So this was the meaning of the paragraph that she (the more fool she) had skipped over. So this was the argument of the officers; the plot that evil Kalter had devised to be carried out against her after his death by proxy. It was unheard of: as if a man were to imbue his body with poisons at the last moment, in order to kill off poor dogs after his death. So this was to be the end of her life. . .
For the moment it did not distress her more than she could bear. Anyway she must keep her wits about her; for she would not have anyone else caught in the plot along with her. Helianos at any rate could not be caught in it, Helianos safe in prison in incontrovertible innocence! There was happiness in that thought, enough to go on with.
The old major was still talking, still in French. “It is a blood-feud between you two somehow: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, your death for his death. It does not seem very reasonable to me in the circumstances, I must say, but there you are: it was his plan, his wish, in the solemn last moment.”
She decided that she did not care. She was able to keep from shedding tears. Her lips twitched in what was practically a smile: a slight smile at herself, as an encouragement and a challenge to be at her best. But she must not let the old fellow know her carelessness; she quickly raised one hand in front of her face to hide her expression. Her bravado was not as perfect as she wanted it to be; her other hand with which she was holding on to the bedstead and her tired legs were shaking, so that she had to turn around sideways and sit down on the edge of the bed. She was almost ashamed of sitting down, thinking with a kind of humor that one ought to stand up to be sentenced to death.
But after all as it appeared it was not a sentence of death, not yet. The good major said, “Do not distress yourself, I beg of you, Mrs. Helianos. Justice will be done, Mrs. Helianos, strict German justice!”
He was a strange old fellow. Now he was making a sort of joke of Kalter’s evil purpose and her plight. “This, yes, Mrs. Helianos, this is your death-warrant,” he said, waving the farewell letter so that the paper crackled or rustled a little.
“How you must have hurt my friend’s feelings, you Greeks! He was such a sensitive fellow. This is his vengeance; the worm turning; the recompense postmortem. What a fighter he was! Still going strong, you see, posthumously!”
Half closing his thin lips, with what looked like a drawstring in them, he gave a small chuckle at what he was saying, chuckle or semblance of chuckle, with his breath in and out of his clever mouth, in and out, fast. As it seemed to Mrs. Helianos he must have disliked his dead friend intensely.
For one wild instant she was tempted to tell him the thought that had come to her a moment ago: of the man poisoning his own dying body for the dogs after his death. It seemed to her cleverer than the things he was saying. In her terrible nervousness she gave a great sigh. For she did not know whether his promise of strict German justice was a true promise or merely another of his jokes.
“But, you see, Mrs. Helianos,” he went on, “this kind of plan has a way of miscarrying when one is dead. My poor Kalter should have stayed alive to look after the matter himself, as he wished it. Unfortunately for him he has left it to me to arrange and I have ideas of my own about it, I am going to make a quite different arrangement. I am on your side. You may count upon me. I will protect and take care of you.”
This, then, was her acquittal or at least her reprieve; apparently it was not a joke. In her profound sense of relief and gratitude she thought of kneeling like a simple peasant woman and taking his plump dark hand and kissing it; but he had made it clear how he felt about such gestures. She stood up but she did not approach him. “Thank you, thank you,” she said in a faint voice; and she would have said more if the quick hard look in his eyes had not stopped her.
He turned away from her then, and faced the lieutenant, and resumed speaking in German. “Now I will explain it to you, Lieutenant Frieher. I feel sure that you will agree with me. After all my friend does say in his letter that I am to arrange it all as I wish, does he not?
“As to this Greek family with whom my friend lived,” he began, waving his hand back in Mrs. Helianos' direction as if she were a number of people, an entire family, “it might indeed suit Lieutenant-Colonel Sertz to hold them responsible for his suicide somehow. Let us suppose that he should wish to proceed along that line. . .
“Very well then,” he said, suddenly speaking in an odd light decisive voice, and as quick as a whip, “in that case I shall be able to testify to the proper higher authority that it is not so!”
Evidently it was a threat of some consequence; the young officer looked confounded by it.
“You may, if you like, Lieutenant, inform the lieutenant-colonel of my attitude,” the old officer added as an afterthought.
Then with his voice low and husky and slow again, as it were a whip drawn back idly on the ground, he said, “Now let me give you a little of the background of this family, Lieutenant, which as it happens I know very well because of my frequentation of the late major all the time he has been living here; which you can incorporate in your report if you wish, to give it verisimilitude.
“The facts are these: Mrs. Helianos, here present, is a respectable woman; my friend used to tell me all about her. A docile creature, timid and dutiful. . . She used to give me what food she could spare,” he added, “for my old bull-terrier, until he got so old that I had to shoot him. After their evening meal she would send it in a neat package around to my apartment. It was extremely kind of her.”
This idle comment upon her as if she were not there, troubled her and vexed her; but she really had no reason to believe that he meant it unkindly. The point of it appeared to be to tease the lieutenant, to pass the time with the lieutenant, and whatever the threat in the whiplike sentence had been, to let it sink into his thick young head. Now apparently it was his turn to be played with. In spite of herself Mrs. Helianos was amused by it, and she could not help liking the old major a little.
Another likeable German! she thought. Now she had met two: the little wise gruff doctor who had come to see her after Helianos' arrest and this old humorist, both in the same fortnight, which was a coincidence; when practically speaking it was too late, when she had decided upon an eternal anger. Another good German; she had always heard of good Germans but of course in the last two years she had begun to doubt their existence. Evidently this was one: insolent but smiling, slightly sinister but scrupulous, playing his games of cat-and-mouse with her and the lieutenant for love of justice, and—as he evidently expected her to believe and she herself had no real reason to disbelieve—for her sake.
He seemed inclined to stay here chatting all the rest of the afternoon. The significance of his chat kept changing terribly, or seeming to change, from moment to moment. Now he said in his careless way, “The husband, Helianos, as you may know, is in prison at this moment. He is and always has been a malcontent, or at least an intellectual, a rather bad type. The exact opposite of this docile, dutiful Mrs. Helianos!
“A bad family, the Helianos', all in the underground agitation, they tell me. He has not yet been condemned; I presume he is giving us valuable information. It may seem advisable to deal with him with our utmost severity, in due course.”
At this Mrs. Helianos did kneel almost like a peasant woman, protesting, “No, no, no.” Now that the fearful matter of Helianos' possible condemnation had been brought up—whatever the major’s intentions were in the way of strict justice—she could not keep her tears back any longer. “Not my Helianos, not Nikolas Helianos! He is innocent, innocent, innocent,” she said softly and stubbornly, over and over.
The worst of it was her not knowing whether she was really in despair or only playing a part as the major intended; whether it was a tragedy or a comedy. Oh, whatever his scheme was, she thought, there could be no harm in her saying that Helianos was innocent. Perhaps he knew it, perhaps the tragic opinion he gave was only to confuse and appease the young lieutenant, for her sake, Helianos' sake, just
ice’s sake. How could she tell? His every word had been ambiguous from beginning to end; only he had promised her that in the end there would be no injustice. She had nothing else to trust to; therefore it seemed sensible to believe in this more or less, for the time being. She had no other defender; therefore she hypothetically accepted this strange old man.
She held her arms out to him in a gesture of intercession but she did not agitate them. She shed tears, but a minimum; she wept, but as quietly as she could, in order not to interrupt his further discourse. She listened to it as if it were far away, the vicissitudes of another family.
“They have a son,” he said, “young Alex, evidently a true Helianos, a bad one, but there is no harm in him as yet. He is very young and not at all healthy. We had to give him a whipping sometimes, because he stole the dog-food; didn’t we, Mrs. Helianos?”
He smiled down at her with apparent kindliness.
“No, no, Alex did not steal it,” she protested without any real vehemence.
Over her soft confused voice he raised his voice a little for the lieutenant’s benefit. “Well, now, Lieutenant, I think I have told you all I know about this family. You will of course do your duty, make your own report, as you think best. I realize that, strictly speaking, this does not concern us quartermasters. It is a personal matter. I personally shall be grateful to you for not stirring up Lieutenant-Colonel Sertz about it.”
He concluded with a few more whip-sentences. “If he will stir himself up, in spite of our good offices—if he really feels that it is his duty to entangle this unfortunate Mrs. Helianos in connection with Major Kalter’s demise—ah, well, Lieutenant, I shall not be altogether sorry! It will give me an occasion for making a report to the high command that I have had on my conscience for some time.
“There has been a little peculation, Lieutenant, taking of bribes and waste of army property, here in Athens. What a pity! Some of that does lie within our jurisdiction. I shall feel that it is my duty to have it investigated if the occasion should arise. Explain all this to Lieutenant-Colonel Sertz, will you? and tell him how anxious I am not to embarrass him in any way.
“You know, Frieher, there is a certain rivalry among the services in our army. It is only natural and very healthy and, on the whole, fun.”
Lieutenant Frieher looked unhappy but extremely impressed.
“Let the case of Helianos proceed in the ordinary way. Let justice be done, with no trimmings of a murder-mystery. Leave the corpse of my poor friend out of it. I suppose your bureau will want some sort of written report from me besides this, won’t they? I will send it around for you to see first, so that you can corroborate it in detail, if you care to.”
The lieutenant brought his heels together and bowed and murmured, “Oh, yes, sir, as you think best.”
Major von Roesch gave a considerable sigh, as one relieved of a great anxiety or responsibility. “Even in the game of war it is better to play according to old rules, Lieutenant. You can take my word for that; the word of an old officer, an officer past his prime in fact, but the lasting kind.
“You know, Kalter was more brilliant than I, but I have been able to bear my misfortunes and I have lasted. I was a captain in the last war, and I expect to be a lieutenant-colonel, perhaps a colonel, in the next! I can tell you, Frieher, the National Socialist Labor Party did not make Germany up out of whole cloth.
“Thank you very much. Do not bother to come down with me. Your men are waiting in the street, I presume. I will tell one of them to come up here for your orders.”
They saluted each other, and with his graceful stout step the major turned toward the door, pausing an instant as he passed Mrs. Helianos, bending slightly, and giving her a little stroke or fillip on the shoulder with his heavy gloves.
During the last part of his bullying of the young lieutenant, although it was for her sake, evidently he had forgotten her presence in the room. As she knelt there listening, amazed, it reminded her of the nights in the clothes closet with the other major beyond the partition trying to indoctrinate poor Helianos in his super-German faith. There was no such exaltation in what she now heard this better-natured major say. Perhaps he really believed that she did not understand German. Or perhaps as it seemed to him she was so helpless and hopeless, so entirely dependent on him, that her overhearing this or that was of no consequence; as if she were an old pet dog merely restless at his feet while he schemed and argued.
Looking up at him with her wet tired eyes, she saw that his yellow eyes were kind still, or kind again, although the expression of the rest of his face was peculiar: an intimate, dreary, envious expression. She went on shedding tears. But she did think that he was sincere in his good will toward her; so perhaps justice would be done in Helianos' case in due course.
“Do not distress yourself too much,” he said. “I think that you are a naturally good woman, Mrs. Helianos. See that you keep good, quietly here at home with your children, and obedient. We shall meet again, you know.”
“Thank you, sir, thank you,” she said.
“And tell that little devil of a son of yours that we have treated you well,” he called back from the corridor.
As soon as he had gone she recovered her composure and ceased her weeping. After all she had heard, she felt a kind of comfortable indifference to Lieutenant Frieher. She asked his permission to go out-doors and find her children and bring them home; they had had nothing to eat at midday.
What she feared was that in despair of her coming as she had promised, they might return alone, and perhaps meet the corpse when the lieutenant’s men took it out, the corpse lurching and sagging down the stairway; and Alex might not think to cover Leda’s eyes while it passed.
The lieutenant did not like to let her go; he shook his goodlooking head a great deal; it was an irregular thing, perhaps a risky thing; but because she was a friend of Major von Roesch’s he gave his permission.
The children were waiting at the street-corner near the playground, sitting on two stones. Leda was all right; Alex had done a good job of distracting her. Hand in hand they followed her back to the apartment. The ambulance or the hearse or whatever the vehicle might be in a case of suicide, had not arrived yet. Hearing several voices in the sitting room, they hastened down the corridor to the kitchen. Mrs. Helianos offered the children a dish of yesterday’s soup but they refused it.
“Leda is not going to mind what has happened to Kalter,” Alex announced, “I asked her, and she said not.”
“Sh-sh, Alex, we must not talk while the Germans are in the apartment. Sit down beside me on the cot, we will just wait here, all three of us in a row.”
There once more on the cot waiting for Germans—waiting for them not to come but to go this time, with at least one who would never come back—she indulged in a little daydream of how it would be when the war was won (if the Germans did not win it). There would be days, weeks, months, when one would not see any Germans or even hear of them; perhaps one could forget that they existed. But it seemed as remote as heaven and it brought tears to her eyes again. She had the wit to turn her head before the children saw them. She resolved that, for one thing, after the war, she would not read or speak any more German.
Meanwhile what a blessing it had been to know it fairly well; to be able to follow the long obscure dispute of the officers about herself, to read Kalter’s farewell letter! She happened to close her eyes just then and to her surprise, found that she could see the letter in her mind’s eye exactly and entirely: the shape of the paragraphs on the paper, the forceful but jerky German script running down hill, even a blot or two, as if he had shed tears upon the ink when it was wet. She re-read it like that, imprinted or as it were photographed in her mind: word for word, beginning with the absurd formality, Much esteemed friend and fellow-officer, including the fatal paragraph that she had been a fool not to read in the first place, ending with the French word: Adieu.
She re-opened her eyes, shook her head, did not like it; but still
there it was: not a daydream or a delusion but a type of memory, a new faculty that the terrible day had developed in her. All spring, especially in Helianos' absence, she had been amazed at the retentiveness of her mind, increased now by this little silly miracle.
How she despised that letter! Even her thirteen-year-old Alex had never dramatized himself as the tragic major did in it. She imagined him sitting there composing the stately false phrases; then laying down his pen and taking up his pistol and with his own blood instead of the ink-pot, writing his eternal damnation so much more plainly. Sitting like Almighty God in judgment upon himself with Helianos' father’s old armchair for his judgment-seat; spilling his life’s blood all over Helianos' scholarly desk as if it were an orgy, drunk on his death-wish; leaving himself as a mess for other people to clean up. . . She was the cleaner-up, it then occurred to her. She would put that off until tomorrow, and she would need someone to help her.
Whereupon in spite of herself her imagination wandered in a kind of funeral march for that insolent creature in whose death she had every reason to rejoice. It passed for a moment very muffled and shadowy in her thought. Then she realized what it was: it was the sound of her own heavy pulse and weary breath and throbbing headache. However, because death is the only absolute equality among human beings on earth, even the ignoblest and the most welcome instance of it deserves a little ceremonious thought. She was willing to mourn him in that sense, as abstract man; certainly not as an individual man, for there had been neither greatness nor goodness in him.
Then a great sound of trampling and shuffling came from the corridor, a good many men, with that peculiar low sweet tone of voice which the deadness of the dead seems to inspire in everyone, even Germans; and a solemn knocking and bumping and clumsiness as they brought the corpse around narrowly from the sitting-room door into the corridor and down it, away, away forever.
Apartment in Athens Page 17