Apartment in Athens (16 page)

Then Alex remembered a quiet shadowy place, adjacent to their playground, where they sometimes took refuge in the middle of the day when it was hot; and where they went for their loneliest games on certain of Leda's bad days when she did not care to play with other children, or other children did not care to play with her. It was in a portion of the masonry of a fallen building; an empty door-frame in a tumble-down wall with half a stairway up inside it and a little caved-in cellar underneath, which made a kind of nook. It was a place Leda liked.

He led her there by the hand and seated her in it, blinking and mystified; and he explained what he had to do and how soon he would come back to her. But twice she climbed out, and came running down the street after him, whimpering his name. Twice he re-seated her, and as it were hypnotizing her with the fiery eyes she loved, stamping his foot, and chattering at her like a worried little monkey or a vexed bird, tried to persuade her. Then he gave her a great stick to hold, to defend herself with, as he told her; and that seemed to reconcile her to being left. Her appearance in the odd niche of broken plaster and stone pleased him: her confused head crowned with her shaggy black locks, and the way she bore the stick formally before her like a scepter. Although his heart was heavy with his father's peril and his mother's illness, he gave a little laugh at her to show his admiration, and that pleased her.

Then he ran, and fortunately found the family physician's daughter in his office; and she knew where he had gone, and promised to go after him and send him to the Helianos apartment before long.

Leda was waiting in the ruin when Alex returned to her, but not happy. Before he got over the fence and around the broken wall where he could see her, he heard her murmuring his name, “Alex, Alex, Alex.” She was standing up in the niche, facing into it with her forehead and her hands pressed against the plaster, the way sleepwalkers do when they have strayed into a corner or behind a door.

Then they returned to the apartment, and because their mother seemed extremely ill, Alex refrained from talking and Leda from weeping.

The doctor followed shortly, and although he did not have the requisite medicines, his visit did Mrs. Helianos good, and she fell asleep and slept the night through, in exhaustion. That night the major did not return until midnight, and he arose early next morning and slipped out without their seeing him, without any breakfast.

Mrs. Helianos was obliged to stay in bed several days, with the children waiting on her; Kalter taking his meals somewhere in town. He came to the kitchen to see her on the second day. His temper had passed as if it had never been, as if he had forgotten it. In a grave, correct manner he expressed his good will toward her and his concern for her recovery.

What little he had to say about Helianos seemed to her encouraging; at any rate it was not ill-tempered, or calamitously prophetic, or overtly vengeful. “You know, Mrs. Helianos, do you not? that your husband spoke to me in the most defiant manner, about the German chief of state and about our allies, in insulting terms. As you are a far from stupid woman, you understand that this could not go unpunished. Now a rigorous investigation of him, and all his friends and family, will be necessary.

“But for yourself, Mrs. Helianos, do not be alarmed. You will not be blamed for his folly. Be patient,” he added, “and if he is reasonable, perhaps it will all be over before long.”

Mrs. Helianos' eyes were bright with hatred, her dry lips whetting one another, her body restless with hatred shaking the old kitchen-cot. The major took no notice of any of this. Actually it was somewhat superficial emotion; it did not cause her to have a serious heart attack. The shock of her husband's arrest had brought its own remedy for the time being, a kind of reduction of body and soul: not enough energy for real hatred or grief or fear; only poor wandering thoughts, a stupid optimism, and a loneliness so absolute that it did not even evoke lost Helianos in her mind very clearly. It seemed a good thing to stay in bed and have a rest.

She was optimistic but not really stupid. With that little intuition of motive, slightly cynical, which is in women more than men, she sensed that the alternative of having to eat in restaurants or looking for another place to live, another family to live with, worried the German; and therefore at this point, with her illness, he genuinely regretted the arrest of Helianos. She thought how to take advantage of this, and made a plan, a little womanly plan: she would get well as quickly as possible, and work hard to make him more comfortable than ever; then fall ill again, or threaten to fall ill. This might stimulate him to have Helianos released as promptly as possible, for his own sake.

He sent a German doctor to see her on the third day. Because he came unexpectedly and in uniform, frightening her, he found her heart in its disturbed condition, and to please Major Kalter took her case seriously. He was a sad gruff little man; but he had a valiseful of medicines, and he impressed her with his air of science, and she liked him. It was the first time in her life she had ever really liked a German; now that it was too late, now that, in her poor natural womanly opinion, for good reason, they were all hateful! . . . Among other remedies he gave her certain pills to counteract undernourishment, and admonished her not to waste them on her children, but smiled kindly when he saw by her expression that she meant to disobey him in this particular; which in fact she did.

Then she got up and resumed her life and housework and motherhood more or less as usual. The hard work, without Helianos' help, with all the tasks neglected during her illness, and her little plan of influencing the major by good housekeeping, and especially the care of the children—more troublesome than ever—these things were Mrs. Helianos' salvation for the time being; keeping her from thinking, grieving, or even hoping. Leda was having a little new sort of weeping fit daily or every other day, sinking to the floor with her arms crossed over her face, and every breath a tiny moan almost inaudible. Alex had reverted to all his former wildness, Germanophobia and melodramatic fancies. He apparently took the darkest possible view of his father's situation, and he would talk to his sorrowful sister about it, sometimes with an excitement verging upon enjoyment, exaltation; for which at last his mother felt obliged to scold him severely.

A day passed, two days, and a part of the time Mrs. Helianos too felt a kind of exaltation, stoicism, and indeed a saving sense of humor. One morning, almost midday, alone in the apartment, she stood at her kitchen-window, looking out in the direction of the Acropolis. She could not remember when she had last looked; perhaps not once in the entire year of the major's lodging with them. So long as she tried to do her housework as he expected and Helianos recommended, she had had no leisure for any such thing. Her plan of influencing Kalter was failing, she thought; he was too tired and sad to notice, grieving for his dead wife and sons. She fancied that he was lonelier than ever now, without Helianos to keep him company; perhaps that would influence him.

In any case, now, a fig for housework! she said to herself. Powerful evil lodger and dear foolish husband had no more mastery over her. Now for a few minutes, until the children came home for their midday crust of bread, she would relax and loiter and look out over the rooftops of Athens all she liked.

In spite of her narrow mind and emotional intensity, Mrs. Helianos was not the simple, Balkan type of Greek woman; not at all. She sometimes reminded herself of this distinction, proudly. She had European culture enough to know in what esteem ancient Greece, ancient Athens, was held everywhere; how everyone in the world was indebted to it for something, and acknowledged the indebtedness. Up there, over modern Athens, there it stood: the chief national treasure that foreign sightseers by the thousand (including Germans) came to see—Parthenon on Acropolis; a building that no amount of warfare had been able to obliterate so far, in the cloudless blue, on the timeless rock that even the might of the Germans could not alter; remnant of past upon portion of eternity. Looking at it inspired in her a certain grandiloquence and blissful stubbornness.

Then as she stood and looked, she assumed an attitude which in physical sensation corresponded to her thought, her spirit. It was an attitude prompted perhaps by unconscious memory of ancient sculpture that she had seen all her life (although without caring for it especially), or perhaps merely exemplifying a racial habit of body from which that style of sculpture derived in the first place—a classical attitude: her fatigued thickened torso drawn up straight from her heels and from her pelvis; her head settled back on her fat but still straight neck, her soiled, spoiled hands lifted to her loose bosom, through which went just then a little of the bad thrill of her palpitations, anginal pain like the stitches of an infinitely strong and invisible seamstress.

“One of the Fates,” she said to herself aloud, “the frightful trio;” but she did not mind the thought. The time of not minding her personal destiny had come.

The minutes passed, she was still looking up at it: the citadel in ruins and the empty temples, the one like a vast box with a broken lid and the other smaller, less broken behind it; bright stone, although it was not pure white; the desiccated flat-topped hill which served as their platform or pedestal, with its steep slope darkling even at this time of day in the sunshine; and all around and far beyond, other hilltops and other slopes—because they were her homeland, she could conjure them up, even those out of sight—the large embracing forms of Greece as a whole with the sunshine sliding over them, rousing the extreme summer in them, and casting pale purple reflections.

In the old days it had been Helianos' pleasure to go up there on Saturday or Sunday afternoons in winter when the wind was not too piercing, or after the evening meal in summer, to stroll about and clamber up and down, in general admiration. He had always taken her and the children along, because he liked to express himself and felt the need of an audience. She had never exactly shared his enthusiasm for the stony, vertiginous site or for the bare broken old edifices themselves. It had vexed her to see a monument so glorious in men's minds left in such dilapidation—how futile and unreal men's minds were, and how they talked and talked!—but she had listened to everything Helianos had to say, patiently, more or less agreeingly, as a wife should do.

She remembered his telling her that he wished it had acres of olive-orchard around it, to furnish it with a garment of the interweaving, wavering branches from top to bottom, just as the human body is furnished with its sensitive nerves and infinite little blood-vessels from head to foot; and the ground all the way up strewn with the mouth-puckering fruit; and the air oily in one's nostrils; and even on top against the sky, the summit and the temples themselves clouded with the pale thin lively foliage, flickering, like an unreal thing, like moonlight in the midst of the sunlight.

Mrs. Helianos wondered how his olive-orchard could have flourished upon that seamed and blasted summit. Had there been a soft bosom of earth up there, lifted to the sky, once upon a time? With her somewhat disrespectful although loving mind, she occasionally thought that Helianos' knowledge of the past was not all he pretended, or that he made things up.

Anyway, now, she preferred the great summit as it was, naked. Nothing but rock, rock, with no nerves, and no flesh on its bones, no soft vulnerable bosom, and no veins or arteries. It seemed more appropriate to 1943 as it was; an omen, a good omen, as good an omen as one could expect in 1943 in Greece. The worst having happened to it for centuries, still there it stood! It was a small comfort, but Mrs. Helianos took comfort in it.

She remembered other things Helianos had told her. Somehow her loneliness for him touched a part of her mind which had absorbed long passages of his talk like a blotter, almost word for word; even things she had not understood one word of at the time, such as the dark pre-historic mode of life and cruel mythology, and bygone foregone philosophies. His theory of ancient Greek architecture, for example; that old temple of Athena vacated and broken open against the sky over Athens especially. It had a more human character than any other architecture, he told her. That was the beauty of it, in his opinion: a kind of comfortableness to human mind and human eye.

“They made it to fit us,” he said, “the way a chair or a bed fits when one is tired. The way a man's embrace fits the soft woman he is embracing; do you remember, when we were young? The way a mother's arm fits her child's weakness, and her breast fits the greedy mouth; do you remember, when the children were babies?”

She used to laugh at him when he talked like that, and chide him, and not admit remembering any such thing. But now, prompted by loneliness, with the memory of his voice as distinct in her mind as it ever had been in her ear, she remembered.

“But, you know, beauty is not only sentiment,” he said, “it is mathematics and psychology. It is because the sight of the Parthenon matches the experience of our other senses, and our other sentiments; everything enters into it. We see its proportion, and at the same time we feel the proportion of our own bodies, and it corresponds; and therefore our eyes enjoy themselves, just as when we are dancing our feet enjoy the music.

“In a dance we feel the sound, we hear the motion; and architecture, our Greek architecture, is like that. Looking at it, even from a distance, we respond to it as if we were touching it, because, by similitude and ratio—ratio is a wonderful thing!—it intensifies our awareness of every part of ourselves touching every other part.”

“Ratio is a wonderful thing” was one of his favorite sayings; he would raise his soft voice in a louder exclamation upon that than anything else. His discourses on architecture were always the least comprehensible, the ones Mrs. Helianos felt most inclined to laugh at. On the other hand, he most enjoyed delivering them, with special illumination of his fine eyes, slow choice of his abstruse words, vibrant utterance of the best phrases; and she had never laughed in fact.