Apartment in Athens (17 page)

Their dead son Cimon had also loved hearing his father talk, but as he had confided to his mother one day, it was on account of the brightness of eye and the dear voice and the charm of rhetoric; he understood no better than she did. They used to joke about his always saying “we“—“we feel and we respond and we believe“—when they scarcely knew what he was talking about. There had been a fond tacit agreement between her and Cimon; good-natured Cimon, gentle as a woman. He had loved her best, and he would sometimes say, “You are the intelligent one, Mother. In Father it is education and eloquence.”

No, she thought now, doubtless Helianos was right about everything; and perhaps as a natural woman no stupider than another, she had felt all these things, as he said it was human nature to feel them, as he expected her to. Perhaps what made it all obscure and nonsensical for her was not what he said but the way he said it, as if he intended to sweep her off her feet rather than to explain anything in earnest. Whether or not architecture danced, certainly, this way and that, his phrases did.

Or perhaps it was nonsense: a mere man's make-believe, typical of men; a kind of game that the idle, over-educated male brain played for the fun of it.

No matter now! For remembering it now gave her a sense of importance and intellectual outlook, which was the pleasantest thing left in the world for her, the only remarkable part of her life left. Was it not remarkable, she exclaimed to herself, in a great agreeable agitation of spirit, for an ordinary woman of Athens, in circumstances like hers—a woman with nothing to look forward to, defeated and bereft, weary and unkempt, fat although famished, ailing, with heart-trouble, aching from head to foot, hot and sweaty and dirty—to have in spite of everything a mind full of abstruse luxurious words, resounding in memory: her dear husband having uttered them long ago?

For a moment the little vanity of intellect charmed her, as if around the self-conscious unfortunate dark figure of herself, the kitchen-window had developed larger, with a finer ratio of height to width than it had in fact; and a sweeter breath of air than the actual exhalation of the accursed Athenian streets; and a better heat than the midday. Then with a sigh she turned around to her dirty kitchen and patiently resumed her work.

That night she lay awake on the kitchen-cot—almost comfortable, now that her dear stout man was not on it with her, comfortable and terrible—trying to think what she ought to be doing about him, to get him out of prison. He had been in prison more than a week. In the first few days she had done her weeping, palpitating, fainting; then for a day or two she had been like an empty shell, thoughtless and helpless; and now another day spent, in the recollection of what a fine man he was and what great obscure profound things he said. Tomorrow would be the seventh, no, the eighth day, and she felt capable of doing something, if only she could think what to do.

Should she go and explain to the Germans that her Helianos was a good law-abiding man, not at all like his cousins of the same name; a man who had yielded to fact and to force and to fate, not only of late as the German yoke obliged him to do, but all his life, according to his nature; a harmless, learned, but on the whole foolish man, past his prime furthermore and not worth the trouble of their indictment and trial: and a good servant, houseman and valet, trained by Major Kalter, who (if Major Kalter no longer wanted him) would know how to make some other German officer comfortable? It was true enough. But she had grown too proud to say it, too proud or too passive or too something.

Perhaps, she thought, in a bitter moment of self-criticism, turning her aching head from one limit of the old cot to the other, worrying the pillow with her fists, beginning to fall asleep—ashamed to sleep while Helianos lay in prison—perhaps she had grown too lazy! She did not admit to herself that she was growing hopeless.

Another thing she did not do: she did not think of her brother or make any plan of trying to discover where he was, and if he was in touch with the Germans, appealing to him to help Helianos. Because Helianos disliked him so, she really had decided to think of him as dead. He appeared to her in vague dreams but when she awoke she interpreted them as having been about someone else.

She woke with a start, with another question for herself. Should she go and see the Helianos cousins and ask them to help? Though doubtless they despised her husband—angry conceited quixotic heroic men that they were—they might help, blood being thicker than water. But the very thought of them made her shiver. Probably by this time they had been driven to illegal and even criminal violence, wild miscellaneous destruction by bombing and burning, even assassination, for their good cause. It was the way of the underground, as Helianos had admitted to her long ago in spite of his family affection. She heard the shocking rumors herself, now that she had to go out and mingle with other Athenians, marketing. They scarcely shocked her any more.

Now there was a worse rumor, to the effect that with one anger leading to another, the men of the underground were beginning to quarrel among themselves. She blamed the Germans for this. One night in the clothes closet she had heard Kalter warning Helianos that they intended this to happen. . . In any case the fighting Helianos' could not help her peaceful innocent one in his present plight, accidental incarceration. If any of them, or anyone like them, were to be mixed up in his case, that would be the end of him. It would only prove to the Germans that he was an angry quixotic heroic man too, who deserved his arrest and imprisonment, and worse: so much worse that the thought of it shook her and the kitchen-cot trembled under her.

Whereas, as things stood, she assured herself, she had no reason to think that in a day or two the Germans would not release Helianos and let him come home. It would make them ridiculous in their own eyes if they did not. But what if they did not? What if he never came home? With sudden pangs through and through her unhealthy bosom, fear would pass through her mind, very real, but passing quickly, taking some semblance of outer reality: gloomy wraith of the midnight, evil odor of the kitchen-bedroom. She shook her head and blinked at it, and it was not there. She blew her nose, turned her pillow over, drew the coverlet up over her head, and ceased to sense it.

It was ridiculous. The conquering Germans were not gods, were they? to stop and do things for no reason, merely to astonish mankind, to make a good story. They wanted their great conquest to last and to work, didn't they? and if they made ridiculous mistakes such as misunderstanding a man like Helianos, arresting poor men for the slips of their tongues, nothing would come of it!

Thus her optimistic imagination arose once more, then merged into a dream, then woke again with a start; but waking or sleeping, thinking or dreaming, told her what she wanted to think, for one more night.

A
NOTHER DAY OR TWO PASSED. OFTEN HER IMAGINATION
worked the other way, not for her but against her; not in self-deception but demoralized and uncontrollable. There came a midday when, standing and resting at the kitchen-window, she could think of nothing but the ugliest matters of fact in the painful present tense. Her mind could not, or would not, take refuge in any remembrance of the past, and it had no capacity for the future.

What had she, outworn and ailing, to do with the time to come? The only time she minded was the day or two, or the week or two, she still had to wait for her Helianos to come home. What had she ever understood of the past, ancient history, Hellas? Nothing, nothing except a pretended interest for his sake. The past was his hobby, and his weakness, she thought, half spitefully, with nervousness increasing and increasing; and apart from his poor dear sentimentality and pretensions to scholarship, what did it amount to? Tumbledown temples, dead religion, obscure dramaturgy, foolishness and cruelty of myths. The myths of today, as she remembered his saying, were worse.

No help for it, no refuge from it: her Hellas was contemporary Athens, and what did that amount to, what had it been reduced to? Dust, stench, fatigue, disgust, fright, constant fright, and beggars and cadavers. She was unable to think of anything else to think about, worth thinking about. The worst of it was what was happening to the children. How much better off her wild one and her subnormal one were than the average child! They were not a really poor family. How fortunate they were in having a German major living with them! Therefore as regularly as clockwork every day of their lives they had something to eat. They did not have to depend on the Red Cross.

The Red Cross did not have milk enough or medicine enough to go around; therefore their policy had to be to select the healthiest child in each poor family, and concentrate on it, the child most likely to survive. Therefore in the really poor families you saw an unprecedented injustice and inequality: one lucky chosen child, amid brothers and sisters with abysmal eyes, loose distended stomachs, lank arms and legs, drying up and dying. It could not be helped. They could not afford to waste anything on the unchosen. The rumor was that they preferred girls, because after the war one male might serve several of them, to repopulate the country.

There had been a strange poor woman standing in a queue in the market place ahead of Mrs. Helianos that morning. A second poor woman had come and jostled her out of her turn; and she had tried to drive her away with imprecations, but suddenly changed her mind and controlled herself and stood back humbly, explaining to everyone within earshot that she never jostled nor even permitted herself to get angry when others jostled her, because she was a religious woman.

She was young but old-looking and might have been a gypsy, with unsympathetic lurking eyes, and dark skin drawn so leanly over her nose and cheek-bones that it was like copper. She wore a ragged dark scarf, in antique fashion: not over her forehead but draped from the top of her head loosely down the side of her face away from her cheeks, and gathered up and pinned on one shoulder, with a sharpened stick instead of a pin.

“I am a religious woman. I pray, every day, for my little children doomed to die,” she had said, turning around and addressing Mrs. Helianos. “I pray for them to die faster.”

Mrs. Helianos had expressed her sympathy and rebuked her not unkindly for her desperation.

To which the woman had answered that death was the only prospect that seemed to her probable enough to be worth praying for.

She had spoken in a cracked voice, in oracular manner, staring away into space this way and that, forgetting Mrs. Helianos and turning her back on her.

“I have one who is not doomed,” she had announced then, somewhat more cheerfully, to no one, to the space in front of her, “my younger son, who gets milk and medicine from the Red Cross. He is a tough little thing, a fighter, he does not need praying for.”

Then she had fallen silent and concentrated on her marketing until she got it done. But evidently remembering Mrs. Helianos' word of sympathy, she had come back with her little purchase to show it to her, having had better luck than usual.

“You know, it's a nuisance when I have luck, when I find something fit to eat,” she had said, “because then I have to feed my Red Cross son separately, because he is so much stronger than his elder brother and sister; he takes more than his share.”

With that dread of the future which is peculiar to mothers, which is sometimes the only imagination they have, Mrs. Helianos asked herself: what will they be like as mature men and women, these tough ones, the milk-drinkers and vitamin-eaters, whom a terrible favoritism and fratricidal appetite have kept from starving? It was the survival of the fittest in the worst way in the world. But they had no choice in the matter, the Red Cross had no choice, Greece had no choice. A little new generation had to be brought up like this, a minority of little murderous pigs at the Red Cross trough, little wolves fattened upon carcass of wolf—or else there would be no new generation at all, no more Greeks.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Helianos reflected, the men and women of her own generation finished out their lives as best they could: good Greeks becoming slaves, and brave Greeks, outlaws and firebugs and bomb-throwers and assassins. Helianos was the only man in Athens, so far as Mrs. Helianos knew, who had been able to steer a middle course; and now like a pack of fools they had arrested him, even him!

However, in a day or two they would have disciplined and investigated and reprimanded him to their hearts' content; then they would release him. Poor soft aging man, it was an extreme hardship for him. Fortunately, he was no longer unaccustomed to hardship. He would get over it; there was nothing really tragic about it, as tragedies in Greece in 1943 went; it would soon be over: so Mrs. Helianos insisted to herself, keeping up her courage. Nevertheless she would hate the Germans for it all the rest of her life.

It was often at the back of her mind, hatred: something she had never experienced before, something mumbling and snarling and talking to itself—it was her own mind of course, one half of her mind; she herself was thinking what it said but it seemed distinct from the rest of her thought, at a little distance from the rest but louder than the rest, and it went on incessantly, and she could scarcely keep up with it or exactly understand it. It was an indictment of the Germans not only for what they did, had done, were doing, but for what they were, and even for the way they looked.

The
Herrenvolk
, the hateful half of her mind said—it was full of German words, the words of the clothes closet, Kalter's big words reiterated like incantation, plugged into her mind by his hammering tone of voice through the partition—the
Herrenvolk
had strong jaws because they kept gritting their teeth, and somewhat shapeless and chapped mouths because they kept licking their lips. Their sharp noses were not exactly centered in their pink faces between their flat cheeks. Their small blue eyes were not in the least like a pig's but they were like some other small animal's. The smallness of their eyes would have given their countenances as a whole a melancholy and humble aspect except for the glory and cruelty shining and snapping in them. Look out for glory and cruelty,
Achtung
, look out! the wild half of her mind said.