The Clover House (20 page)

“If I had known you had all seen them too,” she added, “I would have said something earlier.”

A few days later, Clio’s father suggested they gather fireflies again for an experiment.

“Come on, Nestor.” Leonidas waved at the boy. “Go on and get the jars for us.”

“I don’t want to.”

This surprised everyone, since Nestor was always first to seize whatever equipment was necessary for an exploration.

“Nestor,” Urania said, “do as you’re told.”

Clio braced herself for what she suspected was coming.

“It’s dark now. What about the spies?”

“What spies?” her father laughed, and began to head into the kitchen to get the jars himself.

“The ones by the clover houses.”

The girls had been moving toward him to keep him quiet, but now they backed away quickly, as if by reversing their movement they could undo their brother’s speech. Leonidas turned back into the room.

“What clover houses?”

And Nestor told him.

Clio watched her father’s mouth set and the mustache become a straight bar across his lip as he listened. She saw with dismay that her spy story had given her brother exactly the ingredients with which to finish the job the intruder had started. Nestor drew himself up straighter with each answer to his father’s questions, as if he fancied himself to be defending the farmhouse with his information. Her father seemed to be under no such illusion. He summoned Yannis to come with a flashlight and frog-marched Nestor through the dark pastures to the clover field. The others followed, feeling their way in the night while Yannis swept the flashlight beam in front.

They stopped in a loose circle before the invisible door of the clover village, and their father took the flashlight from Yannis, raking the clover for a hint of the way in.

“Go on. Where’s the door?”

“There isn’t one,” Nestor sniveled, and Leonidas pushed him forward by the shoulders.

“It’s not his fault,” Sophia said. “It was all of us. We do it every summer.”

Clio’s father stopped listening and plunged through the clover. The glow of his flashlight moved like a giant firefly through the hidden houses. Nestor was sobbing now, and Sophia and Thalia wept quietly. Clio wept too, but her thoughts were stuck on the image of the strange man whose real presence had led to the undoing of their game. What if she had drawn him to the houses somehow? What if her nighttime forays had attracted him to the field in the first place? It was her need to be alone that had started everything. Had she not found satisfaction in that first discovery of a sky full of watching stars, she would never have returned for a second visit, and the man would never have gotten the sense that she would be there, available for him somehow.

Clio’s father ordered Yannis to cut the clover field down. Her mother told the children this was a way to keep them safe from the prying eyes of destitute strangers. The mowing would serve as a message to any men wandering the countryside that this particular farm could offer them no harbor.

It was a large enough operation that Yannis required farmhands to help mow as well as to tie up the bales and store them in the barn for silage. He left a message at the taverna in the nearest village, and word spread among the gaunt beggars who gathered each day behind the kitchen for scraps of food. The next morning, six men, their clothes draped loosely over their frames, appeared in the farmyard. One of them held a scythe at his side. The rest would borrow tools from Yannis’s supply in the barn. For three days, under Yannis’s watch, these men chopped the swaying clover down to a plain of stubble, their
scythes flashing in the sun. At the end of each day’s work, they huddled in the farmyard so Irini could feed them chunks of bread and bowls of stewed vegetables, but then Yannis dispersed them, making sure they understood they were not to linger on the premises.

As soon as the mowing began, Nestor, Sophia, and Thalia moved on to other pastimes on the other side of the farm, but Clio couldn’t stay away. She climbed her apricot tree and turned toward the pasture, watching the slow advance of the cutting line and the bales tossed in the air onto the cart. Climbing the tree seemed childish to her, in a way that had not seemed childish at all just a week ago, but she could think of no better way to see and not be seen. For she couldn’t be sure that the stranger—her stranger, as she had come to think of him despite herself—was not among them. Peering through the leaves at the men moving in the distance, she chose one man whose silhouette most resembled the lanky shape of her stranger and followed him up and down the rows. She wasn’t sure why, perhaps to catch him in an attempt to come looking for her. Whenever he straightened his back to gaze around him, she remembered the moment her stranger had moved into the child-sized doorway of the clover house. She remembered his frayed collar and the dark edge of his cap and imagined his grimy fingers tugging on the cap to remove it in the presence of his superiors. But most of all, she remembered that instant in which she had seen a flash of scorn cross his face, and she wondered, with some indignation, what he had seen to be scornful of.

Callie

Monday

Today I can call Constantopoulos, the lawyer, and make some progress on what I have actually come here to do. I get the slip of paper my mother gave me on my first day here and dial the number.

“Embros.”
Proceed: another commanding invitation on the telephone.

I tell him who I am and what I need. He sounds as though he has never heard of my case before.

“It’s about Nestor Notaris,” I say. “I am his niece from Boston.”

“Ah, Notaris,” he says, emphasizing the name. “Miss Notaris—”

“Brown.”

“Sorry?”

“It’s Brown. My father was American.”

“So, Miss Brown.” He pronounces it
Braoun
. “I’m happy to help you, and I can have the document drawn up by the end of the week for you to sign.”

“The end of the week! I thought the document was already drawn up. My uncle died almost two weeks ago.”

“On February eighteenth, actually. Ten days ago.”

He is doing this to prove to me that he is efficient. While we have been on the phone, he has scrambled for my uncle’s file and has just managed to read the date of death in time to quote it to me officiously.

“If it is possible,” I say sweetly, remembering Aliki’s warning about fickle lawyers, “it would be very useful to have the document drawn up before too long so that I don’t have to change my airline ticket.”

He agrees to try.

I go to an Internet café on the near end of Korinthou Street and check email for the first time since last Wednesday. There is a message from Jonah. My scalp buzzes with adrenaline, but I force myself to save his for last. I delete the spam and read through the messages from work—about prospects to pursue, upcoming events in the annual campaign, letters to check. I skim through the messages from certain friends. There is one from Marcus that includes a picture, taken just yesterday, of all the rugby guys covered in snow on the Esplanade. Jonah’s rounded cheeks are bright red in the cold, and he seems to be shouting a joke at the photographer. I don’t know how I expected Jonah to look, but somehow I didn’t expect him to look this contented. I’m not even sure which I’d prefer—for him to be destroyed with pining for me, or for him to be the happy, relaxed man I might be coming back to.

I click on Jonah’s message. It’s brief and, to my embarrassment, makes tears form in my eyes.
I love you
, he writes,
even though I don’t think you always know what that means—to me or to you. There’s no need to respond
. He sent the email days ago, before our phone call, knowing I might not read it for a while.
But then, there is nothing time-sensitive about what he has said. And that is, I suppose, part of the point: He’s telling me there is no expiration date on his emotions. I can’t deny that the idea terrifies and excites me, both. In the end, this is what I write to him.
I just got your email today. I love you too. But I don’t know yet whether that’s enough for either of us
.

The rest of the morning I spend alone in Nestor’s house, working through the boxes and listening to a soft rain tapping on the black and white tiles of the back garden. It’s afternoon when I open the door and let the smell of moist dirt seep into the house. All during my childhood, the aroma of rain-dampened dirt could send the aunts into speechless rapture. Even for me, who grew up with plenty of rain and damp; even I have always drunk in the smell. As if the aroma sent me, like them, back to summer afternoons on the farm, when the rain would soak the dirt beneath the almond trees.

I pull Nestor’s chair out from the desk and turn it so that it faces the garden. I try to do nothing but notice—notice the furniture, the garden, the room, the papers, the homemade gadgets on the desk. This place will change completely in a few short weeks, and I want to remember it as it is now, as it used to be, almost my whole life. After a while, I rise to close the garden door against the chill.

Beyond the yellow lamplight falling on the desk, I am surrounded by darkness in which I can make out the towerlike shapes of Nestor’s boxes and books, like crenellations on a fortification. I switch on the half-domed light on the ceiling and wander back to Nestor’s things, not quite ready to plunge into another box but not wanting to leave just yet either.

I think about the simple fact of refugees on the farm. I know why my mother never told me about them: because to acknowledge the presence of someone else in that idyll would
diminish or destroy the childish pleasure she could take, even now, in her memories of the place. Admitting a stranger would be like admitting an adult into a children’s game.

My mother began with so much. Her father a raisin exporter with warehouses by the docks. Her mother a socialite, accomplished in the arts and in the practice of philanthropy. Enough beauty to go around the family, parents and children, so that when the aunts walked out in the evenings during their teenage years, they gathered boys and young men in a growing wake. And property that sustained and demonstrated their wealth and that could have been passed down through the generations to preserve it. We didn’t lack for comfort when I was growing up either. Two cars in the garage, overseas airfare, college tuition. The ingredients were all there, provided by my father’s engineering salary. But by then there was such poverty in my mother’s spirit that her life sucked the joy out of my father’s spirit too. Long before he finally left for good, he had vowed never to return to Greece.

I think of Andreas’s politics from yesterday, his accusation that families like mine had inflicted harm on others. What exactly is a family like mine? We never became one of the little dynasties that rule Greek life. We were no Gounaris, or Niarchos, or Karamanlis or Papandreou. The Notaris name means nothing in Patras now. When my family had wealth, they did what they could; they were generous. My grandparents offered the refugees on the farm shelter and food. Yes, in exchange for work, according to my mother’s new story. But Andreas turned what could have been a fair and simple exchange into exploitation.

Andreas would have me believe that the wealthy families choke off the routes to success for the rest of Greece. The truth
is that there is plenty of grabbing and snatching to go around today among rich and poor alike. And the government is just as eager to buy patronage from the shopkeeper as it is from the yacht owner. When Nestor used to sigh over preferments given to his politically aligned fellow teachers, or when Nikos fumed years ago about his competitor’s attempts to block his new business, I was listening. Wealthy families are not the problem in Greece. The problem is a lack of generosity, a poverty of spirit like my mother’s.

Outside I hear the hiss of tires on wet asphalt. It is six o’clock, and people are heading out after their long siesta. Soon phones will start to ring again, voices will be raised, television sets turned up. With the “Auld Lang Syne” key in my hand, I lock up and head home.

“I
t’s just us tonight,” Aliki announces when I greet her in the kitchen. “Nikos is at a dinner for work, and Demetra is spending the night at a friend’s house to work on their kites for Clean Monday.”

“They make them themselves?”

“People sell them on the Sunday, but we make them. Tradition.”

I pull out a chair from the small round table, grunting a little at the stiffness in my neck and shoulders.

“Tired?”

“Yes,” I groan.

“You must be drowning in Nestor’s life.”

Aliki pours us each a glass of wine and dribbles some olive oil into a skillet that she sets on the stove. Moving with habits learned from her father, she beats eggs for an omelet while the
sweet, rich smell of the heated oil sails up from the pan. I am caught in a rapid succession of memories, all centered on that earthy fragrance: french fries eaten at Demetris’s taverna, eggs scrambled with tomatoes that Thalia would make when we were tired, the bread we dredged through the juices at the bottom of the salad bowl. Aliki’s thoughts are elsewhere.