Apartment in Athens (5 page)

Furthermore, in his German opinion, corporal punishment was the thing for a boy of Alex's age, especially a nervous cowardly one. He said it was disgraceful how his parents had spoiled him, and he expected them to see a marked improvement as a result of his living with them, and to be thankful to him for it. He hated nervousness and cowardice and impertinence and idleness with a zealous hate, to say nothing of gluttony and thievery. As a rule all he did, besides scold, was to give the little fellow's bony arm a bad twist while he scolded, or to strike him on the head suddenly with only the flat of his hand; but upon occasion he took the trouble to administer a more formal whipping.

Alex never seemed to mind as much as his parents expected. He learned to leap with alacrity away from the cuffs and kicks; and when he had not leapt in time, or it was a flogging in earnest, to be stoic about it and to forget it as soon as it ceased to hurt. But Helianos and Mrs. Helianos could not accustom themselves to it. They spent hours discussing his childish conduct, analyzing what it might be that chiefly aroused the German ire; and often they themselves punished him severely, in hopes of averting the captain's punishment.

Once in a while, when they were getting into their narrow bed beside the kitchen stove, Mrs. Helianos showed Helianos black-and-blue marks on her poor pallid stout body, which at first angered and depressed him so that it was like sickness. But having questioned her each time, and grown accustomed to the captain's ways, he had to admit to himself that in a measure it was her own fault. She was panic-stricken from morning to night and therefore, naturally, nothing she had to do for the captain was well done. She never had the self-control to stand and listen patiently to his sneering and complaining. He did not actually lay hands on her. It was only that same violent gesturing with which Helianos himself had to contend: histrionic shruggings of those broad shoulders, digs of impatient elbow, nervousness of booted foot. In her dread and haste she was forever springing sideways, and thrusting herself into corners, and knocking herself against furniture, and tripping and falling; hence the black-and-blue marks.

“My poor dear,” he told her, “you must remember that the way we feel seems funny to the captain. It can't be helped. Now listen to me: I forbid you to reveal your feelings to him. It's the only safe way; never let him see that you are afraid of him.”

Night after night with the patience of a saint he kept trying to impress upon her these first principles of protecting one's self against a man like Captain Kalter; but she never understood one word. She merely wept and fell asleep with her foolish head on his shoulder, and rose next day in the same folly and panic. The serious aspect of all this was the increasing frequency of her heart attacks.

Meanwhile the city around them, and Greece as a whole, went from bad to worse. They were so absorbed in their domestic situation, afraid and angry, tired and hungry, that others' lives and the general plight and the long process of the war scarcely had reality for them. Indeed, some things that they heard brought a slight sense of relief, almost happiness—things happening to other people and other people's children; things they and their children had been spared. They were thankful for the small favors of fate.

A neighbor woman's baby, for example, had learned to relieve its hunger by sucking blood out of the palm of its hand, making an open sore and keeping it open. Mrs. Helianos remembered how Leda in her infancy had sucked her thumb, and they had tried everything but could never stop her; and this, the family dentist explained later, had caused the ugly protrusion of her teeth. Mrs. Helianos in her natural vanity had expected her daughter to inherit her own good looks, and long before there was any question of her not having a normal mind, Leda had disappointed her bitterly, as her baby-face grew plainer every day, pudgier.

Now as she gazed at the neighbor woman's baby with its pale mouth buried in its skinny hand, like the mouth of a rat in the neck of a chicken, she was ashamed, and said to herself, All the disappointments of our life before the war were a fool's paradise.

Helianos talked with a friend whose brother had escaped from Crete and gave a fantastic account of what happened there. Crete had always interested Helianos. In his youth he had studied anthropology as well as archaeology, and tried in vain to interest his wife in pre-Hellenic religion and custom. “The cruelest part of Greek mythology originated in Crete,” he reminded her. “But listen to these new stories. They are far worse, and harder to believe than the old.”

Outside a certain village the Germans established a burial ground for their sky-borne troops lost in the invasion; and the children of the village playing tag had tipped over two of the little crosses which marked the graves; and for this the Germans punished the entire community. It consisted of twenty-two men and their families. They dug a long shallow trench and lined up the twenty-two in front of it, with two officers and a firing squad of one soldier apiece facing them.

Behind the firing squad they assembled the families, the mothers and wives and little ones, with other soldiers to make them behave. Behavior meant watching the execution over the executors' shoulders without impatience or insolence or outcry. Whenever a woman said anything or hid her face in her hands, or a child made a tedious sound, a soldier or two stepped forward and disciplined them. The firing squad waited until all these eye-witnesses were under control, standing in good order, with their hands down at their sides, their heads up, their eyes open.

Meanwhile four of the twenty-two tried to escape, and these were shot in the legs and left lying or crawling on the ground while the other eighteen were dealt with and pushed back into the trench.

Then the younger of the two officers made a speech. Courage was the highest virtue, he said, and the four who lay on the ground, two unconscious and one groaning and one crawling along as a broken worm crawls, were obviously cowards. Absolute obedience to the commands of the army of occupation and the will of the German chief of state was required of every Cretan. Therefore the four still alive were guiltier than the eighteen dead, who had at least faced their death obediently. Therefore he ordered the four to be laid in the trench on top of the eighteen, and buried alive; and so it was done, with the women and children obliged to wait patiently until it was all over.

Mrs. Helianos wanted not to believe this story. “Are young German officers able to make speeches in Greek?” she asked. “And what Cretan villager would understand them if they did, with their impossible pronunciation?”

“Perhaps some of it is myth,” Helianos answered, “but for the most part I believe it. I have come to the conclusion that the Germans are cruel.”

She implored him not to tell her any more cruel stories, believable or otherwise, and not even to listen to them himself. “What is the good of knowing what has happened to other people? It provokes us to be rebellious, which only makes matters worse. It sickens us so that we cannot do the work that is expected of us.”

It also reminded them that, relatively speaking, they were fortunate to be living in Athens instead of Crete, and that there were worse Germans than their captain. Captain Kalter was a difficult, mysterious, but, after all, prosaic figure. Whereas the others who were worse seemed to fancy themselves in some barbaric poetic drama or terrible opera from morning to night, year in and year out. Or perhaps they sensed in the war the beginning of a new religion, and as the newly religious always have done, improvised things like that episode in Crete to be a kind of ritual. Or perhaps they were simply, by nature, dreamers of such things, and the war gave them an opportunity to make some of their dreams come true. . .

Helianos heard worse cruelties than the subjugation of Crete; certain inquisitorial techniques applied to agents of the underground movement who were supposed to be able to give information or to betray their fellows; various tricks that were like surgery gone wrong, with little up-to-date mechanical contraptions. . .Naturally he did not report things of that sort in detail to his poor wife. But once in the middle of the night when something the captain had eaten disagreed with him and he kept them awake by ringing for this and that, Helianos whispered to her a tedious and terrible discourse on the subject of atrocities in general.

“I think it must be useless to report things of that sort to anyone,” he said. “I'll tell you something about myself, something I'd be ashamed to tell anyone but my wife: when I hear them I am always afraid that I may giggle. I suppose it is animal instinct; rejoicing in the very simple fact that at the moment I am hearing them they are not actually happening to me. Certainly it is not that they are unbelievable. By easy stages we get so we can believe anything. . .”

“But the mind,” he went on, “balks at the corresponding emotion, and it's just as well, I suppose. There is a blessed stupidity about emotion. Even my brave cousins, if they were able to feel in their hearts and in their nerves and in their bones all that their noble minds are steeled to, all that awaits them if the Germans catch them, might not be so brave. . .”

Mrs. Helianos was too tired to protest against his talking to her like this. She shed tears quietly, and pulled the bedclothes up over her head to keep from hearing all of it, until at last they fell asleep.

Thus the nightmare of Greece in general gave their particular lives a background, historical and, as you might say, anthropological and psychological. Only it seemed a distant background, out of focus and in false perspective.

Daily and hourly their own slight circumstances were nightmarish too, and, alas, of a more intense interest: hurt feelings and fatigue and aching entrails, the body sore and the soul sore, and the round and round of domestic difficulty; the tired mind moving from one little trouble to the next with a little jerk like the minute-hand of a clock.

Sometimes they thought of friends of theirs who had succeeded in getting away to Egypt or England or America in 1941. This naturally increased their distress, in the way of loneliness; a sense of separation of mind in the time to come as well as of physical fact at present. Of course after the war they would try to tell them what they had been through, but it occurred to them that they might not be able to.

It is not easy to tell this kind of domestic ordeal and do it justice, without either exaggerating it or making a mockery of it. It has to be understated or else it will be lifted by one's words above that triviality, ignominy, which is one of its worst aspects. In daily detail, they realized, it was only harrowing, not tragic. It should be told with severity, irony. But its actual effect on them was to make irony almost impossible, even for Helianos; and exaggeration a habit, especially for Mrs. Helianos.

They decided not to say much about it after it was over, if they lived to see that day. It was too far below the level of what other people recognized as courage. Their having been able to bear it would be nothing to boast of. They thought of it as having been embodied in themselves, like a disease all through them, like vermin all over them. That would be the story and they would be ashamed to tell it.

B
UT THE EFFECT OF THE GERMAN OFFICER'S LIVING
with them was not all ignominy and bitterness. It had its slight silver lining. It changed the family life inwardly, spiritually, somewhat for the better. Mrs. Helianos, for one thing, no longer worried about Alex as she had done when Greece was first invaded. The actual presence of an enemy in the house had taken the boyish cruelty and romanticism out of him to a great extent. Now he never breathed a word of resistance or revenge, even to Leda. His mother was happy to think that he was learning to be realistic, reasonable, circumspect. In her view of life this was a wonderfully important lesson; she hoped he would never forget it. She could not expect Alex's father to agree with her about this. He had the courage and rebelliousness of his Helianos cousins too much on his mind; they were his ideal.

At first Alex's father scarcely knew what to think. Perhaps the high-strung little boy had become a coward. Sighing for his own limited emotions—and even as his wife supposed, for the opinion of his brave relatives—he hoped it was not that. The more he considered it the less likely it seemed. Alex stood up to the captain's violence well enough when it was a matter of fact, a sudden blow or a regular whipping, did he not? It was when the dread foreigner was in a better mood and he stood and stared at him, loitering in a corner of the sitting room until he was noticed and ordered out, or tiptoeing down the corridor for a look through the sitting-room door, that he turned pale and trembled and bristled.

While he watched the captain, his father watched him; puzzled at first by what he saw shining in the infantile dark eyes, breathless on the thin lips, then little by little, with all the difficulty that fathers have about sons, coming to understand it.

It was a thrilling thing, he thought: a sense of evil rather than a dread of injury; fascination rather than fright. It was the stare which even the youngest of one species of animal will give another species. Helianos trembled at it. For he knew his son's shortcomings as well as his own, and the thought did come to him that in a time like the present they must be the inferior species. But it was only a thought; in his heart it was not so.

In those moments of excitement even the looks of his poor offspring pleased him. Spindling legs, faminous belly, knotty knuckles and over-obvious joints; what did these matter? They were German work. The work of his manhood and his love, all that was left of it, he thought, was the little soul which in the presence of the captain appeared in the child's face. The look in his eyes although it was only hatred was beautiful, like a flower upheld on a bent, spindling, breaking stem.

Whatever Helianos might think, he was simply incapable of feeling that a son of his, a half-Helianos, flesh of his flesh, was inferior. It was instinct and it was a kind of optimism; as in obtuseness heart and automatic egoism, even an animal at bay or a worm turning is optimistic.