Apartment in Athens by Glenway Wescott Page A

in the captain’s rooms could testify against them, until they reached the kitchen and shut the kitchen-door.
    Then they all danced around and hugged each other, and the children asked innumerable questions, and Helianos made one or two jokes, and Mrs. Helianos smiled and cried at the same time in her weak way. In spite of their heavy hearts, irremediable poverty, deteriorated health, continuous hunger, and the brevity of two weeks, they expected to have a good time.
    â€œI remember where Evridiki’s husband buried a case of my imported wine, under a ruined shed in Psyhiko,” said Helianos, “and I will go and get it.”
    â€œNow we can take the children to the seashore for two or three days, which will do them good,” said Mrs. Helianos.
    Alex began his little bravery of imagination and boastfulness again. “When he returns from Germany,” they heard him tell Leda, who smiled at him contentedly as she had not done for many months, “we will lure him out on the balcony and trip him, so he’ll fall over the balustrade and into the street, squash!”
    It was all imagination. The blessed two weeks did not turn out according to any of their plans. For one thing, coming like a little forecast and foretaste of the liberation of Greece, it made them impatient, self-indulgent. They had time to stop and think, and take stock of themselves, and estimate their losses; and with all the good will they could muster, the conclusion seemed to be that the two weeks had come too late; and perhaps the liberation itself when it came would have come too late.
    Their loneliness for their dead soldier son began aching again, in the way of a wound when there has been a sudden change of temperature. For days Mrs. Helianos would not or could not talk of anything else, until Helianos reproved her. If she took this two weeks' holiday as an occasion for grief, the result would be one of her bad heart attacks and no holiday at all.
    He went out to Psyhiko, but either his memory was at fault or someone had stolen the case of wine. He came back empty-handed and tried to be humorous about it, but he could not keep the irony and allegory out of what he said, which spoiled the jest.
    They gave up the excursion to the seashore. The children did not have the energy for anything beyond their usual routine: talk and talk, Alex doing all the talking; the same games as in Hellenic centuries past, marbles, knucklebones, played now more listlessly than ever; unhealthy little naps at odd intervals wherever naps happened to overcome them; long stations at the kitchen-door as if in a trance, waiting to be fed, never quite in vain but almost in vain.
    To be sure, Helianos had more time now to wander here and there in search of food, and he fancied himself as one of the best shoppers in Athens. But, on the other hand, in spite of the captain’s finicking supervision, his wastefulness at table, and his purveyance to the major’s dog, they had managed to abstract a good many mouthfuls from the meals they served him; and in his absence of course they were not entitled to officers' rations. Furthermore, as it seemed to them, the famine was worse than ever. It was so bad that they fell into a vague, irrational expectation of its ceasing soon, of the supply of food augmenting soon, by some miracle. Helianos sometimes showed a weird high spirits in the morning when he set out to do the marketing. For, short of a miracle, the race of Greeks would soon be exterminated; and that, even for Mrs. Helianos with her dark mind, was unthinkable.
    Poor woman, indolent all her life, now she could not or would not stop working. “This is the spring,” she said stubbornly, “and in the spring I give my house a good general cleaning.”
    When they came to brushing and airing the beds, and observed how much blacker theirs and the children’s were than the captain’s, because he bathed and they could not bathe, she let