The Clover House

by Henriette Lazaridis Power

  “Hey! Look,” I say, pulling myself upright. “So my family had some money once. Do you see any of it around now? The farm is gone, the house is sold and falling apart, and all my relatives have left are tiny apartments. And I live in a crummy little place where the heat doesn’t work very well and there are rats in the pipes.” In my frustration, I say pípes for pipes, instead of solínes.

  “They use rats for tobacco?” Andreas smirks.

  “Shut up, Andreas,” I say. “Shut the fuck up.”

  But I’m not as angry at him as I am at myself. That crummy little place was where I lived before Jonah. Our place now is fine.

  “Those tiny apartments, Callie, are at least in decent neighborhoods,” Stelios says, pulling his head up. “Kolokotronis, Kanakaris—you think those places are bad? You have no idea. You should see what the truly poor have to live in.”

  I glare at him for a moment, wanting to be just as angry at him as I am at the other two.

  “I’m not saying my relatives are suffering. They’re not poor. I never claimed that. But whatever wealth we had—”

  “Which was a shitload,” Andreas says.

  “Whatever wealth we had, Andreas,” I say sternly, “is gone. There’s no treasure, there’s no vault, there’s no estate. It’s gone, okay? My mother, her sisters, her brother, they all started their lives over with nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “Andreas has a point,” Stelios goes on. “Families like yours—”

  “What kind of family is that, Stelios?”

  “Wealthy, landowning families.”

  I roll my eyes, disgusted now at the crude simplicity of what he has to say.

  “Families like yours have screwed things up for a lot of people in Greece,” he says. “For a very long time. PASOK understood that in 1980, and now look at what the rightists have done.”

  “The rightists are bringing Greece into the euro. Do you think there’d be a bridge across the gulf without the euro? Or new roads or the new airport? Oh, and aren’t the rightists still paying for your degrees?” I look around at all of them with mock innocence.

  “Absolutely,” Stelios says.

  “Not me,” Maki says. “I’m working.”

  “You weren’t smart enough to take the handout,” Stelios says.

  I hear the echo of my words in our conversation yesterday. Absolutely not, I said to his Treasure Hunt invitation. Now, deliberately or not, with this word and this tease, Stelios is trying to claim a lightness of heart that disappeared almost as soon as we sat down on the grass.

  “Try not to fuck it up anymore, now that you’ve got your uncle’s inheritance, all right?” Andreas says.

  Everybody laughs, and I allow a smile. It is Carnival. I roll onto my back and pretend I’m relaxing, waiting for the right time to end this foolish outing. The air is almost warm, and the grass smells sweet around us. I try to imagine this field as part of my family’s farm, my family’s capitalist, wealthy farm.

  On the way back to the car, Stelios walks beside me, humming softly.

  “They took in refugees, you know,” I say.

  He turns to me, questioning.

  “At the farm. My family took in refugees during the war.”

  “Good for them.”

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  He takes my hand and rubs his thumb against the inside of my wrist.

  “For now, yes.”

  I pull my hand away.

  “This was a stupid idea. I don’t even know you people. And you know nothing about me. So quit judging me.”

  Stelios holds his hands up defensively. “Whatever you say.”

  We drive in silence until Maki pulls the Renault up in front of Aliki’s building. I clamber out and make a point to thank Maki for the ride, and I vow to myself that I will have nothing more to do with Stelios and his friends. As I step out of the elevator on Aliki’s floor, I feel the relief of shedding a false life.

  Aliki is in the kitchen, cooking a beef stew.

  “Where did you go?”

  “Didn’t you see my note?”

  “Yes, I saw the note, but you have no idea where to find the farm, Callie. It’s impossible. Where did you end up with these people?”

  “In a lovely field, actually, behind a warehouse in Perivoli.”

  “Behind a warehouse!”

  “Was it in Perivoli?” I ask. “I thought I remembered the name.”

  “No,” she laughs ruefully. “Pelargos. It was in Pelargos.” The word for stork.

  “Well, I had a lovely time,” I lie, wanting to defend my morning against this new challenge from Aliki. “We can go back to Pelargos another time,” I go on. “It’d be fun. We could take Demetra.”

  “It’s all built up, Callie. Has been for years.”

  “That’s not what you told me.”

  “When?”

  “A while ago.”

  “What did I say?”

  “That the farmhouse was still standing, with a plot of land around the house where the orchards were.”

  She is shaking her head, looking at me as if she wants to comfort me and scold me.

  “I never said that. It’s not even true. Everything was built on. The last time there was a farmhouse or an orchard on that property was before I was born. And our family had sold it long before that.”

  “This is like that drain in the old house that no one can agree on. Doesn’t anybody have any story straight?”

  “Maybe not. But I can tell you the farm was sold a long time ago.”

  “And how do you know?”

  “Because I’ve looked. We didn’t own it after ’45 or ’46.”

  “What if you got it wrong? Like the drain.”

  “No, Callie. Trust me. It’s been gone for a while.”

  If Aliki is right—and I have a stubborn inability to accept this—I understand why the aunts never took us there. They couldn’t. Even if they had been able to find the way among the new and incomplete houses and the warehouses, there would have been nothing for us to see except evidence of loss. While Anna could lie in the grass and imagine how it might have been once to sit in a carriage or a bedroom on the same spot, the aunts knew that what they would need to do would be harder. It is easier to create out of nothing than to cover over reality with images from the past.

  “I was telling my friends about the refugees,” I say, for some reason not wanting to come right out and ask Aliki what she knows.

  “Yes?” She keeps stirring the stew meat.

  “This isn’t news to you?”

  “That you told your friends?” She laughs.

  “The refugees, Aliki.”

  She knocks the spoon on the edge of the pot and turns to me, holding the spoon over the food.

  “The refugees,” she says. “My mother told me.”

  “When?”

  “Ages ago. Some working men. And a family, I think. They took them in during the war. Paki, can you hand me the parsley?”

  I find the parsley on a cutting board, minced into tiny flakes. I gather up a fistful and bring it to Aliki. She gestures to me to toss it into the pot.

  And that is that. Not because Aliki is trying to hide anything—I know her face well enough to see that—but because this information is of no significance to her.

  8

  Clio

  July 1940

  Clio was sitting in one of the apricot trees on the farm, her back resting against the trunk and her legs crooked over a sloping branch, as if she were riding sidesaddle. If she bent her head at the right angle, she could see through the leaves, beyond the edge of the grove, to an area of open land behind which were the rows and rows of grapevines. Yannis had a crew of men in the vineyard now. If she sat very still, she could almost hear them talking and singing as they tended the grapes.

  She loosened the braids she had allowed Thalia to put in that morning and let her hair fall about her shoulders, kinked like Medusa’s snakes. She closed her eyes and pictured herself a
t a soirée, with her dark-brown hair flowing over bare shoulders or tucked up into an elegant twist. A voice shouted close by, but she ignored it, assuming it was one of Yannis’s men.

  She was tugged out of her daydream by the rising peal of a whistle. It was Sophia, signaling that the coast was clear for the children to sneak away to the clover houses. This was the one point on which Clio conceded leadership to Sophia. She had no intention of whistling or shouting for the rest of them, as if she were herding animals. When she wasn’t poring over history books, Sophia liked to organize—people or information, it didn’t matter what, as long as she could keep it in line. She whistled again, this time with an urgency that shook Clio from her thoughts of parties and ball gowns.

  “Do you have to do that?” she called down through the leaves.

  “What?”

  Clio could see the top of Sophia’s head just below her. Her sister looked up into the branches of the tree, hands on hips.

  “Do you have to make it sound so upsetting?” She began to swing herself down from the tree. Landing on the ground at Sophia’s feet, she quickly gathered her hair up into a ponytail and glared at the girl. “It sounds like the siren, for goodness’ sake.”

  “It does not. And you can’t hear the siren anyway.”

  “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 Indian
s 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.