Apartment in Athens Read online

“I will be as German and military as I please. You shall not bully me, I tell you. I have run risks enough for you two.”

  Then with his watery eyes slipped down a little amid crow’s-feet, he fixed her with a great glance, as it were a concentration of his will power. “And not one word to a living soul!” he said, and lifted his forefinger to his lips in the gesture of keeping secrets, keeping silence.

  “Don’t you see, the role I have assumed in this damned war depends on my not having anything to do with the rest of you, all you patriots! I spend my life with Germans,” he added, with a very cynical and ancient chuckle. “Germans, Germans, morning, noon, and night!

  “You must understand. Your husband is a good fellow and all that; we were great friends when he was a boy. But about this trouble he has got into now, and his arrest and imprisonment, the attitude I take is the German attitude. I may tell you that your husband himself understands this perfectly. Good-bye.”

  In the old-fashioned manner he clasped her hand and lifted it to his loose mouth, and began to depart once more. But then he cried, “Oh, dear, oh, dear,” and turned back to her.

  “How rattlepated I am! I’ve forgotten what I came for. Your blessed letter was just by the way. I came to give you a bit of a warning. Now, is there anyone else in the apartment? Where can we sit down comfortably for a minute?”

  So at last she led him into the sitting room; but as it turned out he gave her no news of Helianos.

  “A German named von Roesch, an old major: do you know the man I mean?” he asked.

  “I certainly do. He came here on Saturday.”

  “Oh, he did, did he? Well, I know him, and I had a conversation with him yesterday about our Nikolas. I assured him that he is as innocent and well disposed toward the Germans as I am, which was not a really dishonest way to put it; just misleading!

  “Of course the Helianos' have a great reputation, a bad reputation. It does not seem to surprise the Germans that there should be one pro-German in the family, myself; my well-known vices all my life having brought me to it. But two of us, your Nikolas tagging along after me, is perhaps a little more than they can swallow. Old von Roesch gave me a look, I tell you; suspicious! I suppose they will catch on to me one day.”

  Thus Mrs. Helianos learned that Demos was a hero too. Would wonders never cease, never cease? she murmured to herself.

  “He told me how his friend Kalter came to his sticky end. I never knew Kalter; a bit too strait-laced for my friends, I gather. Now tell me, when was it that he did himself in; was it Friday?”

  “Saturday, Saturday afternoon,” Mrs. Helianos answered.

  “Oh, Saturday; Saturday was the twelfth. . . Ay, ay, he mustn’t have been pleasant to live with all year, that one! It’s a comfort not to have him around any more, alive and kicking—though, I must say, evidently he resolved to make a nuisance of himself after his death as well.”

  Mrs. Helianos did not want to hear all this talk of Kalter. She began to regret having urged Demos to stay and talk to her. She wanted to be left alone with the letter from Helianos, the strange letter. She had unfolded it a little while he was talking: bits and pieces all covered with a minuter version of Helianos' dear script than she had ever seen before; prisoner’s script. She held it in the palm of her hand on her lap, where she could steal glances at it. She did not want to be impolite to old Demos, as he had so kindly and perhaps dangerously brought it to her.

  “You know, dear cousin, you are extremely lucky not to have been involved in that affair of Kalter’s death yourself,” he went on. “He more or less pointed an accusing finger at you, so von Roesch told me; an accusing dead finger!”

  In illustration of which he pointed waveringly at her.

  “Yes, von Roesch explained it to me too. Kalter left a letter there on Helianos' desk.” She pointed back over her shoulder at the desk. “In it he gave all his reasons for killing himself; but he also suggested that some German bigwig named Sertz be notified, so that it should be made to appear that we had killed him.”

  “That was it, that was the idea!” Demos said. “Sertz is a fiend, I may tell you. Von Roesch went to him and threatened to testify in your behalf.”

  “He promised me he would. And, you know, Demos, I heard him arguing about it with Sertz’s young lieutenant; he thought I did not understand German. It was a kind of blackmail; von Roesch has some evidence of their dishonesty, bribes and so on.”

  “Ay, so that was the way of it,” Demos cried gleefully. “Thank you for telling me that, dear. How clever of you to find that out! I knew they had it in for each other. Rivals, and opposite types: the old Junker versus the young up-and-coming Nazi.”

  She hated this chatter about Kalter and von Roesch and Sertz, all fiends. She was prepared to endure whatever they might still do to her but she would not bore herself to death thinking of them in advance. She pressed Helianos' letter to her bosom and stood up.

  But then Demos said, “So now you have von Roesch after you, dear Cousin,” in a small sorry frightening voice. “That’s what I came to warn you about.”

  So she sat down again, and asked him not to hint and joke, but to tell her the worst at once, and clearly, because she was a woman, not very brave or very clever.

  “Well, you see, von Roesch is firmly persuaded that your spirit is broken, my dear. Is it?”

  “No, it is not,” she replied simply.

  “That’s good,” he said. “Anyway, you’re going to have to see more of von Roesch, perhaps a good deal more. Not right away; he went off to Constantinople on some mission this morning. He’ll be away about a fortnight. Then he will call on you, to pay his respects and express his sympthy about Helianos' being in prison and so on. Then he will ask you to give him some information about the rest of the Helianos family.

  “Do you see what I mean, dear Cousin?” he asked earnestly.

  “God help me, yes, I see,” she answered.

  “Yes, you’re in a fix, and you hold some of the rest of us in the hollow of your hand. As it seemed to me our best bet was to explain it to you and put it up to you. Try, dear Cousin, do try not to give von Roesch information. Talk nonsense to him. Think up things to tell him, make a game of it.”

  He spoke very rapidly, with his dissipated but sharp eyes glancing up, glancing down; his old fingers weaving around and around the brim of his hat.

  “Don’t underestimate him. He’s very keen against us Greeks. Not cruel like Sertz but more intelligent. He’d be the boss here, probably, only his politics aren’t right just now.”

  “Also he is indiscreet,” Mrs. Helianos interrupted. “It was foolish to let me overhear everything he said to Sertz’s lieutenant.”

  “Perhaps he liked you. Perhaps he was showing off for you,” Demos said with a smile.

  Mrs. Helianos blushed.

  “In any case he wanted you to think that he liked you. You see, he and Sertz have a quite different policy. Sertz is a really vain brute. All he thinks of is quantity of victims, not quality. Therefore it would have meant something to him to catch even you, if you don’t mind my saying so, my dear. . .

  “Von Roesch has more sense. He doesn’t believe in victimizing women and children. What he believes in is using them for pawns and as bait. Perhaps he was indiscreet intentionally, to show you how far he was prepared to go for you; how he defied his fellow-officers for you. He means to arouse your feeling of gratitude, so that you will confide the family secrets to him. I suppose you’d better let him think that you are grateful.”

  “All right,” Mrs. Helianos said dully. On so short notice she really could not think or feel much about this new problem, with half her mind on Helianos' letter.

  “All right,” he repeated after her. “I must go now. I hope you have a strong character. But after all I have not a strong character, and I manage. There is something in me, something else; perhaps in you too. You see how it is: we’re not in a position not to have confidence in you. Either we depend on you or we kill you; a
nd, you know, I can’t quite imagine our doing that.”

  The old fellow rose to go. “You will take care of my reputation, then, will you? I especially am at your mercy. After all, Petros and Giorges and the others can flee away to the mountains. I can’t, my little work is here. But I have been a good cousin to you, haven’t I? I did bring you your blessed letter; I didn’t read it either, although curiosity is my besetting sin. . .

  “Now I must run like the devil, I’m such a chatter box. It’s why I didn’t want to come in and sit down in the first place. Oh, they’ll catch me, some day, while I sit gossiping with some charming woman.”

  She followed him out into the stairway and hung over the banisters, watching him trip unsteadily down, listening to his thin footsteps out of sight diminishing like a phantom’s; and her heart was stirred by respect and also by a little laughter.

  16.

  HELIANOS' LETTER WAS A LONG STRANGE DOCUMENT, written on four or five different kinds of paper in fifteen or eighteen bits, most of them small, enclosed in one fairly good-sized piece of thin wrapping paper. She took it into her bedroom and sat down on the floor and spread it all around her and read until the children came home, then locked her door quietly and hastened to them and gave them their little supper, without mentioning it to them. As soon as she could get them to bed she went on with the reading. She still had Kalter’s reading-lamp and a very little oil for it; she put it on the floor and held the wearisomely small writing up to the light.

  What she happened to read first, all on the piece of wrapping-paper, frightened her. It was as if Helianos had lost his mind or his character in prison; or as if the Germans had tormented him into thinking in their way. It appeared to be shameless pro-German propaganda in the form of disjointed notes with, here and there, a fantastic sentence enclosed in quotation marks. Suddenly she realized what it was: a résumé of Kalter’s political discourse in the last ten days in May. She herself had heard most of it, kneeling amid the old shoes and under the stuffy suspended garments. Now it vexed her so and bored her so—to think of Helianos still somehow bewitched by all that boastful nonsense!—that she put it aside and took up another piece. She expected Helianos to explain why, knowing her prejudice and her boredom, he had troubled to write that down for her.

  The second piece she took up, several similar pieces to be exact, looked easier to read; and to her surprise she found that it was simply an account of his last conversation with Kalter, of which she had heard only the uproar at the end, when the blows and kicks began.

  Evidently he had not heard of the grief-stricken and hysterical man’s death. But he gave this opinion: “Although at the time his threat of suicide impressed me as mere German romanticism and rhetoric, now, having thought it over, I conclude that he may do it someday; or he may go mad. There was a crazy sincerity in everything he said that afternoon. It is well known: there is often a suicidal streak in the German nature. Unfortunately they will always take as many of the rest of us as possible along with them to their deaths.”

  It was not easy to read, after all; it made her so angry that her eyes flickered out of focus. How she wished she had come to her listening-post a few minutes earlier to hear Kalter threatening, promising, to kill himself! She would have believed it, wanting to believe it, and she would have sensed Helianos' peril. Poor Helianos, he never had been able to distinguish between the truth and the nonsense in anything his wicked major told him, she thought. But then she blushed, remembered how she herself had half believed the other major, the good major.

  Then she found a page which was more like the usual letter; that is to say, it was not propaganda and it was not a narrative: “My dear, a woman’s love is never very respectful, naturally not. She sees too much of her man’s weaknesses, his incompetence and impotence, and how life has worn him down. Please forgive me for all that, now that I am absent, and forget it as much as you can. I need your respect just now. I have to tell myself that I have it, in a kind of self-flattery that I could not live without. It is my necessary medicine.

  “I have tried never to be pretentious in the intellectual way. It is not good for a man to show off his worldly wisdom and culture in the bosom of his family. But I have some wordly wisdom; please believe it! I have been a great reader in my day, and I have known many brilliant men; and even now, past my prime, this recent experience of having Kalter talk to me frankly so many evenings about the German character and the German dream has been extraordinarily stimulating.

  “Perhaps the shock of being arrested and the loneliness and hardship here have excited my mind. In any case I have been very thoughtful these days, and I do want you not to suppose that it is all foolishness just because you know me too well. I implore you to try to take it seriously.”

  This apologetic prefatory page made Mrs. Helianos weep heartbrokenly. Next she picked a small scrap that might have been the start of this strange epistle, which as a whole seemed not to have any formal beginning or any definite conclusion. The small scrap read: “Oh, I have so many things on my mind and in my heart to tell you! Sometimes they keep us very busy here, with their questioning and so forth. I do not always feel quite well, and of course I can only write when no one is watching. But I am fortunate in that I have a tiny window, and in the prison-yard there is a strong arclight, which is to enable the guards to see that we stay where we belong; and all night it gives me a little light.

  “That old rascal my cousin Demos has been here, and he said he would come again. He gave me these scraps of paper. I wonder where he got them. He has a friend here. I think he will be able to serve as my message-bearer to you.”

  A series of bits of grayish flimsy tissue like toilet-paper began: “This is what I want you to do to please me. See my cousins, old Giorges and Petros, whenever you can; especially Petros, if it is safe for him to come into Athens now.

  “You do not like these cousins, I know, they frighten you. But you must be patient and not blame their violence too much; it is the tragic time. They will be good men again when it is over, I swear they will, if they survive.

  “I want you to tell them all our story: the life our German led us last year, and the great change in the month of May, then how it ended. One thing that has made me lonely here is my not being sure that you know the very end yourself; and not having had a chance to talk that over with you. My recollection is that you did not feel well and were lying down; is that true? So perhaps you don’t know how he broke down and wept, and how I happened to say what I did, in sympathy. When you came to the door, before he locked you out, there behind his back I puckered up my lips for you to see: it meant a good-bye kiss, but I think you were too frightened to notice. Tomorrow night or the next night I shall try to write a little account of that last scene for you.”

  Whereupon Mrs. Helianos re-read the little account, angrily again, and as if it were against her will; and she felt how Helianos' mind in prison against his will must be going over it and over it, the memory of his entire relationship with Kalter like a squirrel-cage for him, turning and turning; and she shivered with a little fear of his going mad in prison.

  Then she took up the grayish tissue-paper once more: “It makes me happy now to think that you were listening in the closet on the other occasions—Alex gave away your secret, you know, but don’t blame him, he worried about you. I am glad that you have a good memory. I want you to tell my cousins everything you heard Kalter say, as much as you can recall of it. I shall try to make some little notes, to remind you; and then I want to write down certain thoughts which have come to me here in prison: things I should talk to them about if I were free to do so.”

  She paused and took the piece of wrapping-paper with the little notes of odious propaganda all over it, and crumpled it up a little and threw it away across the floor under the desk. She identified and sorted out Helianos' own political thoughts, and postponed reading them until next day because she was afraid of not being able to understand them.

  Then she read anot
her bit of the flimsy paper: “Don’t show the cousins these wretched little pages. They are too hard to read—a man of action like Petros would lose his patience—and they are badly written, in my style which is naturally pompous. Only a loving wife would have the courage to decipher this tiny handwriting. It has to be tiny or I shall run out of paper. This is a German pencil and it is the worst in the world; Demos had it in his pocket. I have to sharpen it with my teeth. I implore you to make as much sense of my scribbling as you can; then just tell the cousins everything in your own words.”

  Of course she could not make sense of it all but of course she had the courage to decipher it all. Once in a while she grew discouraged and was tempted to put it all away in a box or in a drawer as a mere keepsake, unreadable. But then she would come upon a passage of his old familiar eloquence which charmed her whether it made sense or not, which carried her mind away with his mind wherever it went, even in his contemplation of death without a tremor.

  “I will tell you how it is when one contemplates dying,” she read. “I do not speak of my own death, dear; only this is a place where you cannot help thinking of it in general. A part of your spirit loosens away from you, it turns unearthly, and some of your mind keeps wandering. What you want more than anything is to have your friends and family informed of what has happened to you. At the thought of losing the bodily life you can’t help it; you begin to consider how, without a body, you might still have another kind of existence in their minds; as if you were a ghost making his little plan to haunt someone.

  “I suppose this is one reason I want you to talk to my cousins. I shall be happier, and it will help me to bear things with good grace and patience, if I know that they are aware of my little adventure, how it came about, and what my opinion of it is. You need not try to make a good story of it; just the facts. No matter if they feel no great admiration for the way we have behaved; no matter if there is no inspiration in it for them, no particular moral—so long as we are not forgotten! While there is memory there is hope.”