The Clover House

by Henriette Lazaridis Power

  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.

  myself now, to think that I could fall in love with someone from so disgusting a country as yours, full of lust and baseness. I thought fascists were better than that. If you were a true fascist, you would know that man has to be noble. Man is noble. You are precisely the kind of danger that fascism is going to uproot. I thought you were unique, a soldier who was sensitive, a pacifist who would defend his country, a man whose confidence allowed him to relinquish aggression and embrace sensitivity. I even admired how you enjoyed my strength in certain things. But now I see that you are weak. So weak that you would humiliate a little boy who admired you. So weak that my own father, thirty years older than you, could send you running from the rooftop with a bleeding nose and swollen eyes. You should be ashamed of yourself, not me. But I am ashamed. Ashamed that I joined in as you mocked my brother and drove him to undo all our plans. Ashamed that I was so foolish as to bring you up to Hollywood—laugh now at the word, I don’t care anymore—where I thought we could talk about our dreams, our thoughts on art and love and life. Ashamed that the baseness in my own nature made me let you do to me what you did.

  For months, you have fooled me into thinking you were gentle and refined, that you appreciated me and understood me. Now I see you for what you are: a crude and weak man with a base nature.

  Clio

  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.

  Skourtis kills soldier

  Skourtis turned in

  Nestor gets feathers

  Italian with Clio

  father catches them

  beats up Italian

  letter

  ring

  silk

  bullet

  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.

  16

  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.

  Clio’s father met him on the porch.

  “What’s this?”

  “Parachute. Italian. There must have been a second plane yesterday and—” He made a cutting motion with his hand.

  “Did you see the wreck?”

  “No. It’s probably up in the mountains. Pilot ditched too soon.”

  “What are you doing with it?”

  “I don’t want it,” he said. “It’s for you. For the children.”

  “Leave it in the barn, then. They’ll find some use for it.”

  Clio went to get the others and brought them into the barn to see this new treasure. Sophia pulled the cord for the light-bulb. Vlachos set the parachute down on the dirt floor, where it subsided with a soft exhalation, as if it were alive. In the glare of the bulb, it glowed a soft gray, with its radiating seams picked out in white.

  “A parachute,” Thalia said, in her awed voice.

  “You can have it,” Vlachos said. He stood over the parachute—as if he had killed it, Clio thought.

  That night, the children gathered in Sophia’s and Clio’s room to discuss Vlachos’s gift, if indeed they could see as a gift something whose origins were so mysterious. Their first concern was with the whereabouts of the Italian soldier who should have been attached to the parachute.

  “We saw the plane fly away,” Sophia said. “If there was another one that crashed, we would have seen something.”

  “What if the plane dropped a spy into the forest and that’s whose parachute it is?” Nestor’s eyes were wide with the thought.

  Clio wondered if her lie from last summer and the clover houses could have somehow come true and there really would be spies lurking in the pastures now.

  “What if he’s sneaking into the farmyard now?” Thalia said, shaking Nestor by the shoulders and using an ominous voice. “What if he’s creeping up on you,” then she shouted, “right now!”

  “Thalia, cut it out!” Nestor said, smacking her arm.

  “What I want to know,” Clio said, putting a calming hand on Nestor, “is how Vlachos got the parachute in the first place.”

  “He told us,” Sophia said. “The soldier was gone. Probably dead.”

  “Maybe he chased him away,” Nestor suggested.

  But Clio had darker thoughts. Either the man was dangling from a tree somewhere, wounded horribly and crying out where no one could hear him, or he had died in the fall. Or he survived but Vlachos had killed him. Clio imagined Vlachos stooped over a fallen cypress, chopping its trunk into logs and suddenly seeing the paratrooper limping toward him, with blood perhaps smearing his face. A swift blow of the ax would have been enough to kill the wounded man. Then Vlachos would have followed the bloody trail back to where the parachute hung draped in the trees.

  Thalia’s voice brought her back.

  “What if the soldier’s lying there dead and we’re going to find him someday when we’re out playing?” As Thalia spoke the words, Clio saw her realize that she had described an actual, and terrifying, possibility.

  “I’m sure he’s just gone, Thalia,” she said.

  The idea of an Italian soldier loose in the neighboring forest was far less worrisome than the idea that Vlachos might have used violence
against an acknowledged enemy. The soldier was exotic, connected in her imagination to the cloud of airy silk he must have descended with. Vlachos was the squat, stubbled man she had first seen bloody and dirty in the farmyard.

  She made a point to watch Vlachos carefully, and when she encountered him in the kitchen the next afternoon, she braced herself, waiting for him to seize a knife and reveal the violent man he had been all along. He simply greeted her in his usual gruff way and took a basket of scraps out to the horse trough.

  At dinner, Clio’s mother announced her plan for the parachute. The time for Carnival had come and gone, but there had been no official Carnival in Patras that year. So they would hold a Carnival of their own on the farm, and they would use the parachute silk to make costumes.

  “I thought wings would be nice,” her mother said. “Butterfly wings.”

  Clio remembered the dusty brown wings of the silk moths and wondered if the dingy gray parachute could turn into something better.

  Work started the next day. None of the rooms of the house were large enough to spread the parachute out into an un-creased circle, so they all carried the fabric to the pasture. Each child held an edge of the silk and tossed it up so that it crackled smooth. Then they backed away from one another, pulling the fabric taut, snapping it flat before laying it back down on the new grass. With a fat pastel crayon, Clio’s mother traced the outlines for the wings onto the silk and then cut them out with shears. She gathered the silk toward her little by little, the shears grinding with each cut.

  Vlachos passed by the pasture once or twice with the cart while they helped with the cutting, but he only scanned the scene for an instant before moving on. Clio suspected he did not like to be reminded of the violent deed that had put the parachute in his hands. He was anxious, she thought, to have the thing cut up and turned into something else, something unrecognizable as an Italian soldier’s potential lifesaver.

  But so was she. The longer the parachute remained intact, the more her imagination would continue to play out violent scenarios. Whenever they shook the cloth out into the air, a faint odor of oil and metal wafted up from it, and she could almost feel the gritty slide of engine grease on her fingers. She could not imagine wanting to place this cloth next to her skin or across her back, and the idea she had had of asking her mother to make the extra fabric into a gown for her now seemed abhorrent. Then there was something else. When she had picked up the parachute to lift it for the very first time, she had seen that there were thick canvas cords sewn onto the outer edge of the cloth in several places but that these cords had been roughly cut. Now the image in her mind was of Vlachos swinging at the Italian’s harness with his ax and then watching the man slam down to the ground. Clio might have been reluctant to join the others in their silken wings, but she could not wait until the parachute and all its reminders of death and danger had been cut into pieces.