Apartment in Athens (18 page)

It filled her memory up with hateful details, such as the busy way their jaws and lips and tongues worked when they were eating, and the way they mouthed and jawed their words in eloquence whenever they expounded their world-government,
Weltanschauung
, or boasted of their superiority in warfare,
Wehrmacht
, or made pathetic reference to their hard vain fate,
Schicksal
, or thrilled to their German immortality,
Ewigkeit
. Which for a weird moment made her think of strangling one of them. Her hands rose in front of her as if it were a reflex action, the fingers rigidly curving and the thumbs rigidly hooked, straining like a pair of pincers; and she looked down at them and was disgusted at their small violent energy wasted on the empty air.

It led her to make foolish observations of traits of the national German character, such as their wish to be feared and loved at the same time (and they were, too) and their determination to be scientific and mystical at the same time (and they were, they succeeded).

It deluded her senses with unpleasant impressions, such as their peculiar body-odor, a whiff of it at the moment even there at the open kitchen-window, Kalter's body-odor; and whereas in the old days Evridiki's body-odor in the kitchen had been musky, his now was lardy, and it made her sick.

It gave her a certain morbid contaminated feeling; so that she turned away from the window and went to the sink, and wet her nervous hands and her hot face, and rubbed and scrubbed them exaggeratedly. Then as she had only a few towels for the children, she went back to the sunny window and held her head back and her fingers spread out, to dry in the sun. The lardy smell was still in her nostrils and she still felt sick.

Actually of course it was not the Germans in general or Kalter in particular that sickened her, for none of this was a reality; she knew that. What sickened her was her own hatred, and weariness of being dominated and reminded and misled and disgusted and made a fool of by hatred; and it was all so foolish and childish, and it went so fast, that she could only recall a small part of it afterward.

She tried not to let her mind go on like this. She knew what it was; it was the voice of the time we live in; “the
Zeitgeist
,” she said to herself aloud, mispronouncing the word with a hiss. Until this moment, this bitter week, she reminded herself proudly, she had been a good woman. Her mind had never prostituted itself like this before; no accursed
Geist
had ever taken her for its mouthpiece before! She was ashamed of it and afraid of it. She preferred the passivity, the self-pity, which was her ordinary mood. She thought that she preferred misfortune itself, which was at any rate a real thing; whereas this hateful voice of one-half her mind sounded mad, and it was against her will. When it rose to its high pitch, she could not repress it, she had to listen to it, her whole heart joined in it.

And her heart also reacted and rebelled, in revulsion against it, with almost the reverse of it. In her fatigue, with the imaginary evil odor and imaginary contamination, the tears came to her eyes in a flood and the breath up through her mouth in a sob; and she stood weeping in the hot sunshine at her kitchen-window.

She was as ashamed of weeping as of hating. Fitful emotion, hysterical Germanophobia with the hysteria suddenly breaking, fit following fit, in fact one fit bringing on the other: it was a waste of time and energy while her Helianos lay in prison and nothing was done. Besprinkling of tears and soft bemoaning, it, too, was the
Zeitgeist!
It was another German trap and German spell, which probably everyone the world over fell into for a moment now and then. But, shaken again by indignation, drying her tears on her dirty sleeve, and trying to stop her little hiccoughing sobs by gritting her teeth and holding her breath, she resolved not to fall into it herself again. Not another tear would she shed!

What use was it? It had no influence on the imprisoner, it was harmless against the enemy, it was no hindrance to the oppressor. As it seemed to her, even Germanophobia was to the German advantage somehow. Perhaps a German like Kalter could keep that kind of temper up—against international Jews, against Asiatic Russians, against vile Greeks—but if you were a naturally good Greek woman you could not. Suddenly it broke and you were ashamed of it and it made you sick; you wept about it until you wore yourself out, in a stupor; and still Helianos lay in prison unhelped.

It was no solution. Of course as a simple emotional woman, she did not know, or did not yet know, what solution there might be; but she felt sure that emotion was not it. Kalter was not hurt by it or even inconvenienced by it. Kalter, she thought, would not begrudge her her moment of letting herself go at her kitchen-window; he might even feel flattered by it. What if she did gibber for a few minutes in helpless animosity, what if she did whimper away the next few minutes in revulsion and confusion, did it help Helianos? As she looked back on it—looking back on it, to be sure, before it was quite over—it seemed to her that she had lost all her self-respect.

Lonely, lonely, lonely for Helianos she tried to look up to the desiccated flat-topped rock and the indestructible old temple once more, because they were what he loved—the national treasure of Greece, Athens' trademark, the tourists' delight as well as his—but as she had not yet succeeded in not weeping, they were only a phantom and a smudge; which left her lonelier than ever.

It was early in June but it was mid-summer there in the sun—the summer slid down the steep of the Acropolis, slightly green with slight purple shadows, the summer tickled her in drops of sweat on her forehead and her upper lip, the summer evaporated the shameful tears off her cheeks—and yet she was as cold as a stone. Her tedious old heart had almost ceased to circulate the blood in her veins. How long, ten or fifteen minutes (she could not tell how long), she had been standing there staring at the slightly verdant and empurpled hill without seeing it, blinded by her desperate thoughts, half-thoughts. Not only had she been weeping like a fool, she had been talking to herself out loud, and already like a fool she was forgetting what she had heard herself say.

So she turned away, with no more patience with herself, and angrily pulled the curtain across the window, and went to work in the shadowy kitchen, warming up some soup (more than half water) for the children's midday meal; then sat on the cot and dully waited for them to come up from the street. So well had they learned their lesson of enduring hunger that a good deal of the time they had not much appetite. . .

It was Kalter's fault. Suddenly then she remembered how when he had arrested Helianos he had locked her out of the sitting room, her own sitting room; and in a more irrational temper than ever she sprang out of the kitchen and went running and stumbling down the corridor, and took the key out of that door and brought it back to the kitchen and threw it out the window.

Her mind and her life shrinking away to this silly gesture, vain ritual and symbol, childishness! The instant it was done she was ashamed of it, and in spite of her weariness and her weary heart resolved to go down to the street after it and to put it back where it belonged. She leaned far out of the window in the hot sunshine for a long time, not knowing where it had fallen, trying to locate it on the sidewalk and the pavement, in vain, with the shadows in her eyes from the cruel blaze and the swash of blood to her head from leaning out.

The children returned from their play then, and she was ashamed to mention the key to them, and forgot to go down after it herself.

Major Kalter rarely locked the sitting-room door. (“Only when he arrests people,” as Alex said to Leda. . .) But the next morning by some chance he noticed the disappearance of the key and it displeased him.

Mrs. Helianos, in the kitchen, heard him in the corridor, irritably accusing Alex of having taken it to play with. At it again, the supposedly reformed character! she said to herself, with her nerves quickly contracting as if she were about to cry or to laugh. It was his bad voice, his voice like a chisel with a temper behind it like a hammer; it was insufferable!

She came out into the corridor. There was the gloomy officer facing in her direction, towering over the small boy who had his back to her. She could tell at a glance that it had begun again, their old tedious, perilous antipathy: the German's neck thrust forward and little explosive eyes, and the rigid back of Alex trying to maintain his equanimity, protesting his innocence—which for once in their lives Mrs. Helianos knew to be genuine. As she drew close to them Alex glanced hopelessly to her over his shoulder. Down at the German's side she saw his large hand agitating and beginning to come up in a fist.

In six long steps she was there, threw her arm around Alex, thrust him aside, stepped between them, and faced the major with her arms spread out, her entire person spread out, like a hen between her chick and the hawk; and for the first and last time, she addressed him with real vehemence.

“Major Kalter, Major Kalter, do not shout at Alex! What if you have lost your key? The man of the house is gone now, thanks to your fury and folly. Naturally things go wrong, things get misplaced. None of us has touched your blessed key, I tell you. If you have lost it, I am sorry, we shall find it or replace it; but mean-while do not shout!

“Please remember, sir, that it is my property, this key you say you have lost; you shall not accuse my son of stealing it. This is my house, and I will not have any brawl or roughhouse in it, between you and Alex.”

It was a fearful, freakish moment. Roused by her sharp voice, Leda came to the bedroom door panic-stricken, and tumbled over the threshold with a ghostly cry. Alex pulled away out of his mother's grasp and thrust himself back between her and Kalter, to ward off the German blow, due to strike her now if ever. Naturally she too shrank from it; even with the words on her lips she had realized that she deserved the worst that might happen.

But nothing happened. Breakdown of her common sense, fit of nerves, height of imprudence and impudence; but to her amazement it worked. She saw the German's face turn red, she saw his fist relax and go down, she saw his German authority and his manly strength hesitating and hanging in the balance for a second, and failing. He did not even say anything. He gave her a somewhat sheepish smile and turned on his heel, back into his sitting room.

As he departed Mrs. Helianos took Alex by both shoulders and turned him around, and ordered him to pick Leda up and go for a walk with her, to be out of harm's way, and to calm her. Alex was all a-tremble; but evidently he had observed the strange surrender of the major, and perhaps with his sixth sense knew that there had been something no less questionable in his mother's outcry about the key. As he and Leda went out the front door, he turned and gave her a flashing grin from ear to ear. A few minutes later the major also departed to his headquarters with a quiet, “Good-bye, Mrs. Helianos.”

It was a miracle, she said to herself. But with an ill-natured shiver she remembered how, when Kalter first came back in his bereaved and exhausted condition with a kind word for them and a little better demeanor in general, she and Helianos, fools that they were, had called that a miracle; whereupon in a new fury he had given Helianos a beating and packed him off to prison!

Well, she would not trust him now. But still, she fancied, this had a little more reality than that. A large part of that other miracle had been Helianos' bewitched and doting gentleness, and Helianos was the most charming man in the world. Whereas there had been nothing charming about her behavior: spiteful naughtiness of some little child, and dishonesty worse than any of Alex's, and the hue and cry of a common market-woman!

Upon which strange terms the force of her spirit somehow had prevailed over Kalter's tyranny and physical force. Somehow the great vile fellow's spirit really was broken, his ego undermined, his state of mind unhealthy, his energy waning. This perhaps had been the point of his final brutality and injustice to Helianos: a last flaring up of his temper, a burning out of his evil, a kind of fierceness which took all the strength he had left. Now it was for her to pursue her little advantage. Now apparently the time had come for a change of policy and practice in what, just then, she had so proudly proclaimed to be her house. All the rest of that day she could not think of it without a slight smile.

So she resolved, from now on, to make some little scene whenever she saw the least sign of Kalter's misbehaving, a daily scene for a while if she could find pretexts enough, little by little, feeling out his weakness. Then, having saved up her energy for two or three days, having thought everything out in advance, she would stride into his sitting room, and with hysterics and histrionics, demand the liberation of Helianos! It might work; perhaps it was what the strange German was waiting for; it would work! Planning all this made her happy for two days, dreaming of Helianos' homecoming.

The episode of the key so enchanted Alex that at the sight of her, the enchantment would come on him again and he would give her the same happy grin. She did not like it. She was afraid of his feeling that her defiance of the major somehow authorized him to do likewise. Or he might guess, or perhaps he had guessed, what a shrew's part she intended to play with the crestfallen Kalter. If he should decide to take a hand in it, all would be lost!

More than this, it vexed her on her own account to have him leering at her like a fellow-conspirator or little evil genius. She was his mother, and a woman of a certain dignity, most of the time; and as it struck her, there was incongruity and mockery in this kind of boyish admiration. With all the shame and the humor of her behavior about the key, she kept an odd, intense self-respect about it. She respected the desperate nervousness which had inspired it all unconsciously, and brought it to pass.

There was a strange little test of strength between her and Alex—it was on a Friday night, the second Friday in June—as she put him and Leda to bed. There once more, once too often, was the mocking expression on his face on the pillow; and she lifted her hand, tempted to slap him. The joyousness died out of his grin but he held his lips in it stubbornly, and for a moment their glances were fixed on each other in bitter emotion, will against will; his then somewhat pathetically failing.