The Clover House (38 page)

“Never mind.”

Thalia wrapped the scarf around her head, a mass of curls peeping out like bangs. She batted her eyelashes at Clio.

“Thalia, stop it,” Sophia said, pulling the scarf away. “We’re not joking, Clio. People will see you.”

“No, they won’t. I know how to get out.”

“But people on the street will see you.”

Sophia twisted the hair at the end of her braid, as if she were trying to squeeze the water from a paintbrush.

“It won’t be the first time.”

“Even more reason for you not to go.”

“Sophia says people are talking about it,” said Thalia, plopping down onto Clio’s bed.

“Who?”

“People.”

Clio looked inquiringly at Sophia.

“Eleni and Alexandra saw you last week. They were calling you a collaborator.”

Clio jumped up from the chair she had drawn before the mirror.

“Oh, thank you so much, Sophia, oh, wise one.” She swatted at Sophia’s braid. “I think you’ve butted into my life enough. A collaborator! He’s my boyfriend.” She saw the other two startle at her use of the word. “I’m older than you, anyway. I’m already eighteen, for Christ’s sake.” This was more forceful language than they usually used, and Thalia registered it with admiration.

“But he’s
Italian
.” Sophia said it, as she had said it countless times, slowly and loudly. “I heard there was a woman in Aigio who got beaten up because they saw her just walking with a Bersagliere. They almost killed her.”

Clio didn’t answer right away, but then she picked up her mascara wand again and waved it in the air.

“That’s Aigio,” she said. “We’re not in the provinces, Sophia.”

“If
Mamá
finds out,
she’ll
kill you,” Thalia said.

“And she’ll be mad at us for not stopping you,” Sophia added.

“Then why don’t you tell her?”

Sophia glared at her.

“Go ahead,” Clio said. “Tell
Mamá
.”

Clio knew Sophia wouldn’t call her bluff. The children’s allegiance was to one another first, then to the rules laid down by their parents.

Finally, Sophia answered. “I’m not going to be a tattletale. It’s your secret. Your responsibility to tell.”

“Well, I’m not going to tell. And, by the way, maybe you’ve
noticed that
Mamá
and
Babá
don’t seem to care whether I go out or not.”

“They just haven’t seen you do it.”

“If they wanted to, they’d have seen me.”

She knew her parents were worried by the occupation, but it stung a bit that while they had been so concerned about Nestor’s loss of the Scouts, they seemed unaware of all the ways in which the war had changed their daughters’ lives. She busied herself with her eyelashes until Thalia broke the silence.

“Sophia didn’t want me to say, but
I
think he’s handsome.”

Clio left her sisters and crept through the napping house and down to the basement, where she followed her usual route out. She didn’t look at the officers’ club but kept going north toward the outskirts of the city, where the tall neoclassical houses gave way to mews and stables. She tried not to think about Aigio and the woman who had been nearly killed there. Aigio: where Skourtis was from. Surely they
were
uncivilized there, and surely something like that couldn’t happen in Patras. Things were different between Giorgio and her, anyway. He pretended he was rough, but Clio knew that he had been afraid to fight, joining the elite troops of the Bersaglieri only because his father and grandfather had forced him to. Not because he was a coward. That was Skourtis. Giorgio was a pacifist at heart. It couldn’t be wrong for her to be with an enemy soldier if he was a pacifist. He was practically on her side.

By the third stable down on the right on Kilkis Street, she stopped and waited. Then she saw Giorgio strolling toward her, his black-belted uniform pressed crisp, his sword at his side, and the black rooster feathers that marked him as a Bersagliere bobbing proudly from his hat. As he neared her, he slowed and lit a cigarette. After they kissed, he held it out to her and let her have a puff. She pretended to like it.

“I have something for you,” she said.

“Oh?”

“I want you to have it, as a memento of me.”

“I don’t need a memento. I have you.”

He pulled her into an alley and kissed her again. It made her feel truly adult to hear him say these things, to be kissed like that and to kiss him back. She traced a finger over the surfaces of his uniform, the smooth leather of the belt, the sword swinging against her leg, the scratchy wool of his back.

“I want you to have this.”

She reached into her coat pocket and held out the topaz ring that her mother had given her for her sixteenth birthday.

“You want me to wear this?”

“No, Giorgio. Keep it somewhere safe, so when you see it, you can think of me.”

She had a notion that lovers did this sort of thing. It would have been better if this were a ring she wore all the time, so he could know that it bore some traces of her. Better still if he were giving her something instead. But this was the best she could do. He was laughing now and placing the ring on the tip of his little finger. When he saw her face, he stopped, pulled the ring off, and held it to his heart.

“I will keep this close to me, Clio. I promise.”

He tucked it inside his uniform and took her in his arms again.

C
arnival began, but there were no parades and no celebrations in 1942. The occupation drove the festivities into private homes, where people stayed overnight to beat the curfew. Guests played cards and roulette until the wee hours, when roomfuls of men and women changed out of evening clothes
into pajamas and spread out on the bedding that had been laid on the floor. For the Bourbouli dances, there were larger parties. Women made
dominos
out of blackout curtains they no longer needed, or, craving something finer in a time of limitation, they fashioned costumes out of scraps and outgrown clothes; they made masks from papier-mâché, painting over ripped headlines that announced battles won and lost. The Notaris family party was scheduled for the night of the final Bourbouli, and all the best families in Patras would be there.

The day of the Bourbouli, Clio took Nestor with her as a ruse to get out of the house. He wanted to play ball, she said, and she would grudgingly take him to Plateia Olgas to meet his friends. Once they reached the sidewalk, Clio steered them instead toward Kilkis and its shadowed doorways. Nestor tugged on her arm.

“It’s this way.”

“We’re not going to the Plateia, Nestor.”

“But I have my ball.”

“Not today.”

“Why can’t we?”

“We’re meeting Giorgio. You like Giorgio.”

“But I already sent a message for you today. And I’d rather play with my friends.”

“You can do that tomorrow.”

She tugged him along, cajoling him when he dragged his feet or dropped his ball and had to go fetch it.

“Come on, Nestor. We don’t have forever.”

“You shouldn’t bring him to the house, you know.”

“Does it look like I’m bringing him to the house, Nestor?”

“Not now. Tonight. He’s a foe.” Nestor said the word grandly.

“A foe.” Clio laughed. “Is that from the Scouts?”

“Yes.”

“You like him, don’t you?”

Nestor nodded.

“Well, then, he can’t be a foe.”

Eventually Nestor’s resistance dissipated.

“Do you think he’ll have the bullets I asked him for?”

“Why would he give you bullets? To shoot Italians with?”

“You told me yourself: He’s a pacifist. Anyway, he said he would give me spent ones. I’ve never seen a real bullet,” Nestor said.

“Yes, you have.”

“Up close.”

“Why do you want one, anyway?”

“To add to my other war stuff.” He shrugged. “I already have his old feathers and some old buttons.”

“Well, maybe he’ll bring a bullet for you, then.” Clio didn’t want to remind Nestor that he’d seen worse than bullets. He’d seen bombs, and people with their heads split open.

Giorgio was standing in the arched doorway to a stable. When he saw them, he dropped his cigarette and twisted it beneath his boot heel.

“How’s my boy?” he asked Nestor, tousling his hair. With his other hand, he pulled Clio into a kiss.

“Do you have my bullet?”

“What?”

“He said you were going to give him a bullet. I told him that was a stupid idea and that a soldier would never give his bullets away.”

“You didn’t say that,” Nestor said. He was tugging at her sleeve, but she turned further into Giorgio’s embrace.

“Nestor, pal, I have one right here, but I need you to do me
a favor first. Go to the officers’ club and fetch me more cigarettes.”

“But that’s a long way.”

“He’ll do it,” Clio said. “Won’t you, Nestor?” To Giorgio, she said, “I swear he’s the one who’s in love with you. Not me.”

“I am not.”

“Come on, lover boy. Cigarettes, please,” Giorgio said. He pressed a hand on the small of Clio’s back and kissed her again. She pulled away for a second. Nestor was standing at her shoulder, looking at her with an expression of pure dismay.

“Go, Nestor!” Then she took his ball from under his arm and held it out for Giorgio to take. He stepped away from Clio and, in one motion, drop-kicked it down the street. Nestor ran after it, beginning to cry.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Giorgio laughed. He brought his face toward her. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” she said.

T
he household was too busy with preparations to notice that Nestor had returned from his outing without his sister. And when Clio returned from Kilkis Street much later, again, no one paid particular attention. She went straight upstairs to arrange her costume, forgetting to seek her brother out. That night, for the party, Clio chose to wear the butterfly wings her mother had painted vivid magenta, pink, and orange on the farm almost a year before. Whatever blood had stained the silk was painted over now and blotted out in her mind by memories of far worse.

She was eighteen and could opt for a
domino
, but the wings were better, adorning one of her mother’s old blue satin dresses.
She wanted to be more like a princess than like a sultry, mysterious figure. Her message to Giorgio that morning had told him to come through the back stairs and up to the roof at eleven o’clock. With a mask and a dark suit, no one would know who he was.

She went up to the roof, to her Hollywood, and waited for him, looking out over the city. The streets were dark. Only the officers’ club was well lit, with the iron sconces of the concert hall now shining on the boots of the soldiers who stood guard by its doors. A small number of houses, most of them in this, the best neighborhood of Patras, had lights on, visible around the edges of drawn curtains. From below she could hear the music and the voices in her own house, wafting up through the open door of the stairwell. She was not sure what she wanted, but she sensed that this evening was unique. She had already forgotten that business about Nestor in the alley.

Giorgio was there, wearing a black mask and his blue wool uniform. He had removed the belt and sword, making Clio wonder if this was a violation of some military rule. But before she could ask him, he held her hands out from her sides, smiling at the unfolded wings.

“They’re beautiful,” he said. “You’re beautiful.”

“And you’re handsome. But I can’t see you in that mask.”

He raised his mask and began to kiss her, but she turned him away. They were in Hollywood, not the dirty alleyway. Here they could be romantic.

“Wait, Giorgio. Look at the stars.”

“I don’t care about the stars, Clio. Listen.”

The sound of a slow American song was drifting up to the roof. He took her in his arms and began to dance with her on the rooftop, and she thought how lucky she was to have this
romance in her life. When the music stopped, his hands began to roam.

Now it was clear to her why this night had felt unique. On any other night, she would have stopped him, but now she let him run his hands along her sides, over her breasts, over her bottom. Her own hands moved too, and soon he was steering her to the back side of the little tower through which the stair came up and taking off his jacket to spread it below them. The wings came off, and he undid the long zipper down the back of her dress. She was cold, but he rolled on top of her. He held himself up and she could breathe better. With one hand, he was fumbling at his belt, and then he took her hand and pressed it against the leather, showing her what to do.

She had both hands on his buckle, hurrying to finish this mechanical task before it broke the mood, when suddenly the noise from the party grew louder. She heard Nestor’s high voice somewhere nearby and pulled Giorgio down tight against her. They froze. But it was too late. She heard Nestor cry, “There!” and scrambled to pull the top of her dress up, tugging the satin against Giorgio’s wool.

Giorgio was working at his belt when Clio’s father lunged for him, one large hand grabbing at Giorgio’s shoulder and heaving him off her.

“Get up, you bastard. Get up!”

He tugged Giorgio to his feet and shoved him up against the little tower.

“
Babá
, stop! Giorgio and I are in love.”

Her father punched him twice in the face, and, when Giorgio brought his hands to his nose, he punched him again, in the stomach.

“Bastard,” her father said, breathing hard.

Giorgio dropped his arms to his sides, his nose and lip bleeding.

“Giorgio, tell him!”

“Clio, go to your room,” her father said.

“What are you going to do to him?”

“I said, go to your room.” He turned to say this, looking at her for the first time. “Get dressed.” She had never heard his voice like that, low and choked.

She reached behind her for her zipper, but the teeth kept catching.

“Let me,” Giorgio said.

Her father’s punch dropped Giorgio to his knees.

“Nestor, what did you do?” She went for him, and he seized his father’s arm, beginning to cry. “What did you do, you stupid little boy?”