Apartment in Athens (25 page)

“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; and, 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.

H
ELIANOS' 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 another 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
.”

On three irregular pieces of the same relatively good paper which obviously belonged together, there were certain reflections inspired by his experience of Kalter. The first read: “
It is in the nature of Germans to change every so often; to appear to change. At the end of a war—or it may be, as in the case of our Kalter, before the end—suddenly they grow tired of war, they love culture, they feel sorry for those whom they have made miserable. It is all sincere; that is what makes it so dangerous for us. We have been taught to care more for sincerity than it is worth
.

“In time of peace they are so likeable. Their emotions are so warm and their minds so cultivated; they are so comfortable in friendship, they take such pleasure in doing little kindnesses; and they are so absolutely convinced of every kind of idealism: there is great charm in knowing them
.

“Even in wartime; even Kalter was likeable sometimes. I know, dear, you never felt it, because he made things too hard for you personally; and your instinct about it was right, as it has been again and again, all our lives
.

“But I felt it; I had my moments of liking him, now and then, in the month of May. My prejudiced unreasonable wife, yes, you did warn me. But no, no, I was the good-natured and reasonable and judicious one, I would not listen. I forgave him, especially one midnight. I was sorry for him, especially that last afternoon. Therefore now here I sit in an evil old prison writing you a long, illegible, impotent letter. That is my story. I think there are millions of men as foolish as I, in every nation; and I want them to know what I know now
.

“It is something for us to beware of: the good moods of Germans, their suddenly reforming and seeking to please, the natural changes of their hearts. That is the moral of my story
.

“In fact the likeable and virtuous ones are far worse than the others as it works out, because they mislead us. They bait the trap for the others.”

“Von Roesch, von Roesch, von Roesch,” Mrs. Helianos whispered to herself, letting this piece of paper slip out of her fingers on to the floor. Likeable von Roesch saving her from arrest and promising her strict German justice, misleading her into his little trap; Demos Helianos warning her of it after she was in it; changeable von Roesch coming back to spring it in about a week. . .It was as if her Helianos knew everything that had happened to her. He did not know, he could not know, he had written it in his prison. She was not really afraid of the trap, she was not afraid of anything now, except Helianos' absence; she was lonely. So there she sat a while in a stupor of loneliness that was like laziness: the wife of Helianos, with his letter strewn around her on the floor, as if she were a most commonplace poor housewife with an overturned waste-basket that she was too lazy to pick up.

After a while, on another small crumpled piece—it was the torn flap of a small envelope—she deciphered this:
“Naturally there will be forgiveness after the war, it is the natural thing. People will like them again: at least the Anglo-Saxons will, it is their predilection somehow. But I tell you, liking or not liking doesn't matter, doesn't matter! The important thing is never to trust them. With a mature mind one can like people, or even love them, without a blind confidence in them; cannot one?