Apartment in Athens (14 page)

Whatever he reported to his wife of the themes of Kalter's conversation, she never would admit that she had heard any of it. Oddly enough, her habit of hiding in the closet had never been mentioned between them. Because of something she said he felt sure that she knew that he knew; that was all. On one or two evenings it marred his pleasure: the poor woman he loved kneeling uncomfortably a few feet way on the other side of the partition, the tremulous and faded, freckled, once-lovely face pressed close to the crack in the baseboard, fearfully listening and doubtless misinterpreting it all.

On other evenings the sweetness of having her near him, of her caring enough about him to spy upon him, of speaking up so that she could hear him—whenever the major gave him a chance to say a few words—made him forget her sadness.

Then he would draw a sigh, and probably Kalter, absorbed in his theories, took it as a compliment; an admission of the dark overwhelming German logic. It was no such thing, but rather a refutation. Helianos' mind wandering away to that poor dear female of his species where she hid, knelt, prayed, trembled: it was the working in him of a basic principle of his type of manhood: private life greater than public life, which was the opposite of German principle.

More was the pity, in a way, for if he had not been distracted by his old love, if he had paid closer attention to the major's talk, he might have detected the constant little menace to him personally in it.

One of their latter conversations surprised Helianos a good deal, perhaps was intended to surprise him. “You foreigners have a notion that we Germans all think alike,” Kalter said, “but it is not so. I will tell you something. It may not be the thing to tell a foreigner, but no matter, it is what I personally think. Today there is all the talk about race, Aryan and otherwise: I myself do not believe in it much. Of course it is an effective point to make in propaganda, but it is all relative and imaginary.

“Don't you see, to be a German is nothing like that, biology, ethnology, anthropology; it is not so complicated. To be a German is simply the way we live; it is a love of government and orderliness, for one thing, and confidence in ourselves and in each other. Above all, it is a role in history, and a preparation for our role; it is an education and a belief. It is the hope of the world: the hope that one day at last the world will be well-governed, by those willing and able and worthy to govern it—not always in a mess as it is now.

“That is why a great many German-Jews are wonderful Germans. They learn from us to have a vision of the future, like their promised land. Especially between wars they are wonderful; they persuade all the world to be sorry for us, to help us, to admire us.

“On the other hand a great many Germans, when they go to live abroad, especially in America, change overnight; they become Americans. As I told you, I have a brother in New York; he has not been there long, only since 1923; and he is no more German than you are.

“How strange it is! Not only peasants go there, and not only ambitious scientists, and business men who naturally are tempted by the easy money, but all sorts, scholars, film-actresses, writers—the very class who all their lives have been giving expression to the German spirit—and in a few years, it is unbelievable! they absorb all the American education and politics and morals; even the American patriotism, if it can be called patriotism.

“I think they must be unhappy when the novelty wears off. How can they ever forget what it means to be a German!” he exclaimed.

“I will tell you. See if you, as a foreigner, can understand it! Today religion is almost out of date. So few modern people have any sense of ultimate future, of life after they die. Still, in this life, hardships have to be endured, and virtue has to be exercised. And for all this, in the way of unearthly reward, we look forward to nothing, nothing! Self-sacrifice is good, in fact it is necessary, anyway it cannot be avoided; and what is the recompense? What is there, leaving out immortal things, to make it worth while?

“Now, perhaps you think I say this all in scorn, speaking only of the materialistic foreign nations. No! If this is foreignness we have it in us too, unfortunately. We too are skeptical; I admit it, you see. How can it be helped, now? For it is modern science, modern government, modern psychology: to have no heaven.

“Only we Germans can help it; we have something else, to take heaven's place. Yes, the German also sacrifices himself and he loses heart, like everyone else; but it is only personal: the nation does not lose heart. If the German fails, he gives up and goes quietly and stoically, having wound up his affairs in good order as it may be expected of him in the circumstances, whatever they are. His responsibilities he hands over to another, another who is like himself, knowing that the faith will be kept—and if not by that one, by the next one!

“Although he dies, no matter; he lives in his fellow-German, his compatriot, his kind. For us Germans, I tell you, this is our immortality. What if one man is imperfect, still there is the type; and sooner or later the type will come to perfection. If you believe that, there is vindication and a remedy for everything. If the one man is defeated—one and then another, no matter how many!—the triumph will come nevertheless, in the end.”

T
HE LAST OF THOSE CONVERSATIONS OF GERMAN AND
Greek was the strangest. It was not exactly a conversation, but rather a little drama and a revelation in the major's own person of that private weakness and defeat—in spite of which collective Germany was to triumph forever, with German after German forever taking up the burden whenever one weakly put it down—of which he had spoken so eloquently on the previous evening.

It was in the afternoon, on the last day in May, a Monday; one of Kalter's free half-days. He had returned to the apartment just before midday. As it happened Helianos had procured somewhat more food than usual for the midday meal; and the weary officer had eaten less than usual; and the family had been able to make practically a normal meal. The children descended to the street to play. Mrs. Helianos, who was not feeling well, lay down to rest.

And then—it was about three o'clock—Helianos in a good mood ventured to the sitting room, thinking that the major might not be taking a nap and might like a talk. He had some political question or other to propound to him. To his amazement he found him at his desk with his head bent far forward over it, his face pressed in his hands, in tears.

At the sound of Helianos' coming in, he sprang to his feet, crying out, “In God's name, why must you come in here just now? There's a devil in you! When I am alone, when I need to be alone—”

The Greek apologized and started back out of the room but the tragic-faced German strode over to the door and shut it.

“It's too late now,” he said, returning to his chair, pulling it around to face Helianos, grimacing to stop his tears, “it's too late to stand upon ceremony. I have talked too much already. Why, why did I have to take you, you damned Greek, into my confidence? What possessed me?”

Helianos in his astonishment, stammered, “I do not understand, sir, it must be a misunderstanding, a mistake.” He apologized, nevertheless, for whatever it was; and begged to be allowed to go back to the kitchen if his presence made the major nervous; and offered to run and prepare a glass of hot wine; and wondered if perhaps the major had not fallen ill, and suggested calling a physician; and begged to be told something to do, if the major could think of anything agreeable or useful.

During which well-meaning discourse the unhappy officer, unhappier than ever or really ill, seemed not to pay attention.

Then when Helianos could think of nothing more to say, he said, “No, it makes no difference. You're a good fellow, Helianos, aren't you? Or perhaps you're not, I don't know. . .”

It was in a muttering voice with weakly impatient gestures of one hand. “That's the worst of it, God! I don't know, I can't judge. When a German officer loses confidence in his judgment of other men,” he added, “it's the end, the end of everything, isn't it?”

Then he bared his teeth in a semblance of a smile, dried his eyes, blew his nose. “No, Helianos, sit down, I will tell you what the trouble is. I wish you to know that it is nothing dishonorable; I have done nothing. I assure you of that, for my self-respect.

“Also it is good to tell my trouble. It relieves my thinking about it, it passes the time, the deadly time.”

Helianos sat down, with a more ambiguous feeling than any he could remember: embarrassment? inquisitiveness? sympathy? Added to which he half expected to feel, half hoped to feel, some sense of humor and slight rejoicing in the discomfiture of an enemy; except that one could scarcely think of a man in such disorder of mind as an enemy. . .

He himself was not a very self-centered man, and until the end of the conversation, too late, he did not realize that it could possibly concern him in any way. He was not thinking of himself at all, only of the German: almost his friend by that time anyway in spite of the war, and in spite of different political principles.

His friend Kalter, for all his pride of intellect and of nationality, Helianos had decided, was a poor violent emotional human being, one who doubtless needed, more than most men, to be sustained by that collected agreed organized humanity which he advocated, the state, even the world-state; one who at the moment, for some reason, needed a friend.

He was deathly pale, and now and then he drew an extremely deep breath with a slight shudder, as he controlled himself. It was a hot afternoon, and there was sweat on his upper lip as well as tears on his upper cheeks.

Then after a silence he began, with a bit of his violence, “You Greeks, and the other foreign nations, all of you—it's your damned conceit!—think that all the suffering of the war is on your side. It is not so! War is hard, I tell you, hard for everyone.

“Listen to me,” he went on. “I told you that I had to make my will, a new will. Didn't it occur to you, stupid Greek, to wonder what had happened, why my old will was null and void? If you were my friend you would have wondered; but of course you aren't, how could you be?

“This is what happened:—Just before I returned home to Germany, my elder son, who was a fighter-pilot, crashed and was killed. Very well! almost every family has to give a son for the fatherland, sometimes more than one.

“Yes, very well, but while I was on my way home, my house in Königsberg was destroyed in an air-raid; a bomb set fire to it and my wife was burned, almost to death.

“And after I got there, while she lay unconscious, my younger son was killed in Russia.

“He was a young boy, a green soldier; he had never been at the front before. He wrote us shameful discouraged letters, the way green soldiers do, the poor youngster! He had not yet received any decoration or citation, he had done nothing to be proud of, he was killed like that.

“My wife lay at death's door for days and when she recovered consciousness, she was not in her right mind. They let me see her and she talked to me like a lunatic. Helianos, it was heartbreaking. It was indecent, Helianos, with all her hair burned away, half her face in bandages; and she talked nonsense; and the doctor did not know whether she would be insane the rest of her life or not.

“Then she got better and came to herself, and for two or three days she was wonderful. She comforted me for the death of our sons; she restored my faith in the future and in Germany, and my self-confidence.

“I can't tell you, Helianos, how it was. You wouldn't understand! With your Greek morality you couldn't. We were like a god and a goddess, there in the grim hospital, with her frightful bandages, in our grief and loss. Wonderful days! Then she died.”

It was a good story, Helianos thought: a commonplace of today, an epitome of war; and as he listened to it he noted that Kalter's peculiar rough grudging voice was just right for it, softened by his fatigue, with the cadences of his grief. But bit by bit, word by word, he had a sense of unreality somehow, not the story itself, which was common and obvious truth, but the context—Kalter telling and himself listening; that was like fiction.

After all, it was the last thing he would have expected ever to see in reality on earth: a German officer grief-stricken, complaining of the commonplace of war. His mind ran back over all the past, the time when this weeping major was still the terrible captain, and wondered at it: the tyranny and insults and histrionics, then the metamorphosis, and his own curiosity and misinterpretation and forgiveness and relaxation, and appalling politics, and now this. . .

The rough voice choked on the words, “Then she died,” and ceased; and Helianos did not know what to say, simply sitting there in a kind of false thoughtfulness. He found himself falsely thinking that one could scarcely begrudge these people the mastery of the world, if they wanted it enough to pay the same price they exacted of others; if they were willing to bring the common suffering and irreparable loss upon themselves as well as everyone else. Until that moment it had never seriously occurred to him that they were susceptible to the common suffering. His half-pity when he had stood peering at the major's bedside that night had not been very serious. . .Now it astonished him, and he realized that astonishment was in a way a tribute to the conquering race, and a measure of the depth of his own despair as one of the conquered: it had not occurred to him that conquerors could be unhappy!

Suddenly he felt that all this, acquiescence, rationalization, was idiotic nonsense. They were not willing to bring things upon themselves, no indeed; they told a plaintive story like other men, they shuddered and wept like other men, naturally; and each of them somehow blamed someone else for everything, and in fact someone must be to blame! Suddenly Helianos' short stout weary person began to tremble with another of his angers, shushing heart and sweating hand, lump in throat and knock in knee; indignation against common misfortune and against fate, his individually, Greece's, and the rest of the world's for that matter, everyone's, even this German's as an individual.