Apartment in Athens (9 page)

He thought that it was like a little stage with painted shadows, darkened lights; the whole house-hold somehow changing places, as it were in a vague inconsequential dance to almost inaudible music, and he could scarcely see even the dear face of his wife dancing closest to him.

But at least in the old habitual strength of his love he had imagination about her. Living with her in a certain illusion and hypothesis as lovers must, even superannuated lovers, he knew how to explain everything concerning her to himself; if not in any one way, in two or three ways at once, alternatives. . .

One thing, as he thought, was an effect or a result of the change in Kalter. Because Kalter seemed weak her feeling about him grew strong and reckless. His easier unhappier unhealthier spirit, his weariness and softness, encouraged her to show fight and defiance; not of course to his face, outright, but in imagination and in conversation behind his back. All her spirit was strained, as if it were a grimace at him; all her thought clenched and shaken at him, like a fist.

Another thing was her having had a holiday, in Kalter's absence on leave; a rest, relatively speaking, and a change, and a taste of independence. It had put ideas in her head. For a fortnight she had been out from under the German's heel; so now naturally—although it was not the roughshod, punitive heel that it had been—she could not help fighting wildly against being back under it. That bad fortnight, when all their little plans had miscarried, when they had toyed with the idea of suicide, when they had had a horror of their poor children—nevertheless it had done her good! Helianos marveled at this. Out of it came her present tirades, which at least gave evidence of energy; her perpetual complaints, which at least showed hope.

Sometimes he felt in spite of himself that she had grown somewhat less loveable; alas, just now, when there had been an improvement in his life otherwise. Indeed she had not an easy character, she never had had. But he had not minded her exaggeration and self-pity in the past, when this or that went wrong. What he minded was her general resentfulness and permanent mistrustfulness, now that things were going better. He hated to see her assuming a kind of despair indifferent and frivolous, as if she had ceased to take an interest in a little better or a little worse, tweedledum or tweedledee. Even when she did admit a little betterment, it was ungracious. She would always add that it was too good to be true or too good to last.

Oh, yes, it was too good to last, Helianos also felt that. No doubt the amiability of the victorious foreigner was to lead to the foreign advantage in the end, somehow. That was what victory meant; victory was the lasting thing; for the victims, nothing was intended to last. But Helianos was rather philosophical about it. His feeling of insecurity at least quickened in his good heart a certain thankfulness for every moment while it lasted.

For the duration of the war, while the foreigners maintained their overlordship, given a kind word, a few crumbs from their particular foreigner's table, a little less mortification in their underdogship, a surcease for their nerves, a domestic truce, a hiatus in martyrdom: what more could they ask? As their Greek lives stood, the world was a prison, Greece a prison-cell. Here at any rate, for him was a chink in the wall, a door open a crack, a faint beam of daily sunshine on the floor; and there are times in life when this will serve for happiness as well as an accustomed liberty or supposed security.

One evening, toward the end of the second week, Major Kalter had intended to go out after dinner, then decided to stay and write a letter instead; and the family noticed how still he kept: not a step around the room, not a cough or sigh.

About eleven o'clock Helianos went in with his kettleful of warm water, and found him stretched out on top of his bed fast asleep, in his uniform all belted and buttoned up, with his boots on. Dead to the world, flat on his back with his hands loose on his stomach, his long legs straightened out to the foot of the bed, his heavy feet pointed up side by side. . .

Helianos started to wake him, then thought it kinder and wiser not to, and tiptoed across the room and stood for a few minutes gazing at his slumbering face. In the weakness, unwariness, of slumber it struck him as more lamentable than ever: the bony mask like a great fist, with the flesh drawn loosely, vacuously over the bone; his cheeks long and slack and pallid, the scar on one cheek bright pink. His lips, so willfully pressed together when he was awake, now looked as though they had grown together, like another scar.

Oh, what was the matter with this man? Perhaps, Helianos thought, it was remorse for the various cruelties of the Germans in Greece, and cruelties all over Europe for that matter: the rack and the boot and the branding-iron, the whip and the club and the thumbscrew and the wheel; whatever the terms were in up-to-date parlance, whatever the equivalents were in contemporary German practice. . .

This was an explanation which had not occurred to Helianos before. As the major was not a really cruel man himself, not in those terms, hearing what his compatriots were up to and brooding on it, perhaps he felt the collective guilt little by little, at last heavier than he could bear. A cumulative shock and endless regret and helpless indignation; for in fact, as a mere staff-officer of the quartermaster's corps, whatever he thought about it he could not help it. . .

Although he lay there without tossing or turning in his corpse-like attitude it was not a peaceful slumber. There was some constant, almost imperceptible motion in his face, now in one feature, now in another; as on the surface of even stagnant water, in a leaf or a little stick or a scum, you see or you imagine the life of the water up and down, sinking, swelling.

Perhaps it was not remorse, perhaps it was fear. Perhaps Germany had begun to lose the war and the major knew it. On his journey home he might have seen signs of it.

Helianos as it happened had never heard anyone say that Germany was losing the war. How he would have liked to hear someone say it, just for the sensation, even without believing it! He did not believe it. No, he kept telling himself, no—lest he go mad with impatience—Germany had not even begun to lose the war, not yet.

Nevertheless he had a little vision of what it would be like when it did begin, when the common people of Germany all got panic-stricken, and their foreign slaves rose against them, and their armies on the broken battlefronts began to turn and run, with the other armies, especially the Russian army, hard upon them. . . Was this what the major had in mind? Was this the prospect, as he had seen it in Germany on his journey home? If so, it might well have sickened him, and taken the joy out of life for him, and inspired in him a little more kindness than usual, even to inconsequential Greeks.

Helianos moved a step closer to the bed, leaned over the recumbent rawboned figure, peered into the depressed face with its soft, uneasy animation, some bad dream: it was as if he could see the flesh over the high cheekbones and around the melancholy mouth, creep. If his dream was the defeat of Germany, no wonder!

As for himself, he, Helianos, wanted so to believe it that for a moment it was like an ecstasy. He drew his breath in sips as if it were a medicine, potion, poison; and his blood in his veins, in his temples and his throat, pulsed audibly, sh, sh, sh; and his knees shook.

But he did not believe it. After all, a man of his age and his type is never very good at believing things, with nothing but his heart's desire to go by. For a breathless, foolish moment, he could deceive himself, but it was his nature to catch himself at it pretty quickly. Furthermore the ferocity of his heart's desire shocked him a little; and his physical reaction to it—wild stare, wheezing breath, gritting teeth—somewhat aroused his sense of humor about himself. An oldish Greek man-servant at his occupying officer's bedside with a kettleful of warm water shaking and sloshing in his hand, letting himself think what he wanted to think. . .

Furthermore he was a civilized Greek, and he had a certain deep prejudice to the effect that this kind of imaginary violence, collective vengeance, was not becoming to him as a Greek. Even fighting for his life, even (as it was in his case) having lost the fight, hoping against hope, a Greek ought to keep that moderation and strict sense of reality which, he reminded himself, Greeks had invented in the first place.

Only one German concerned him personally, in reality; the sleeping major there before him, as it seemed at his mercy, helpless and unhappy in his sleep. And certainly whatever vengefulness he might feel toward him was moderate enough. . .

Just then the major shook his sleeping head, and rolled over on his side with a little grunt which sounded like waking up; which startled Helianos out of his nocturne, his foolish revery. The sleeper did not wake up but he began to snore softly, and with his head turned sideways in a different light, his lips parted by the heavier sideways breath, his appearance changed.

It was not a remorseful face or a defeated face. Helianos sighed. No German remorse, no German defeat (yet), no Greek revenge: all that had been in his imagination, and the crisis of imagination had passed. It was a mere German face, unhappy. Sooner or later probably he would find out what caused the unhappiness—surely one ought to find out all one could about Germans—but his curiosity was not intense now. It had run its course for the time being, perhaps its entire course.

So let the proud major sleep as he was, with his boots on, in his uniform, unwashed, like a common soldier, Helianos said to himself. It was a waste of the kettleful of warm water; no longer very warm anyway. He might wash his own face with it at the kitchensink. The major's blessed leftovers! He was not sleepy but he was so tired that it seemed a long way down to the corridor to the kitchen; and hard work to wash, and to undress, and to get into the shaky semi-bed without waking his wife.

Would she mind if he did wake her, and whispered to her a little, not what he had just been thinking but something inconsequential to drive the wild thoughts out of his head? He realized, at moments like this, that he could not have lived without her. It was her dear female mind, with its narrow, intolerant, but tender concentration on what concerned it, that kept him in his right mind.

He poured the warmish water away, too weary to want it, resigning himself to weariness and dirtiness as it were forever. Just before getting into bed he went to the kitchen-window and leaned out, and turned his heavy shoulders and his stiff neck around to gaze up into the dark night, thinking of the misfortune (war and defeat and vengeance) of all the common humanity of Europe of which he himself now had become just a part—himself no-man, no one in particular, certainly no one of consequence.

The common misfortune, he thought, is infinite like the dark sky full of painful stars and mad clouds. The sky is as great as we are, and the stars burn like our anguish, and the clouds shift like our insanity.

His heart quailed and shrank, there seemed to be nothing in it except pity; and he could not tell the difference between pity in general and self-pity. It was a moment of despair, but on the whole it suited him better than his impotent physical anger, like a snake cut in two; and vain defiance, like a rat in a corner.

He thought of the major also as just a part of European humanity—because he had seen him sleeping like a common soldier, a most common sleep, and because perhaps, he felt a sincere remorse, and possibly he might be defeated and be made to suffer someone's vengeance, and in any case he was unhappy about something (and Helianos was unhappy himself) —and this made him laugh softly, cynically; for surely the proud man would not thank him for it. He was not the kind who cares to be included in the common international lot, even in compassion.

Mrs. Helianos was not asleep, and his soft laugh with its mocking or self-mocking note worried her. “Helianos!” she whispered from the cot behind his back. “Helianos, what are you doing, hanging out of that perilous window?

“Someday someone is going to slip and fall out there, and break his neck. We ought to have a railing or a bar put across it,” she added sleepily.

Soon they both fell asleep, but Helianos slept badly, talking aloud, waking his wife and frightening her by what he said. Sometime before daybreak he woke and heard the major awake: his footsteps around his room, the squeak of his closet-door, the thud of his boots one after the other, as he undressed and went back to bed again properly.

When at last it was another day and Helianos was up and about, at his work, he found himself more cheerful than usual, somewhat purged of both vindictiveness and sentimentality; his war-fever abated. Of course he could not expect to be entirely happy, but, he began to believe—if the major continued in his new reformed way, and refrained from shouting at him, and kept his hands off Alex, and spoke civilly to Mrs. Helianos, without frightening her—he might be a little less unhappy if he tried, if he applied his mind to it; and he resolved to.

The major did persist in his reformation; he made progress in it, better and better. Indeed, looking back on it a week or ten days later, Helianos felt that his night in his uniform and his boots—the dream in the sleeping face, whatever it had been, whether or not there had been any scrap of truth in his own interpretations of it—had marked some good turning-point in the depressed officer's life.

He was still exceedingly melancholy but he appeared to have made up his mind to something, and not to be making it worse by straining against his will. There had been a freakish spirit even in his kindness; now it relaxed into an easier, simpler manner that you felt you could trust. As a new man, the newness wore off; as a changed man, he settled into the change with less self-consciousness, with better grace.

Even Mrs. Helianos appreciated this, and for a while she seemed to forget her anxiety and malice. For a while Helianos thought that she had come around to his point of view: sufficiency unto the day, happiness in so far as possible within one's self, and hope for the best.