This was one of the occasions when Leda spoke. She asked what dog they were talking about. All her life she had wanted some small animal all her own, a puppy or a kitten, and could not understand her parents' refusal.
Alex said that a week ago he had seen the old beast loping along the street, with its caved-in white flanks muddy, its eyes glittering red, sniffing and drooling; and he, thinking it might be mad, had run the other way; and after that it had not been seen again. But as he told this, the poetic expression played over his face, and Helianos supposed that it was a yarn; his imagination slipping loose again, incorrigible.
Presently Helianos happened to meet the old Macedonian at the street-corner and entered into conversation with him, and leading up to the matter tactfully, questioned him. “Is it your impression, sir,” he inquired, “that our major and your major are not as friendly as they used to be?
“You remember how I used to bring all our leftovers for your old bull-terrier. Our major—he was a captain then—insisted on it. It was a little gesture to please your major. Then he went home to Germany on leave, and since he got back, he has never mentioned it.”
The Macedonian gentleman was exceedingly old, deaf, and obtuse; but finally gave the information that interested Helianos. Far from ceasing their friendship the two officers had spent the evening together lately, two or three evenings in fact, when Helianos had assumed that Kalter was at his headquarters working or at the officers' club playing cards.
The mystery of the dog-food was no mystery at all. The ravenous old animal was dead. It was a pity, the Macedonian felt, in view of the fact that he had the best possible British registration-papers for it, and half a dozen blue ribbons of its youth, which he offered to show to Helianos if it interested him.
These coincidences, these deaths, that of the neighbor’s bull-terrier following Evridiki’s, affected Helianos strangely, as it were with extreme superstition. Commonplace, inconsequential deaths; representative of death in the average and the abstract. For a long time as it had happened he had not heard of anyone’s simply dying; only of people getting killed, which was another thing. Killing aroused anger, sometimes caused despair, sometimes gave hope. This was death the charmer, the changer; a continuous factor in one’s life, to which one yielded.
With this generalization, and others no less farfetched and poetical, Helianos yielded (as he thought) to his life, however things might turn out for him, wherever his brighter prospect might be leading him. He ceased to worry or wonder about the explanation or the motivation of the major’s better nature. He kept saying to himself that he was happy, relatively happy, somewhat losing his sense of the relativity in question, ceasing to be a judge of happiness. He no longer knew what to think, and gave himself up to small simple surprises and doubts from day to day, and occasionally to hope.
One night he had a bad dream about the dead terrier, pink-faced and blistered with eczema, covered with blue ribbons, forever dying, forever whining for something to eat; and as it impressed him it was like those heaven-sent birds and beasts of mythology which lured ancient men to their destiny or perdition. He followed the pink and sick animal, somehow coerced to follow it, fated to follow it, shouting against it the while; and his shout wakened Mrs. Helianos, who shook him until he woke. Evridiki also came into the dream somehow but when he was awake he could not remember in what capacity.
He had other dreams that same week, and was moved to various emotions by them and interpreted them to himself, as a mystery, turning their meaning this way and that, as Greeks have done from the beginning of time. He mentioned them to his wife but did not narrate them, except this one of the old dog and the old servant. Afterward Mrs. Helianos was to regret his not having told her everything that came to him in his sleep: riddle, malediction, or glimpse of the future.
9.
OF ALL THE CHANGES, THE HAPPIEST FOR HELIANOS was being allowed to pass the evening in the sitting room. That was in the third week of May.
“Why shouldn’t you sit in here?” Kalter asked him, with that calm inconsistency which he still could not fathom. “Here is where you used to sit, after your dinner, is it not? There in the corner, that is your armchair, I suppose. You must get tired of that kitchen (which, I must say, your poor wife does not keep very clean) don’t you?
“No, you won’t disturb me in the least. I am a companionable type of man; most Germans are in fact. You like to read, don’t you? When I feel like a little talk, we can talk; when I am busy you can hold your tongue, can’t you? Anyway I am not working in the evening now, as I used to do.”
The first evening of this new regime excited Helianos so that he scarcely enjoyed it. He went to his own bookcase and took two of his old favorite books, and it was an enchantment, fantastic; it gave him a lump in his throat. He could not really read, he could not take his eyes off Kalter as he sat at his desk reading, reading: one of his new unbelievable cheap paper-covered novels. Helianos held his own book up before him in serious manner; he felt that he had to pretend to read, lest his companion who was in a manner of speaking his host, should turn around and discover that he was not really reading, and be made nervous by his glances.
But the next evening Kalter began to engage him in conversation, and from then on, all went well enough. It was an unforgettable experience to penetrate into that German mind little by little.
On the third evening Kalter went to work again, but obviously it was not his former work. It did not require a one of the volumes, the strategy, logistics, dietetics, put away beside Helianos' dear books in the bookcase, nor the worn copy-book. Instead he brought out a bundle of legal-looking papers, which he perused for an hour; then began adding and subtracting, and apparently drafting a letter or a document, tearing up version after version, discontented, frowning and pinching his thin underlip with his long white teeth; and adding and subtracting all over again, while Helianos watched from his armchair in the corner.
Presently, at a moment when the work (whatever it was) seemed to vex the military man especially, Helianos plucked up his courage and said, “Sir, if this thing you have to do is nothing confidential, nothing military, perhaps I could help you. I was the accountant in our publishing business when I was young, when my father was alive. I know bookkeeping and my handwriting is neat.”
Somewhat in his former rough way the major looked up, perhaps inclined to regard this as impertinent or too prying. But the peaceful face of Helianos reassured him. He replied a little stiffly, “Thank you, no. I am making my will, that is, re-making my will. I must do it myself. I have property, and in time of war it is hard to handle such things. There are many new laws, but I have informed myself. That is all. Do not concern yourself with it.”
But an hour later he asked Helianos to prepare him a glass of hot wine, and as he sipped it, volunteered a little more information. “You see, I have no family,” he began.
Helianos glanced up to the top of the desk where the three photographs used to stand in a row; they were not there now.
“I have no family,” the major repeated, “and it might interest you to know how I am disposing of my modest fortune. You foreigners think of us as men of action only: as statesmen, as political leaders, in world politics too, and as soldiers. Which we are; but it is only the half-truth. You forget what we have done for civilization: philosophy, science, music.”
Helianos assured him that he personally had not forgotten it.
It was a somewhat mumbled interruption and the major took no notice of it. “Music is what I love best,” he went on. “Now, as I am a good patriot and a National Socialist, naturally I considered leaving my property to the party, or to a welfare organization, war widows, or something of that kind.
“But no, I reminded myself, no! If things were to go badly in the next few years and our German musicians suffered great hardship, it would be disastrous. Some of our new young men in the government—their lives have been so laborious and exciting—are perhaps a bit shortsighted about such
things.
“It would be the end of music all over the world; dead silence everywhere, am I not right? You Balkans have no music, have you? Neither have the Anglo-Saxons, and French music, what foolishness! Therefore the bulk of the proceeds of my estate is to go to a music school in Leipzig, for scholarships and for a pension-fund.”
In so far as Kalter’s purpose in telling Helianos this had been to impress him, he succeeded, although of course as an Athenian Greek he did not like to be sneeringly called a Balkan. What mistakes one kept making about Germans, Helianos sighed. It never would have crossed his mind that this one had any great cultural enthusiasm—the future of music, of all things!—or that he was a man of property either.
Mrs. Helianos, when he reported it to her, was not impressed. “But, my dear gullible husband, we know for a fact that he has a family. Have you forgotten the photographs: the elegant mother-in-law and the sourfaced boys in uniform?
“If he is telling you the truth about his new will, which I very much doubt, then it must be in typical German heartlessness and spite,” she concluded, “to disinherit someone.”
Of course she intensely disapproved of her husband’s new sociability with the major, and expressed it or at least implied it every hour, every day, every hour, either in a scolding way or with strange pathos. Once or twice Helianos replied to her about it indignantly. “Is it not natural for two men living under the same roof to talk things over,” he wanted to know, “whether or not they like one another, with or without real agreement? You do not think that I always agree with him, do you?”
No, she did not think that. Little by little he got her to speak her mind about it, her divided mind. On the one hand, her dear husband was the most charming man in the world, in her opinion. Even a foreigner, even an enemy, even terrible Kalter, might yield to his charm, and some advantage to them all might ensue; she hoped so.
On the other hand, she had decided, he was unwise and indiscreet. One of these days, with a slip of his tongue, absent-mindedly, he might say the wrong thing; her dread of that was inexpressible. Then as a warning she gave a series of past examples of his indiscretion, which bored him, and nagged at him about it off and on until he grew resentful; and when she saw his resentment, relapsed into her pathetic brooding.
It was flattering to him on the one hand, exasperating on the other; but it was hard for him to argue with her about any such thing now, because he was worried about her. She had always had a mind of her own, but of late, he thought, it had gone too far. Agitatedly over and over she would harp on certain subjects all the day long, then suddenly shift, and fall into a kind of heavy daydream in which she would not express herself at all for hours. Sometimes she went from the one extreme to the other with a rapidity and apparent lack of sequence that startled him: up and up with her fiery spirit, in some conceited opinion, vain anger, even unexpected mirth; then in an instant down, as it were visibly into a pit, a soft hopelessness. Often when her spirits fell Helianos could see where Leda got her little scowling self-absorption, her apathy and loss of herself in emotion.
There were days when she talked to herself rather than to him. He would hear her, sometimes quite loud, in the kitchen or the children’s bedroom, and at first he would think that the children were with her; then find her alone. She had never done that before, and what he heard alarmed him: little exclamatory phrases, as it were bits of some obscure poem or play, little retorts arising out of some inner argument.
In his presence of course it was never more than a tiny whisper, or soundless pantomime of her poor pale mouth. But long ago, when the major was still a captain, they had learned to read each other’s lips, and he read hers now, when they were not addressing themselves to him. For the most part it was familiar subject-matter—her sorrow for Cimon, her dread of what Alex might do next, her mistrust of Kalter, her anxieties about Helianos himself—but there was an increase of the phrases he could not understand; and sometimes the soundless utterance turned to mere grimacing. Of course as soon as she noticed his anxious eyes fixed on her lips, she ceased. She talked wildly in her sleep as well, and she had never done that before.
Poor weak weary woman! Helianos had less and less confidence in her, as to her future, as she grew old. Sometimes with a desperate compassion he said to himself that if the war went on much longer she might lose her mind little by little. Or if she were to be overtaken once more by grief—his death, for example, or the death of another of their children—or by extreme hardship, as it had been before the major changed, or even by great anger, she might suddenly go mad.
His friendliness with the major of course was one of the subjects she harped on, even to herself, even in sleep; but in Helianos' opinion that was not a serious matter. Certainly it was too foolish to affect her very deeply. It was nothing but her excess of imagination and lack of good judgment.
As he was a Greek, it was not in his nature to condemn a woman very severely for a mere error or shortcoming of intellect; and as he was a good man he wanted not to wound her self-esteem if he could help it. He did not reply to her nagging about his evenings in the sitting room as sharply as he knew how. Instead, in the major’s absence or in their midnight hours, to flatter her and reassure her, he told her more and more of the subjects of their manly conversations, encouraging her to protest openly and to argue with him upon every point all she liked.
Still it did not satisfy her, she did not trust him. As she lay by herself on the folding cot in the kitchen, her ears were as sharp as some old watch-dog’s dozing by the hearth. Through the thin partitions she heard Helianos' voice and the dread German voice the minute they began any important conversation; then arose and tiptoed into the children’s bedroom, and opened the clothes closet and shut herself in, and there among the outworn family shoes and under the ragged family garments, crouched or knelt where there was a crevice along the baseboard, and hearkened to all they said night after night.
It was young Alex who, with a flash of his love of melodrama in his dark eyes, informed his father of this. For two or three evenings Helianos was made exceedingly nervous by it, sitting with the major, but forewarned of her coming; listening, then hearing her characteristic tripping step, the opening and closing of the closet door, the creak of the floor boards. The major too might have heard it; but if he did, he must have presumed that it was only Alex and Leda. Helianos accustomed himself to it and sometimes it gave him an absurd sweet satisfaction. Dear comforting though exasperating presence; love in the wainscoting, scratching softly like a mouse, knocking softly like a ghost! The secret of a good old marriage like theirs, symbolized, he said to himself, in his fanciful humor.
Then he decided that her spying on them probably had no harmful spirit or morbid motivation; it was because she was bored and lonely. In the great days before the war she had been a most sociable little Athenian, back and forth with the neighbors in Psyhiko, and with the family, his kin as well as her own. Also she might be a little jealous; the time he spent in the sitting room was, after all, subtracted from the twenty-four hours of their dear wedlock.
Furthermore, the fond, vain husband said to himself, a good deal of the talk in the sitting room was well worth listening to; and if the major continued in his present civility, it would get better and better: revelation of the foreign mentality, and deep and prophetic historic principle. Surely it was a good thing for Greeks to learn what manner of world these world-conquerors intended! He took some credit to himself for all this. Was it not his tact and his dialectic which little by little drew the major out? The previous year, with a chip on his shoulder, he must not have been good company; whereas now he had relaxed, and recovered some of his social graces of before the war.
One evening Kalter brought home a bottle of German brandy; and after dinner gave Helianos a small amount, and drank a large amount himself, and discoursed upon the subject of the heroic aims of his great nation, so misinterpreted in all those nations pretending to have united against it. He himself brough
t it up, a bit irritably, and succinctly at first, merely exclaiming against the united international error. Perhaps as he had gone about Athens that day, someone had said something challenging to him or provoked him by some silliness.
Then, as he sat and relaxed with Helianos, Helianos expressing an interest, he began expounding his views at greater length in a more mellow, sententious way.
There was no excuse, as it seemed to him, for anyone’s not knowing the German purpose by this time. “For it is a platitude among ourselves,” he said, “and again and again our statesmen and writers have explained it, with the wonderful German frankness. Only, the rest of the world has never paid attention. That is how wars start!”
As Helianos rephrased this to himself, with his humor, it was as if the Germans felt obliged to wage war now and then in order to prove that they meant what they said.
“The incredulity of the foreign nations is fantastic!” Kalter exclaimed. “It is one of their worst weaknesses.”
Helianos detected in his enunciation some slight influence of the brandy; and he remembered that all during 1942, in so far as they could tell, he had never drunk a drop.
Now he lit a strong-smelling cigar, with sensitive motions of his fingers and his lips showing his pleasure in it; and gave Helianos a benevolent look, as if he saw in him and was pleased to see in him a less weak, less incredulous foreigner than most; and proceeded to explain something of the German purpose, in his fashion.
“Naturally the German nation is superior in actually waging a war, all other things being equal; that is, unless it has been betrayed by the internationally-minded Jews or something of that sort. In fact,” he pointed out, “the nations opposed to Germany are all more or less agreed about this. Even the way they deplore it is a kind of admiration.”
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