Apartment in Athens (11 page)

When Helianos tried to explain what a tragic conversation it had been for him—his shame, his resentment, Kalter's evident sincerity, his decision of forgiveness—she smiled at the inconsistency of his feeling and reproved him for his false pride.

“My poor Helianos, you are the strangest man on earth. With all your appreciation of the major, when at last he does express a little sympathy and offers some help, you resent it, you lose your temper!

“Helianos, try to be reasonable about Leda. What can we do ourselves to improve her condition? Nothing. We feed her what food there is; we get her out of bed in the morning, and put her back to bed in the evening; we wash her, when we have time. She gets a little exercise with Alex; that is all her life. We do not understand her, we have no notion of her health or her real welfare.

“It is like keeping some little animal for a pet. Or like a bird in a cage. She is both bird and cage, and forever shut!” Mrs. Helianos' face as she said this lit up with a peculiar smile, as if she knew the answer to everything in the world.

“Now, if these fantastic Germans wanted to try some treatment to help her,” she went on, “oh, let them try, for pity's sake! It is the least they can do. For they are to blame for her condition, their war frightened her into it!

“But, Helianos, try not to take things so seriously. Your blessed major talks and talks; naturally he wants to impress you, with the goodness of his heart, and now with his great knowledge of science; and perhaps he means it all. But nothing happens; he has too much on his mind now, whatever it is.

“I must say, this plan about Leda is the kindest thought that has come into his head so far. But I am afraid he'll not do anything about it. It is pleasant to have him at least try to behave like a reasonable human being. But we shall have to take the will for the deed.”

Because this was what Helianos had said to himself in the very act of indulgence, it made him shiver to hear her say it.

So the weeks passed, with Kalter maintaining an entirely correct and friendly attitude, toward Mrs. Helianos especially, overlooking anything that seemed not to fit into his scheme of friendliness, perhaps making allowances for her as a woman in poor health. This was the cleverest thing he did to convince and conciliate Helianos.

She was still very alien with him, still afraid, or indignant or proud; who could tell? Whatever he said to her, the tone of her voice always shifted key a little in reaction to his voice. Her eyes pinched together somewhat at his glance. There was still a distinct withdrawal, a sudden straightening somewhere about her thick small raggedy person, if he made a gesture; evidently it was a habit she would never overcome.

Naturally all this had some chilling, discouraging effect on him, but he appeared not to hold it against her. Not once since he came back from Germany had he really reproved her for anything. He rarely asked her to do any hard or disagreeable task. When she had done something well enough, he appreciated it and complimented her. Sometimes a day would pass without his speaking to her at all, but that too may have been with friendly intention, as she had a way of showing that she preferred not to be spoken to.

“She is not well, is she?” he inquired of Helianos one evening. “I have been noticing it, perhaps you have not, you're too accustomed to the way she is. I think you must insist on her seeing a doctor. You know, it's a serious matter. . .”

It was in one of his genial moods, when he paid little attention to anything Helianos replied to him. “Now, Helianos, don't argue about it. Do as I tell you!

“Another thing, Helianos. There is, as you may have heard, a shortage of all kinds of medicine in Athens. Ask your doctor about that when you take your wife to see him. If he can't get what he thinks she ought to have, tell him it can be arranged, in her case. Bring his prescription to me, I will see what can be done about it.”

He had forgotten all about Leda and the psychiatrist, Helianos reminded himself. How true Mrs. Helianos' intuition was now and then! Perhaps now he was talking just to make a friendly effect; but he had to be listened to in any case.

Dr. Vlakos happened to be absent from Athens that week. The physician's daughter whispered to Helianos where he was: somewhere in the mountains where some leader of the secret Greek army lay in a fever. Helianos inquired anxiously whether it was his heroic cousin Petros; it was not.

Mrs. Helianos was unwilling to change doctors. Furthermore, she said, her health at the moment was better than it had been for months. “Tell your blessed major to look at himself in the mirror,” she snapped, “and he will see which of us most needs medical attention. And tell him, if you please, to compare what he has eaten and what I have eaten in the past year, and his work and my work, and his victoriousness and our defeat!”

Helianos argued with her in vain. His anxiety about her health never ceased; as a rule she too was anxious enough. What a willful creature she was! Probably there would not be another opportunity for her to get proper medication while the war lasted. Furthermore Helianos was afraid that the proud German might resent their not taking his advice; but he did not, he forgot it.

His friendly concern expressed itself in another way. “Helianos, I think our work is too hard for your wife now. Can't you help her a little more than you do? Can't you get that old servant back to help her, the one you had when I first came? Old Euridice, Evridiki. . .”

“Oh, but,” Helianos stammered, “we understood, Major Kalter, that you didn't like that old servant.”

“It's true, I didn't, but now it doesn't matter. It will be easier to have her than to train a new one. Don't you know where she lives? Send word to her, do it right away, so Mrs. Helianos can get some rest.”

With a certain misgiving Helianos did try to get in touch with Evridiki but word came back from her village near Eleusis that she was dead.

Kalter still had not recovered his old hearty appetite, and one evening Helianos asked him to suggest some improvement of their meals, or change of menu. “If I knew what would tempt you, sir, perhaps I could find it in the market; and Mrs. Helianos likes to attempt new dishes.”

“Thank you, no,” Kalter answered, “I can't be bothered. No appetite; no matter. Why should you complain of it, Helianos, if I may ask? There is a little left for you, as it is now, and you need it, you poor devils!”

Helianos blushed, asking himself for an instant whether this might be the beginning of a scolding in the old manner, the change again, the change back. When they had first begun profiting by his abstemiousness, reveling in the leftovers—at the thought of his temper if and when he found them out, they had held their breaths as they reveled. Then they forgot and took it all for granted. As there were four of them the little extra was soon eaten.

Helianos blushed, but the tone of Kalter's remark was so good-natured, he almost thought it might be safe to smile or to make a jest. . . Then he caught his breath, suddenly reminded of something else he had forgotten: the decrepit greedy old dog, the other major's dog, the dog of the Macedonian couple. Not once since Kalter's return had he ordered anything wrapped up and taken down the street to their apartment! What a strange thing; and stranger still, his never having given it a thought: he who had done the wrapping and the taking, night after night.

He served the rest of the major's dinner, he cleared the table, without knowing what he was about; amazed at himself, with that slight streak of oblivion running back through the month past, as if it were amnesia, a tiny dark hole in his good-for-nothing brain. It worried him; he wondered what else he might have forgotten, all the while he had been flattering himself that everything was going well, what worse amazement might be in store.

He could scarcely wait to get away from the major, away to his wife in the kitchen, to ask why she had never mentioned it. She said that it had slipped her mind too. What a spell the German had cast on them! It was as if they had lost some of their capacity for knowing what happened, even their own everyday existence with its slight ups and downs, unless and until it happened to be revealed to them by the major. The assuagement of their hunger by a few more mouthfuls than usual had distracted them. Night after night they had consumed the dog's portion without stopping to think what little turn of fortune entitled them to it.

This was one of the occasions when Leda spoke. She asked what dog they were talking about. All her life she had wanted some small animal all her own, a puppy or a kitten, and could not understand her parents' refusal.

Alex said that a week ago he had seen the old beast loping along the street, with its caved-in white flanks muddy, its eyes glittering red, sniffing and drooling; and he, thinking it might be mad, had run the other way; and after that it had not been seen again. But as he told this, the poetic expression played over his face, and Helianos supposed that it was a yarn; his imagination slipping loose again, incorrigible.

Presently Helianos happened to meet the old Macedonian at the street-corner and entered into conversation with him, and leading up to the matter tactfully, questioned him. “Is it your impression, sir,” he inquired, “that our major and your major are not as friendly as they used to be?

“You remember how I used to bring all our leftovers for your old bull-terrier. Our major—he was a captain then—insisted on it. It was a little gesture to please your major. Then he went home to Germany on leave, and since he got back, he has never mentioned it.”

The Macedonian gentleman was exceedingly old, deaf, and obtuse; but finally gave the information that interested Helianos. Far from ceasing their friendship the two officers had spent the evening together lately, two or three evenings in fact, when Helianos had assumed that Kalter was at his headquarters working or at the officers' club playing cards.

The mystery of the dog-food was no mystery at all. The ravenous old animal was dead. It was a pity, the Macedonian felt, in view of the fact that he had the best possible British registration-papers for it, and half a dozen blue ribbons of its youth, which he offered to show to Helianos if it interested him.

These coincidences, these deaths, that of the neighbor's bull-terrier following Evridiki's, affected Helianos strangely, as it were with extreme superstition. Commonplace, inconsequential deaths; representative of death in the average and the abstract. For a long time as it had happened he had not heard of anyone's simply dying; only of people getting killed, which was another thing. Killing aroused anger, sometimes caused despair, sometimes gave hope. This was death the charmer, the changer; a continuous factor in one's life, to which one yielded.

With this generalization, and others no less farfetched and poetical, Helianos yielded (as he thought) to his life, however things might turn out for him, wherever his brighter prospect might be leading him. He ceased to worry or wonder about the explanation or the motivation of the major's better nature. He kept saying to himself that he was happy, relatively happy, somewhat losing his sense of the relativity in question, ceasing to be a judge of happiness. He no longer knew what to think, and gave himself up to small simple surprises and doubts from day to day, and occasionally to hope.

One night he had a bad dream about the dead terrier, pink-faced and blistered with eczema, covered with blue ribbons, forever dying, forever whining for something to eat; and as it impressed him it was like those heaven-sent birds and beasts of mythology which lured ancient men to their destiny or perdition. He followed the pink and sick animal, somehow coerced to follow it, fated to follow it, shouting against it the while; and his shout wakened Mrs. Helianos, who shook him until he woke. Evridiki also came into the dream somehow but when he was awake he could not remember in what capacity.

He had other dreams that same week, and was moved to various emotions by them and interpreted them to himself, as a mystery, turning their meaning this way and that, as Greeks have done from the beginning of time. He mentioned them to his wife but did not narrate them, except this one of the old dog and the old servant. Afterward Mrs. Helianos was to regret his not having told her everything that came to him in his sleep: riddle, malediction, or glimpse of the future.

O
F ALL THE CHANGES, THE HAPPIEST FOR HELIANOS
was being allowed to pass the evening in the sitting room. That was in the third week of May.

“Why shouldn't you sit in here?” Kalter asked him, with that calm inconsistency which he still could not fathom. “Here is where you used to sit, after your dinner, is it not? There in the corner, that is your armchair, I suppose. You must get tired of that kitchen (which, I must say, your poor wife does not keep very clean) don't you?

“No, you won't disturb me in the least. I am a companionable type of man; most Germans are in fact. You like to read, don't you? When I feel like a little talk, we can talk; when I am busy you can hold your tongue, can't you? Anyway I am not working in the evening now, as I used to do.”

The first evening of this new regime excited Helianos so that he scarcely enjoyed it. He went to his own bookcase and took two of his old favorite books, and it was an enchantment, fantastic; it gave him a lump in his throat. He could not really read, he could not take his eyes off Kalter as he sat at his desk reading, reading: one of his new unbelievable cheap paper-covered novels. Helianos held his own book up before him in serious manner; he felt that he had to pretend to read, lest his companion who was in a manner of speaking his host, should turn around and discover that he was not really reading, and be made nervous by his glances.

But the next evening Kalter began to engage him in conversation, and from then on, all went well enough. It was an unforgettable experience to penetrate into that German mind little by little.

On the third evening Kalter went to work again, but obviously it was not his former work. It did not require a one of the volumes, the strategy, logistics, dietetics, put away beside Helianos' dear books in the bookcase, nor the worn copy-book. Instead he brought out a bundle of legal-looking papers, which he perused for an hour; then began adding and subtracting, and apparently drafting a letter or a document, tearing up version after version, discontented, frowning and pinching his thin underlip with his long white teeth; and adding and subtracting all over again, while Helianos watched from his armchair in the corner.