The Clover House (19 page)

“Yes, you can. When the wind is right.”

Though the war had not reached Greece yet, Patras had set up a system of air-raid sirens and tested them from time to time, always in the middle of the day so that people could see with their own eyes that there were no bombers on the way. Here on the farm, they were only ten kilometers from Plateia Georgiou at the heart of the city, closer still to the city’s easternmost siren. When the sirens wailed, Clio tried to ignore the sound, but she could never keep herself from that initial start and shiver as the high-pitched wail filled the air.

“You can,” Nestor chimed in. “I heard it yesterday.”

Clio looked at him, this little boy with a head of black curls and a wide collar. She knew for a fact that there had been no siren test the day before, but she was happy to have his corroboration now. She turned back to Sophia, drawing herself up straight to remind her sister that she was the oldest. If she said
she could hear the siren, then she could hear the siren. Even Nestor’s allegiance was not necessary.

“Why don’t you just sing part of a song or something?”

“Fine,” Sophia said. “I’ll sing a Guides song.”

“Can it be a Scouts song instead?” Nestor asked.

“Sure.” Clio gave him an indulgent smile. Though the Greek Youth had taken his Scouting things away, Nestor was one of the few boys in Patras who had not joined Metaxas’s organization. Their mother had won the debate with their father. Until it was no longer a matter of choice, no child of hers would participate in a fascist movement.

“Start us off, Nestor,” Clio said.

He began to sing in his high voice, bringing his knees up high on each step, clearly relishing the opportunity to follow orders.

Nestor led them to a pasture on the west side of the house, far from the vineyards and out of sight of the farmyard. Here, Yannis had made a small village of four child-sized houses out of shoulder-high forage grasses of clover and rye. It was like the mazes in the palaces of England that Clio had read about, only, instead of paths, Yannis had cut rooms and streets and a village square. Each house had a roof made of sheaves of hay placed across the tops of the walls, and each had a window and a door, where Yannis had cut the normally tall clover short. He made the clover houses for the children every year, mowing the village down in the fall along with the rest of the crop. Clio’s parents never knew.

Clio followed Nestor in his high-stepping march, occasionally looking over her shoulder to exchange a glance with Sophia and Thalia. Nestor, too, turned around, to check that his sisters were still playing along. Each time he looked back, the girls sang a little louder and stepped a little more crisply.

When they arrived at the houses, Nestor begged to play grocery.

“We’ve been doing your thing all the way here,” Thalia said.

“Please.” He looked at Clio.

“Just a little bit,” she said, rolling her eyes at Sophia behind his back but making sure that she and Thalia joined in the game. This meant taking turns visiting Nestor’s house and pretending to buy the odds and ends of fruit that he had stored there and set inside on top of a box. He gave the girls money made of leaves so they could use it to pay for what they bought. For change, he used small pebbles dug up from the pasture.

After a bit of the game, Clio retreated to her own house to resume the daydreaming that Sophia’s whistle had interrupted. There in the dappled light, she lay back and rested her head on her folded arms. She listened to the hiss and creak of the drying clover and imagined herself stepping into a ballroom silenced by her glamour. People murmured from the edges of the room and then slowly resumed dancing. Young men lined up to escort her onto the floor. As she spun around in a waltz, jewels in her hair sent tiny reflections flickering along the walls. She closed her eyes.

A shout from Nestor pierced her reverie, and someone darted past her house, setting her clover walls swaying. She sat up, crying, “Hey!” and heard Thalia and Sophia giggling somewhere nearby.

She decided then that the fragile privacy of her clover house was not enough; she needed solitude, and there was little of that at the farmhouse. She had to find a way to get to her clover house completely alone—to be away from the others, but to be away, too, from the rest of the world, which she would soon be entering as an adult. In the clover house at night—for that seemed the best time—she could imagine her future, fashioning
the story of her life so she could recognize each perfect phase as it came along.

That afternoon she crept into the kitchen, hoping Irini would be in her cottage, napping.

“What do you want?”

Irini stood in the door to the storeroom where they kept sacks of flour and grain and jugs of olive oil. Ever since the children had flooded the basement in the city house, Irini seemed to be on strict watch over the food at the farm—not the fresh fruit, for there was plenty of that, but the dry goods and the staples. Clio’s mother never said anything about it, but the message was clear: The supplies were to be protected. Every now and then, Irini would prepare a cake for them sweetened with syrup made from sugar beets. “It’s an experiment,” Urania would say, but Clio knew it was because sugar would someday be scarce.

“Just some bread,” Clio attempted. While Yannis indulged the children with treats like the clover houses, Irini seemed to resent them, quietly seething whenever they dared enter her kitchen, especially here on the farm, where the space was smaller and the outdoors more appropriate for children, in her view.

Irini tucked the morning’s loaf under one arm and, with the other, sawed a slice off the end with the bread knife. She speared the slice onto the knife tip.

“Here.”

Clio thanked her and retreated.

Over the next two days, she managed to sneak away a few more slices of bread, which she wrapped in handkerchief bundles, like the hobos in the movies and the tramps who, in recent months, had begun to wander into Korinthou Street. She
hid a flashlight in her nightstand. She filled two old Girl Guide canteens with water and hid one under her bed, another behind a barrel in the barn.

Her preparations complete, she sat through dinner and then caught a few fireflies with her sisters and brother, arranging the glowing jars on the railing of the porch before setting the insects free again. Finally, when her mother signaled the end of the day, she went to bed in the room she shared with Sophia, tingling with the excitement of the coming adventure. She waited until she heard the wheeze of Sophia’s deepest sleep and then forced herself to wait even a little longer to be sure that Thalia, down the hall, had given up watch on her older sisters. Then she slid the flashlight from its drawer and snuck out in her nightgown and bare feet, stepping on the soft wood boards toe–heel, like the Indians in the novel she had read in school.

Outside, the air was cool and still. Stars shone unchallenged by the moon, and the glowing specks of the released fireflies dotted the edges of the farmyard. Clio zigzagged across the yard to collect her provisions. As she crept toward the field, she heard rustling in the darkness and hoped it was just a fox, so that she could be both afraid and brave. She imagined the glowing eyes of foxes or even wolves peering at her through the orchard and walked a little faster, swinging her flashlight high before her to ward the creatures off. The beam cast shadows that made it seem as if a group of people were dancing and jumping among the tree trunks. Suddenly fear overtook her and she ran part of the way back to the house, leaving her canteen and handkerchief behind. Breathing deeply, fighting the notion that she had seen a figure in the shadows, she returned to her things and continued on to the clover houses.

The clover whisked her cheeks as she pushed through the
barely perceptible gap that swam up before her in the flashlight beam. So many times before, she had led the way into the field, but only now did she notice the caress of the clover on her skin. The sound, too, of the matted clover underfoot: Each step seemed now as if the ground were sighing. She passed Sophia’s house and then Nestor’s and then stood before the darkened rectangle of her own door. She scanned the house with the flashlight and ducked inside.

Though she had brought the food and water with her, she neither ate nor drank anything. She sat on the soft floor of the house and hugged her knees, peering up at the roof and listening to the night breathing around her. She reveled in her solitude—more than that, in her singularity, as if she felt her value increasing in isolation. For though the roof of the house largely obscured the sky, she kept in her thoughts the image of the myriad stars she had seen from the farmyard. Each one was an admiring eye looking down on her.

Clio made three more trips to her clover house over the next few nights. With each trip, she grew bolder and more at ease in the darkness. And though she continued to hear rustlings in the shadows and again thought she saw a figure looming behind a tree, she never hesitated on her way. By the third night, she knew the nighttime path so well that she switched the flashlight off and made her way in the glow of the stars. But she did wonder as she went, what if something were to happen to her in the middle of the night? She would be far from the farmhouse with only a flashlight and a metal canteen for protection. If she cried out, no one would hear her. Still, even as she formed this thought, she grew excited at the idea of real danger. She felt wiser, rendered more important by this change in the quality of her imaginations.

The following day, after Thalia had dragged Nestor and Sophia home to cadge some candy from Irini, Clio was lying on her back inside her house, resting her head on her hands and looking up at the way the sunlight showed in stripes through the roof. She became aware of a faint rasping in the clover beside her. She turned her head toward the sound and stiffened at the sight of a man looking through her window. He had a small head and wore a bluish shirt with a frayed collar. A cloth cap drooped over his eyes. She held her breath, not daring to move. It seemed to her that eye contact was what he wanted, so she forced herself to look away and stare at the beaten clover on the floor. Moving only one hand, she reached down and tugged at the hem of her skirt, which had hiked up during her rest.

In her mind, Clio ran through the dangers her parents had been warning of all summer: There were tramps about, and the beggars were getting bolder. This man must be a tramp; he was not a farmhand she recognized. Again, she heard the clover hissing and felt a change in the light of the house. From the corner of her eye, she saw that the man was crouching in the doorway of the clover house now, completely blocking the rectangle sized for a child to pass through. She clenched her fists, realizing with the first real fear in her life that she had nothing to protect herself with.

Without thinking, she sprang up into a squat. “Get out!” she shouted, her neck muscles straining. For an instant, she saw a kind of scornful surprise on the man’s face, and then he turned and slipped into the field.

She fell back onto the floor of the house, wiping away a sudden flow of tears. When she had collected herself, she ran back to the farmhouse, not minding the twigs and brambles that caught at her clothes. Twisting to look behind her, she saw only
fields and sky, empty and unmoving. She found her sisters and brother in the kitchen, peeling strips of cooled caramel syrup from the marble counter.

“Where have you been? You’re all out of breath,” Sophia said.

“The cow was looking strange again. I ran from the barn.”

They laughed and rolled the candy strips up into little barrels.

“It’s not funny,” Clio snapped.

“Yes, it is,” said Thalia. She licked her fingers one by one. “It was funny when the cow chased Irini.”

“Well, it’s not funny now.” Clio looked down at the rolls of candy, realizing she had shown too much emotion.

“What’s the matter with you?” Nestor murmured.

She wheeled on him. “I heard someone in the clover field. A stranger.”

The children stopped what they were doing and stared at her. She narrowed her eyes, determined not to say anything more. Still staring, Sophia began to nod.

“Me too,” she said. “I heard some strange noises by the edge of the pasture a couple of days ago.”

“Like twigs snapping. I heard it when I was sitting in my house today,” said Thalia.

Nestor slowly peeled another strip of candy from the counter.

“Me too,” he said, as he rolled it up into a cylinder. “Someone was moving around in the clover field.” He held the candy up to admire it. “It didn’t look like anyone we know.”

“You dope.” Sophia shoved him. “You didn’t see anybody!”

“I did too.” He put the candy down and took on a serious look. “And he looked scary. Dangerous.”

Clio waited, not knowing what to say but anxious to reclaim
the story she had paid for in fear. She flushed suddenly at the thought of how she had screamed at the man, crouching like an animal.

Thalia took Nestor by the arm. “I wonder if there were more than one. He probably wasn’t alone.”

“They could be trying to steal food,” Nestor said, “or the tractor.”

“Or the cow,” Sophia laughed.

“I know who they are,” Clio jumped in finally. She didn’t raise her voice but spoke firmly enough to cut the others off. “I saw them.”

Sophia squinted at her, but Clio concentrated on the widening eyes of Thalia and Nestor.

“You saw them?”

“What did they look like?”

“Who are they?”

Clio took a deep breath, feeling her lungs fill and push her rib cage out, and watched for the precise instant when the others’ anticipation was almost ready to dissolve into impatience.

“They’re spies,” she said, exhaling as the other children drew their breath sharply in, unable to forget the disdain with which the man had looked at her.

She elaborated, explaining that she had seen enough of these people at the edges of the farm to suspect that they had formed a network and established a system of message posts throughout the property. She speculated on the meaning of certain coded flashes of light at night and convinced the others that traitors were planning an attack on the harbor later in the summer.