harness.

When Captain Kalter was at home he wanted absolute silence. Leda was naturally silent, but as for Alex, this was the hardest of those rules which the poor parents tried to enforce in order to forestall the captain's enforcement; and it was hard for them too. They could never learn to work so as to keep a regular and accustomed division of their responsibilities; the simplest task at some point required their asking each other's advice, coming to each other's rescue. The partitions throughout the apartment were thin and one of these days, if they disturbed the captain, might he not require Mrs. Helianos to do all her work alone, without Helianos? Then how would she manage? Therefore they learned to speak without a sound if necessary, and to read each other's lips, indeed to communicate a good deal by mere glances, as the inmates of asylums and prisons do.

If their so commonplace wedded life had not been engulfed in misery along with everything else, their habits broken, and normal expectations aborted, they might never have learned the extent of their affection. They were middle-aged, and felt older than their years. Even the mortal blow of losing their first and best son had not quickened their old attitudes of mind and stale sentiments much. This hard everyday life together did. It was the autumn of their love no longer, but suddenly winter, when in fact, with illness and starvation and decrepitude, the coldest husbands and the bitterest wives often do find each other kinder than other people, kinder than nature, kinder than God.

To be sure, there was nothing erotic or sensual or even sensuous about it. Helianos was, or fancied that he was, impotent; and Mrs. Helianos' menopause had come early, in keeping with her poor health in general. Yet in the dead of night they pursued an extraordinary intimacy, as they lay wearily in a heap of one body almost on top of the other on the folding cot. They knew once more the double egocentricity of lovers, confusion of two in one. Everyone else and everything else in the world might have been shed away in the forgotten sky over Athens, and the dark turning of the earth toward next day, purposeless except to rock them, on the formless mattress and sagging springs.

The captain would ring and be waited on, or Helianos would start to snore and Mrs. Helianos would wake him on the captain's account; and then they would lie awake awhile. Verbose even when half asleep, with her lips pressed to his ear like a kiss, she would whisper the things she had not dared broach during the day, pouring her poor heart into his; and he would console and admonish her to his heart's content.

I
N THE SPRING OF
1943
CAPTAIN KALTER WAS GIVEN
two weeks' leave to return to Germany. When he informed the Helianos' of it, they could hardly contain themselves for joy; but with his strong small eyes fixed on them, they did not even have the courage to wish him a safe journey and a good time. Then he had to wait a week for his plane-reservation. That was hard for them, with all their work and worry as usual, and the added uneasiness lest they betray their unusual excitement.

When at last the day came, and they carried his despatch-case and duffle-bags down to the sidewalk—even breathless Mrs. Helianos insisted on carrying one bag, for was it not a sort of ceremony?—and they stood watching the army-automobile slowly start and shift gears and get up speed and turn the corner out of sight, they were afraid to rejoice, with unknown faces in the neighboring windows perhaps looking down on them. Back upstairs, they still maintained their anxious composure, as if the furniture in the captain's rooms could testify against them, until they reached the kitchen and shut the kitchen-door.

Then they all danced around and hugged each other, and the children asked innumerable questions, and Helianos made one or two jokes, and Mrs. Helianos smiled and cried at the same time in her weak way. In spite of their heavy hearts, irremediable poverty, deteriorated health, continuous hunger, and the brevity of two weeks, they expected to have a good time.

“I remember where Evridiki's husband buried a case of my imported wine, under a ruined shed in Psyhiko,” said Helianos, “and I will go and get it.”

“Now we can take the children to the seashore for two or three days, which will do them good,” said Mrs. Helianos.

Alex began his little bravery of imagination and boastfulness again. “When he returns from Germany,” they heard him tell Leda, who smiled at him contentedly as she had not done for many months, “we will lure him out on the balcony and trip him, so he'll fall over the balustrade and into the street, squash!”

It was all imagination. The blessed two weeks did not turn out according to any of their plans. For one thing, coming like a little forecast and foretaste of the liberation of Greece, it made them impatient, self-indulgent. They had time to stop and think, and take stock of themselves, and estimate their losses; and with all the good will they could muster, the conclusion seemed to be that the two weeks had come too late; and perhaps the liberation itself when it came would have come too late.

Their loneliness for their dead soldier son began aching again, in the way of a wound when there has been a sudden change of temperature. For days Mrs. Helianos would not or could not talk of anything else, until Helianos reproved her. If she took this two weeks' holiday as an occasion for grief, the result would be one of her bad heart attacks and no holiday at all.

He went out to Psyhiko, but either his memory was at fault or someone had stolen the case of wine. He came back empty-handed and tried to be humorous about it, but he could not keep the irony and allegory out of what he said, which spoiled the jest.

They gave up the excursion to the seashore. The children did not have the energy for anything beyond their usual routine: talk and talk, Alex doing all the talking; the same games as in Hellenic centuries past, marbles, knucklebones, played now more listlessly than ever; unhealthy little naps at odd intervals wherever naps happened to overcome them; long stations at the kitchen-door as if in a trance, waiting to be fed, never quite in vain but almost in vain.

To be sure, Helianos had more time now to wander here and there in search of food, and he fancied himself as one of the best shoppers in Athens. But, on the other hand, in spite of the captain's finicking supervision, his wastefulness at table, and his purveyance to the major's dog, they had managed to abstract a good many mouthfuls from the meals they served him; and in his absence of course they were not entitled to officers' rations. Furthermore, as it seemed to them, the famine was worse than ever. It was so bad that they fell into a vague, irrational expectation of its ceasing soon, of the supply of food augmenting soon, by some miracle. Helianos sometimes showed a weird high spirits in the morning when he set out to do the marketing. For, short of a miracle, the race of Greeks would soon be exterminated; and that, even for Mrs. Helianos with her dark mind, was unthinkable.

Poor woman, indolent all her life, now she could not or would not stop working. “This is the spring,” she said stubbornly, “and in the spring I give my house a good general cleaning.”

When they came to brushing and airing the beds, and observed how much blacker theirs and the children's were than the captain's, because he bathed and they could not bathe, she let herself go in angry rhetoric and senseless weeping. Helianos, in his constant anxiety about her health which he never admitted to her, undertook the hard part of everything. But it was up-hill work, make-believe work; nothing went well. The fear and humiliation and anger, in which they could not indulge when the captain was in residence, now welled up in them, and this, even more than their fatigue and undernourishment, alarm and anxiety, made them incompetent, invalid. Whatever they pretended to be doing, it served only to pass the time, two weeks, ten days, one week, then only a few days, thinking and thinking of the captain, waiting and waiting for the captain to get back; and the time passed quickly.

As they thought of it afterward, it seemed that this holiday had been the worst time; soft and unstrung and maniacal. It was the time when they had no more imagination; they could not even predicate any future betterment, except that folly of expecting to find more food in the market. And apparently their memory of the past was failing little by little: Helianos' failure to find the case of imported wine, for example. . .

Mrs. Helianos, on one of her rare excursions into the street for something—scurrying along, looking neither to the right nor the left lest her eyes light on some terrible beggar or terrible cadaver—encountered a man whom for a moment she took to be her runaway brother. It was not he. Afterward she confessed to Helianos that she had come to have only a vague idea of what her brother looked like. If he came to their very door she might not recognize him.

Their tenderness toward each other did not fail, in spite of hard remarks; but more than once the death-wish arose in the midst of it, mingled with it. One night he confided to her that he was tempted to defy the captain, or all the occupying foreigners as a lot somehow, to make an end of his shame and enslavement, at whatever penalty or cost. She whispered back with affectation of scorn, “You know you'd never have the courage to do anything of the kind.”