Apartment in Athens Read online

  17.

  THREE DAYS AFTER HIS FIRST VISIT DEMOS CAME TO SEE her again. Then by the ugliness of his old face, uglier than ever, and his preliminary silence and embarrassment, and his anxious inquiry about the children’s presence or absence, and the look of relief on his face when she replied that they were absent, she knew that he had bad news. Again he refused to come in farther than the corridor, and this time his refusal was too solemn for her to argue against it. He hung his head like an ashamed schoolboy, standing on one leg and shuffling the other foot up around his ankle; and tormented the brim of his hat more than ever.

  “I am in a hurry,” he began, “I have some news for you about the fix you are in.”

  “What is it?” she asked bravely.

  “Tell me first,” he asked, “what did you say the other day, what was the date of your major’s suicide?”

  “Saturday, the twelfth.”

  “Well, then, the day before, Friday the eleventh, he marched down to Sertz’s bureau and made arrangements with him to find Helianos guilty of everything under the sun.”

  Mrs. Helianos lifted her hands and reached out on either side toward the narrow walls of the corridor.

  “He explained to Sertz that he was about to be recalled to Germany and transferred to active service on the Russian front; therefore he would not be here to help with Helianos' case. Therefore they drew up a kind of affidavit against Helianos: Kalter’s testimony signed and sworn and sealed, dated June eleventh.

  “Von Roesch saw it the day he had his little row with Sertz about you. I knew this, dear cousin, when I came to see you the other day. I didn’t mention it because I hoped it would all blow over.”

  The wife of Helianos held her breath, and frowned so that she could only half see.

  “What a ghastly devil!” Demos cried out in a sort of despairing tone. “He planted his hatred of poor Nikolas to take effect after his own death the way we put explosives under bridges and things with a timefuse, in order to be miles away when they explode.”

  The desperate woman sighed.

  “You are taking this very well, dear cousin. You are a better woman than I thought. Shall I tell you the rest now? Would you like to hear the bad news all at once, like this, alone with me?”

  “Yes,” she answered.

  After all, it was news that she might have broken to herself any day, for days and days, only she could not bear to be the one to break it. She might have known it, except for a fantastic exercise of her poor mind not to know it: except for just enough confusion of her thought with her heart’s desire to enable her to put off the blow from day to day; except for the folly of her love: love which is an act of imagination and often entails other kinds of imagination and fictitiousness and blindness to fact.

  This was the news, the fact, the blow:—“They shot Helianos yesterday,” Demos said.

  The widow of Helianos said nothing. She did not even brace herself against the wall or stir her head or make a face.

  “I suppose that was the compromise,” Demos said. “Von Roesch wanted to keep you, so he let Sertz have Nikolas. When he gets back from Constantinople he will tell you that if it had not been for his enforced absence he might have saved Nikolas for you. He will express the profoundest regret about it.”

  Demos went on talking in a kind of drone, of the particulars and the details, as if he could not stop.

  “Kalter had borne witness to his guilt in having uttered an insult to the chief of the German state, and acted insubordinately toward an officer of the German army of occupation, and indulged himself in anti- German opinion and a rebellious attitude generally. His fate had been decided at once. They reprieved him two or three times, as a stimulation and an encouragement to him to give them the names and pseudonyms and descriptions and present whereabouts of the rest of us.”

  It was hard for Mrs. Helianos to listen to Demos talking like this, but she could not summon up energy enough to stop him; and he meant well; and in any event she would want to know it all eventually, so she might as well listen.

  “Then there were the days of waiting to be questioned, and the days of the questioning itself; and in the nights he stayed awake, I suppose, to write you his letter. It all followed a certain German routine; nothing out of the ordinary, except that some inefficient underling left his name off one list of the condemned and put it on the next list; and at the last minute there had to be another postponement of twenty-four hours because the officer commanding the firing squad happened to fall ill. At last, yesterday, they delivered him to death—and they delivered him from themselves—along with four or five men and one woman accused of one thing and another.”

  Demos Helianos was a strange man, Mrs. Helianos thought. She remembered how well she and Helianos, especially Helianos, had behaved when the news of Cimon’s death in the battle of Mount Olympos came. She resolved to behave no less well now. She said, “I must go and lie down. Go away now, Demos. Thank you.”

  But then Demos like a fool, with that extreme stoic mentality of those who have lived as outlaws in the familiarity of death a long time, thinking to console her, added: “You must not mind too much. It was a blessed deliverance for him. It is hell to be questioned by those fellows, they are so extremely merciless and expert, and against the mind as well as the body. Surely he was glad to have it over with. As a matter of fact I do not believe that he answered any of their questions.”

  Then she swooned at his feet. It was the thought of that young psychiatrist, the great genius, the author of the great treatises, the one who was to have been Leda’s savior—science all things to all men!—which flashed through her mind at the last instant, and struck her down like a lightning-flash.

  Her swooning distressed Demos extremely. It would not have been safe for him to go in search of a doctor. He thought of the telephone and trotted all around the apartment looking for it, but Mrs. Helianos had had it removed. Women’s distress had always demoralized him and he had no notion what to do when they swooned. But he was a good creature. He put a pillow under her head; he set a cup of water on the floor beside her; then departed, leaving the door open. He wandered around the block and here and there, and found the playground, and finally found Alex and Leda, drew him away from her, whispered to him what had happened, and gave him the responsibility, as the head of the family from now on.

  The boy and the girl ran home as fast as they could. Afterward Alex tried to remember whether or not he had repeated Cousin Demos' tragic announcement to her as they went—he could not remember, but he must have, or it was a case of her abnormal infant clairvoyance; she knew.

  They found Mrs. Helianos on the corridor-floor coming to her senses, trying to reach that blessed water which the cousin had provided. Alex tried to help her drink it, but spilled it all over her face. The fact that she did not complain at all, or even grimace, warned him of the gravity of her condition; therefore he did not waste time apologizing.

  By gestures she indicated that she wanted to get up off the floor. When she had managed it, leaning against the wall, she noticed Leda and with particular tenderness lifted one hand to pat her shoulder; but happened to feel a greater giddiness just then, and involuntarily rested some of her weight on the little one. The little one with her cloudy but good instinct rose to the occasion, drew closer, and tried to bear more weight.

  Alex drew close on the other side; and thus they began the little trip down the corridor, through the sitting room, to the bedroom, the good bedroom. It was a hard trip. For one thing the corridor was narrow, with the mother’s arms held out upon her young props; the team of the three of them harnessed across, of necessity, by their mutual weakness. For another thing Mrs. Helianos' weakness was extreme; now and then for a few steps she had to use them as if they were crutches.

  When at last she reached her bed and fell on it, for a moment she minded nothing except not being alone. She did not know what it was or why it was. It was no lack or lapse of her tenderness toward the children; on
the contrary, she was to remember it ever afterward as a moment of adoring them. Nevertheless she could not endure their standing beside the bed, figures of consternation and pity.

  She found it hard to speak. She had to save up breath and consciously direct it from her mouth in a few words at a time, blowing them. “Go away, children. Away a minute. Go away.”

  Alex responded instantly, “Yes, Mother, I am going, and I will run and I will bring back Dr. Vlakos.”

  But she forbade him to go just then. “No, not yet. First, wait, in your room. Wait a few minutes. Come back first, before you go,” she said to him in her strange blown whisper.

  For this was the great pain, the pain that all the other pains had been promising; the pain like a large fish-hook perfectly inserted in over, and in back of, and around under her heart, the pain like a heavy fish-line solidly attached and pulling with absolute even power, no nonsense, nothing like sewing, no piercing or wrenching: simply that perfect cruelty including her entire heart and that steady pull affecting her whole body. Therefore her spirit went down, down, as if it were a fish instinctively seeking deep and dim weeds to wind itself in, great rocks to brace against, to fight the pull in the only way possible, by weight and depth and quiet. Then it broke. She was not dead, therefore she presumed that it was chiefly deathly sorrow, not really deadly sickness. She was all right. Only she was cold, with a cold enveloping her from head to foot, and washing her inside and out.

  Then, according to her request, Alex came back before going to get the doctor. She heard him gasp, perhaps in the supposition of her death. Slowly, with an effort she opened her eyes, to reassure him. He was scarcely able to hear her say, between her teeth set in pain, between her lips just slightly rippling with mortal nervousness, “Take Leda away, keep her away now. If I should get worse, it would frighten her, one of her fits. Two of us, too hard for you, take her with you.”

  By which Alex understood that she expected or half expected to die. Therefore it was imperative to run for the doctor. If he took Leda with him he would not be able to run. What should he, what could he do with her? It was the usual problem, graver than ever.

  He took her by the hand and gently pulled and pushed her along and put her in the water-closet. He did not have time to wheedle her or explain to her. He hurried her so that she did not have time to weep. Realizing how he must be frightening her and hurting her feelings, in the instant of closing the door he bent toward her and gave her a kiss; he had never done that before.

  He took the key out from the inside and turned it on the outside and forgot to leave it in the keyhole; with it in his hand, sprang out of the apartment and down the stairway and along through the hot streets, tripping and falling once and skinning his knuckles, and in exasperation about that, uttering some curse-words that he had known a long time but never used before, with not enough breath to curse well; then arrived at Dr. Vlakos'. Fortunately he was there in his office. But he was busy setting someone’s broken wrist, so Alex did not wait; he ran back home ahead of him.

  One more of the poor small miracles of the Helianos family had taken place. The door of the water- closet stood open. Leda was not there. Thinking that perhaps his mother had risen from bed and unlocked the door, or perhaps his mother was dead and someone else had been in the apartment, he scurried to her bedroom. She was not dead; indeed her face was of a less deadly color, less crooked, more like a mother’s face. “Mother, Mother, where is Leda?”

  She did not know; she shook her head. He went back to the water-closet. He looked for the key, and found that without noticing, he had put it in his pocket. “Leda, Leda!” he called.

  No answer. He ran to their own bedroom and to the kitchen, and thinking that she might be hiding somewhere in fright or in anger, he looked under the beds, in the clothes closets, in the fuel-box. Then he returned to the water-closet, and then noticed that it had not been unlocked; it had been forced. The fixture, wrenched out of the wood of the door-jamb, lay on the floor. How Leda could have done that with her small weak hands he could not imagine.

  In his haste as he came in, he had left the front door open. Now through it, approaching up the stairway, he heard Leda’s voice in short sharp notes as if she were a bird in a panic, with footsteps, not only her footsteps. He ran to peer down the stair-well, there she came, and this was the miracle: she was fetching the neighbor woman to nurse their mother. She was pulling the small breathless creature, hurrying her but getting in her way, drawing her up faster by fistfuls of the folds of her skirt now and then, from step to step first on one side and then the other, in exalted excitement, with infinite expression in her face.

  Finally, for the last flight of stairs, the neighbor woman picked Leda up and carried her, although she was burdensome and although she kicked. In spite of the sorrowful emergency this made Alex laugh. He took her from the arms of neighborliness into his arms of extreme kinship; and very soon she calmed down, and then turned and gave him a smile of uncanny contentment. Obviously she knew that she had done an extraordinary thing and the right thing.

  Afterward the neighbor woman described the little one’s startling arrival in search of her. Evidently memory and instinct had brought her wild small feet straight to the right block, the right cluster of old tenement-buildings; but then she did not know which house, which doorway, which stairway. So there in the street she screamed, “Maria’s mother! Maria’s mother!”

  Maria was the name of the little girl who had accompanied her to the massacre, who had died more than a year ago. Another neighbor came and cleverly made out what Mrs. Helianos' poor child wanted, and led her to Maria’s mother’s door. There Leda had explained the emergency quite clearly, except for punctuation of tears and panting, “My mother fainted, my father is dead, my mother is dying!”

  18.

  BUT MRS. HELIANOS LAY AT DEATH’S DOOR THREE DAYS. Old Dr. Vlakos came morning and evening. The neighbor woman stayed in the apartment, and proved to be a competent nurse as well as an energetic housekeeper and a kindly nursemaid. She slept in the single bed with Leda, and, poor lone female, doubtless enjoyed having her dead daughter’s little simple-minded friend to fuss over. Apparently Leda’s miraculous effort had tired her, but that was all; she did not fall into her apathy or her tearfulness.

  Alex was not happy to have the neighbor woman living with them. As it seemed to him her presence was too commonplace and cheerful for this turning point in their lives. But he kept a sufficient civility. As he well knew, he could not have managed his little household by himself. He obliged her to help him move his cot back to the kitchen, and oddly enough, made her promise not to tell his mother.

  On the fourth day Dr. Vlakos told Mrs. Helianos that she was out of danger. As to her heart-trouble and her general health, if she would stay in bed a fortnight and rest, she would not be much the worse for the shock and tragedy of her husband’s death. Before long she would be able to live as before, to keep her house and go marketing and do the cooking, and care for the children.

  When he had given the good news and departed, she reminded herself that—while her lot in the last two years, her fate in the war, had been hellish indeed, like other people’s—still a portion of a kind of good luck had been mixed in with the rest. In the next few days as she lay there, presumed to be resting, she counted certain of her blessings.

  For example, how fortunate it had been for her to have had, in the series of violences of those months of May and June, some practice in extreme emotion! Even Helianos' preliminary absence, while he lived and she hoped: now that his absence was forever she had to admit that it had been a blessing. Her mind, without knowing it, without admitting that she knew it, had had time to take in the possibility of his never returning and to adjust itself a little: so that it did not take her by surprise and kill her.

  Vlakos wanted her not to talk. She had nothing to tell the good neighbor woman in any case. She began talking to herself in her old way. Now nothing about herself would ever surprise her, sh
e thought; and then heard her own whisper, “I know myself well, my strength and my weakness, my good qualities and my faults. I am still alive; here I lie sick; I have lost my conceit; I have forgiven myself. But without Helianos to give me a sense of my importance with his love, I am of no interest to myself; and in the circumstances that is a blessing.”

  How fortunate she had been, in that the news of Helianos' death had been a divided blow. Half of the great pain had been only in her imagination: this had saved her life. Her body had borne half the brunt of her sorrow: that had saved her sanity.

  Then, having lost interest, she ceased to whisper in soliloquy; she spoke to Helianos instead.

  “Helianos,” she whispered, “let me not be too sure of myself, especially as to my sanity. Without you to warn me or comfort me, your steadying influence, I must be careful. I will be careful. For years I have worried you in this way, even when I was fairly young and our life was not so bad; now I am older and my life is worse. Forgive me, Helianos, for worrying you about nothing. You will have to forgive me if I go mad now, when I have good reason to.”

  Then she quickly fell asleep. A poignant thought of Helianos often swept her away to some dream in which there was a chance of her forgetting that she had lost him.

  When she woke she said, “Helianos was a proud man; he would have been ashamed of me if I had lost my mind. No matter now, he will never know it.

  “But shame on me for saying: no matter!” she added almost aloud. “In spite of death there is a point of pride; and so long as I feel obliged to live, I shall have, I ought to have, a sense of duty. Helianos' widow is not to play the fool even in grief. Helianos' children’s mother must keep her wits about her, for their sake.”