Apartment in Athens (20 page)

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.