Apartment in Athens Read online

  Although she had that pearly white skin which had been a feature of her mother’s loveliness in her girlhood, Leda was not pretty. Her teeth grew too far forward, and her cheekbones were too high under her eyes. But the great pity was her expression or lack of expression. Sometimes, when something went wrong, or when she could not understand what was happening, her sensitive but passive face made one shiver. It merely shrank and hung heavy like the loose petals of a large flower.

  She never wanted to play with anyone except her brother, and rarely spoke, sitting and watching things without a word for hours at a time. Whatever was said to her or done for her she accepted indifferently, and gave no sign of devotion to either of her parents. Only Alex found the way to her small heart.

  When their various relatives came to visit them, Helianos would remark, “Leda is more like a daughter-in-law than a daughter.”

  It was the kind of delicate, obscure joke that he liked to make, in his low voice with his clever smile. And there was truth in it: the delicate boy and the sleepy-headed little girl were like a bride and groom in a fairy-tale, diminutive, uncanny, one as bewitched as the other.

  Chattering by the hour, Alex confided to Leda all his fantasy of taking revenge on some German, often with extreme passion, with details of childish atrocity. It frightened her but because it was he, and she so loved the sound of his voice, her dull chubby face would light up with blissful attention.

  Mrs. Helianos thought that Alex should be punished for his wild talk, not only because of its bad effect on Leda but for his own sake and for their sake: his long-suffering parents! War was not for children. She wanted her children to think of it as it might be of illness in the family, or bankruptcy, or an earthquake or a flood; with no one to blame. She could not imagine where Alex got his vengeful notions. If he went on harping on the war in this way of his, daydream and melodrama, sooner or later he would feel that he must do something in fact, to make his dreams come true. And as he was not capable of anything, he would fail and be caught by the Germans and be punished in the German way. Had they not suffered enough?

  Helianos only shook his head dubiously, refusing to discipline his silly son. As a matter of fact Alex’s cruel patriotic make-believe did not depress Leda so much as her mother’s fuss and foreboding. Children are somewhat immune to their own level of cruelty. . . She overheard a part of the argument her parents had about this, and started to cry in her silent, passive fashion. There was an affinity between Mrs. Helianos and Leda, somehow closer than their affection: the anxious motherly imagination reflecting itself in the little one as if it were a dark cloud over a small stagnant pool.

  One afternoon in the summer of 1941 Leda had an adventure. Alex was absent, taking a message to one of his father’s friends; and Leda went out and down the street to a vacant lot where he had promised to meet her and play with her. Presently Alex came back alone, asking, “Mother, where is Leda? Where is Leda?”

  An hour later Leda returned, like a small sleep-walker; and for two and a half days she would not, or could not, move or speak or eat or sleep. She sat no matter where all day long, and when her mother picked her up and put her to bed, lay all night long, breathing with her mouth open and staring straight ahead, as though her eyes were of marble. The family physician, Dr. Vlakos, whom Mrs. Helianos summoned on the second day, could not explain her condition. On the third day, a chance remark of Alex’s having aroused her, she resumed her poor listless existence as usual, but would never tell what had frightened her.

  Although they were newcomers in that part of town and Mrs. Helianos did not know or care to know many of her neighbors, now she went among them to investigate the mystery of Leda. At last she found one whose small daughter, younger than Leda but not so sensitive or secretive, had gone along in search of Alex that afternoon. This is what had happened: another neighbor’s child had misinformed them as to the direction of Alex’s errand. They had strayed into a side-street near the municipal market where, earlier in the day, there had been a gathering of hungry Athenians to protest against some new ruling or new deprivation. The German military police had arrived, chosen to regard it as a riot, and fired upon it to disperse it. Eight or ten bodies lay on the pavement, machine-gunned, some with grimacing faces, all with grimacing bodies, rags of flesh in ragged clothing. There was a sickening wall against which some had been knocked, and as they fell they had soiled it, sprinkled it, painted it. Only one living being was there, when the two little girls in their confusion wandered up: a young German on sentry-duty, who paid no attention for a while, then shouted at them to run away, for God’s sake!

  The neighbor’s child, having narrated this historic scene to her parents at the time it happened, now repeated it all to Mrs. Helianos. Leda on the other hand still would not answer their questions, or Alex’s either; but Mr. and Mrs. Helianos thought it unlikely that she had forgotten it or ever would. She had a kind of placidity, never the least hysterical alarm or panic; but there was something always weighing upon her thought, oppressing her spirit, as if the thick little skull were too tight for the melancholy mind.

  Mr. and Mrs. Helianos themselves could never forget the loss of their elder son, their Cimon, who from the day of his birth to the day of his death had been perfectly healthy and intelligent and promising. But, as Greeks having a natural realism and a sense of the absoluteness of death, they somewhat closed their minds to this; at least they kept silent for each other’s sake. There was heartbreak enough in having to bring up the two living offspring in this evil time, poor inferior offspring; which they discussed by the hour.

  There was also the troubling subject of Mrs. Helianos' brother. “Probably he too is dead,” she would say; but neither of them really believed it.

  “Oh, he will turn up one of these mornings, when we least expect him,” Helianos would answer, “perhaps in peril, perhaps in disgrace.”

  He had never thought highly of his brother-in-law; a cynical and sycophantic youth, in his estimation. Before the war he had held a good government job under Metaxas, and belonged to a reactionary club where he talked the platitudes of those days, against the parliamentary form of government. Helianos, recalling all this, wondered if he might not have gone over to the enemy in some capacity. He had heard that they were eager to have some knowledgeable Greeks on their side.

  Mrs. Helianos fiercely defended her brother against her husband’s ill opinion; and in their fond but uneasy relationship of late, this had been the worst disagreement and the strangest issue. For Helianos felt that in her heart of hearts she would have been willing to have his worst suspicions confirmed. She wanted to believe in secret what she would not have him believe or speak of: that her brother had come to terms with the Germans somehow. She had reached that point of the sorrow of war when nothing matters except the survival of one’s loved ones.

  The Helianos family had always been liberals, and now two or three had become heroes with great prestige in the eyes of all the rest—notably the leader of a band of saboteurs and snipers who troubled the Germans incessantly, a cousin named Petros Helianos— and none of them had ever approved of those wealthy merchants who were Mrs. Helianos' uncles. As for her young brother, they were more than suspicious, they were convinced: he was alive somewhere, collaborating with the enemy somehow; and they half blamed Helianos for having married into such a family.

  He himself was to blame in a way; he was too sedentary and philosophical for the time of war. To be sure, he would have nothing to do with the Germans or Italians; but on the other hand he did not participate at all in the underground or any sort of organized resistence to the occupiers of Greece. He never thought of anything that he felt he might be able to do in that way. His relatives let him know how they felt, by sharp sayings in the Athenian spirit, or by a new solemnity at family gatherings, or by not coming where he and his wife were expected.

  Therefore Helianos was extremely despondent when they had to take a German officer to live in their apartment. As things
stood between him and his kinsmen he could see that it was bound to bring disgrace as well as difficulty and distress. It was his weakness to be timid, conciliatory, he knew that, and now in the actual physical presence of the enemy he would be less than ever able to correct it in himself. He knew how sincerely his wife hated the invaders of Greece—had they not taken her first and best child’s life as they came?—but indeed it was hard to distinguish between such hatred as this, and mere fear. It was in her nature to keep imagining that things might be worse; worse and worse in spite of every effort. Doubtless the German would take advantage of this; and his cousins would misunderstand it and despise them both more and more.

  Little did he dream how it was to turn out in fact; and how the heroic Helianos' speak of him today, if not as a hero, at least as a martyr.

  2.

  A CORPORAL AND A PRIVATE CAME FIRST, EXPLAINING that they had been ordered to make a survey of all the apartments in that section of town for a certain officer; followed in a day or two by the officer himself. With an indifferent air but methodically, he requested them to open all the doors, not forgetting the kitchen-cupboards and the clothes closets; looked down to the street from all the windows; inspected the Helianos' themselves no less carefully than their habitation and furniture, giving them to understand that they were to wait on him personally; said that he required a telephone, and asked one or the other to stay in the apartment until a man came to install it; reserved the sitting room and the best bedroom for his exclusive use; sat down on all the beds to test the box-springs, and expressed a preference for one of the single beds in the other bedroom; and ordered them to have this substitution made and their personal effects removed out of his rooms by five o’clock that evening. At five o’clock he returned with his baggage and a boxful of books and moved in; probably, he said, for the duration of the war.

  All that day and the next day Mrs. Helianos wept as she worked, with her husband and the children assisting most inefficiently. Helianos scarcely knew how to comfort or encourage her. He himself hoped that they might get on well enough with this officer, who seemed a reasonable human being; but it was a hope so mixed with his dread of the disapproval of his relatives in case they did get on well, that he dared not speak of it. In any event, as to the housekeeping, the upbringing of the children, and all the detail of life which was his unhappy wife’s concern, it was going to mean more trouble, harder work, worse hardship, than anything she had ever known.

  However, he kept telling her, just how hard it would be depended on the individual character of the foreigner in question, as to which they should reserve judgment for a while, and on their own serviceability and tactfulness toward him. He included young Alex and Leda in his little lecture upon this last point, and they all promised each other to be on their best behavior.

  “Furthermore, my poor dear wife,” he said, “this is not a thing for you to hold against the Germans in your bitter way. Every army of occupation has to billet some of its officers upon private citizens. It is normal. If the British or the Americans ever came to liberate Greece, they too would want the best rooms in half the houses in Athens.”

  But before the week was out Helianos had begun to feel something of the peculiarity of German occupation; and his having to try to fathom the mind and temperament of their domestic German for some practical purpose every day, helped him understand the general truth and the historic matter. He warned himself against generalizing too much from the one example, but his observations of other Germans in the streets of Athens, and the confidences of other Athenians who had them thrust into their homes, gradually confirmed him in his sense of what they had in mind, all of them. It evidently was a matter of fixed policy: in one way or another, the citizens of occupied countries were to be subjugated individually, by the individual occupiers whatever their rank, in the minutest detail whenever they got a chance.

  Their occupier was a captain and his name was Kalter, Ernst Robert Kalter; they found it neatly inscribed on tags attached to his baggage. He was a man just past middle age, tall and vigorous, and handsome in his way. Evidently he was as healthy as a wild animal, although now and then he caught cold, which was his weakness. There was one thing about his face that was bound to strike a Greek or any Mediterranean as odd: a certain asymmetry, as if it had been cut out of wood and the knife had slipped at certain features. As Helianos put it to his wife, in that precise but not serious style of his, his pointed nose appeared somewhat in profile however you looked at it; that is to say, it did not point straight at you. He had a dueling scar, but not the becoming kind; it was more like the remainder of a sore than a closed cut. Although his ears were small they stood out, and his hair was cropped so as to bare them to the utmost. His chin was long and full of character, with slight dimples or puckers in the ruddy skin all over it.

  The Helianos' had one advantage over many other occupied families; as a basis for good relations with their officer they had languages. In Helianos' youth, while his father was still alive and active in the publishing business, his hobby and youthful ambition had been archaeology, and then in a sort of hero-worship of old Schliemann, the excavator of Troy, he had learned German. Captain Kalter knew only a few words of practical, peremptory Greek, but having served in the campaign of France in 1940, he spoke some French. Mrs. Helianos spoke fairly good French and a little German, as became the daughter of a merchant-family of consequence.

  At first they could not conceive why he had chosen their modest apartment, of all places. One would have expected a man of his rank to feel entitled to a more spacious, wealthy establishment; something like their former villa in Psyhiko, for example. But having considered his way of life for a while, they saw that it was a quite characteristic and sensible choice. He was a staff-officer in the quartermaster’s corps, absorbed in his work; and doubtless it was hard work. He went to it very early in the morning and stayed late in the evening, and occasionally it kept him all night; then as a rule he came back in the middle of the day for a nap. What he liked about living with them was the convenience of it: his headquarters was in the next street. In any case, they soon found, their waiting on him meant more to him than comfort or luxury, and his power over them in little ways day in and day out more than vanity.

  It was a small apartment, for three grown-ups and two children; he had taken more than half of it. They were left with the foyer and the corridor, too narrow for any use, and the kitchen and one bedroom. They remembered that Helianos' fondest old aunt had a good-sized folding cot, and persuaded her to take their second-best single bed in exchange for it, and placed it in the kitchen for themselves. This enabled them to put Alex and Leda together in the bedroom. They were light sleepers—Alex because he was so thoughtful, Leda because she was timorous and given to bad dreams—and when anything disturbed their sleep it made them high-strung and tiresome next day. There was always some disturbance in the kitchen: the captain sat up late, and wanted a kettle of hot water just before he retired; and sometimes he rang for them again in the middle of the night; and in any case they had to rise at dawn to prepare his breakfast.

  Their plan was to use the children’s room for a common sitting room during the day, but as it turned out they spent more and more time in the kitchen. To sit where servants sat seemed to make it easier for them not to forget all the things they now had to do. They intended to keep the cot folded and back against the wall, but before long they were using it as a couch; sitting side by side on it for the preparation of the meals and other sedentary tasks, and also when they took their ease, when they were able to take any. The bedclothes of course got irremediably soiled but they ceased to mind that.

  The captain insisted upon having the bathroom and the water-closet all to himself, as a hygienic precaution. “All you Greeks have venereal diseases,” he explained. Since they had to be sparing of warm water anyway, and could not afford soap, their having only the kitchen-sink to keep clean at was no great increase of hardship; but the trip downstairs and
outdoors and across the courtyard to a semi-public latrine was hard, especially for Mrs. Helianos with her painful heart.

  At night in the winter months the apartment often got too cold for the captain to get out of bed to relieve himself—catching colds was the bane of his life—and then he rang for Mr. or Mrs. Helianos to bring him a vessel, and made them wait while he used it. Helianos liked to think that he was the one who answered this call invariably, but he was a little deaf and his wife often rose and did it without disturbing him, and complained of it the next morning. They never knew whether as an upper-class German he was accustomed to this intimate kind of service, or whether their inconvenience and humiliation amused him. He did not smile or joke about anything, but occasionally his blue eyes appeared to twinkle.

  You might not think that keeping house for themselves and this one extra man would have occupied them from morning to night, straining every nerve, but it did. The marketing was Helianos' responsibility, which took all morning; occasionally, when the nearby markets had nothing edible or when the queues were long, a part of the afternoon as well. Fuel for the kitchen-stove had to be brought from some distance, sometimes in small amounts, sometimes a week’s supply at a time, requiring several trips the same day, with Alex’s help. He also had to do the heavy cleaning, because of his wife’s heart-trouble. While they resigned themselves to the dirtiness of their own clothes, the captain expected them to wash and iron his shirts and undergarments. Mrs. Helianos was forever sewing or mending, and there was more and more of this, and harder to do, as all the family wardrobe wore out.