The Clover House (18 page)

“What?” I say, leaning forward.

“Look.”

The road ends at a chicken-wire fence, behind which is the back of a large cement-block building, a warehouse of some sort. Up ahead and to the left are posts topped with metal signs that face the other way.

“But look over there,” says Stelios.

He tugs me farther forward so I can look past him out his window. I see nothing except a field with tall blond grass and a group of cypresses on the uphill side. It’s quite lovely, actually, but it’s not my family’s farm.

We all get out of the car and stand looking around us at the warehouse, the distant mountain, and the field. Now that we’re here, I want to keep looking for the farm, hoping that some scrap of orchard remains like this tiny patch of tall grass.

“It’s probably all gone now,” Andreas says. “Redistributed from the one to the many.”

I smile at him but can’t tell if he is joking.

“More like sold off in tiny pieces for less and less money,” I say.

He shrugs and walks to the back of the car, where he pulls a shopping bag from the trunk. Anna fishes two bottles of wine from the well where the spare tire should be.

“Let’s go. Aren’t you starved?”

Andreas hands me the bag and tugs a blanket from the
trunk. Now I see that they have brought bread and cheese and oranges.

“There are chocolates in there too,” Anna says.

I walk behind the others, watching their dark figures stride through the grass, their red-beaded bracelets peeking out from their sleeves as their arms extend. For some reason, I want to turn back. Perhaps because the contrast of their clothes against the wheat-colored grass makes them seem sinister, or perhaps because our dealings today are robbed of either drink or the wantonness of Carnival. In the sober light of day, these are strangers to me, and there is no clear reason why I should trust them.

“I can carry that,” Maki says. I had not counted him, and now he comes up behind me and smiles, taking the bag from my hand. He is so genial that my worries fade.

Anna spreads the blanket out and it floats above the ground, a blue-patterned square suspended on the stalks of grass. I sit down on it, feeling a slight descent onto the dirt. The untrodden stalks rise up around us, hiding us completely from anyone’s view. I think of the houses the aunts and Nestor used to play in somewhere very near here: toy houses carved out of fields of
trifílli
—a very tall strain of clover.

“This place is perfect for Carnival,” I say.

“You could screw for days and no one would see you,” says Stelios.

I lie on my stomach. Beside me, Anna rolls over onto her back and Stelios wraps his hand around her waist where her shirt has risen up. I pick at a chunk of bread before me on the blanket.

“It’s nice here,” Anna says after a while. “What if this turns out to be where your farm was, after all,” she muses, “and we’re lying where the stables used to be or something.”

“I hope not,” Maki says, twisting away from the blanket in mock revulsion.

“Do you think it could have been here?” Stelios asks.

“I really don’t know. I only know it from stories and pictures. I’m pretty sure it’s a big farm. We employed a lot of people, apparently.”

“How long had it been in your family before your grandfather’s time?” Andreas asks, sitting up.

“I don’t know.”

“And how did they make the money to establish it? Where did the fortune come from?”

“Raisins, I guess. I’m not sure.”

“See?” He slaps the blanket with a dull thud. “Typical rich irresponsibility. Failure even to understand the connections of their wealth to someone else’s work, someone else’s labor. The connection to all those people you employed.”

“You’re joking, right?” I look around, smiling. “He’s got the Marxist thing down pat.”

But Andreas is sitting up now. “Do you suppose your grandfather gave them a fair wage?”

“Andreas, knock it off,” Stelios says in a voice muffled by Anna’s neck.

“Why should we soften the truth for her? Just because she’s not from here?”

“She’s our guest,” says Maki.

“She’s from the most capitalist culture in the world,” says Anna dreamily, as if her words are not intended as insult.

“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.

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 at 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.”