Apartment in Athens (4 page)

One evening when the captain was sitting there writing, and Helianos brought him a glass of hot resinous wine to ward off a chill, the latter said, “The captain's wife, if I may make the remark, is a noble-looking, lovely woman.”

“That one is not my wife,” the captain snapped, “my wife is the daughter. But, if you please, it is none of your business. You are not to concern yourself with anything of mine, do you hear?”

Helianos, realizing that praise of a man's mother-in-law is never very ingratiating, sighed and begged pardon, and went into the bedroom to draw the curtains and turn down the bedclothes; and there in a mirror he could still see the back of the captain's head. He was sitting with his head lifted up stiffly, staring at the photographs, with his hands clenched over the arms of his chair. Suddenly he reached for them and thrust them into a drawer and shut it with a shove; and he fidgeted a few minutes, opening and closing books, crumpling papers, rearranging things all over the desk, before he resumed his writing.

Then Helianos fancied that he understood the captain better. That stare and that impatient removal meant that he could not keep his mind on his work with the blurry photographed eyes of the slim girl and sad boys fixed on him, wooing his imagination. It was genuine excitement, wild and miserable affection.

Greeks and other Mediterranean men have not a great many sentiments in their talk or even their thought, but they are almost all familiar with this: the feeling of family, which in extreme instances may be a positive spell in a man's blood. It scarcely applied to himself, nowadays, Helianos thought—his wife had changed so, his surviving children were such poor little things—but how well he could understand it! For a man strongly affected by it, forced away from home by the inhumanity of war, loneliness, mere loneliness, might turn his entire character into a kind of drama or melodrama. Hence, he supposed, the captain's unsociability and pride, intolerance and unpredictable temper. . .

It made him more conscious than ever of the coldness of his own marriage and his disappointment in his children—his own old age beginning before it was due (actually he was a younger man than the captain)—and he sighed almost enviously as he tiptoed out of the captain's room and away to his marriage bed in the kitchen.

One evening a week at the officer's club: that was all the sociability Captain Kalter indulged in. He would return without the least look of pleasure spent, or even of fatigue. They never detected any influence or even any breath of liquor. He did not ask his fellow-officers to visit him; no one saw him in a cafe or anywhere with any sort of boon companion; there was no sign of his having to do with women. Except for his hearty appetite for his breakfast and his dinner, nothing in the way of creature comfort appeared to tempt him. The Helianos' had never known a man in the prime of life to be so systematic in his habits, so independent and ascetic and self-denying. As they were conventional middle-class people, in spite of themselves they more or less admired this good side of the German character.

His rooms had to be given a careful daily cleaning, but beyond that they were instructed to stay out of them in his absence, especially to keep away from his desk. One day while dusting Mrs. Helianos disarranged some of his papers, and he reproved her for it with all his vehemence and malice, and after that kept a dust-cloth in a drawer and did this bit of the housework himself. Every night except the club-night he wrote a long letter or letters, and then studied for two or three hours, sometimes propping a book up on his desk and copying things out of it on a block of paper or in a notebook, sometimes reading to himself aloud in a language that Helianos had no knowledge of.

Finally his Greek curiosity got the better of him. He waited until an afternoon when his wife had taken the children to visit his aged aunt—for he did not wish to set them a bad example—then crept into the sitting room and made a thorough examination of the books and notebooks on that desk at which he too, in his day, had spent so many studious hours. He found several important volumes of military history and the science of war, a topographical atlas, a handbook of meteorology, a treatise on the diet of armies. In the notebook there were pages and pages of arithmetic of some sort, as well as exercises in the unknown language. He took it to be Persian or perhaps Hindustani; it was not Arabic; he knew what Arabic looked like. For an hour that afternoon he marveled at the extent of German ambition, which reminded him of Alexander the Great.

B
Y THAT TIME ATHENS WAS STARVING. THERE WERE
beggars everywhere, some of them so hungry that they were like lunatics, but too weak to do any harm. Some lay down and died wherever they happened to be. Sometimes they were people you used to know, someone's servants, or keepers of little shops, or someone's poor relations; but famine had given them such faces that you might not recognize them at first glance. Mrs. Helianos was afraid to venture out of the apartment. Fortunately Alex took care of little Leda. He understood that sensibility of hers, so mixed up with dullness, he was as trustworthy with her as any governess, and he was not squeamish. He would go down to the street alone and investigate whether any of the dead lay in their neighborhood; then return for her and take her to play where it was all right.

Of course those families who had German officers to feed were entitled to certain supplies which the occupying authorities reserved for them out of the small national production or brought from abroad. At first the Helianos' expected to be able to live fairly well on the leftovers from the captain's table, but unfortunately he had ideas of his own about that. Once a day he went into the kitchen and had all the cup-boards open and considered what staples they had on hand and what new purchases Helianos had been able to make. He showed a most expert mind at this. “You see,” said Helianos, “his work in the quartermaster corps is something like housekeeping, on a grand scale. There's no deceiving him. We may as well be honest.”

His wife resented this pleasantry.

“You remember, my dear, how you used to keep an eye on your servants, even Evridiki. Though I suppose you never were as merciless nor as efficient; and of course they were not starving to death. . .”

The efficient captain never forgot a thing. He required his entire meal to be brought to the table at once in covered dishes, so that he could easily check the amount they served him against what he had seen in the larder. He was a heavy eater. Sometimes he left a bit of stew or a few spoonfuls of soup; but he smoked a cigar after eating and used his plate or the souptureen for an ash-tray. When he rose to begin the evening's work or to stroll around to the club, he stopped and carefully brushed the crumbs into the palm of his hand and scattered them outside his window to attract birds. It was always his way to combine a painstaking, ungenerous frugality with some little manner of lavishness. Presently an idea came to him which satisfied him in both these inclinations: the extraordinary idea of purveying to a certain major's dog.

This officer was his immediate superior in the quartermaster's corps, with whom he also played cards at the officers' club; his name was von Roesch. He occupied the salon and guest-room of an old Macedonian couple whom the Helianos' knew slightly. They had an ancient half-blind dog, an English bull-terrier of good pedigree with an alarming pink-and-white face. When the famine started their intention had been to put it out of its misery, because it required an impossible amount of food. But meanwhile their major had taken a fancy to it; therefore its life had to be spared while its owners somewhat wasted away. Now it was to benefit by the wasting away of the Helianos' as well. Whatever there might be in excess of their captain's appetite, a crust of bread, a fragment of meat or bone, a vegetable, he scraped together on his plate and ordered to be wrapped up and taken by young Alex with his compliments to the major.

After about a week of sending Alex with the little packages, the captain told them in his formal manner with sarcasm: “My friend Major von Roesch appreciates your good management and generosity in contributing your little superfluity of food to help keep his old pet in good condition. By the way, it comes of one of the best blood-lines of the breed, British stock, and has taken prizes at dog-shows.

“Furthermore, it is good for that soft boy of yours to take a little exercise after his evening meal.”

Then presumably the two officers compared notes as to the exact amount of dog-food entrusted to Alex, and perhaps they miscalculated. In any case they accused him of helping himself to it on the way, and first one and then the other upbraided him; one boxed his ears, and the other whipped him. His father questioned him about it patiently and gravely. The boy's reply was that of course the dog-food tempted him—after all, what was that evening meal which in the captain's opinion necessitated his taking exercise? a cup of weak soup and a single biscuit—but he had never touched it, because he was afraid to. He quite convinced his father of his innocence. Nevertheless a few days later the two dog-loving gentlemen charged him with a repetition of his offense and punished him again.

Helianos thought it over and decided to protect his offspring by a little stratagem. “My son is a growing boy,” he told the captain, “and suffers from his appetite. If you entrust the food to him he will steal some of it, alas, he cannot help it. Therefore, after this, please let me carry it to the major's dog myself.”

Having to make this false confession angered him, and men of his type, passive and well-meaning, have a very physical anger. The captain observed his flushed face and watering eyes, and took them to mean that he was ashamed of his son; therefore the stratagem worked.

“You Greeks are all thieves by nature,” the captain remarked. “Only an old broken one like yourself knows that he cannot get away with it.”

Helianos, without understanding much about the class-distinctions in Germany, never doubted for an instant that the captain was a gentleman. His manners were extremely distinguished, and yet—it was hard to understand—they permitted him to indulge in a gross discourtesy or ugly outburst every now and then without a trace of embarrassment or self-consciousness. It was never a real fury; he himself was not deeply disturbed by it. Out of the cold dignity of his bearing as a rule, suddenly the fit would come on him. He would let himself go for a few minutes; then fall back into his ordinary composure as if it all had been a matter of course. To fly into a rage without losing one's temper, to curse and shout without getting out of breath, without any fire in one's eye or color in one's cheek: what kind of self-contradiction and false spirit was this? It seemed to Helianos somehow in-human, possibly unhealthy.

Still he was trying to understand the German in general by this officer; and vice versa, to solve his domestic problem by studying the other officers that he saw around town, and by discreetly questioning fellow Greeks who had dealings with them. Invariably there appeared to be something self-conscious and methodical about their behavior, as if they had been instructed in it according to some new historic theory or psychological science. And they were complacent, even the young ones, as if they had every reason in the world to believe that it would work. Helianos concluded that it must have worked where they had already tried it, in France, Belgium, Holland. Sometimes this conclusion inspired in him a kind of wondrous patriotism. For he knew that the psychology of Greeks differed from that of other nations; they might withstand it better. But sometimes his heart sank, when he asked himself whether he and his family were withstanding it, and realized that he could not tell. Everything depended on how long it lasted.

He had been told that German gentlemen struck their servants, even in peacetime, at home; but he really had little to complain of in that way. When his gentleman was indulging himself, his fists were always clenched, and as it were to punctuate his ill-tempered utterance he struck out with them or swung them this way and that, apparently not minding whether you were hit by them or not; and striding up and down, he often gave at random what certainly would have been a kick if you had got in the way of it. When you helped him on with his coat, or rendered any other such service at close range, he would elbow you or shoulder you aside so brusquely that you had difficulty keeping your feet; and when you were removing his boots you had to look out for his feet. But as a rule, if you kept withdrawing and dodging with dexterity, he seemed satisfied. He was too proud a fellow to follow you across the room to give you a beating. As it seemed the look of self-preservation and intensity of shame on your face was enough for him.

Anyway, Helianos reflected, when he shook his fist or aimed his kick, you felt that he was human, after all. The unnerving thing was the great Prussian manner, serene and abstract, almost a mannerism; with insincerity in it somehow, but combined with absolute conviction. Priests have a manner somewhat like this, because in their sacerdotal function they are more than human, and their individual lapses and limitations of soul do not matter so much. So have actors, when they are sure that the play they are in is great; and so have certain madmen, when their dream is sublime. . .

Without a doubt in Captain Kalter's mind, he was the personifier and minister of a power far greater than any foreigner could be expected to understand; greater than the past, present and future of Greece; greater than himself. What he was, in his mind, what he represented to himself, was far more intimidating to a simple rational man like Helianos than anything he actually did or could do. In fact he found that the fear of him physically, somewhat relieved the other deeper uneasiness.

As for himself, he came to the conclusion that he was a coward, and he told Mrs. Helianos so; but it was not exactly physical cowardice, nor chiefly on his own account. The way to upset him was to abuse Alex or frighten his wife, and before long Captain Kalter seemed to sense this.