The Clover House

by Henriette Lazaridis Power

  Already on the northeastern edge of Patras, I turn so that the water is on my left and walk out of the city. As I leave the port behind me, the paved path draws nearer to the water and I can feel the spray on my face. When I wipe my hand across my cheek, it comes up wet, my tears mingled with the sea. The gulf is teeming with provatákia, little sheep, waves herded along with me by the stiff wind.

  I am trying to think my mother’s story through, to piece together the scraps and fragments into a whole I can keep in my head. Images begin to form in my mind—of this Vlachos, whoever he was, with his hands tied behind his back; Giorgio the soldier snipping feathers from his hat; and my mother embracing a Bersagliere during the war.

  But it’s not just my mother’s story I need to piece through now. It’s my own. The story of a little girl whose aunts tried to protect her from her own mother.

  18

  Clio

  April 1941–February 1942

  Clio rushed to the window to see the source of the strange crunching sound outside. She caught a glimpse of a black car, and then her father was pushing her away from the window.

  “In the back room. All of you.”

  “Come on, girls. Nestor,” her mother said, ushering them into the small room where Skourtis had set up his sewing months before.

  “What is it?” Nestor asked.

  “I saw a car,” Clio said.

  “Italians!” Nestor scrambled to the door, but his mother pulled him back.

  “Sit down and wait for your father.”

  A moment later, Leonidas came to the door.

  “Where’s Vlachos?”

  “Fetching wood,” Clio’s mother said.

  “Tell Yannis to go find him. It’s all right,” he said to the children. “You can come out.”

  They edged out of the room and crept slowly to the windows that gave onto the porch. Outside were two Italian officers.

  “Lieutenants!” Nestor gasped.

  They stood in black uniforms with their backs to the house, hands clasped behind them, swords glinting in the sun. A few paces away was their car, a dusty black vehicle, long and low like an insect.

  What happened next seemed to Clio to be part of a movie. She could hardly hear what was being said, but the gestures and actions were clear enough. Yannis met Vlachos and the wood cart at the edge of the farmyard, grabbing the bridle with one hand. Vlachos saw the Italians, started, and made as if to jump from the cart. Yannis stopped him, said something to him, and led the cart the rest of the way, stopping the horse beside the sleek black car. The horse nickered and pawed the dusty ground.

  Vlachos swung himself down from the cart and listened as the lieutenants spoke. They were close enough now for Clio to hear that they were talking about a plane and a pilot, about a stolen parachute. One of the officers pointed to the foothills. Both officers turned to Clio’s father, and he nodded, seeming to confirm their tale. Vlachos reached out as if to ask for help, but Clio’s father ignored him. He nodded again and watched as the officers each took one of Vlachos’s arms.

  They tied his hands behind his back and frog-marched him to the car. Clio rushed to the porch, waiting to see Vlachos struggle or protest or even spin around and shout condemnation up at the house of his betrayers. But he walked along with the Italians until he reached the car. And then he faced the house and spat. One of the Italians slapped him across the face.

  “Oh, my,” her mother said softly.

  Clio didn’t know what surprised her most: Vlachos’s insult, the officer’s violence, or her mother’s sympathy for the rough old man.

  By early fall, once the bombings were finished and the Italian occupiers had made it clear that order had returned to Patras, the family returned to the city. Greece was fully occupied now, divided up by the Bulgarians to the east, the Germans to the west of them and in Athens and Crete, and the Italians everywhere else. In Athens, where the Germans had raised the Nazi flag over the Acropolis, things were very bad, with famine spreading and reports of people dying where they stood. Patras was luckier. The Italians had turned the concert hall across the street from the family house into their officers’ club, and they seemed at least as interested in enjoying themselves as they were in keeping control of their new subjects. In the evenings, Clio went up to the roof and watched as the Bersaglieri came and went, their feathered hats giving them a carefree and dashing air. They hardly looked like soldiers at all to her.

  One day in late November, she was standing on the sidewalk in front of the house, waiting for Nestor to catch up to her, when one of the Bersaglieri sauntered across the street.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Notaris,” he said, doffing his feathered hat.

  “Good afternoon.”

  The soldiers never spoke to her, but this one, a lean young man with curly black hair and a slightly crooked nose, had made a habit of nodding at her from his post whenever he saw her emerge from the house. She liked the looks of him, and it pleased her that he knew her family name. Still, she was not certain she should be engaging in conversation with the occupying army.

  No matter how much the people of Patras had believed in una fatsa, una ratsa, they now worried constantly about collaborators. If they thought you were in league with the occupiers and that you were profiting from that association, they might do more than boycott your store, as they had done with Marinelli; they might kill you. Still, Clio wondered how you were supposed to obey an occupying army without being friendly. How nice was she allowed to be to this Bersagliere, who now stood there in his blue wool uniform, his tidy gaiters, and his dashing feathered hat?

  She turned to look back up at the house. She would have shouted for Nestor to hurry, but she didn’t want the Bersagliere to think she was vulgar.

  “Are you waiting for someone?” His Greek was accented, like Marinelli’s.

  “My brother.”

  “I can command him to come out.”

  “Please don’t,” she said, before realizing he was joking.

  Clio walked back to the house and pushed the door open, her back tingling from the awareness that he was watching her.

  “Nestor!” she hissed.

  “He’s getting a bag to put the bread in,” her mother said, calling from the sitting room.

  Clio sighed and turned to face the walnut-framed mirror while she waited. She undid the clip that held her hair—bobbed now—in a wave over her ear and clipped it up again. She tilted her head this way and that, confirming that the shorter cut of her hair emphasized the planes of her cheekbones and the length of her neck. Her green dress was shorter than she would have liked, but there had not been enough fabric to adjust it to her new height. At least her coat fit her properly, and her shoes were up to the current occupation-determined fashion: platforms on a thick rubber wedge.

  Nestor came from the kitchen with a canvas sack.

  “There you are. Button this,” she said, tugging at the folds of his peacoat. Nestor smiled up at her, letting his body shake freely as she fastened the buttons. “We’re going,” she called, and led Nestor out of the house.

  The Bersagliere was still there. He saluted them crisply as they passed before him. Nestor giggled.

  “Do you need an escort?” the soldier said.

  “No. No, thank you.”

  They were only going to Drimakopoulos’s for some bread. A week after that first bombing that began the war, Clio had found Marinelli’s place boarded up, with no sign of Marco or the old woman, and Mussolini = Marinelli scrawled in red across one plank. He would have been all right now, Clio guessed, and maybe the Bersaglieri would have craved his raisin rolls. But soon after the war had begun, Marinelli, Marco, and the old woman had disappeared. No one had seen them since.

  At least Drimakopoulos made good bread. Every other bakery in Patras had been reduced to baking heavy loaves of cracked grain and whole wheat, but Drimakopoulos lightened their loaves with white flour. Nobody knew where they got the flour, and nobody wanted to ask. It seemed collabora
tors could be tolerated if they gave people what they desired.

  “Young man,” the Bersagliere said to Nestor, “tell your sister that I am available to make sure none of these sciocchi bother her.” He waved a black-gloved hand toward the two Bersaglieri guarding the officers’ club. The men had wandered closer and now posed in mock affront.

  Nestor stopped short, glancing between the soldier and Clio. Clio put her arm around him and kept walking.

  “We can take care of ourselves,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m sure you can.”

  At this, she turned, scowling. He tipped his hat again, smiling with no apparent malice. The long black feathers bobbed behind him as he set the hat back on his head.

  “I’m going to get matches from Babá and set his hat on fire,” Nestor whispered.

  “You are not, Nestor.”

  “Kostas Dolos did.”

  “Kostas Dolos is older. Besides, this one doesn’t seem so bad.”

  The next day, when she went out to meet some friends, the Bersagliere approached her again, this time walking a short way with her. His name was Giorgio, information she wasn’t sure he should have told her. She told him her name was Clio.

  “The Muse of History,” he said.

  “You know the Muses?”

  “Of course.” And he reeled them off, his lilting Italian accent making a song of Melpomene, Terpsichore, Calliope, and the rest. “Una fatsa, una ratsa,” he said, and she thought of how the phrase had lost its meaning. Giorgio went on. “Our countries are too much alike to really fight each other.”

  “We beat you in Albania.”

  “If you beat us, then why am I here wearing a uniform?”

  He answered his own question, placing one finger across his upper lip like a mustache.

  “Jawohl,” he said.

  She laughed and found herself still smiling when she reached the Plateia.

  “What’s going on?” her friend Marianna said.

  “What?”

  “Why’re you smiling?”

  The other girls clustered near her, sensing intrigue. The boys stood awkwardly around the edges, not really caring but not wanting to be too far from the girls. Clio glanced at them over her friends’ shoulders. Ares with his mouth slightly open; Takis with one ear higher than the other; Thanassis with that faint shadow of hair on his upper lip. She tipped her head down as Marianna and the others drew closer.

  “I was talking to a man,” she said.

  “Who?” Marianna frowned.

  “One of the Bersaglieri.”

  “You can’t do that,” Ares said.

  The girls stared at him and he stepped away, as if now shocked to realize he had spoken.

  “He’s right, though,” Marianna went on. “You can’t do that.”

  “Come on. I can’t even say hello? Besides, I wasn’t very nice to him,” she said, even though she knew that wasn’t true.

  The rest of the afternoon, the boys hovered around her as if she had become newly fascinating. But all they accomplished, in Clio’s mind, was to prove that they were no match for a Bersagliere. So what if he was part of the occupying army? He was a grown-up, and they were children who never even knew what to say to her.

  That same evening, Nestor knocked on the door to her room. He handed her a piece of paper folded into quarters.

  “What’s this?”

  “Open it.” He sounded like Thalia with that breathless voice of hers.

  She unfolded the paper, noticing a watermark of the Italian fasces printed on the stiff sheet.

  “Nestor, go away.” Her face grew hot, and she wasn’t sure if it was because of the sight of the occupiers’ fasces or of the name at the bottom of the note.

  Clio turned her back to Nestor and read the message again.

  Dearest Miss Clio Notaris, Muse of Korinthou Street,

  Do me the honor of meeting me to discuss further the similarities between our two oppressed nations. Around the corner from the officers’ club, at 9:00.

  Giorgio Tartini

  “Where did you get this?”

  “From the Bersagliere.”

  She passed her hand behind the paper, noticing how its shadow showed through where the watermark was. Then she folded the paper back up and pulled out her dresser drawer to tuck it inside.

  “No, you’re supposed to write something,” Nestor said. “Then I can give it back to him.”

  “I thought you didn’t like the fascists.”

  “He gave me two million drachmas to buy chocolate with.” Nestor held out two small banknotes, newly printed for the occupation. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that, even if he could find any chocolate in a shop, even two million drachmas wouldn’t buy it now. “And he said he’d give me some old feathers from his hat if I brought you the message.”

  “That must be better than burning them. Kostas Dolos will be jealous.”

  She took a pen from her nightstand and began to respond below Giorgio’s signature. Then she smiled and wrote in Italian: Va bene.

  During dinner, she told herself it was folly to go, to sneak out of the house to meet a man, never mind an Italian soldier. Nestor said he had delivered her message, but what if there had been some error? What if he had given it to the wrong soldier or if Giorgio had changed his mind? Worse, what if it was all a trick to make a young Greek woman look foolish?

  But the war had made everything so dull. The occupation had been going on for more than six months, and even though the Germans were in Greece too now, they seemed so far away, in Athens and Crete and other places she had never been to. In Patras, it seemed that there had been no real change since the bombings and dogfights had stopped and the Italians had won. Clio had to have something to do. And Giorgio was handsome. She guessed he was close to her age, yet he was so different from the boys in her circle. The uniform and that wonderful feathered hat made him dashing, like a character out of Captain Blood. By the time her mother signaled that they could leave the table, Clio had convinced herself to meet him. She went down to the basement and from there crept out the servants’ door to the black-and-white-tiled patio and then out onto the street.

  She had forgotten to get a coat and hugged herself against the cold. Turning the corner, she saw a figure she thought was Giorgio, the red bead of his cigarette moving in the air like a firefly. He stepped out of the shadow and, seeing her, removed his jacket.

  “Allow me.” He swung it around her shoulders. The wool was heavy and scratched where it touched her neck.

  They didn’t kiss until several meetings later, and Clio took it as a sign that he was not like the soldiers she had heard about, who only toyed with the young women they seduced. Besides, he had not seduced her at all. The messages they sent, with Nestor’s help, went both ways. Psilalónia at 7:00, she wrote, or Behind the house at 3:00. And from him: I need to see you. Meet me at 8:00 in Plateia Georgiou, in the colonnade. It was a mutual arrangement. It was love.

  Two days before Christmas, Clio left the dining room table after lunch and went to her room. She pulled the top drawer of her dresser open, rooted through the socks, underpants, and bras, past the box where she had long ago put their very first silkworm cocoon. The cocoon’s empty shell was still inside the box, but she couldn’t bring herself to either look at it or throw it away. She reached for the makeup she hid in the very back of the drawer. Quickly, she applied some rouge and lipstick and was combing the mascara wand over her eyelashes when Sophia and Thalia came through the door.

  “I was right,” Sophia said.

  “Go away.”

  “Where are you off to this time?” Thalia sang. She drew a scarf from the top of the dresser and waved it in the air so that Clio could see it snaking behind her in the mirror.

  “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.