The Clover House (23 page)

“Sorry.” Marco kicked at the sidewalk.

“It’s not your fault, Marco.” She crouched down to him. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure something out, and I’m sure your father will let you have the cocoons.”

Clio could see that he was not convinced, but she tousled his hair and sent him off to the right, where the lower school was. She sent Nestor along behind him.

The teacher began French class by leading the students in the national anthem. Everyone made swooping gestures to accompany each reference to a sword. Clio was waiting for something else—a discussion of the war, an announcement of safety plans—but, once the singing was finished, the teacher insisted they return to their seats and proceed with the lesson. Still, it was clear that even the teacher was distracted, constantly looking out the windows. Clio was certain she chose the text from Racine with Mussolini in mind:
Ses yeux indifférents ont déjà la constance/ D’un tyran dans le crime endurci dès l’enfance
. Indifferent eyes, a tyrant hardened in crime since childhood.

It was math class in the middle of the morning when Clio
noticed a few children by the window, looking up from their textbooks. She followed their gaze but couldn’t see anything besides the tops of the buildings across the street. Then there was a drone and a whine and a roaring crash and the room shook. Glass blew in from the windows and children began to shout and cry. They all began to run.

There was nobody in charge. Out in front of the school, children grabbed hands and ran off. Clio was looking for Sophia and Thalia and Nestor. There was a plane in the sky, drifting over the city, and she stopped in her tracks to watch actual bombs drop from it, simply falling out of its belly and sailing down like giant loaves of bread. It was a fascinating image, something she had never seen before. In one instant, she lost sight of the bombs and heard and felt them explode. There was smoke and fire and the sounds of tumbling stones. Shocked out of her daze, she screamed for her sisters and her brother, and she saw Sophia, who had Thalia by the hand. Together, the three girls ran to the lower school and found Nestor crying and darting from one gate to the other. Clio grabbed him to her and then thrust him away, yelling at all three of them to run.

She led them down Maizonos, as she was supposed to do. Sophia and Thalia insisted on holding hands, and Nestor would not let go of Clio’s, so she dragged him along.

“My arm, Clio!” he cried, as he dangled awkwardly from her grasp.

“I’m sorry, Nestor. Come on. Over this way. Sophia! Thalia!” she shouted. “Hurry up!”

Another plane roared into view and the girls screamed, pressing themselves into a doorway. Clio ran back to them, Nestor by her side, and pulled them back out.

“It’s gone. We need to run!” she yelled.

Ahead of them, a hole was ripped out of the street. Two
houses were torn in half, a bureau hanging over the edge of a shattered floor. Men and women were bleeding and screaming, holding their heads. An old woman in black was clutching her head and crying, crouched beside a dark form on the ground. Clio dragged her siblings to the right, but soon there was another bomb site in front of them, with smoke still rising from the rubble. They went left. Now they heard the drone of yet another plane coming over the city. They ducked into a doorway. A bomb crashed farther up the street, showering them with dirt and hard pellets of concrete or plaster. Clio tasted salt on her lip and spat out grit and blood. She retched at the thought that the blood might not be her own. She dragged the others to their feet; they began to run again. They were all crying and yelling now, covering their heads, moving vaguely northeast until a crater would force them to turn.

It went on like this until, up ahead, Clio could see the portico of the concert hall and she knew that they were near their home.

“Almost there,” she yelled. “We’re close.”

She heard a man’s voice calling her name and, through dust and smoke, made out her parents running down the middle of the street. The sleeve of her mother’s dress was torn and there was dirt on her father’s face.

“It’s all right,” Urania said, hugging the children around her. “It’s all right. We’re all safe.” But Clio knew that they were not safe at all anymore.

When they made it home, they saw smoke coming from the house two doors away from theirs. It was missing its top left corner, which lay in pieces in the street and in the walled garden of the house. The neighbors were standing in the street, crying. Clio’s mother tugged all of them up the stairs and pushed them inside, where Clio was almost disappointed to see
that nothing appeared to be altered at all. The house was quiet. Everything was as they had left it that morning and every other morning. The sun had risen to fill the atrium window, casting stark shadows down into the hall.

“Come,” her mother said softly. She took them to the kitchen and washed their faces gently with a warm cloth. When it was Clio’s turn, she held her elbow tight. “Sophia,” she said, over Clio’s shoulder, “take your brother and Thalia upstairs and find your father. You’ll be fine there.”

Clio looked in her mother’s eyes as she dabbed at the dirt on her cheek.

“You kept them safe,” Urania said. “I’m proud of you.”

“What happens now,
Mamá
?”

“I don’t know.”

No one spoke very much for the rest of the day. Clio’s father tried the radio, but all he got was patriotic music with the national anthem thrown in from time to time. She wondered if they would have to go to school now. And where would they go to take shelter from the bombs? Her parents, Irini, the neighbors—they were all shaking their heads, stunned, caught off guard, as if they had never believed the war could come to Patras.

That afternoon, she went up to Hollywood, bracing for the sight of an enemy plane. The sun had turned the buildings golden and the sea a dark purple. Across the Gulf of Patras, a broad mountain rose up almost from the water. And to the west, the island of Ithaki stood out clearly in the calm October air. She wanted the landscape to reveal a sign of the change she knew was finally, actually, upon them. In books and movies, it always rained when the heroes were sad. But that day the landscape did not cooperate. It was indifferent to their situation.

When Clio woke the next morning, she remembered the bureau hanging in midair, the crouched woman crying in the street, and the missing corner of the neighbors’ house. And then she remembered the first bomb that had blocked their way on Maizonos Street, and she wondered if Marco was all right. She thought of the bag of cocoons his father would not let him accept. She had been planning to see him again, but that had been before the war had started. She begged her parents to let her go out, and eventually they allowed all the children out to see what they could do to help. Clio waited until no one was watching and headed for the bakery.

The streets were full of people clearing rubble, walking from house to house with food or water, standing in the street and talking. On Astiggos there was a ruined house with a black mourning cloth draped across the door. Along Maizonos some of the shops were open and people were buying tins and sacks of food. Someone passed Clio, pushing a cart loaded with a piece of beef and a large paper bag full of loaves of bread. In front of Marinelli’s, Clio saw a woman carrying a
karveli
. The bakery was open. Marco was all right.

But the woman was going into the bakery, not out of it. She came out again empty-handed and frowning. Then another man came out through the door and, seeing the owner of the cart, called out to him, “Hey, where’d you get the bread?”

“Drimakopoulos.” The cart owner nodded up to the sign over the door and laughed. “Today I’d rather buy from a Greek.”

“Marinelli’s flour is bad anyhow,” said the other man. “Full of bugs.” He walked off toward Drimakopoulos’s bakery.

In no more than a minute, as Clio stood there beside the door,
full of bugs
was tossed from one person to another until
no one went into Marinelli’s at all. People glanced up and shook their heads at the name on the sign and then continued down the sidewalk.

Clio went to the door and peered through the glass, but it was dark inside and she could make out only the counter that ran across the front. She pushed the door open. Marco came to her side. The old woman was sitting in her regular place at the end of the counter. But Marinelli had his back to Clio. He was reaching up into the bins where he kept the bread—loaves he must have baked only hours after the bombs fell—and he was doing something with his hands. Then Clio saw the moths. There were dozens of them, crawling over the bread and falling into the spaces between the loaves and then pulling themselves up again.

She made a noise and he turned around. He had a small bandage on the side of his neck and he looked tired. He was not smiling.
Ses yeux indifférents
, was all Clio could think of.

“Marco, vieni ad aiutarmi,”
he said to the boy.

“Si, Papà.”

When Marco twisted back to look at her, she gave him an uncertain smile. But he didn’t seem to register whatever it was she was trying to say.

Clio left the bakery, knowing people would think she, too, had refused to do business with an Italian man. Two women on the sidewalk nodded approvingly at her, encouraging what they thought was her decision. She walked home and saw Nestor’s face in the basement window.

“Clio!” he called. “The cocoons are hatching. Come see.”

She went in through the main doors, past the walnut mirror, and started up the stairs. She was glad that Nestor was happy. But she couldn’t bring herself to see why.

Callie

Tuesday

Aliki has told me where you get a
domino
if you’re going to the Bourbouli, so Tuesday morning, before starting a day’s work at Nestor’s house, I follow Kanakaris to Ermou Street, where a temporary shop has been set up near the harbor to sell Carnival supplies. There are sacks of papier-mâché makings, piles of masks adorned with feathers and sparkles, and, on the wall, a row of black
dominos
in various fabrics. The proprietor uses a long pole to lift one off a hook and bring it down to me.

“Try it on,” he says. “You’re short. You can’t have it trailing behind you.”

He motions to the back of the store, where a handful of women are gathered around a trio of mirrors, laughing and talking. I wait in line among them, as one by one they step on the small platform and check their black reflections in the mirror. I am surprised to see that some of the
dominos
are not shapeless but are instead tailored to come in at the waist. Some versions hug the hips, making the wearer look like a kind of sinister mermaid. As they turn to face their friends, the
women give me polite smiles, as if I am intruding on a private party.

Eventually it’s my turn. I pull the
domino
over my head and arrange the hood so that the opening falls symmetrically over my face. At the top, there is a brim, like a short beak. The whole effect is to make me look not so much like a mermaid but like a little bird of the kind that pecks insistently at the ground. I can’t be bothered to find another, but one of the women watching hands me a
domino
from a pile of their discards.

“Try this one,” she says. She is roughly my size.

As soon as I have this one on, I see the power of the Bourbouli. Looking at myself in the three-way mirror, I feel sophisticated and seductive. The
domino
tucks in just right at the waist and skims my hips before falling perfectly to the ground. It is made of a light jersey, and though the seams pull a little over the top of the head, where the brim comes to a tiny peak, it is well made.

“That’s the one,” says the woman.

“You can do whatever you want in that one,” says another, giving all of us a knowing smile.

I buy it, along with a glittering red mask that ties behind the head with a black ribbon.

As I walk along Riga Ferraiou Street with my shopping in a plastic bag, I feel as though everyone must assume that I am simply another local—or a Greek out-of-towner—getting ready for Carnival. I smile to myself, proud to have errands to do, like everyone else.

It’s a long walk across the city to Nestor’s house, but the air, once again, is mild and moist. In Boston, it will be dry enough now to make the insides of my nostrils crackle with each breath. As I walk, I remember running errands with the aunts when I
was younger—the shopwindows decorated with soap paint announcing the summer sales, the vendors on nearly every corner selling grilled corn on the cob, the hundreds of motorcycles buzzing through the traffic so that an aunt always had to whip her arm out in front of me to keep me from stepping into one. Then my aunts’ lives descend like a scrim over my own, and I begin to imagine what the city was like when the three young women strolled long-legged down these same streets—my mother and her two sisters, known throughout Patras for their beauty.

Today the streets are only at half strength, and even the vendors’ stalls are closed. It’s a lull in the Carnival, perhaps because everyone is preparing for the purported chaos of the Bourbouli. I wonder how bad it can be. These are modern times. You can misbehave all you want every day; you don’t need the cover of a
domino
for permission.