Apartment in Athens Read Free

throughout her ivory skin. Her mouth drew down tight, and her eyes protruded and had pouches under them. She was an orphan, adopted and very indulgently educated by two uncles who were wealthy merchants. Helianos, taking up where they had left off, had gone on spoiling her. It made everything more troubling and difficult for her when the bad time began. The first year of the disaster of Greece seemed to bring out only the weaknesses of her character.
    Their twelve-year-old, Alex, was a bright but strange little boy. He had great over-excited eyes, a nose straight from his forehead, turned-up lips, and a precocious fixed hard expression; but if you looked at him or spoke to him, his lips parted, his eyes danced. He had adored his elder brother, and when the war began, only hoped that it would go on a long time, until he grew old enough to enlist in the army. He had taken the news of his brother’s death on Mount Olympos very quietly, but after that, when Greece no longer had a proper army, he began to talk only of growing strong enough to kill at least one German, himself, without waiting to grow up. Every few days he asked his parents whether in their estimation he had grown taller or gained weight; and many of his games were tests of his strength, experiments, for vengeance’s sake.
    In fact he was not strong. His father was afraid that he had inherited the mediocre health which ran in Mrs. Helianos' family. Although they had somewhat more to eat than the average household in Athens, he seemed to be shrinking, not growing; and between his sharp hipbones he was developing the little pot-belly of famine.
    His ten-year-old sister Leda had the physical stamina that he lacked, but the Helianos' worried about her too, because her mind was backward. She had never been a clever child, though they had thought nothing of it until after the fall of Greece. Then in the terrible year her infant character took on a strange aspect, as if she drew all the confusion and intimidation in with her breath, absorbed it through the pores of her skin in an unwholesome damp or an icy chill.
    Although she had that pearly white skin which had been a feature of her mother’s loveliness in her girlhood, Leda was not pretty. Her teeth grew too far forward, and her cheekbones were too high under her eyes. But the great pity was her expression or lack of expression. Sometimes, when something went wrong, or when she could not understand what was happening, her sensitive but passive face made one shiver. It merely shrank and hung heavy like the loose petals of a large flower.
    She never wanted to play with anyone except her brother, and rarely spoke, sitting and watching things without a word for hours at a time. Whatever was said to her or done for her she accepted indifferently, and gave no sign of devotion to either of her parents. Only Alex found the way to her small heart.
    When their various relatives came to visit them, Helianos would remark, “Leda is more like a daughter-in-law than a daughter.”
    It was the kind of delicate, obscure joke that he liked to make, in his low voice with his clever smile. And there was truth in it: the delicate boy and the sleepy-headed little girl were like a bride and groom in a fairy-tale, diminutive, uncanny, one as bewitched as the other.
    Chattering by the hour, Alex confided to Leda all his fantasy of taking revenge on some German, often with extreme passion, with details of childish atrocity. It frightened her but because it was he, and she so loved the sound of his voice, her dull chubby face would light up with blissful attention.
    Mrs. Helianos thought that Alex should be punished for his wild talk, not only because of its bad effect on Leda but for his own sake and for their sake: his long-suffering parents! War was not for children. She wanted her children to think of it as it might be of illness in the family, or bankruptcy, or an earthquake or a flood; with no one to blame. She could not