Apartment in Athens (13 page)

“Of course, it is not the same for the common people, I must admit. They have so much to bear, in a defeat; naturally they want to win. But, you know, they are such a good people, with stout hearts and peaceful minds; they are naturally so happy to follow the leaders.

“Oh, the cost is great, even for the upper classes, in many ways. It takes our all, in the prime of life, to the limit of our strength. In the practical way, economics and so on, it is not so bad. In that sense, to a great extent—this is something I see for myself a little, in the quartermaster's corps—we make the war pay as we go along. And in peacetime the other nations help us. It is not just sentiment; as their economy is, as they understand it, it is to their interest to do so. . .

“But I do not speak of materialistic matters only; it is the imagination, the future, the ideal! We Germans are not so practical a people, after all; not as you might think. It is never a mere question of how we fight or how we live; it is why we fight and what we live for.

“Victory, yes, very well, all in due time! But if this is not the time, then no matter, we will have the future! Just so long as victory is possible, up ahead—constantly beckoning like a dream, leading on and on, as it were our hope of heaven, our salvation—it is enough! You must understand what I say, Helianos! After all, it used to mean something to you Greeks, with your winged
Nike
, didn't it?

“I know, I know, there is some slight pessimism about it, and a certain desperation, but how glorious! It is what makes men fight like angels; even silly Englishmen and drunken Americans individually, in the sordid sense, at the last moment, when it is a question of kill or be killed.

“But for us, it is not momentary, it is forever. It is not sordid, it is a vision, even when it happens to be peacetime. We are always a little in the frame of mind that you all are in, upon occasion, when the battle is actually on. . .”

After this long portion of his tirade the strange fellow drew a sigh, as if he were a weary schoolmaster, expounding rudimentary and self-evident things to a child. And in fact Helianos as it went on felt rather like a child. He reminded himself somewhat of poor Leda listening to one of Alex's yarns.

How it would have frightened him if he had entirely believed it! Point by point, sentence after sentence, it seemed as plain as day and in dead earnest and quite convincing and almost overwhelming—then when he tried to contemplate it in its entirety, as a whole, it fell to bits, and he felt inclined to giggle. If he had been a younger man, a fighter, or a politician, it would have been his duty to try to believe it, in order to combat it. It occurred to him that this was one point upon which he agreed with Kalter: incredulity was a weakness. . .

“You see,” Kalter continued, apropos again, “you see how weak you are, you other nations, in your intellect. After all, all you care for is the everyday life, the fun of it, or the pity of it, as it happens to be in reality.

“Naturally, everything in reality has its ups and downs; and for you, your destiny goes up and down accordingly; but ours does not! You judge everything by results, whereas we judge by the greatness of the ambition and the undertaking. If you fail it is nothing, nothing. Whether we fail or not, it is a great thing.

“You naturally are afraid of fate. We are not afraid, because we have identified ourselves with it, we are active in it, we are it. Whatever happens, yes, we have the satisfaction of knowing that we have helped it along, with all our might, with a whole heart. If it is not what we expected we care little—it is a change, it is creative! Nothing we have had anything to do with will ever be the same again.

“But now let us try to look at it from your point of view, sympathetically,” he said, in a more sympathetic, companionable, though patronizing, tone of voice. “None of you, you foreigners, can even consider the possibility of losing the war, can you? Not even for argument's sake! Naturally not. The very thought of defeat is unthinkable for you. It would be the end, the end of your world, your one-sided world in which everything has to be just so.”

To be sure, Helianos thought, with his heavy irony, all this was addressed to him as you might say by courtesy, representing all the other still embattled nations as best he could in his poor person. For of course, to him specifically as a Greek at this point, losing the war was not at all unthinkable, alas, and there was no argument; in so far as his world was one-sided, certainly the end of it had come.

“You must get results,” Kalter said meanwhile, in his loud voice full of life, “for whether you amount to anything or not depends on it: results or nothing. You must win, or your war is meaningless.

“Nothing is meaningless for us. Everything is just a new beginning, a fresh start. There will be another war, always, we say to ourselves; some war or other. It stands to reason, historically. Forever and forever history will always give us another chance.”

Which was not, Helianos said to himself ruefully, what he called looking at it sympathetically from his point of view. Once or twice during this discourse he had to cover his lips with his hand, to hide what might have been called a smile. It occurred to him to wonder what his poor wife made of it, crouching so close, silent and secret in the clothes closet.

“At last,” Kalter proclaimed, “sooner or later, it will work for us. That will be a great day; a Utopia as the English call it; everything new, everything creative! At last the world will have a world-government; and who is to govern, unless it is Germany? What other nation is there, equal to the task, self-confident, hard-working?”

His small blue eyes, slightly dilated, with the whites not quite white and the eyelids irritated as they had been ever since he returned from Germany, shone with the historic vision. Helianos gazed back at him in dismay; but their eyes did not meet because the major's eyes, literally as well as figuratively, were focused over his head, far off.

Then the major remarked that actually not one of the other nations really wants the job of world-government, calling Helianos' attention to the general unwillingness and unworthiness of the non-German Western world: the Greeks, for example; and the French, what foolishness! The English have ability, he admitted, but no imagination; and the Americans are wonderfully inventive but frivolous.

“I happen to know the Americans well, because my own brother is an American,” he confided. “What a frivolous people, it astounds us: always on the go, getting nowhere, drinking and drinking and making merry, talking and talking and, in the end, doing very little!

“Anyway we have taken all their inventions, and made something of them. They are wonderfully generous and free-and-easy between wars,” he said.

“Then Russia! It will not have escaped your attention, Helianos, that I have not said a word about Russia. You will understand why: it is not particularly the German enemy, it is not a part of the Western world, it is the common enemy, Asia!

“You know, it has spirit, a kind of great spirit, like the other Asia. As a man of the world I appreciate it. But how different it is from the rest of us, so bestial, so simple, with the passive mysticism of its poor people. We Germans understand it very well; no one else seems to. It was made for us, our natural hinterland. It has great strength, but only a defensive strength. We should have no trouble with it if the other nations would refrain from attacking us.

“As for its revolution, I presume—as I understand that you were also a man of property in your youth—that you feel as I do. A frightful thing; but it has run most of its course now, naturally. . .

“Don't forget that they owe it to us Germans anyway. Marx was a German although a Jew: the spiritual son of our great Hegel. We have the true version, in our National Socialism; they have the heresy. And don't forget how well it has served our purpose, turning all the liberals in the democracies against their own governments, back into our arms, where they belong; we can almost always use them.”

At the end of the evening he tried to give Helianos some idea of what the German world-government would be. It sounded well but afterward Helianos found that he could not remember much of it. He seemed constitutionally incapable of taking it all in, or at least momentarily unable. His natural skepticism overcame even his curiosity, and he let entire topics pass with little attention.

He had not the least inclination to argue with the German about anything. How bored, and perhaps vexed, Kalter would have been if he had argued! Furthermore, he thought, from his own point of view, the Greek point of view, it was better not to. It seemed to him that if he tried to meet the German on his German ground, abstract, ideal, ideological, he certainly would be lost.

Perhaps there was no argument, as such, he said to himself, with a kind of serenity and idleness in his own conviction. Then he had a momentary wonderful, tragic glimpse of what his conviction was, simply this: there were too many sick enslaved women like his wife, too many wild half-criminal boys like Alex, too many psychopathic babies like Leda. . .Whatever the great day up ahead might be, he, for his part, was unwilling to pay that price, today. The clever thing all Germans did was to get everyone talking in terms of the future, as if the present did not exist or did not matter; and for Helianos, with his Greek sense of the value of a lifetime and the absoluteness of death, there was something wrong about that.

Presently he grew sleepy, and it was like pure imagination, laughable, though not very pleasantly laughable: himself, as it were over against the grandeur of the German humbly personifying the international nations, and perhaps combining the worst features of each: the weakness of character of one, the apathy of mind of another, the superficiality of another, as well as the Greek faults which he knew so well.

He kept nodding his head at Kalter's every word; and this mere acquiescence seemed to suit the proud German better than his various other reactions on other occasions. The longer Kalter talked the friendlier he appeared; which perhaps was a good omen for that great day to come, if and when his kind are to govern the world. World-governor or not, he concluded upon an almost fraternal note; and when at last the weary Greek departed to his rest in the kitchen, patted him on the back.

Their next night of serious talk was all about propaganda. “What makes us great in propaganda,” Kalter began, with a manner of having prepared his thoughts in advance, “what helps us so much, is that the other nations have no consistent belief, no soul, no idealism, except one thing. . . Sympathy for the underdog, that they have! It is fantastic, it comes over them like a madness! And in the interval between wars, that is to our advantage. When we need help, then it is in the nature of the other nations to give us help.

“We are the only nation that has not a divided mind. Therefore all our culture and our art is good propaganda. Wagner, for example, invincible all over the world! You see how important that is. It is the way to make peace at the end of a war, so that we can get on our feet again. It gives us time, between wars, to learn and develop, to plan and prepare everything.

“I myself do not know all about propaganda. I always have specialized in the problems of supply, ordnance, transportation. But my friend Major von Roesch knows all about it; I have studied it somewhat with him. Of course it is not so mighty as military science but as it appears, it is a more exact science. So to speak, a weapon of lesser caliber but more accurate aim. . .

“As Major von Roesch tells me, our
Fuehrer
as a statesman and a general has made mistakes; I admit it. Men of action always make mistakes. For one thing, military action is directed against the strength of the enemy, propaganda against the weakness of the enemy; so our minister of propaganda has an easier job of it. He is a kind of artist. Nothing is a mistake for him! He never loses a battle, not even here in Greece where you are so savage and cunning. . .

“Wait and see, wait and see! Even in backward Greece, with your pride in your burning patriotism, you will fall out among yourselves. Naturally there are these political diseases in any occupied country, and if the occupying authority knows its business, it is amazing how much can be done along that line, to keep them from being cured, to nurse them along to our advantage.

“Naturally there are two sides to everything, two ways about everything; that is fate. But everything can be fixed so that it is effective for us either way, and that is art! Wagner understood that so well. . .”

Helianos was not impressed by the bit about Greece. He did not believe that there were among his people any great schisms or angry passions helpful to the enemy. A foreigner naturally would misunderstand the old Hellenic quarrelsomeness, which was essentially democratic, he thought; and flatter himself that it could be taken advantage of.

It was the main theme of the evening that impressed and fascinated and frightened him. For one thing, the arts, literature, music, at least Wagner, came into it a bit, at least in theory; and he fancied himself a little less incompetent in that field than in political philosophy, martial mysticism. They never forgot a thing, these Germans! It was thrilling in a way. It bore some resemblance to parts of Plato but of course it was more in earnest. . . Off and on for two or three days he kept arguing the principles of cultural propaganda pro and con, not exactly with Mrs. Helianos but in her presence, thinking out loud. It seemed to him that what he had heard Kalter say that night was the most evil stuff he had ever heard uttered.

She not only despised it, she pretended not to be able to understand one word of it. How he doted on this terrible lodger of theirs, this intellectual quartermaster, this fitful bully! It was all very well for Leda to dote, she declared, but as Helianos was a man, a man of honor and good education, he ought to be ashamed of himself.

But he could not find it in his heart to be ashamed. He knew what he was about, he said to her, and to himself. Listening to the major was a kind of education; often it was a pleasure. Sitting there in his sitting room with a strange, and now strangely amiable companion: it was the natural life for him, after all; thoughtfulness, talkativeness, philosophy and history in dialectic form. It was more like his life in peacetime—as a publisher, an intellectual, and a man of some leisure—than anything else in this world-war, this German world, this brutalized, half-dead Athens.