The Clover House (34 page)

“What are these,
Theia
Thalia?”

Thalia looks over her shoulder toward the kitchen.

“I don’t think I should tell you.”

“But you saw Nestor’s note to me. There’s a story he wants me to find.”

Thalia sits silently for a while and then lifts all the feathers out, sees the silk and the bullet, places the feathers back in the box, and sighs. I wait for her to say something, to do something. Finally, she puts a hand on my knee.

“All I can tell you is this: Those feathers come from the hat of a Bersagliere.”

“A what?”

“An Italian soldier. The boys used to sneak up behind the soldiers and light the feathers with a match.”

“Was this the soldier Skourtis killed?”

Thalia looks at me, confused. “All of the Bersaglieri had them. What exactly did Clio tell you?”

I repeat what my mother has told me about Skourtis and the parachute and killing the soldier. Thalia’s face is hard to read. Finally, she presses her hands together in her lap.

“Calliope, you need to leave.”

“Why?” My eyes sting with ready tears.

“Don’t make me explain, but it’s for your own good. Please. Please leave before Sophia finishes making that toast.”

“Thalia, this is about my mother.”

She stands up and gently, very gently, places her hands on my back and pushes.

“Please, Calliope. Trust me.”

She looks so sad, the way I’ve never seen her. She looks as if her heart will break if I stay—or as if she’s afraid mine will. I turn and kiss her on the cheeks. I think she’s a bit surprised at my compliance.

“Okay,
Theia
Thalia,” I say softly. “I’ll go.”

I stand on the sidewalk outside their apartment building. With a motorcycle parked by the next door, and a dumpster farther along, and some discarded boxes in the other direction, there’s not much room, and people jostle me as they pass. I wait for a break in the foot traffic, then I turn toward Ellinos Stratiotou. I don’t have to force Thalia to tell me, but that doesn’t mean I can’t try to find out by myself.

When I reach the busy intersection with Maizonos, I see that Plateia Georgiou is full of Carnival floats: huge confections of papier-mâché in vivid purples, pinks, and greens. Some have political messages—which I can read, but which mean
little to me—and some represent the standard characters of Carnival, the smiling harlequins, the grinning clowns. Men in blue jeans and leather jackets lean on the floats, smoking in groups or dancing to the disco samba that’s back on the loudspeakers. I won’t be watching this parade. I can’t; I have to keep following the thread of this story—this story that Thalia won’t tell.

I keep going, pulling Nestor’s key from my bag before I even reach his block. With the “Auld Lang Syne” key ring in my hand, I could be returning to my own home from a morning of errands. I’ve spent so much time at Nestor’s that I can almost imagine the place as my own. My desk, where I have made my lists; my kitchen, where I can make coffee with Nestor’s grounds; my garden, whose smells of earth and damp remind me of the tortoises he kept. I try to stop this train of thought here, to leave it at these new-made memories that connect me to the past. But my mind goes to other things: my floor, where I pushed Stelios down beneath me; my sideboard, where I sat, legs spread, as he kissed me. Memories I would like to forget.

I unlock the door and go in, heading straight for the living room, where I drop the bag and begin looking—for what, I’m not sure. I start with the part of the room where I found the box, riffling first through a pile of papers and then forcing myself to take the sheets from the pile one by one, look at them, and set them in a new pile. These are letters and receipts, bills and notices, that might put together a narrative that would be interesting to somebody. But not to me. I want documents about soldiers, about the war, the refugees.

I almost don’t recognize it when I see it: a page of light-blue paper, not much larger than a postcard, on which dark-blue ink runs in upward-sloping lines across the width. I rotate the page and see that this is the last page of a letter, and there is my
mother’s name at the bottom:
Clio
. Above it:
I see you for what you are: a crude and weak man with a base nature
.

I keep reading backward, moving up the page, sentence by sentence, and then I start at the top and take it all in.

I breathe in sharply when I’m done and flip the page over, even though I know the other side is blank. I tear through the remaining papers in the pile, looking for the other page, but I find nothing. I grab the phone and call Aliki.

“I’m at Nestor’s and I’m going to be here awhile,” I say.

“Should you be there alone?”

“I’ve locked the door. And I won’t open it for strangers.”

“You sound funny,” Aliki says.

“I found something.”

As the rooms darken, I search through every single pile of paper in Nestor’s house. My eyes sting, and tiny sparks of light dart across my vision. I force myself to get a drink of water from the kitchen and chug it down all at once so that my throat hurts from the cold. I check under the rug, the furniture. I dig through the garbage, where I find Stelios’s condom but no sixty-year-old letter from my mother to some man. Pressing my hands against the small of my back, I straighten and take the garbage bag to the bin by the front door. I turn and look back into the house: cones of light breaking up the shadows, everything sorted through and piled neatly, Nestor’s life arranged in orderly collections whose one bit of error contains all that is most meaningful to me now.

I get a piece of foolscap from the desk and write down what I know.

And then, over all of this, the one last important piece I don’t write down but commit to memory:
Nestor undoes their plans
.

Skourtis the refugee killed an Italian soldier and took the parachute. My family turned him in to the Italians. Nestor saved the feathers from some other soldier’s hat. My mother was in love with an Italian who seems to have wanted more than just to talk about their dreams. The Italian made fun of Nestor, who did something to screw things up for my mother and her Italian. My grandfather beat the man up on the roof of the city house. There was a gun to match this bullet. But who was holding it, and who was it aimed at? And who really gave Nestor my mother’s ring? The man she was in love with: Was he a soldier? Just how many men are there in this story?

I sit on the floor and lean my back against the wall, holding my list. I have no idea.

Clio

April 1941

Clio was sitting on the ground at the base of an almond tree. She looked up through the branches, through the white blossoms that dusted the bare wood, and sniffed the thin almond fragrance, so sweet it was like breathing in a macaroon. The air was warm, almost summerlike. The sky had been quiet for several days, but the radio was full of dire news of German progress through Bulgaria and other places just north of the Greek border.

They were calling the fortifications there the Metaxas Line, but everyone was worried that the line wouldn’t hold. Clio pictured the Germans pushing through with their stubby helmets that made them look like human bullets. If Patras was occupied, they would have Italian soldiers, Bersaglieri. She had seen pictures of them, with their wide-brimmed hats cocked at a jaunty angle, flamboyantly decorated with festoons of long black feathers. It hardly seemed possible to be an enemy if you were dressed like that.

She had turned the almond grove into her new Hollywood, even better than the apricot tree she had climbed last summer.
She came here nearly every day to be alone and think, going through the sad calculus that she had taken up just before Christmas: what she was doing now measured against what she would be doing if there were no war. Today, she was going to finish darning a basketful of socks; but if there had been no war, she would have been going for a stroll in the Psilalónia section of the city, flirting with the boys in the square there and spooning a syrupy dessert from a bowl.

She heard a high-pitched grinding sound and, before she realized what it was, the hairs on her neck stood on end. She jumped up and began to run to the house, answering the wail of the homemade air-raid siren, cranked by her father on the front porch.

By the time she reached the house, she had seen what her father had seen. A group of five Italian planes was swooping over Patras. Little spots marked the sky like punctuation on a piece of paper.

“Get in!” her father said. He never shouted but spoke clearly and firmly, the way one would to a dog or a horse.

“But they’re not here.”

“I said get in, all of you.”

Sophia, Thalia, and Nestor had come running from the barn, where they had been swinging into the hay. Clio saw bits of it stuck in their hair.

Their father led them down the stairs to a small basement area they had turned into a shelter. When they were all in, along with their mother, Vlachos, Irini, and Yannis, he pulled a sheet of corrugated metal over the stairwell and then closed the door.

“Where do the workers go,
Babá
?” Nestor asked.

Ever since Yannis had taken him to deliver Christmas wine
to the vineyard workers, Nestor had not stopped asking about their well-being.

“I told you. They have their own place,” their father said.

They all sat, waiting for silence. Clio almost wished they were in Patras, to hear the all-clear sounding from the municipal sirens. Here they had to listen for a change in the cadence of the bombing before their father could emerge from the shelter and turn the siren crank to signal their own relief.

She looked at the bench across from her, where Yannis and Vlachos sat, with her mother at the head of the row beside Irini. The two women and Yannis gazed up at nothing, listening to the rumble of the bombs. Vlachos always looked down, as if he were waiting for a bus. She hated that he seemed so calm. It was almost insolent not to share the concerns of the people who had sheltered him all these months.

Vlachos suddenly stared right into her eyes, and seconds later she heard what had made him look up: the sound of one engine, separate from the collective din of the bombing.

“It’s coming this way,” Nestor said.

“Shh, no.”

But it
was
coming toward the farm. The sound grew closer and Clio was sure she felt the air grow denser. The plane seemed to pass right over the house, heading for the foothills where the cypresses grew.

“As long as it dodges the vineyards, we’ll be all right,” said Clio’s father.

Nestor stammered in consternation, worrying about the workers.

As soon as Clio’s father slid the metal sheet out of the way, Nestor was up the stairs into the house. Clio ran after him into the farmyard, where she saw the plane disappearing, a tiny
speck sweeping around to the east, toward Corinth. It veered again, to the northwest this time. Heading home.

“Crazy Italians,” Yannis said, and trudged down the porch steps to return to work.

The next day, Clio was bringing eggs back from the chicken coop when she saw Vlachos driving the horse cart out of the almond grove. The cart was stacked with freshly cut wood, but a large bundle of light-gray cloth billowed over the pile and dragged in the dirt.

“What is that, Vlachos?” she asked.

“A parachute. Italian.”

He climbed down from the cart and, with surprising delicacy, gathered the fabric up in his arms.