There’s a pause.
“I love you too.”
I let out a long breath and head for a pair of frosted glass doors that lead out of the airport. The crowd is ten deep, all jockeying for position so they can spot their loved ones the instant they emerge. I start to push through, murmuring, “Sygnomi,” as I go. The word releases a flood of Greek all around me.
“Pou pas, ré? Where are you going?”
“Slow down. Siga. They won’t leave without you.”
They are including me in their joking—men, mostly—but they know I can’t possibly be from here. I am hurrying, refusing to be swallowed up in the happy chaos of the crowd. I belong but not quite. It’s the belonging of the graduate student in the waiters’ break room—harder won but never complete.
“Geia sas,” I say to the driver of the bright yellow Mercedes taxi by the sidewalk. I tell him I’m going to the bus station and then lean into the corner of the backseat and rest my head against the window. My head is beginning to feel heavy from lack of sleep.
I wake up when the taxi comes to a final stop. On the corner of two busy streets in a worn-out part of Athens is the station, little more than a large cement shed through which the buses pass in and out. I pay the driver from the stash of drachmas I changed in Boston and head over to a ticket booth. There is a three o’clock bus to Patras that will get me there at six, just as the siesta is ending. The station reeks of diesel fumes and oil, and there are dozens of people pushing toward the buses or the ticket booths in a mass of earth-toned coats and scarves. As in the airport, there is no line, just a crowd, so I nudge my way steadily forward.
“One for Patras,” I tell the man in the booth.
“Round trip or one-way?”
“Round trip,” I say, giving him the date of my return flight.
“Enjoy the Karnavali,” he says, as he bangs a stamp against some papers and hands me my ticket and some coins.
“I will.”
But I had no idea it was Carnival in Patras. Now I realize that we must be somewhere in that four-week period before the start of Lent. The Carnival in Patras is renowned through all of Greece and Europe; if my mother is to be believed, it rivals even Mardi Gras in New Orleans. I’ve never experienced it, knowing about it only from my mother’s stories. How as children, she, Nestor, Thalia, and Sophia threw candy and streamers from the balconies of their grand neoclassical home onto the parading crowds below. How they lit firecrackers and tossed them into the groups of festivalgoers. How their parents worked for days helping to paint and build floats representing the tennis club or the symphony. It occurs to me that Jonah would love to see it. For his Cape Verdean clients, Carnival is how they remember home. It’s the one thing they fill with all their love for the place they are trying to leave behind.
I board the bus along with a group of roughly ten young men and women, smoking and joking with one another as they tussle for seats. As I take a seat toward the back, I notice that all of these people are dressed for the Carnival in some way. They wear flowing scarves, velvet, and ribbons, and the women’s makeup is dark and rich. One of the men, a little bit younger than me, has a stovepipe hat of purple velvet. His longish hair is dark, with trim sideburns framing his angled face.
He tumbles into the seat in front of me, pulling a henna-haired young woman in with him. They fall together, half standing, against the back of the seat, and the woman glances toward me, saying, “Sorry,” and then pressing her lips together into a tight smile. The man with the velvet hat leans over the seat, holding up a finger.
“Forgive us, for we are celebrating and we will not be silenced.”
“Shut up, ré,” the woman says. “She’s a foreigner.”
“Ah,” he says. Then, in accented English: “Sorry.”
I smile but don’t respond. I want to sleep, or at least to prepare myself for the coming encounter with my mother. I slouch down and try to prop my knees against the seat in front of me, but I am too short to make this work. I tuck my legs beneath me and curl in toward the window.
I close my eyes, but I can hear the couple in front of me talking with their friends in Greek across the aisle.
“Too bad she’s a foreigner,” Velvet Hat says.
“I told you. I’m meeting Daphne.”
“She’s better-looking than Daphne.”
“Fuck off,” says the friend, laughing.
“He’s right,” says the woman. “She is.”
“She’s got that sexy American thing going on,” says Velvet Hat. “All buttoned up, but you can tell she’s got a good body.”
“Probably wears a thong,” says the other friend approvingly.
At this point, I have to sit up.
“A black one,” I say. “Want to see?”
The four of them look at me in consternation.
“Shit!”
“You should have said something!”
“You’re not American?”
“I am.”
“But you speak Greek.”
“Yes.”
Velvet Hat is waiting, but I don’t want to explain. I imagine him without the hat and realize that he is impressively good-looking, in the straight-nosed, dark way that I never see among the round-featured Greek Americans of Boston.
“Glad we have that settled,” I say, and lean against the window.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to sleep.”
“You can’t sleep! It’s Karnavali.”
I turn to see Velvet Hat bobbing his head. The henna-haired woman and the others across the aisle laugh as the hat waves from side to side.
“You’re going, aren’t you?”
“Then xero,” I say. I don’t know. I hear the American accent in my voice.
“What are you doing here, then?” he says. “You’ve come a long way to not go to Karnavali.”
Back home—and I catch myself at the thought of back home, as if I have been gone more than a handful of hours—Jonah and I would be laughing and joking like this group. On St. Patrick’s Day, the closest thing that Boston has to Carnival, we pull on silly hats and scarves and drift from bar to bar with Marcus, Ted, and all the others. I look at Velvet Hat and think of inventing something innocuous, then decide to tell him the truth.
I say evenly, “I am here to sort through the inheritance my uncle left me when he died.” I give him a little smile.
“Amán!” he exclaims, then calls over his shoulder, “Shut up, you idiots. We have a mourner here! Or,” he says, looking at me again, “do you just need cheering up?”
Before I can answer, he starts to wave his head, and voices from the front rows shout and point at the hat.
“Wiggle it again, Stelios!”
“It’s drooping,” someone crows, and adds some new slang I can’t understand that sets the rest to renewed laughter.
“Stelios! Leave her alone,” says the woman. She smiles at me. “What’s your name?”
“Callie,” I say. “Calliope.”
“Ela, come, Callie.” The way she says the word, it sounds like its own Greek name: Káli. “You don’t have to listen to this moron who stole his girlfriend’s hat!” As she says this, she swipes the velvet hat from Stelios and puts it on. He grabs for her and they wrestle briefly, ending with a deep kiss. Stelios reaches under her sweater.
“Karnavali,” he says to me, with an exaggerated leer.
“Stop that, you rude and crass boy,” the woman laughs. “You’re offending our American friend.”
Knock yourselves out, I want to say, using Jonah’s phrase. But I don’t know the equivalent expression.
“It’s all right,” I say instead. “Karnavali.”
I look out the window at the three pristine lanes of highway to the left of the bus and remember the pitted, narrow road that used to lead out of Athens when I was a child. We would drive it in a rented sedan, with my mother sailing around the turns on the edge of safety. I loved the feel of the hot sun on my arm and the wind be
ating my hair from my temples.
“Come on,” Stelios is saying to me, and I can’t understand why he won’t leave me alone when he has a willing and attractive girlfriend.
“Look,” he goes on, “we’re sorry we were rude before. Though, actually, it’s not really rude to call someone sexy.”
“Stelios, shut up,” the woman says, and smacks him on the chest. “Let us make it up to you,” she says to me. “You hungry?”
She turns back to her seat and I can hear her opening a packet of food. She peers around the side of the seat and holds out a cellophane-wrapped sleeve of rectangular biscuits to me. I recognize them instantly: Pti Ber biscuits by Papadopoulos, a staple of car rides with my aunts. Unlike everyone else in Greece, my aunts and my mother pronounced the name with the proper French accent, “petit beurre,” a tribute to their years of lessons.
“Want some?”
“Oh, I love these,” I say, taking the sleeve. And as I push three biscuits up with my thumb, I realize how familiar the action is to me—as familiar as the toasted-butter smell, the smooth, hard surface of the biscuits, then the moistened crumbs sticking to my palate. I smile up at her, and I can tell she thinks I am just hungry. But it’s more than that. With surprise, I realize that I fit in here. No matter that I tried to cut Greece out of my life, along with my mother. The Greekness isn’t gone. Stelios and his girlfriend and their friends and I—we have a common bond, a shared culture.
I take two more biscuits and hand the sleeve back to the young woman, chiding myself for having stayed away from Greece for so long. Right, I catch myself: You think a relationship with your mother is as easy as a relationship with a biscuit.
I learn that Stelios’s girlfriend’s name is Anna and they are spending a long weekend in Patras, maybe longer if their friends have space. It is Tsiknopempti, Roasting Thursday, when, they tell me, everyone eats grilled meat and dances in the street. They are both graduate students on the dole, as is the rest of the group. Stelios studies history and Anna is a mathematician. They are both nearly thirty and have been dragging out their degrees for years, and neither one of them seems bothered by the fact that they are skipping some lectures. I watch them explain this to me, glancing at each other with laughing eyes, and I admire their irresponsibility.
I tell them what I do for work and where I live. And I tell them the simple facts of my reluctant trip.
“And …” Anna points at my left hand.
“No,” I say, blushing. “I’m not married.”
“But you wear them on the left in America, right?”
I always forget that Greeks wear their wedding rings on the right, as my parents would have done had they worn their rings at all. Whenever I asked my mother why they didn’t, she claimed the rings didn’t fit. I stopped asking once I understood the real reason.
“It’s an engagement ring,” I say. “I’m engaged.” My face goes immediately to full burning and I’m sure my distress is visible. But they don’t seem to notice.
“So who is your fiancé?” Stelios asks, exaggerating the French accent.
“Jonah.”
Stelios and Anna look at each other, murmuring Jonah’s name and searching for the Greek equivalent.
“In the Bible,” I say. “With the whale.”
“Ah.”
I brace myself for the next question—when is the wedding—but the bus is crossing over the Corinth Canal and, though the new highway makes it hard to see, Stelios and Anna turn to look for the channel through the window.
“Behold Peloponnesos!” Stelios announces to the whole bus. We have crossed from Attica to the square-shaped landmass near whose northwestern corner Patras sits.
The highway drops one lane, and then another. The bus moves to the right, straddling the solid white line that marks the breakdown lane. Speeding cars and motorcycles pass us, pinching in as traffic flies by on the other side. This is the main road to one of the country’s largest cities, and it is an undivided two-lane highway.
The people in the front rows of the bus are singing a song about the Carnival.
“You should come with us, Callie,” Anna says. “I’m the only woman with these men.”
“Where?”
“The Carnival!”
I shake my head.
“I have work to do. My uncle was a big collector. There’s lots of stuff to go through.”
“You’re going to want to take a break. Let me call you.”
“You just met me.”
“That’s what Carnival’s for: making new friends. What’s your mobile?”
“I don’t have one. Not here.”
Anna groans.
“Your cousin’s number?”
Aliki’s number comes back to me in the musical chant I memorized as a child when the house belonged to my aunt Thalia and my uncle Demetris.
“Two, three, eleven. Forty-four, seven.”
Anna enters the number into her phone.
“Done.”
Dusk falls and my eyes begin to close, even though it is only nine-thirty in the morning in Boston. Jonah will be at his desk, looking for his chance to grab the morning’s second coffee.
“I’m falling asleep,” I tell Anna.
“Sleep now. There’s no time for sleep once you get to Karnavali.”
As I drift off, I think about the fact that, though I have been in the country for just a few hours, I have already made friends on my own, and the heaviness of my American consonants is beginning to disappear. I have the absurd thought that Nestor will be proud of me.
I wake up to find the bus at a stoplight and I realize I’ve been asleep for more than an hour. We are surrounded by traffic—motorcycles, cars, scooters—and the street is decorated with lights and streamers. Stelios and Anna and their friends are singing again, pushing toward the doors at the front, and the driver is telling them to get back to their seats. Outside, I can hear not just the horns and revving of the street but the hum of a crowd and of different kinds of music coming from every direction. When the bus starts up again, everyone at the front stumbles in the aisle and joins in a loud cheer. Stelios comes back down the aisle, velvet hat pushed low on his head, and falls into the seat. He calls someone on his cellphone.
“Hey, maláka! Where are you, you wanker? Get your sorry ass down to the bus station! We have arrived!” This last he shouts to the entire bus.
The bus stops at the station with a hiss of air brakes, and we all gather up our bags and push toward the door. Or, rather, the others push, and I let myself be nudged along. All my earlier enthusiasm is fading now as I step down into the bustle of the station, down into my mother’s city.
Anna and Stelios are drawing their jackets tight around them, but to me the air feels balmy, blowing a faint salt aroma from the harbor.
“Callie,” she says, “we’ll call you.”
“All right,” I say, certain that she’ll forget.
“We’ll call you,” Stelios repeats. “Have fun with your inheritance!”
They kiss me on the cheeks and head off. I watch the velvet hat bob through the crowd until it disappears in the dark.
I decide to walk rather than take a taxi to Aliki’s house. This is foolish, I soon realize, because the streets are packed with people going to the various celebrations for Roasting Thursday, and the Carnival has rendered everything unrecognizable. Banners obscure the façades of the boxlike apartment buildings, and strings of lights throw strange shadows on the city’s distinctive colonnaded sidewalks. Every doorway seems to hold a shop whose windows are covered in neon-colored cardboard letters. Motorcycles are chained to every lamppost and door grate. Cars are parked nose-in, many of them over the curb and resting just feet from a rack of clothes or a table of women’s shoes set up beneath the colonnades. Where is Plateia Olgas, Olga’s Square, where I used to play with Aliki in the mulberry trees? Where are the streets whose small section of Patras’s grid I knew by heart: Riga Ferraiou, Kolokotronis, Maizonos?
People
are blowing whistles and shaking tambourines and rattles, and samba music booms from loudspeakers on every corner. It seems that everyone throughout Patras is dancing to the same joyful rhythm. I twist through the dancers, heading in the direction I think is west. It is nearly seven o’clock, and I am sweating beneath my knapsack. My hair is frizzing in the humidity and I imagine I have begun to resemble the mop-headed little girl and teenager of my summers here. Finally, I find Kolokotronis Street and start the last few blocks to Aliki’s apartment on Kanakaris. The air beneath the colonnade is thick with greasy smoke from street grills on which costumed men are turning spits of souvlaki and sausage. I shake my head to get the hair out of my eyes, and the scent of grease blows across my face.
I am hungry, and I think of stopping for a souvlaki, but I know I will be in Aliki’s kitchen in a moment or two. She will take me in, feed me, and show me to a well-made bed with ample blankets.
I press the bell by the door and, after a pause, a man’s voice comes over the intercom as the buzzer sounds.
“Get up here, maláka, we’re all starving.” Maláka: the Greek man’s term of insult and endearment.
“Wait,” I say. I wedge the door open with my foot and strain to shout backward into the intercom. “It’s me. It’s Calliope.”
The intercom goes dead, so I go into the lobby and toward the two elevators at the back. It is as if I never left—never stopped riding the elevators with Aliki during the siesta, to the consternation of Mario, the superintendent; never stopped coming back from the Plateia with a comic book and standing on tiptoes by the intercom; never stopped falling into Thalia’s open arms when the elevator let me out on her floor for the first time each summer. Nothing has changed except that this is Aliki’s house, now that widowed Thalia lives with her never-married sister, Sophia. I swing my arm up in the perfect arc to press the call button, and I tug the heavy metal door open and step aside with exactly the right timing. My body fits this place just so, with ease and grace, the way it fits against the hard planes of Jonah’s hips.
There is noise and cigarette smoke coming from an open door at the end of the hall. Through it, I can see Aliki’s living room and beyond into the dining room, where a group of adults and children is standing around the carved walnut table that used to be Thalia’s. The rest of the furniture that I can see is light and airy: blond-wood chairs, an ash sideboard, and a beige canvas couch. It was a good apartment decades ago, when Aliki’s father bought it on the earnings from his taverna, and it’s a good apartment still.
The Clover House Page 4
