4.
BUT THE EFFECT OF THE GERMAN OFFICER’S LIVING with them was not all ignominy and bitterness. It had its slight silver lining. It changed the family life inwardly, spiritually, somewhat for the better. Mrs. Helianos, for one thing, no longer worried about Alex as she had done when Greece was first invaded. The actual presence of an enemy in the house had taken the boyish cruelty and romanticism out of him to a great extent. Now he never breathed a word of resistance or revenge, even to Leda. His mother was happy to think that he was learning to be realistic, reasonable, circumspect. In her view of life this was a wonderfully important lesson; she hoped he would never forget it. She could not expect Alex’s father to agree with her about this. He had the courage and rebelliousness of his Helianos cousins too much on his mind; they were his ideal.
At first Alex’s father scarcely knew what to think. Perhaps the high-strung little boy had become a coward. Sighing for his own limited emotions—and even as his wife supposed, for the opinion of his brave relatives—he hoped it was not that. The more he considered it the less likely it seemed. Alex stood up to the captain’s violence well enough when it was a matter of fact, a sudden blow or a regular whipping, did he not? It was when the dread foreigner was in a better mood and he stood and stared at him, loitering in a corner of the sitting room until he was noticed and ordered out, or tiptoeing down the corridor for a look through the sitting-room door, that he turned pale and trembled and bristled.
While he watched the captain, his father watched him; puzzled at first by what he saw shining in the infantile dark eyes, breathless on the thin lips, then little by little, with all the difficulty that fathers have about sons, coming to understand it.
It was a thrilling thing, he thought: a sense of evil rather than a dread of injury; fascination rather than fright. It was the stare which even the youngest of one species of animal will give another species. Helianos trembled at it. For he knew his son’s shortcomings as well as his own, and the thought did come to him that in a time like the present they must be the inferior species. But it was only a thought; in his heart it was not so.
In those moments of excitement even the looks of his poor offspring pleased him. Spindling legs, faminous belly, knotty knuckles and over-obvious joints; what did these matter? They were German work. The work of his manhood and his love, all that was left of it, he thought, was the little soul which in the presence of the captain appeared in the child’s face. The look in his eyes although it was only hatred was beautiful, like a flower upheld on a bent, spindling, breaking stem.
Whatever Helianos might think, he was simply incapable of feeling that a son of his, a half-Helianos, flesh of his flesh, was inferior. It was instinct and it was a kind of optimism; as in obtuseness heart and automatic egoism, even an animal at bay or a worm turning is optimistic.
So he disagreed with his wife as to the nature of Alex’s changed, chastened spirit; he told her so. It was not reasonableness and realism, he said, it was the grave reality developing for him. It was not a wise renunciation of vengeance but the natural gestation of it, getting ready for it. He had it on the tip of his tongue to point out to her that even in looks, the boy was rather like his fierce cousins, not at all like her clever vanished brother—but he refrained from that. Although he argued as gently as possible and left her brother out of it, the subject of Alex always made her cry.
Oh, he had no fatherly illusions; his Alex was an unfortunate, perverse, quivering, stunted little fellow. Still, he decided, there was life in him, life and ferocity, and he was growing up! He was a brave small boy who, when his time came, if he survived the famine, might well commit some exploit against the oppressors of Greece.
The thought frightened him almost as it did Mrs. Helianos; and it increased his melancholy realization that as an oppressed Greek, an avenger, he himself was good for nothing. But at the same time he felt a little prouder of himself, a little less ashamed of himself, as a father. It buoyed up his self-respect just when everything seemed hopeless. He ceased to talk about this to his frightened wife, but she sensed what he had in mind. She still thought him dead wrong but she did not mind, if it made him happier.
Leda, too, was fascinated by Captain Kalter, and she soon lost all her fear of him; then little by little, to her parents' dismay, began to show signs of liking him. When she heard his step outside the front door, his key in the keyhole, she would slip quickly into the corridor and stand smiling up at him, seductive, like a tiny courtesan. Sometimes she took his hand, or reached out her small grimy hand to give his fine uniform a sort of envious, luxury-loving stroke. Meanwhile she seemed to grow less fond of her brother. Perhaps she was disappointed in him, now that he no longer entertained her with terrible stories. Perhaps he had noticed her friendliness toward the captain before anyone else did, and scolded her. Mr. and Mrs. Helianos did not know what to make of it. Was there more cleverness in her retarded little mind than they had given her credit for? Was she seductive in order to be on the safe side, in the terrible vague anxiety of infancy, in self-defense? Whatever it was, to some extent, with reservations, it worked. Little Leda was the only one of them, and probably the only Athenian in Athens, the only Greek in Greece, whom the captain regarded with favor.
Before dinner, when in the weariness of his day’s work he stretched out in his armchair, with Helianos kneeling and removing his boots, he would ask Leda what she had done all day. She was never able to answer but she invariably smiled. After breakfast, as they all stood at the front door to hear his last-minute instructions, sometimes he would give her a little pat on the head with his gloved hand. He never did it ungloved; and upon one occasion he called Mrs. Helianos' attention to this point and sarcastically explained it: the child’s hair was in a miserable tangle harboring lice, and there were some scabs on her scalp as well. The foolish woman allowed herself to be provoked by this, bursting into tears, and giving all her excuses for not taking proper care of her children; for which in his grim way he teased her. Perhaps Leda, in her chronic daydream, did not realize what they were talking about. She took no notice of her mother’s weeping but still gazed up at the sarcastic German with her blissful simple expression.
Helianos, thinking it over, decided that this new enthusiasm of Leda’s was a good thing. “Of course it shocks us,” he said to Mrs. Helianos, “but we must look at it from the poor child’s standpoint. She has scarcely taken any pleasure or even any interest in her poor life, from the day she was born, has she? I cannot begrudge her any kind of happiness that may happen to her, according to her nature. It is a strange nature. I used to think that perhaps her love of Alex was something like incest. Now perhaps this, you might say, is a kind of treason. But it does not matter, she is an innocent.”
It was his way of talking which Mrs. Helianos never quite understood. “One should not expect too much of one’s children,” she said, humbly.
It is true that in all our human attachments based on nothing but blood-relationship there are strict limitations, inherent disappointments. For their chief comfort Mr. and Mrs. Helianos had to turn back to that intimacy between themselves which, in the beginning at least, had been based on passionate love. In the ordinary way the Greek husband, even at the time of passion, maintains his male aloofness away from domestic affairs. But now that the housekeeping was so far beyond Mrs. Helianos' strength and competence, and Helianos had to help her more and more, and they were together morning, noon, and night as they had never been in their youth, they were like an old team of horses broken to double harness.
When Captain Kalter was at home he wanted absolute silence. Leda was naturally silent, but as for Alex, this was the hardest of those rules which the poor parents tried to enforce in order to forestall the captain’s enforcement; and it was hard for them too. They could never learn to work so as to keep a regular and accustomed division of their responsibilities; the simplest task at some point required their asking each other’s advice, coming to each other’s rescue. The partitions throughout the apartment were thin and one of these days, if they disturbed the captain, might he not require Mrs. Helianos to do all her work alone, without Helianos? Then how would she manage? Therefore they learned to speak without a sound if necessary, and to read each other’s lips, indeed to communicate a good deal by mere glances, as the inmates of asylums and prisons do.
If their so commonplace wedded life had not been engulfed in misery along with everything else, their habits broken, and normal expectations aborted, they might never have learned the extent of their affection. They were middle-aged, and felt older than their years. Even the mortal blow of losing their first and best son had not quickened their old attitudes of mind and stale sentiments much. This hard everyday life together did. It was the autumn of their love no longer, but suddenly winter, when in fact, with illness and starvation and decrepitude, the coldest husbands and the bitterest wives often do find each other kinder than other people, kinder than nature, kinder than God.
To be sure, there was nothing erotic or sensual or even sensuous about it. Helianos was, or fancied that he was, impotent; and Mrs. Helianos' menopause had come early, in keeping with her poor health in general. Yet in the dead of night they pursued an extraordinary intimacy, as they lay wearily in a heap of one body almost on top of the other on the folding cot. They knew once more the double egocentricity of lovers, confusion of two in one. Everyone else and everything else in the world might have been shed away in the forgotten sky over Athens, and the dark turning of the earth toward next day, purposeless except to rock them, on the formless mattress and sagging springs.
The captain would ring and be waited on, or Helianos would start to snore and Mrs. Helianos would wake him on the captain’s account; and then they would lie awake awhile. Verbose even when half asleep, with her lips pressed to his ear like a kiss, she would whisper the things she had not dared broach during the day, pouring her poor heart into his; and he would console and admonish her to his heart’s content.