The Clover House (39 page)

“Don’t you speak to your brother like that. He did the right thing.”

“Telling secrets,” Giorgio mumbled through swollen lips. “Did you at least get money for it, Nestor?”

Nestor let out a sound that was half shout, half sob.

Clio was crying now too. She took a few steps toward the edge of the roof.

“Get back here.”

“I’m getting my wings.”

Her father grabbed her arm and tugged her back toward the stairs. His fingers were twisting her skin so that it burned.

“Go now and don’t say a word.”

She stumbled down the stairs and ran along the parapet toward her room, hugging the wall so she wouldn’t be seen by the guests in the foyer below. She could hear Nestor sniveling behind her and didn’t care.

She slammed the door to her room and rushed to the window,
through which she saw her father emerge from the house, holding Giorgio by the arm. Giorgio had put his jacket back on, but half of the collar was turned up. Her father walked over to the officers’ club, where the two guards broke their pose and descended the stairs toward their bloodied comrade. He said something to one of the guards, who disappeared into the club and reappeared with a man she recognized as the lieutenant. She pushed the sash up and tried to hear. Her father spoke to the lieutenant for a moment, smiling and shaking his head in a bemused way. She heard something about a fight and drunkenness and then he wished the officer good night. As soon as her father’s back was to the officers’ club, the fury returned to his face.

Clio kept watching as the lieutenant lit a cigarette and gave it to Giorgio. The two men stood on the steps for a minute, talking softly, then the lieutenant clapped Giorgio on the back, laughing, and sent him inside.

She sat at her desk to write one last message to Giorgio, scratching her pen across the paper and nearly tearing the envelope as she stuffed the two sheets into it. She waited until the next morning and called Nestor into her room.

“Please don’t be mad at me,” he said.

“It’s too late for that, Nestor. But if you don’t take this last message for me, I’ll tell
Babá
that you were lying all this time about where you were going.”

“You were lying too.”

“He already knows that, Nestor, doesn’t he?”

Nestor found Giorgio in the alley behind the officers’ club, pumping air into the tires of one of the staff cars. He was too afraid to speak to him, but eventually Giorgio looked up from his work.

“What the hell do you want?”

“I have a message,” Nestor said.

“No more messages, lover boy. And your father’s going to wish he’d never lifted a hand against me.”

Before Nestor could fish the paper from his pocket, Giorgio took his hand, opened the palm, and pressed into it a small ring with a honey-colored stone.

“Give this ring back to your cock-teaser of a sister.”

Nestor had never heard the word before, but he understood. He walked away, looking back over his shoulder to be sure Giorgio wouldn’t come after him. But when he caught the soldier’s face, there was only a look of scorn.

A day later, Clio was in a downstairs room of the house when she saw the lieutenant and another officer coming up the front steps. She heard them ask for her father and listened as Irini took them into her father’s study. She crept from the room and stood outside the door, but she could not hear anything. After the two officers had gone, her father sat in the study alone for a while.

“What did they say,
Babá
?” she asked.

“They’re taking the raisin business and the farm.” He said it as if it was unimportant.

“Why?”

“It’s a trade, Clio. I get to punch an Italian soldier, they get our livelihood.”

“Why would they do that?” She pictured it for a moment as if her father had sought out a chance to strike an Italian.

“There are limits to what a Greek man can do under Italian occupation, even when he’s trying to defend his daughter’s honor.”

“You can change their minds. We could talk to them.”

“Talking to them is what got us into this mess.”

“Nestor shouldn’t have told you.”

He snapped his head up and glared at her, color rising on his bald head.

“Well, he did. And none of this would have happened if you had simply kept away from the enemy. Kept away from a Bersagliere.” He almost shouted the word. “Did you think this was all a game, like your cocoons and your parachutes? Did you not realize that this is a war? And to let that man—” He caught himself.

Clio bit her lip, letting the tears run down her cheeks. She made herself stand there and listen.

“Nestor told the truth,” her father said, falling back in his chair. “Who’s to say that was the right thing to do? I don’t have the answer, Clio. Do you?”

He looked at her for a long time, as if he really wanted to know, and then she couldn’t bear his gaze anymore and turned away.

Callie

Saturday

I have walked all the way to Bozaïtika Beach, a stretch of gray and white pebbles with a steep drop-off into water that used to be over my head. Behind the beach, a taverna nestles in a grove of eucalyptus trees with their trunks whitewashed to keep the bugs from climbing. I walk a little farther to the next taverna along the shore, which I recognize as Demetris’s old place. Thalia sold it when he died, and it is closed now anyway. The trees, usually crowded with tables and chairs, now stand alone like columns in a ruin. But I remember clambering into straw-seated chairs beneath those same trees, with the salt crusting on my suntanned skin, reaching for all the good things Demetris would bring us. I sit on the beach now and stir the pebbles with my hand, occasionally tossing one into the sea. The sun is warm on my face, though the wind is still brisk. As it gusts, I feel my face going hot and cold and hot again.

I sit for a while. I am not much of a smoker anymore, but I wish now that I had the comfort of a cigarette. I imagine the arguments my mother and her sisters must have had as she prepared to see her Bersagliere. Thalia might have tried to keep
Nestor out of it, and my mother—what would my mother have done? Nestor was her ally, but somewhere along the way she blamed him for what went wrong. I can’t piece together what he did, and I don’t even know what it was that went wrong. A little boy of ten or twelve back then—what could he possibly have done to be deemed complicit?

I walk inland down the little roads until I find a taverna that is open this time of year. I eat a beef
kefte
and some fries smelling of olive oil; I drink some wine. A young waiter is standing by the kitchen door, smoking, and I smile and bum a cigarette, my first in weeks. I drink two coffees while I smoke, sitting and thinking about all that I have learned and imagined.

The truth is that what Sophia said isn’t news to me. I have known it my entire life, but, like those secret shames we don’t admit, I could never acknowledge even to myself the fact that my mother didn’t take care of me. Besides, as a child, how could I understand neglect when it came in the form of liberties and extravagances? It was only later, when adolescence made me an expert on the ego, that I could see my mother’s gestures as what they were: gifts for herself. I thought her permissiveness was a blessing, when in fact it was inattention dressed up as a treat. That time in Kythira when Aliki and I were drunk and skinny-dipping, it was Thalia who scolded us about the risks of what we’d done, while my mother got herself ready for her day at the beach.

What sticks in my mind the most from all of this is the image of two old women snapped out of a rare argument to confess that they couldn’t stand my mother because of how she treated me. What surprises me even more than that revelation is the feeling it calls up in me. Not just gratitude, not guilt either, but sadness. It’s not my fault that my mother’s sisters distanced themselves from her, but it’s because of me. And I’m
saddened to think that I have inadvertently caused my mother pain. I could say that she deserved it, but that suggests a universe in which events are tidily paired: crime and punishment, and—less often, it seems—kindness and reward. But that’s not how it is at all, I’m convinced. Just from what I’ve read and heard and guessed at during these past ten days, I know that there are few perfect matches, or pairs, in our lives. Only connections and compromises that bind some of us together but pull some of us apart.

I
t’s nearly eight o’clock when I finally make it back to Aliki’s apartment building, physically exhausted and emotionally spent. As soon as she hears my voice through the intercom, she buzzes me in, and the long buzz has a peremptory, strident quality I haven’t noticed before. I step out of the elevator to find Aliki, Thalia, and Sophia crowding around the frosted glass door.

“Where were you?” Aliki says.

“I went walking.”

They bundle me into the house and close the door behind me quickly, as if I’m some form of contraband. I look around at them. Three worried faces, and Nikos behind them with his head tilted, half scolding and half bemused.

“I’m sorry, everyone. I didn’t mean to make you worry.”

Thalia barges through the others and grips me in a tight hug.

“We knew how upset you were,” she says.

“And when you didn’t come to the memorial …,” Sophia adds.

“Oh,
ghamóto
,” I say—fuck—and catch the frisson of shock, irritation, and amusement that sweeps across their faces. “Oh,
no.” I fall heavily into the low chair beside the telephone table. Aliki stoops over me.

“I was worried about the asshole from the other night,” she says. “I was afraid he’d done something.”

“I should have called.”

“You should have come to the memorial is what you should have done,” she snaps.

“
Theies
, I’m sorry I wasn’t at the church. It’s not that I didn’t want to go—”

“Where were you, Paki
mou
?” Thalia asks. I have never seen her like this. While the others have calmed down now that they can see I am safe and sound, Thalia is still racked with worry. Her face is creased, her shoulders are squeezed near her ears, and she’s wringing her hands, actually wringing them.

“I went to the Bozaïtika.”

“All the way there!”

“It’s not that far. I found the taverna,” I add brightly.

“We said too much,” Thalia says, refusing to be drawn into other thoughts. “We shouldn’t have let you hear any of it.”

“Now someone has to tell me what is actually going on,” Aliki says.

“We told you, Aliki
mou
,” Thalia says. “Your aunt and I had an argument, and Calliope became upset.”

I sit up.

“I was upset because you wouldn’t tell me what I need to know.” As I say it, I realize I’m hiding what upset me most.

“This again?” Aliki goes into the kitchen and starts emptying the dishwasher, banging the pots and dishes into the cupboards.

“Yes, Aliki. This again.” I go after her. “There’s something they’re not telling me. About the farm and my mother and some Italian. Something they’re not telling us.”

Aliki wheels around and smacks her dish towel onto the counter.

“Don’t lump me in with you, because I don’t really care, Calliope. Today was about something that happened now, not sixty years ago. Your uncle’s memorial service. We prayed for a sweet man who just died, and you weren’t there to be a part of it. You were too busy digging through things that don’t matter anymore.”

“But they do matter, Aliki. They’ve mattered all our lives.”

“I’m not going to listen to this anymore.”

She brushes past me but I stay with her.

“Why do you keep pushing this away? Are you afraid of what you’ll find?”

“Don’t do that. Don’t paint me as the coward, Paki. Ask yourself which is the braver thing: to live your life every day or to lug some mysterious past around with you as an excuse not to.”

I stop still, and Aliki realizes what she has said. There is a moment here when she could offer an apology. We both know it. And we both wait for it—she, as if it’s not her decision to make. One fact runs through my head, and I sense that Aliki knows what it is, the counterargument that confirms the cruelty of her words: My mother isn’t here. Why wasn’t she worried about me, like the rest of them? I don’t say it, because that’s part of the burden she doesn’t want me to lug around. But Aliki doesn’t say her apology either.

We stare at each other for a few seconds more, and then I snap out of it. It’s too late for me to change course now. I go back into the living room and find Nikos stooped over the aunts. He is holding each woman by the hand, and their heads are bowed—in prayer or in contrition, I can’t tell.

“How many more arguments do we need to have before you’ll tell me?” I ask. “Just tell me.”

I don’t know if it’s the weariness in my voice or something Nikos said that makes the aunts sit down on the couch, side by side, and look at each other. Sophia begins.

“It was almost exactly sixty years ago. In ’42. The night of the last Bourbouli. The Italians didn’t allow Carnival celebrations during the occupation, but the prominent families held parties in their homes. It was all right as long as people stayed overnight and no one defied the curfew. Your mother’s Bersagliere, Giorgio, showed up at our party. Something happened. He caused a disturbance and our father took him over to the officers’ club so his own people could deal with him. The next day, the Italians came to the house to talk to
Babá
. They knew about the farm because we had helped them when Vlachos was arrested back in the spring. And of course the Notaris raisin business was well known anyway. So they commandeered them. The farm and the business.”