Apartment in Athens Read Free Page A

imagine where Alex got his vengeful notions. If he went on harping on the war in this way of his, daydream and melodrama, sooner or later he would feel that he must do something in fact, to make his dreams come true. And as he was not capable of anything, he would fail and be caught by the Germans and be punished in the German way. Had they not suffered enough?
    Helianos only shook his head dubiously, refusing to discipline his silly son. As a matter of fact Alex’s cruel patriotic make-believe did not depress Leda so much as her mother’s fuss and foreboding. Children are somewhat immune to their own level of cruelty. . . She overheard a part of the argument her parents had about this, and started to cry in her silent, passive fashion. There was an affinity between Mrs. Helianos and Leda, somehow closer than their affection: the anxious motherly imagination reflecting itself in the little one as if it were a dark cloud over a small stagnant pool.
    One afternoon in the summer of 1941 Leda had an adventure. Alex was absent, taking a message to one of his father’s friends; and Leda went out and down the street to a vacant lot where he had promised to meet her and play with her. Presently Alex came back alone, asking, “Mother, where is Leda? Where is Leda?”
    An hour later Leda returned, like a small sleep-walker; and for two and a half days she would not, or could not, move or speak or eat or sleep. She sat no matter where all day long, and when her mother picked her up and put her to bed, lay all night long, breathing with her mouth open and staring straight ahead, as though her eyes were of marble. The family physician, Dr. Vlakos, whom Mrs. Helianos summoned on the second day, could not explain her condition. On the third day, a chance remark of Alex’s having aroused her, she resumed her poor listless existence as usual, but would never tell what had frightened her.
    Although they were newcomers in that part of town and Mrs. Helianos did not know or care to know many of her neighbors, now she went among them to investigate the mystery of Leda. At last she found one whose small daughter, younger than Leda but not so sensitive or secretive, had gone along in search of Alex that afternoon. This is what had happened: another neighbor’s child had misinformed them as to the direction of Alex’s errand. They had strayed into a side-street near the municipal market where, earlier in the day, there had been a gathering of hungry Athenians to protest against some new ruling or new deprivation. The German military police had arrived, chosen to regard it as a riot, and fired upon it to disperse it. Eight or ten bodies lay on the pavement, machine-gunned, some with grimacing faces, all with grimacing bodies, rags of flesh in ragged clothing. There was a sickening wall against which some had been knocked, and as they fell they had soiled it, sprinkled it, painted it. Only one living being was there, when the two little girls in their confusion wandered up: a young German on sentry-duty, who paid no attention for a while, then shouted at them to run away, for God’s sake!
    The neighbor’s child, having narrated this historic scene to her parents at the time it happened, now repeated it all to Mrs. Helianos. Leda on the other hand still would not answer their questions, or Alex’s either; but Mr. and Mrs. Helianos thought it unlikely that she had forgotten it or ever would. She had a kind of placidity, never the least hysterical alarm or panic; but there was something always weighing upon her thought, oppressing her spirit, as if the thick little skull were too tight for the melancholy mind.
    Mr. and Mrs. Helianos themselves could never forget the loss of their elder son, their Cimon, who from the day of his birth to the day of his death had been perfectly healthy and intelligent and promising. But, as Greeks having a natural realism and a sense of the absoluteness of death, they somewhat