Apartment in Athens Read Free Page B

closed their minds to this; at least they kept silent for each other’s sake. There was heartbreak enough in having to bring up the two living offspring in this evil time, poor inferior offspring; which they discussed by the hour.
    There was also the troubling subject of Mrs. Helianos' brother. “Probably he too is dead,” she would say; but neither of them really believed it.
    â€œOh, he will turn up one of these mornings, when we least expect him,” Helianos would answer, “perhaps in peril, perhaps in disgrace.”
    He had never thought highly of his brother-in-law; a cynical and sycophantic youth, in his estimation. Before the war he had held a good government job under Metaxas, and belonged to a reactionary club where he talked the platitudes of those days, against the parliamentary form of government. Helianos, recalling all this, wondered if he might not have gone over to the enemy in some capacity. He had heard that they were eager to have some knowledgeable Greeks on their side.
    Mrs. Helianos fiercely defended her brother against her husband’s ill opinion; and in their fond but uneasy relationship of late, this had been the worst disagreement and the strangest issue. For Helianos felt that in her heart of hearts she would have been willing to have his worst suspicions confirmed. She wanted to believe in secret what she would not have him believe or speak of: that her brother had come to terms with the Germans somehow. She had reached that point of the sorrow of war when nothing matters except the survival of one’s loved ones.
    The Helianos family had always been liberals, and now two or three had become heroes with great prestige in the eyes of all the rest—notably the leader of a band of saboteurs and snipers who troubled the Germans incessantly, a cousin named Petros Helianos— and none of them had ever approved of those wealthy merchants who were Mrs. Helianos' uncles. As for her young brother, they were more than suspicious, they were convinced: he was alive somewhere, collaborating with the enemy somehow; and they half blamed Helianos for having married into such a family.
    He himself was to blame in a way; he was too sedentary and philosophical for the time of war. To be sure, he would have nothing to do with the Germans or Italians; but on the other hand he did not participate at all in the underground or any sort of organized resistence to the occupiers of Greece. He never thought of anything that he felt he might be able to do in that way. His relatives let him know how they felt, by sharp sayings in the Athenian spirit, or by a new solemnity at family gatherings, or by not coming where he and his wife were expected.
    Therefore Helianos was extremely despondent when they had to take a German officer to live in their apartment. As things stood between him and his kinsmen he could see that it was bound to bring disgrace as well as difficulty and distress. It was his weakness to be timid, conciliatory, he knew that, and now in the actual physical presence of the enemy he would be less than ever able to correct it in himself. He knew how sincerely his wife hated the invaders of Greece—had they not taken her first and best child’s life as they came?—but indeed it was hard to distinguish between such hatred as this, and mere fear. It was in her nature to keep imagining that things might be worse; worse and worse in spite of every effort. Doubtless the German would take advantage of this; and his cousins would misunderstand it and despise them both more and more.
    Little did he dream how it was to turn out in fact; and how the heroic Helianos' speak of him today, if not as a hero, at least as a martyr.

2.
    A CORPORAL AND A PRIVATE CAME FIRST, EXPLAINING that they had been ordered to make a survey of all the apartments in that section of town for a certain officer; followed in a day or two by the officer himself. With an indifferent air but methodically, he