Apartment in Athens

by Glenway Wescott

  It led her to make foolish observations of traits of the national German character, such as their wish to be feared and loved at the same time (and they were, too) and their determination to be scientific and mystical at the same time (and they were, they succeeded).

  It deluded her senses with unpleasant impressions, such as their peculiar body-odor, a whiff of it at the moment even there at the open kitchen-window, Kalter’s body-odor; and whereas in the old days Evridiki’s body-odor in the kitchen had been musky, his now was lardy, and it made her sick.

  It gave her a certain morbid contaminated feeling; so that she turned away from the window and went to the sink, and wet her nervous hands and her hot face, and rubbed and scrubbed them exaggeratedly. Then as she had only a few towels for the children, she went back to the sunny window and held her head back and her fingers spread out, to dry in the sun. The lardy smell was still in her nostrils and she still felt sick.

  Actually of course it was not the Germans in general or Kalter in particular that sickened her, for none of this was a reality; she knew that. What sickened her was her own hatred, and weariness of being dominated and reminded and misled and disgusted and made a fool of by hatred; and it was all so foolish and childish, and it went so fast, that she could only recall a small part of it afterward.

  She tried not to let her mind go on like this. She knew what it was; it was the voice of the time we live in; “the Zeitgeist,” she said to herself aloud, mispronouncing the word with a hiss. Until this moment, this bitter week, she reminded herself proudly, she had been a good woman. Her mind had never prostituted itself like this before; no accursed Geist had ever taken her for its mouthpiece before! She was ashamed of it and afraid of it. She preferred the passivity, the self-pity, which was her ordinary mood. She thought that she preferred misfortune itself, which was at any rate a real thing; whereas this hateful voice of one-half her mind sounded mad, and it was against her will. When it rose to its high pitch, she could not repress it, she had to listen to it, her whole heart joined in it.

  And her heart also reacted and rebelled, in revulsion against it, with almost the reverse of it. In her fatigue, with the imaginary evil odor and imaginary contamination, the tears came to her eyes in a flood and the breath up through her mouth in a sob; and she stood weeping in the hot sunshine at her kitchen-window.

  She was as ashamed of weeping as of hating. Fitful emotion, hysterical Germanophobia with the hysteria suddenly breaking, fit following fit, in fact one fit bringing on the other: it was a waste of time and energy while her Helianos lay in prison and nothing was done. Besprinkling of tears and soft bemoaning, it, too, was the Zeitgeist! It was another German trap and German spell, which probably everyone the world over fell into for a moment now and then. But, shaken again by indignation, drying her tears on her dirty sleeve, and trying to stop her little hiccoughing sobs by gritting her teeth and holding her breath, she resolved not to fall into it herself again. Not another tear would she shed!

  What use was it? It had no influence on the imprisoner, it was harmless against the enemy, it was no hindrance to the oppressor. As it seemed to her, even Germanophobia was to the German advantage somehow. Perhaps a German like Kalter could keep that kind of temper up—against international Jews, against Asiatic Russians, against vile Greeks—but if you were a naturally good Greek woman you could not. Suddenly it broke and you were ashamed of it and it made you sick; you wept about it until you wore yourself out, in a stupor; and still Helianos lay in prison unhelped.

  It was no solution. Of course as a simple emotional woman, she did not know, or did not yet know, what solution there might be; but she felt sure that emotion was not it. Kalter was not hurt by it or even inconvenienced by it. Kalter, she thought, would not begrudge her her moment of letting herself go at her kitchen-window; he might even feel flattered by it. What if she did gibber for a few minutes in helpless animosity, what if she did whimper away the next few minutes in revulsion and confusion, did it help Helianos? As she looked back on it—looking back on it, to be sure, before it was quite over—it seemed to her that she had lost all her self-respect.

  Lonely, lonely, lonely for Helianos she tried to look up to the desiccated flat-topped rock and the indestructible old temple once more, because they were what he loved—the national treasure of Greece, Athens' trademark, the tourists' delight as well as his—but as she had not yet succeeded in not weeping, they were only a phantom and a smudge; which left her lonelier than ever.

  It was early in June but it was mid-summer there in the sun—the summer slid down the steep of the Acropolis, slightly green with slight purple shadows, the summer tickled her in drops of sweat on her forehead and her upper lip, the summer evaporated the shameful tears off her cheeks—and yet she was as cold as a stone. Her tedious old heart had almost ceased to circulate the blood in her veins. How long, ten or fifteen minutes (she could not tell how long), she had been standing there staring at the slightly verdant and empurpled hill without seeing it, blinded by her desperate thoughts, half-thoughts. Not only had she been weeping like a fool, she had been talking to herself out loud, and already like a fool she was forgetting what she had heard herself say.

  So she turned away, with no more patience with herself, and angrily pulled the curtain across the window, and went to work in the shadowy kitchen, warming up some soup (more than half water) for the children’s midday meal; then sat on the cot and dully waited for them to come up from the street. So well had they learned their lesson of enduring hunger that a good deal of the time they had not much appetite. . .

  It was Kalter’s fault. Suddenly then she remembered how when he had arrested Helianos he had locked her out of the sitting room, her own sitting room; and in a more irrational temper than ever she sprang out of the kitchen and went running and stumbling down the corridor, and took the key out of that door and brought it back to the kitchen and threw it out the window.

  Her mind and her life shrinking away to this silly gesture, vain ritual and symbol, childishness! The instant it was done she was ashamed of it, and in spite of her weariness and her weary heart resolved to go down to the street after it and to put it back where it belonged. She leaned far out of the window in the hot sunshine for a long time, not knowing where it had fallen, trying to locate it on the sidewalk and the pavement, in vain, with the shadows in her eyes from the cruel blaze and the swash of blood to her head from leaning out.

  The children returned from their play then, and she was ashamed to mention the key to them, and forgot to go down after it herself.

  Major Kalter rarely locked the sitting-room door. (“Only when he arrests people,” as Alex said to Leda. . .) But the next morning by some chance he noticed the disappearance of the key and it displeased him.

  Mrs. Helianos, in the kitchen, heard him in the corridor, irritably accusing Alex of having taken it to play with. At it again, the supposedly reformed character! she said to herself, with her nerves quickly contracting as if she were about to cry or to laugh. It was his bad voice, his voice like a chisel with a temper behind it like a hammer; it was insufferable!

  She came out into the corridor. There was the gloomy officer facing in her direction, towering over the small boy who had his back to her. She could tell at a glance that it had begun again, their old tedious, perilous antipathy: the German’s neck thrust forward and little explosive eyes, and the rigid back of Alex trying to maintain his equanimity, protesting his innocence—which for once in their lives Mrs. Helianos knew to be genuine. As she drew close to them Alex glanced hopelessly to her over his shoulder. Down at the German’s side she saw his large hand agitating and beginning to come up in a fist.

  In six long steps she was there, threw her arm around Alex, thrust him aside, stepped between them, and faced the major with her arms spread out, her entire person spread out, like a hen between her chick and the hawk; and for the first and last time, she addressed him with real vehemence.

  “Major Kalter, Major Kalter, do
not shout at Alex! What if you have lost your key? The man of the house is gone now, thanks to your fury and folly. Naturally things go wrong, things get misplaced. None of us has touched your blessed key, I tell you. If you have lost it, I am sorry, we shall find it or replace it; but mean-while do not shout!

  “Please remember, sir, that it is my property, this key you say you have lost; you shall not accuse my son of stealing it. This is my house, and I will not have any brawl or roughhouse in it, between you and Alex.”

  It was a fearful, freakish moment. Roused by her sharp voice, Leda came to the bedroom door panic-stricken, and tumbled over the threshold with a ghostly cry. Alex pulled away out of his mother’s grasp and thrust himself back between her and Kalter, to ward off the German blow, due to strike her now if ever. Naturally she too shrank from it; even with the words on her lips she had realized that she deserved the worst that might happen.

  But nothing happened. Breakdown of her common sense, fit of nerves, height of imprudence and impudence; but to her amazement it worked. She saw the German’s face turn red, she saw his fist relax and go down, she saw his German authority and his manly strength hesitating and hanging in the balance for a second, and failing. He did not even say anything. He gave her a somewhat sheepish smile and turned on his heel, back into his sitting room.

  As he departed Mrs. Helianos took Alex by both shoulders and turned him around, and ordered him to pick Leda up and go for a walk with her, to be out of harm’s way, and to calm her. Alex was all a-tremble; but evidently he had observed the strange surrender of the major, and perhaps with his sixth sense knew that there had been something no less questionable in his mother’s outcry about the key. As he and Leda went out the front door, he turned and gave her a flashing grin from ear to ear. A few minutes later the major also departed to his headquarters with a quiet, “Good-bye, Mrs. Helianos.”

  It was a miracle, she said to herself. But with an ill-natured shiver she remembered how, when Kalter first came back in his bereaved and exhausted condition with a kind word for them and a little better demeanor in general, she and Helianos, fools that they were, had called that a miracle; whereupon in a new fury he had given Helianos a beating and packed him off to prison!

  Well, she would not trust him now. But still, she fancied, this had a little more reality than that. A large part of that other miracle had been Helianos' bewitched and doting gentleness, and Helianos was the most charming man in the world. Whereas there had been nothing charming about her behavior: spiteful naughtiness of some little child, and dishonesty worse than any of Alex’s, and the hue and cry of a common market-woman!

  Upon which strange terms the force of her spirit somehow had prevailed over Kalter’s tyranny and physical force. Somehow the great vile fellow’s spirit really was broken, his ego undermined, his state of mind unhealthy, his energy waning. This perhaps had been the point of his final brutality and injustice to Helianos: a last flaring up of his temper, a burning out of his evil, a kind of fierceness which took all the strength he had left. Now it was for her to pursue her little advantage. Now apparently the time had come for a change of policy and practice in what, just then, she had so proudly proclaimed to be her house. All the rest of that day she could not think of it without a slight smile.

  So she resolved, from now on, to make some little scene whenever she saw the least sign of Kalter’s misbehaving, a daily scene for a while if she could find pretexts enough, little by little, feeling out his weakness. Then, having saved up her energy for two or three days, having thought everything out in advance, she would stride into his sitting room, and with hysterics and histrionics, demand the liberation of Helianos! It might work; perhaps it was what the strange German was waiting for; it would work! Planning all this made her happy for two days, dreaming of Helianos' homecoming.

  The episode of the key so enchanted Alex that at the sight of her, the enchantment would come on him again and he would give her the same happy grin. She did not like it. She was afraid of his feeling that her defiance of the major somehow authorized him to do likewise. Or he might guess, or perhaps he had guessed, what a shrew’s part she intended to play with the crestfallen Kalter. If he should decide to take a hand in it, all would be lost!

  More than this, it vexed her on her own account to have him leering at her like a fellow-conspirator or little evil genius. She was his mother, and a woman of a certain dignity, most of the time; and as it struck her, there was incongruity and mockery in this kind of boyish admiration. With all the shame and the humor of her behavior about the key, she kept an odd, intense self-respect about it. She respected the desperate nervousness which had inspired it all unconsciously, and brought it to pass.

  There was a strange little test of strength between her and Alex—it was on a Friday night, the second Friday in June—as she put him and Leda to bed. There once more, once too often, was the mocking expression on his face on the pillow; and she lifted her hand, tempted to slap him. The joyousness died out of his grin but he held his lips in it stubbornly, and for a moment their glances were fixed on each other in bitter emotion, will against will; his then somewhat pathetically failing.

  Even as he grimaced and she stared him down, she noticed with a little pride what perfect teeth he had. Poor little devil, with his calamitous physique, yellow-skinned, lean but soft and paunchy, with arms and legs that reminded her of sticks loosely put together with thongs—but with this one perfection, matched like a string of pearls, whiter than any pebble!

  As it happened, as their lives were, in a spell and a snare around Kalter’s life, this was the last occurence of her maternal bitterness against him, disappointment in him. Presently she would have to forgive him for everything, once and for all.

  13.

  THE NEXT DAY WAS ONE OF KALTER’S FREE DAYS, AND his presence in the apartment made Mrs. Helianos uncomfortable, irritable. He still had not made any reference to her tantrum about the key and she was afraid he might; she was not in a mood for it. He had said that he was not feeling well and declined to eat anything in the middle of the day. He had asked her to keep the children quiet, intending to sleep, but evidently he was not sleeping. She could hear him inexplicably walking around his room a while, then at his desk pulling out drawers and noisily pushing them shut again, and repeatedly clearing his throat, blowing his nose. She was so tired that she did not want to hear anything and so nervous that in spite of herself she kept listening and hearing everything.

  She went to her kitchen-window once more, with her odd un-Greek notion that the midday sunshine did her good, and sank to her knees with her elbows on the window sill. She had sent the children to play outdoors, on the major’s account, but they had returned for some reason. Their piping little talk came to her from the bedroom, and she wondered if she ought to go and scold them, before they disturbed the major. She could remember when with less provocation he would have shouted the house down. . .

  Then there was a pistol shot, resounding through the apartment. She could tell by the sound exactly what part of the apartment it came from: the sitting room, his room. Just for an instant she thought that Helianos might have come back and taken his revenge; but she knew his step so well, even on tiptoe, even all the way down the corridor or at the front door she would have heard him come; therefore she instantly dismissed that thought, as she scrambled to her feet and ran out of the kitchen toward the sitting room. There was no one in the apartment except herself and the children and the major, she thought; there was no one in the sitting room where the pistol shot had come from, except the major; had she not been listening, nervously listening to everything in spite of herself? Therefore she thought she knew what had happened, she hoped it had happened, as she listened outside the sitting-room door—it was silent, not a voice, not a breath, not a footstep—and tried to see through the keyhole, in vain; then ran to the children’s room.

  Leda was trying to come out into the corridor, Alex was holding her back with both hands on her shoulders.
Leda looked as if she had lost what small mind she had; her fleshy features out of shape and fixed in a grimace. Alex was transfigured, with his beautiful face loose and white like a handkerchief and his morbid eyes shining, and his unreasonable lips apart, panting, saying, “Mother, Mother, something has happened. Tell me, is it Father? Has Father shot him?”

  “You know better than that,” Mrs. Helianos answered, “your father is not here, your father is in prison. Now, listen to me, you must behave well, Alex, like a grown-up man.”

  She took Leda and sank into a chair, drawing the stricken infant body tight in her arms, and the pudgy face clenched like a fist against her breast; at the same time with some difficulty holding Alex by the wrist as he pulled and wriggled away from her. “Mother, let me go,” he begged, struggling to free himself.

  She had no notion where he was going or what he wanted. Then he drew his face down to her hand which held his wrist, and for an instant she fancied that like a little animal in a trap he was going to bite her, but instead he kissed her hand and rubbed the tears out of his eyes on her wrist. “I’m afraid, Mother,” he cried, “Mother, aren’t you afraid?”

  No, she was not afraid, she was happy, thinking happily that there was no one in the apartment now except herself and the children. There had been no one in the major’s room when the pistol shot had sounded, except the major; and therefore she kept hoping that there was no one in the major’s room at all now, nothing except the major’s body with the pistol shot through it; and his body, she thought almost gleefully, hysterically, was nothing to be afraid of. Her hysterical heart was throbbing faster than she had ever known it to throb, but she did not mind it because she was beginning to have confidence in what she hoped, and she could scarcely wait to go and see if it was so. But first she had to get these poor children out of the way.