Apartment in Athens (3 page)

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.

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.

One afternoon as she sat with her husband beside her on the cot, thrusting her needle faster and faster, yanking the thread until it broke, she remarked, in a soft hysterical tone, “There is one advantage in our children's not having enough to eat and not growing as they should. They can go on wearing the same old garments longer than normal children.”

Helianos took the needle and thread away from her, put his arms around her, and told her that this was no way for her to talk. Unintentionally or not, it was like a parody of his own ironic speech and it disturbed him, somehow between sadness and anger. Their nerves were on edge. They were unaccustomed to everything, inefficient at everything; for which they alternately blamed one another and apologized to one another.

In the past of course they had had servants, and even in the early days of defeat and poverty, until the captain came, they were able to keep one old woman, Evridiki (or as we say Euridice), a maid of all work who had moved in from Psyhiko to be near them, and worked by the day. In the captain's opinion they had no real need of her; furthermore he took an instant dislike to her. For a German of his temperament and habit, to be waited on by Greeks at all, even the superior sort, was condescension and tolerance enough.

“None of you has any talent for domestic service,” he said, “and this kind of ill-natured but meek, broken-down, old country cousin is insufferable.”

He also complained of her having a body-odor offensive to him; and at the end of the first fortnight instructed them to dismiss her and not to engage anyone else.

Not only did this make their life twice as laborious as they had expected; for Mrs. Helianos especially, in the peculiar way she felt about everything, it was one of the bitterest of the humiliations inflicted upon them by the proud captain; all the more bitter because it was not exactly an injustice. Helianos also said that in fact they ought to be able to manage their small housework themselves. They were well aware of Evridiki's inefficient service and shortcomings of character. They too minded the musky exhalation of her old body and old clothes. But she had been around them so long that her faults were like infirmities of their own flesh, perversities of their own soul.

Some forty years had passed since Evridiki as a buxom peaceful-eyed maid had been brought from a village near Eleusis to care for Mrs. Helianos when Mrs. Helianos had been a sickly motherless infant. To have her rejected and sent away by the fastidious German after so many years, troubled the sickly middle-aged woman as if it were a curse on them all; a profanation of all that time.

And yet she did not complain of it in her ordinary, repetitious, self-revealing way. For one thing, she knew that the children, and perhaps Helianos as well, agreed with Captain Kalter about the old woman's uselessness and rough ways and gloomy temper; and she shrank from hearing them say so. She wanted to forget all about it, and her husband wondered why; it was not like her to forget anything. The reason was that letting her mind wander back in the years she had shared with Evridiki gave her an uncanny feeling, a vague apprehension of losing her mind altogether if it went too far.

They often speculated about Captain Kalter's past, background, and family. Up on top of Helianos' desk which was now his desk he had placed three photographs: one in a leatherette frame, a placid rigid lady with her arm around a slim little girl, and two of postcard size, unframed, two boys with ideal Northern faces, disciplined and morose, the elder in uniform and the younger in a college cap.