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.

Oh, she needed Helianos more than ever in her life, and here instead she had only Alex, still holding him by the wrist: this half-Helianos, poor flesh of their flesh, small body deformed by the war, small dæmonic mind perverted! But with Helianos away in prison, in her very womanly spirit habit-bound by her relationship with him, now there was a vacancy which in these circumstances had to be filled, by someone; and it was Alex or no one!

She drew him by the wrist around where she could look at him; and looked at him as it were with strange eyes; and for a wonder, for the first time in a long time, did not mind his undersized spindling paunchy body, and was moved by his strange face—the morbid light in his eyes sparkling wet with tears, the indefinable expression of his lips, the smile that was no smile—and neither feared him nor feared for him; and decided to take him into her confidence. She had to have someone in her confidence, someone to help her, especially with Leda.

“My little boy Alex,” she said softly, “I think I know what has happened. There was no one in the major’s room except the major. He has shot himself, that is what I think, what I hope. . .”

Alex gave a soft exclamation deep in his throat, and stopped struggling, so that she did not have to hold him by the wrist any longer. The pain in her heart was not a bad pain, only a fast pain, but she was glad not to have to hold him.

“Alex, will you do something for me? Will you do as I tell you?”

“Yes, Mother, I will.”

“Then, Alex. . .” She was trying to whisper, just in case she was mistaken about there not being anyone else in the apartment, but when she tried to whisper no voice came at all. “This is what I want you to do. Take Leda down to the street and stay with her until this is over, until I come for you.”

“No, Mother, I won’t,” he answered loudly. He could not whisper any better than she could.

Meanwhile Leda lay in her arms as quietly as if she had fallen asleep, with her face like a bad dream.

Then she had an inspiration about Alex. Next day she was to ask herself if it had been mere cowardice, but surely it was not so simple. . . There came into her mind a wave of singular pity for the vengeful little boy who had never had a chance for vengeance, and a wave of greater affection for him than she had ever felt before. In the past she had denied him her affection because his vindictive spirit displeased her; now it did not displease her. Suddenly she saw how she could compensate him for the long denial, and at the same time make use of him, for Leda’s sake, to get Leda out of the way, and for her own sake: so that she could postpone everything for a moment and sit here with Leda for a moment and rest.

“Alex, do you hear me? It is for Leda’s sake. You love Leda, don’t you? She will never get over it if she sees what has happened.”

He only stared at her, shaking his head.

“Alex, you hate Major Kalter, don’t you? If I let you go by yourself, to see what has happened to him, then will you take Leda down to the street?”

“Yes, yes, please let me, Mother. I want to see what has happened,” he said.

It was a cowardly inspiration in a way, cowardly and clever. For if what she hoped for had not happened, if instead he interrupted some evil deed of the German’s, or terrible exploit of Greeks against him, what harm? They would give him a cuff or a kick, that would be all! They would blame him only as one blames children, without any further suspicion; he was too young to be blamed in earnest, or suspected or arrested.

She grasped him by the wrist again and made him wait. “I don’t think the door is locked, I took the key away—”

“I knew you had taken it, Mother,” Alex said as quick as a flash.

“Don’t interrupt me, Alex, listen to me. Tiptoe to the door, listen outside it, peep through the keyhole. Open it only a crack at first, quietly, to be on the safe side. If the major is dead or badly hurt, go in. Go as close to him as you like and look at him.

“I will wait here. When you have seen whatever there is to see, you can tell me about it. You can tell Leda too, but not now! Someday, when she is old enough. . .”

“Let me go now, Mother,” he cried in a high painful voice which made her ashamed of herself.

“Don’t touch anything,” she called after him as he scampered out of the room.

It was a wicked thing: letting him go, sending him, and she only half understood it. It was the last effect of her having been spoiled by Helianos all her life: in unreasoning excitement she required someone to do something for her. Even a semblance of help was better than nothing; a ghostly-faced wild feeble manikin of a son better than no one. It was her nature. It occurred to her that Alex with his wild nature might be better than his father at this kind of thing; a manikin better than a man, in the circumstances.

She lifted Leda away from her bosom, looked at her, and gave her a little shake, to which she made not the slightest response, and kissed her grimacing cheeks. Perhaps the fright of the gun had done her the same harm as the massacre of the municipal market: stupefaction, mind and body. Perhaps this time it would last longer than three days; all the rest of her useless life she might be like this, like a heavy fleshy doll. With distracted tenderness, all the foolish gestures of mother-love, she fondled and rocked the hopeless small body as she might have done if she had been Leda’s age, and Leda in fact a doll.

Then Alex came back. Evidently whatever he had seen had done him good; his cheeks were no longer dead white, his eyes no longer starting out of their orbits, and he had regained control of his voice. “He is dead, Mother,” he announced quietly.

“I know, I thought so.” She shut her eyes for an instant, imagining the proud powerful German figure fallen on the floor or down under the desk, and his evil changeable soul flying out the window with the pistol shot, whistling away, fading, in the silence after the pistol shot. . .

“No one was there,” Alex added. “The front door was locked, the sitting-room window was latched on the inside; so no one could have been there, could any one? The sitting-room door was not locked, I went in and looked. Don’t you go, Mother, please, don’t you look!” he begged.

“Very well, I won’t. Now take Leda, as you promised. . .”

Then he drew himself up as tall as he could and with an expression of obscure old drama, said, “I killed him, Mother.”

“No, you did not, Alex. Remember, now you are a grown-up boy, you must not tell lies.”

“I know, Mother. Don’t scold me,” he said. He started to cry but quivering in every nerve, stopped it.

“Now take Leda. If she can’t walk, or doesn’t want to, you’ll have to carry her. Don’t stay in front of our door, go away down the street, because the Germans are coming. Take care of Leda, play with her, talk to her, tell her anything you like, but not what you have seen.

“I won’t be long. I must telephone the Germans to come and get him.”

Leda could and did walk, very softly, as if in her sleep, clutching her brother’s hand. For an instant, as Mrs. Helianos followed them down the corridor, watched them down the stairway, bolted the front door after them, her tired spirit lost its sense of direction: she felt some of the emotion of not expecting ever to see them again.

Then she wanted to see Helianos so badly, and needed his advice and help so badly, that she gave a little whimper, but in the empty apartment the sound of it distressed her, so she hushed. It was no time for sentiment. It was time she did something about getting the major’s body out of the apartment, unadvised and unhelped. She had been given hard tasks and shameful tasks since the Germans came to Greece; this was the worst.

Alex had closed the sitting-room door, so she could put if off a few more minutes if she chose to. By that time the jerky unwilling beating of her heart had begun to frighten her, but gradually, as it seemed by exercise of will power, she was able to control it. “It is God’s mercy,” she said to herself out loud, “I am not going to have a heart attack.”

She stood there in the corridor holding her breath, conscious of the seconds, the minutes, wasting them, pretending to concentrate on what had to be done. “Thank God,” she said, “for the major’s telephone.” It was there in the closed sitting room with his body.

Once more her absurd voice in the still apartment making these remarks to herself, distressed her. This habit of talking to herself had been one of her reasons for fearing that someday she might lose her mind. Now she realized what self-indulgence that fear was; what spoiled hypochondria! In fact, all things considered, even in this tragic farce which had come upon her, she marveled at what good sense she had, and quietness of brain, even amid her habitual chatter.

Then, when she kept quiet, hearing only her own heartbeat—gradually beating better, though with a wet beat, as it were a sodden squeeze—it was fantastic, it was a little world in which everyone else was dead; and the silence, and absolute loneliness without the children, without Helianos, without even the major, half distressed her but half pleased her.

She went back to the kitchen and looked out the window; leaned far out, and saw Alex and Leda a little way down the street walking up and down, talking: the brave small boy pulling the automatic little girl along by the hand, and doing all the talking, telling her some long but apparently not terrible story, not the truth. Leda was walking not quite straight forward, with her fond face turned sideways toward him.

She felt, just then, a pang or a twinge of suicide; the merest hint to herself that it would be agreeable, suitable, to fall down out of the window and lie there face-down on the sidewalk forever. For there around her in the kitchen she noticed the slight stench, as of death—actually it was the bad food she had been cooking, the soiled folding cot, her own neglected body, her old clothes—whereas the breeze brought from outside a whiff of sweet smoke exhaled by someone’s chimney, and a scent of wild herbs from some hill on the outskirts of town.

It was life, on the one hand, there inside the kitchen and behind her back, her life, deadly and disgusting; to say nothing of the corpse in the sitting room to be looked at and looked after. It was death, on the other hand, out the window in the sweet air and down on the sunny street, lively and attractive death! Things were in reverse, and her mind got mixed up for a moment: change of the metabolism of the mind which indeed is one of the causes of suicide. Furthermore one suicide may somewhat prompt another.

But in her mind it actually amounted to nothing; it was just a possibility, and a self-indulgent idle game of her imagination in danger. For, in so far as she could tell in the confusion, the mad things done and the maddening things to do, she was happy. Everyone was not dead, far from it. Helianos would be back now before long. For only his enemy was dead; blissful good fortune! Now there would be no one to testify to what he had said when his tongue slipped.

So she turned away from the kitchen-window once more and with an ordinary busy step, as if it were a household task like any other, went down the corridor and into the major’s room.

The proud tall body had not fallen on the floor. It sat in its usual place at the desk; its weight all toppled forward on to the desk. One arm he had flung out across the desk toward the wall, where it hung down; and the other he had drawn up under him. It was a wonder that his toppling forward had not thrust the chair out from under him and brought him down. Mrs. Helianos understood why this had not happened: the floor was not waxed, and the chair was Helianos' father’s heavy old armchair, with no casters and no rug under it. He had kicked one leg far out on the right side, perhaps in a reflex effort to get up out of the armchair.

In a row on top of the desk she noticed the photographs of his family, which had not been on display since he returned from his leave: the proud mother-in-law, the puny wife, the bitter schoolboys.

There was a slight stench in this room too, and at first, fancying that it was blood she shrank from breathing it, with her nostrils palpitating. But it was not blood, it was gunpowder. She looked at the body only enough to make sure that it was all over. The blood all came from his mouth and nostrils, and some of it had run down from the desk into his lap. It was running down his chin and down his neck. He had shot himself up through the roof of his mouth. It was a disgusting sight: the barrel of the gun still pointed toward his mouth as if it were a bottle; as if he had been drinking out of a bottle and his death was drunkenness. All except the butt of the gun and one half of the hand that had pulled the trigger were in the pool of blood on the desk, with his no longer human face resting beside them.

Mrs. Helianos imagined what it must have meant to Alex to see this, and the thought made her sick at her stomach.

But only for a moment. Sickness was not what it meant to her. Strange! with regard to this dead man, in the year of him, she had felt a variety of emotions, each overpowering at its height—but this was her first moment of anger.

Quickly she looked back and saw the order of her experience, quite clearly: fear first; then suspicion and resentment—so incessant and nagging that for a few bad weeks Helianos had almost ceased to love her, she remembered that—followed by despair, when they first took him to prison; and then in her meditation in the midday sun, seized by nightmare (only it was day-mare), hatred. All these emotions relatively facile, in the circumstances; no true anger until now. She sensed very strongly how far superior to hatred in the moral order anger is.

She was the type of woman for whom it is hard to be angry, with all it entails in emotional exhaustion, and all it leads to: unwomanly action. She was one of those women who are not angry with men whom they respect; and most of these emotions she was reviewing seemed to her somehow respectful. Fear certainly is; and as for hatred, there is a vague spirit of damned worship in it! But now as she contemplated the man lying there dead, that is, sitting there dead, she no longer respected him, she despised him, he disgusted her.

She felt very little other emotion; this purged her of all the rest. After anger, she supposed, next in order and in cause and effect came fury; fury, to be avoided or at least put off! How much she had to do first, in anger; she and Helianos, when he got home, which would not be long now. She could not imagine where anger would lead them. She knew only that there was something she did not know.

Then with a gesture of her hand before her eyes to brush her vain thoughts away, with a kind of effort she brought her mind back to the frightful matters of fact before her. At the back of the desk, not in the blood, lay a large unfolded piece of paper, a document or a letter. “What a blessing, I can read German!” she cried, still aloud in her bad habit; coming closer, stepping over the outstretched leg, and looking over the shoulder.

It was a letter, beginning with a formal German salutation, but in spite of the formality an intimate letter, to the dead major’s friend, the other major, the dog-loving major, von Roesch. She reached and took it over the shoulder, and half read it and then—realizing that it absolved her and Helianos from any blame for his death, acknowledging to herself what she had refused to acknowledge until then, suffering in one breath the peril and terror of their being blamed, letting herself go in her sense of relief—she fainted away.

When she came to her senses, lying on the floor, it was with the strangest happiness, deliverance from peril and happy ending; but naturally for a moment it was not clear and not real. It was like a religious experience, or the crisis of an illness, or something in a fantastic book. Then with troubled eyes gazing along the floor, seeing where she was, suddenly coming to the outstretched leg of the major’s body, she remembered everything: what peril and what deliverance, exculpation.

Where was the letter? It had fluttered away under the bookcase. As soon as she was able, she got up off the floor and recovered it and re-read it.

“I need not tell you my story, dear friend von Roesch,” it read, “you have heard it. My breakdown of character and courage, and this act of self-destruction: you will understand it, although you cannot sympathize with it, thank God.

“When I told you that my mind was failing, and it would eventually come to this, you could not believe it, and I scarcely could myself; but today it is the simple truth.

“When a soldier loses hope, then he must give up, get out! If they had not refused to send me to the Russian front, into active service—you remember my telling you that I had requested it—a damned enemy would have done this for me; and it would have been more honorable, more dignified, don’t you think?

“You understand, it is not the same as other suicides. It is with objectivity about myself. My intellect is one thing, my changed character and broken heart another thing, and so I can judge myself. I am incapable of living, I am unfit for the responsibility I bear as an officer, I pass judgment, I sentence myself to be shot, I shoot. If my present knowledge of myself had been brought before an army tribunal, I tell you, what I am going now would have been done to me. I am saving you the trouble!”

As Mrs. Helianos painstakingly read all this, her angry disdain of it moved her so that she could scarcely concentrate; it rose in her throat with a catch like nausea, with a lump like self-pity. To think of him sitting there composing and inscribing these sentences of pompous pathos; then proceeding to do to himself what he had done!

“Arrange things as honorably as you can,” the well-composed epistle went on; and in that paragraph recommended something that Mrs. Helianos did not understand, some arrangement with one of the special services of the army of occupation, with a particular officer, something the dead major wanted done after his death. It also gave the names and addresses of lawyers in Athens and in Königsberg who had his various business papers and his will in safekeeping.

“I do not care for my own dishonor,” it concluded, “now that my sons are dead, my family extinct. I personally have no hope—you remember my telling you how it was, like a disease, unbearable and incurable—but faith in the superior will and supreme destiny of the German people, and confidence in our leader, of course I still have.

It closed with one of those French words which Germans like to use, Adieu, and only the family name, Kalter.

She went to the kitchen-sink for a drink of water: the water of unwholesome Athens with its deathly odor and disgusting taste! and as she sipped it, at last she was able to think. She decided that the clever thing to do was to notify, not the municipal police or the army of occupation or any general authority, but the dead major’s friend in person, the other major whose name she had forgotten; whose name, praise God, was inscribed at the top of the farewell letter.

So then she returned to the sitting room and did just that. It was not easy: she had almost no voice, for one thing, and she had trouble with the name,—she pronounced it wrong, and spelled it out to two different quartermaster’s underlings, von Roesch, and learned to pronounce it from them—but the trouble and delay and impatience distracted her from the corpse sitting so close across the room, steadied her nerves; the lesser nervousness steadied her against the greater. She kept crying the name of Major Kalter and the word tod! tod! and the name of Major von Roesch, who answered at last; and then kept dialoguing back and forth with him in confusion until suddenly he understood, lowered his voice to a grave husky note, promised to come at once, and instructed her to lock her door and not to let anyone else in upon any pretext until he got there.

While waiting for him she sat in the kitchen, and fell into a revery, so that she did not notice the passing of the time it took him to get there. Shocked and tired, her mind fled away from everything immediate and important: the corpse in the other room, the trouble of removing it and tidying up after it, the unknown dog-loving major on his way. It was like a sleep, a sleep in which all the unimportant small realities around her were the dream, this and that in the kitchen: the stove, rusted in one place, an old rag of a shirt of Helianos' which served for a wash-cloth, her pair of shoes that she wore to market, a table-spoonful of rancid oil in a cup, a bedbug (she absent-mindedly destroyed it), a bucket.

Then she found herself thinking about herself: how she resembled Alex and Leda and Helianos, all three: the likeness to Leda in momentary flights away from reality at times like this, sleeps of soul; and the likeness to Alex in other ways, in excitement and verbosity, and in lively interest in trouble to come, and in increase of energy and good sense when at times like this it did come. . .

And as for Helianos, certainly in the early days of their marriage she had not been in the least like him —a liberal family and a reactionary family, a healthy male and an ailing wife, a scholar and an ignoramus, a humorous long-suffering intellectual and a plaintive bourgeoise—but in the last year how she had drawn close to him, been influenced by him!

So that as it seemed to her she was a different character, with a re-educated mind; and when it came to enduring fatigue and discomfort and in recuperative power, a rejuvenated body; and a new heart. From pessimism to optimism (of a sort); from hypochondria to a certain energy in spite of poor health; from womanishness and narrow-mindedness and bourgeoisie to a certain spirit, and relative knowledge of the world—what an improvement! And without any self-discipline, without even a conscious desire to improve; driven to it by the force of circumstances, for the most part evil circumstances. . .

She gave one more disdainful thought to the dead Kalter, and to the famous change in him, from the day of his return from Germany to this day of his death: it was nothing, nothing, compared with the change in herself! For he had no real intelligence—a preachment upon propaganda and make-believe world-government was not intelligent, a sophisticated suicide-letter was not intelligent!—and unintelligent or unintelligible change was of no account, she thought.

Oh, she reminded herself, doubtless she herself would never be intelligent enough to suit Helianos. But, she fancied, she would not be able to be really unintelligent again, not even if she tried; so much having happened to her. Thus she saw herself, lifted up above who she was and what she was, in the increase of drama in her life—the wealthy merchants' spoiled child, the clever young publisher’s bride, the benefactor of her country to the extent of one hero fallen on Mount Olympos, the long-suffering mother of abnormal little Alex and subnormal little Leda besides, and now the imprisoned anti-Nazi’s wife, the corpse’s landlady, what next!—and it was as proud as a mystic vision.

Though with no false pride; evil circumstances keep one from false pride. . .For in a sense she owed it all to the Germans. She had risen to the occasion indeed, but the occasion was German. It was their intervention in her common circumscribed, stagnant, passive existence that had aroused her. But she did not, she would not, thank them for it. It was a good thing; and to admit that a good thing has derived from an evil thing is to bend the knee to evil to some extent. In her uneasiness and exalted sentiment—a lone Greek woman in a kitchen with a German corpse in another room, waiting for the police—she did not even thank God for it; she thanked her Helianos.

All of which passed in her mind in the little time; in less time (as she herself thought) than it would take to tell it.