The Clover House (13 page)

“You’ve got your work cut out for you,” Aliki says. “We both do.”

Everything is exactly as it was five years ago. The square foyer with its hat stand and oval mirror; Nestor’s broad desk
facing out from the French doors to the garden; the velvet couch dimly visible in the living room to my right. The house smells, as always, of ground coffee, roasted dark and bitter. Aliki and Nikos will change all this. They’ll bring their modern furniture in, and they’ll add another story, and they’ll fill the airy rooms with Demetra’s toys. It’s a nice idea, but it still makes me a little sad that this house, too, will exist only in memory.

I follow Aliki into the living room and find cardboard boxes arranged in rows along the shelves where books are stuffed into every open space. Papers lie on top of the boxes; books lie open on chairs and on the velvet couch.

“Is this how you found it?”

“Yes. He was working on something. He was preparing for his death, I guess, since they’d told him he was sick.”

I pick up a sheaf of yellowing foolscap covered with Nestor’s blocky handwriting. It is a list of song titles—Greek ballads whose names I don’t recognize—each one cross-referenced with the number of a cassette tape.

“Aliki, how am I supposed to manage this?”

For the first time in my life, it occurs to me that Nestor might have been a hoarder, and that this charming habit of documenting and collecting his way through life might actually hide a grim obsession. I force myself to reject the thought.

“You think there’s something in here my mother wants?”

“I had that distinct impression.”

Aliki switches on a floor lamp with a dark paper shade.

“Little by little, Paki. And I’ll help. Once Demetra is back in school, it’ll be easier.”

“You said she doesn’t go back to school until after Lent begins. I need to be finished before then.”

“Even if you find the lawyer, he probably won’t do much until after
Katharotheftéra
, Clean Monday. There’s not much you can do about it.”

Clean Monday is the first day of Lent, March 6 this year. That is ten days away. And my plane leaves Athens the day before Clean Monday.

We make a space in the living room and begin to group boxes in piles according to their subject. Music by the back wall, films by the front, and photographs on and beside the couch and the coffee table. I find a box of cassette tapes and another of metal reel-to-reel spools stacked on top of one another so they look like a keg of beer. There is no dust here, and I picture Nestor in slippers and a cardigan, spending what would become his last weeks poring over the objects that defined his life.

“Calliope, look!” Aliki says, holding up a little wooden box.

I go closer and see a shallow tray in which are set a series of pits and nuts—almond, peach, cherry, hazelnut—each one identified with a label pinned beside it, the way an entomologist preserves bugs.

“From the farm,” she says. “There’s a date: 1940.
Amán
,” she says with a shudder. It’s the Turkish word Greeks use to express dismay—the same word Stelios used on the bus when he heard why I was going to Patras.

“Poor kid,” I say. “No clue what was coming.”

It is a year to make a person shudder—the last year of calm for Greece. Not that anytime in that first half of the century was truly calm in the Balkans, with one war leading straight to another. But just a few months after the spring of 1940, Ioannis Metaxas rejected Mussolini’s ultimatum and boys nine years older than Nestor headed off to fight the Italians in Albania. Almost every boy Nestor’s age was enlisted in Metaxas’s fascist
youth brigades. I know there is a false poignancy here, borrowed from the magnitude of later events, but I do feel sorry for the young Nestor, who put together this tidy box of remnants from the farm as the disorder of another, bigger war was bearing down on the world around him.

“At least they always had the farm to go to,” I say, handing the tray back to Aliki.

“I guess.”

I think of the farm the way my mother always described it—as an idyll of everything a child could want. Fresh air and liberty to wander all day long, coupled with every imaginable treat for all the senses. There were separate orchards for cherries, pears, apricots, and peaches, and rows of high bushes producing several varieties of berry. And beyond the orchards that surrounded the farmhouse were the Notaris vineyards, full of grapes to be dried into raisins and then exported throughout Europe. The children spent their days running through the vineyards and climbing into the trees, filling baskets and their mouths with glistening fruit.

When I was growing up, there were plenty of treats around but never much real food in our kitchen—to the delight of my friends, who often helped me sneak slabs of expensive chocolate or jars of sticky Greek syrups from my mother’s stash. My mother couldn’t make a meal, but she could give you a great dessert any time of day or treat you to some candy for breakfast. I realized at some point that she’d probably never learned to cook, since her family had people to do that for them and she didn’t live on her own until she was in her mid-twenties, after that failed attempt to share with Sophia. If nourishment occurred to my mother at all, it was as if she expected me to climb a tree, the way she and her siblings had on the farm.

I go back to the trays of cassette tapes. Beethoven’s
symphonies—all of them in order—recorded from the Greek National Orchestra broadcasts in the sixties; bouzouki music; Rachmaninoff concertos. I feel the pull of these boxes and trays, the temptation to touch every object they contain.

“Which came first?” I say, sighing. “Bachelorhood or hoarding?”

“I think we just saw proof he was always like this.”

“True.” A little boy in shorts and high socks, sticking pins in slips of paper to identify the pits of what he ate.

I look at my watch: It’s four o’clock. Two and a half more hours for today.

“Are you going to get married, Paki?”

I look at her. The nickname doesn’t soften the force of the question that comes out of nowhere. I force a laugh.

“You sound like the aunts. You think I’m going to end up like Nestor?”

“Just that you haven’t mentioned anybody.” She’s giving me a tentative smile. “Is there anybody?”

I can’t answer this.

“What is it, Paki?”

I turn my head down, tucking the last batch of cassettes into a larger box. I hold my hand out, palm up, so that the stones show. It feels like I’m giving her something, which in fact I am.

“It’s an engagement ring. His name’s Jonah. I’m engaged.”

“
Ré
, Calliope.” She makes the Greek gesture of exasperation: body arched backward, chin tucked in, arms extended downward. “When were you going to say something?”

She stumbles over the piles and boxes and gives me a tight hug.

“I’m not an idiot, you know,” she says. “I saw the ring last night, but I wasn’t sure. Then you didn’t want to call anyone. And then you turned the ring around, so I started to wonder.”

“We argued before I left. We might be breaking it off. I don’t know.”

“Why?”

I pick at the cardboard flap on the box.

“I can’t, Aliki. It’s too much. There’s so much … risk.”

“But you
are
a risk-taker. You were always trying everything when we were growing up.”

“Because it didn’t matter. With marriage, it matters. It’s the kind of thing you have to get right.”

“Do you think everyone gets it right?”

“You know I don’t believe that.”

“Do you think Nikos and I get it right? Because we don’t. Not always.”

“Yeah, but my parents.” I can’t get the rest of the words out. After a bit, I look up at her. “Back when my mother sold the house, we took the pictures off the walls. You know what was behind them? Holes. All these places where they’d punched the walls. Marriage was like a cage for them, Aliki. Like a prison.”

“Yours won’t be.”

“How do you know that?”

I keep picking at the box, tearing a strip of cardboard from the flap.

“So his name is Jonah?”

I nod.

“You could have told me, Paki.”

“Well, you and I had kind of lost touch the last few years.”

“Whose fault was that?”

I look sharply up at her. This is a surprise—and then I realize it’s true. I had let myself believe the comforting notion that my disconnect with Aliki was the product of a mutual falling away. In fact, after my sudden decision five years ago not to visit her, there were several phone messages, for holidays and
regular days, that I just never got around to answering. The longer I went without replying, the harder it became to pick up the phone.

“Sorry, Paki,” she says. “I didn’t need to say that.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “I deserve it.”

I slap my hands against my thighs and let out a big sigh.

“I’m going to slit my wrists if we keep talking like this, Aliki. Let’s go back to sifting through a dead man’s hoard. I’m going to switch to the other room,” I say, and weave through the furniture to Nestor’s study.

I twist my hair into a knot and look around me. There are boxes stacked up against the wall, each one with a series of numbers on it—some cataloging system of Nestor’s devising. I open them one by one and list the carefully packed contents on the box in words I can understand: clothes; books; newspapers. There are yellowed newsprint pages announcing the end of Greek civil-war hostilities in 1949; the 1967 coup and the military
junta;
the fall of the
junta
seven years later; and the 1981 election of Papandreou’s socialist government. It’s hard to discern Nestor’s political leanings from these, but they are all important milestones in Greece’s path to a false and tenuous stability. He has carefully folded a front-page article with an image of a drachma note crossed out like a one-way street. He won’t be around to see the euro take the drachma’s place. I linger over the 1989 clipping about the decree that declared the civil war just that—a civil war and not a communist insurgency. Nestor grew furious every time he thought of this—this law that gave pensions to former communist guerrillas and allowed them to hold the property they had taken by force from their own compatriots.

I find a box that is marked 38/4-12/
. Here is my mother’s refrain:
To Spiti
. The House. When I pull back the
cardboard flaps, the smell of mothballs stings my nostrils. These are freshly poured, still sending fumes into the air. I look again at the marking and wonder how recent the ink is. I reach in and wrap my hand around a tin can through whose end is threaded a length of string. I pull gently, and the connected can rattles its way out of the box. I laugh.

“What?” Aliki calls.

“Nothing. I sneezed,” I lie.

But I can’t believe it. Inside this box are things I wish I had seen before my visit to the old house—things that would have given me the certainty that at least some of my mother’s stories are true. I carefully remove a few more things from the box: toy
Karagiozis
shadow puppets tied together with a ribbon; a basket with another length of string attached to its handle.

This is the basket the children lowered through the atrium on a pulley. These cans connected with string are the telephone my mother and the rest used to send messages across the atrium’s open space. I tell myself that this box is simply one among many in a lifetime of collection. But it feels as though Nestor has assembled the contents with me in mind, folding together his and my mother’s pasts with my present.

I move on to a square wooden chest and lift the lid. My hand flies to my mouth and I stand there looking down at what must be a hundred vials of sand. Each one is topped by a tiny cork, and each one rests in its own small compartment, separated by a cardboard grid. I squat down and pull one vial up, turning it so that some of the grains of sand catch the light from the floor lamp. In block letters on a tiny white label, Nestor has written
October 1952 Koukounariés
, the name of a beach in Skiathos known for its golden sand. Here it is in my hand, on the other side of Greece, golden and glimmering. I imagine I can hear the sand hissing as it tumbles inside the tiny
vial. I pull up another:
August 1975 Perissa Santorini
. Black sand like caviar.
1953 Gérakas Zakynthos
. From the year of the earthquake.

I once asked Nestor if he had ever thought to put the sand in hourglasses instead. I was tipping the vials from side to side, watching the grains pile up and diminish as we talked. No, he said, and asked me if I could guess why. I was just a teenager then, but I sensed that the vials were already his way of marking time. The collection itself was a story, a chronicle of his travels and his life. To put the sand in hourglasses would be redundant. I still remember how pleased he was with this answer. He had tears in his eyes that made me a little embarrassed, but I remember the deep satisfaction I think we both felt in being understood.

“I’m going to make a coffee,” Aliki calls, and I can hear her coming to the study. “Do you want one? Then we can go home a bit before the parade.”