5.
IN THE SPRING OF 1943 CAPTAIN KALTER WAS GIVEN two weeks' leave to return to Germany. When he informed the Helianos' of it, they could hardly contain themselves for joy; but with his strong small eyes fixed on them, they did not even have the courage to wish him a safe journey and a good time. Then he had to wait a week for his plane-reservation. That was hard for them, with all their work and worry as usual, and the added uneasiness lest they betray their unusual excitement.
When at last the day came, and they carried his despatch-case and duffle-bags down to the sidewalk—even breathless Mrs. Helianos insisted on carrying one bag, for was it not a sort of ceremony?—and they stood watching the army-automobile slowly start and shift gears and get up speed and turn the corner out of sight, they were afraid to rejoice, with unknown faces in the neighboring windows perhaps looking down on them. Back upstairs, they still maintained their anxious composure, as if the furniture in the captain’s rooms could testify against them, until they reached the kitchen and shut the kitchen-door.
Then they all danced around and hugged each other, and the children asked innumerable questions, and Helianos made one or two jokes, and Mrs. Helianos smiled and cried at the same time in her weak way. In spite of their heavy hearts, irremediable poverty, deteriorated health, continuous hunger, and the brevity of two weeks, they expected to have a good time.
“I remember where Evridiki’s husband buried a case of my imported wine, under a ruined shed in Psyhiko,” said Helianos, “and I will go and get it.”
“Now we can take the children to the seashore for two or three days, which will do them good,” said Mrs. Helianos.
Alex began his little bravery of imagination and boastfulness again. “When he returns from Germany,” they heard him tell Leda, who smiled at him contentedly as she had not done for many months, “we will lure him out on the balcony and trip him, so he’ll fall over the balustrade and into the street, squash!”
It was all imagination. The blessed two weeks did not turn out according to any of their plans. For one thing, coming like a little forecast and foretaste of the liberation of Greece, it made them impatient, self-indulgent. They had time to stop and think, and take stock of themselves, and estimate their losses; and with all the good will they could muster, the conclusion seemed to be that the two weeks had come too late; and perhaps the liberation itself when it came would have come too late.
Their loneliness for their dead soldier son began aching again, in the way of a wound when there has been a sudden change of temperature. For days Mrs. Helianos would not or could not talk of anything else, until Helianos reproved her. If she took this two weeks' holiday as an occasion for grief, the result would be one of her bad heart attacks and no holiday at all.
He went out to Psyhiko, but either his memory was at fault or someone had stolen the case of wine. He came back empty-handed and tried to be humorous about it, but he could not keep the irony and allegory out of what he said, which spoiled the jest.
They gave up the excursion to the seashore. The children did not have the energy for anything beyond their usual routine: talk and talk, Alex doing all the talking; the same games as in Hellenic centuries past, marbles, knucklebones, played now more listlessly than ever; unhealthy little naps at odd intervals wherever naps happened to overcome them; long stations at the kitchen-door as if in a trance, waiting to be fed, never quite in vain but almost in vain.
To be sure, Helianos had more time now to wander here and there in search of food, and he fancied himself as one of the best shoppers in Athens. But, on the other hand, in spite of the captain’s finicking supervision, his wastefulness at table, and his purveyance to the major’s dog, they had managed to abstract a good many mouthfuls from the meals they served him; and in his absence of course they were not entitled to officers' rations. Furthermore, as it seemed to them, the famine was worse than ever. It was so bad that they fell into a vague, irrational expectation of its ceasing soon, of the supply of food augmenting soon, by some miracle. Helianos sometimes showed a weird high spirits in the morning when he set out to do the marketing. For, short of a miracle, the race of Greeks would soon be exterminated; and that, even for Mrs. Helianos with her dark mind, was unthinkable.
Poor woman, indolent all her life, now she could not or would not stop working. “This is the spring,” she said stubbornly, “and in the spring I give my house a good general cleaning.”
When they came to brushing and airing the beds, and observed how much blacker theirs and the children’s were than the captain’s, because he bathed and they could not bathe, she let herself go in angry rhetoric and senseless weeping. Helianos, in his constant anxiety about her health which he never admitted to her, undertook the hard part of everything. But it was up-hill work, make-believe work; nothing went well. The fear and humiliation and anger, in which they could not indulge when the captain was in residence, now welled up in them, and this, even more than their fatigue and undernourishment, alarm and anxiety, made them incompetent, invalid. Whatever they pretended to be doing, it served only to pass the time, two weeks, ten days, one week, then only a few days, thinking and thinking of the captain, waiting and waiting for the captain to get back; and the time passed quickly.
As they thought of it afterward, it seemed that this holiday had been the worst time; soft and unstrung and maniacal. It was the time when they had no more imagination; they could not even predicate any future betterment, except that folly of expecting to find more food in the market. And apparently their memory of the past was failing little by little: Helianos' failure to find the case of imported wine, for example. . .
Mrs. Helianos, on one of her rare excursions into the street for something—scurrying along, looking neither to the right nor the left lest her eyes light on some terrible beggar or terrible cadaver—encountered a man whom for a moment she took to be her runaway brother. It was not he. Afterward she confessed to Helianos that she had come to have only a vague idea of what her brother looked like. If he came to their very door she might not recognize him.
Their tenderness toward each other did not fail, in spite of hard remarks; but more than once the death-wish arose in the midst of it, mingled with it. One night he confided to her that he was tempted to defy the captain, or all the occupying foreigners as a lot somehow, to make an end of his shame and enslavement, at whatever penalty or cost. She whispered back with affectation of scorn, “You know you’d never have the courage to do anything of the kind.”
She confided to him that she was tempted to kill herself; her health was going from bad to worse anyway. He answered very roughly, “My poor dear, you have always exaggerated your illnesses. Anyway, you know, with your passive womanly nature, you’re incapable of suicide.”
Then there were reproaches on both sides, especially for that disregard of their poor helpless children which these temptations indicated. Which brought their minds suddenly to the strange fact that neither of them felt any great love for Alex and Leda. They had tried to, but they were unable to. They blamed each other for it, but with a sense of guilt so sharp in them both that they had to stop. They saw eye to eye as to what small excuse there was for their lack of love. Peculiar little bodies of their children, morbid little minds of their children: what was there lovable about them? Even if they lived to maturity they would not be normal. Their shortcomings were irremediable and their future of no interest; and irremediability in the lives of children—being a contradiction of terms, and against nature—seems worse than what happens to their elders.
It brought these elders, Helianos and Mrs. Helianos, to a clearer realization than ever of what they had to live for, all they had: each other. With almost no surcease of sleep all that night, clinging together, as they were obliged to do, to keep from falling out of the folding cot on to the grimy floor—even in the captain’s absence they were afraid to move into his room, lest he return unexpectedly—they both wept together, so that there was no consolation, no consoler. Even in their early married life which had been difficult at first, infatuated, jealous, disappointed, they had not fallen into any such waste emotion.
Next day, returning to the subject of suicide, Helianos made one of his little formal discourses: “Undernourished people almost never take their own lives,” he said. “It has been a good while since we have heard of a case. Those of our acquaintance all did it at the start, in violent imagination, before they were weakened too much in reality. It is a general rule, a platitude: hunger binds one to life. You might call it a philosophy. Stop and think how it is, even with us: we live fascinated, like animals under a spell, from meal to meal.”
There was another platitude applicable to their situation of which he did not think: to wit, one can never tell from what direction betterment may come; what little change will mend matters, for a while. It is never too late for a little happiness even in the shadow of death; and death itself may come and go with fascination like a spell.