The Clover House (12 page)

“That’s not fair! I’m opening the door!”

But he didn’t. And Clio knew he would not dare to do anything to make her mad.

Thalia crowed and pushed off for another turn along the tiles.

“Shh,” Clio said. “Irini will hear you.”

Clio took a running start and threw her right foot out in front of her, gliding along with her arms outstretched. The other two started up again, mugging for each other as they passed like gliding statues. Their hems were nearly soaked, and stray locks of dampened hair stuck to their cheeks. They swept it back from their foreheads and made faces at each other.

“You look like Tyrone Power,” Sophia said.

“Like Ramón Novarro,” said Thalia, in a deep voice.

“Watch me,” Clio said. As she pushed off, she threw her chin up and arched her back like women she had seen dancing the tango.

Clio could hear Nestor murmuring tearfully through the scullery door.

“Not much longer,” she told him.

“Come on, Clio,” Nestor snuffled. “Let me open the door.”

The truth was that she had already lost interest in the game,
and it bothered her that her sisters seemed to be enjoying it more than she was. It had been her idea, but the promise of mischief had turned out to be more exciting than the experience.

“All right, Nestor,” she said, and opened the door.

Nestor ran to the base of the stairs and launched himself across the ebbing water with a look of grim desperation on his face. By the time he reached the end of the hall, the water had gone and he jerked to a halt on dry tiles.

“Now look what you’ve done,” said Sophia. She was standing in the open doorway, watching the water flow into the scullery.

“What?” Clio said.

Nestor kicked the end wall with his booted foot.

“Over here.” Sophia was pointing to a darkened corner of the room that was piled with large sacks and bundles. The water had rolled there in a broad, flat wave. “I’m getting a mop,” she said.

“It’s just sheets,” Clio said. “They’ll dry.” She stooped to drag a bag out of the way of the water. But the bag was different. Instead of the soft patina of worn cotton, she felt rough cloth, like the feed bags they gave to the horses at the farm. “What is this?”

She tugged, and the contents of the bag hissed and settled. It was rice. Next to it were five more and, farther along, six bags of flour, with black stenciling that marked them as twenty kilos each. The bags were tucked into a corner—where the room sloped down toward the outer wall of the house—and almost seemed to be hidden in the darkness of the scullery.

“It’s flour,” Sophia said. She held the mop out to her side, where it dripped into the film of water with tiny pocking sounds.

“I can see that now,” Clio said.

“What’s all this flour doing down here?” Thalia said. “What are we, a bakery?”

“It’s wet,” said Nestor. He had gone into the very corner of the room and was nudging at one of the bags with his toe.

There were footsteps on the stairs—three impatient steps—then Irini’s voice.

“Upstairs! Now!”

Clio turned to the others.

“Close the door. We’ll take care of this later.”

“But the water,” said Nestor.

“We have to go.”

Clio made the first move, grabbing her shoes from the dry step and beginning to put her socks on. She knew the other three were watching her as they smoothed their uniforms down and pulled their socks over damp feet.

“Don’t say anything about this,” Clio warned them. “Is that clear?”

They nodded and marched into the dining room, where their parents were already sitting at opposite ends of the long table carved of dark wood.

“What’s the matter with you children?” said their mother. Urania set her sketchbook on the sideboard, watching with a bemused expression as the children took their seats.

Their father folded his newspaper and tucked it by his plate, peering across the room through round glasses whose dark rims stood out against his bald head. He was a tall man with an upright posture, but he had a habit of slouching down in his chair, perhaps to better match his wife’s plumper, smaller form. “Why so solemn?” he said.

“Nothing,” Clio said. But she’d never seen such a hoard of staples in their house before. Whenever they needed anything,
their mother sent Irini out to buy it. The only thing Clio had ever seen in bulk that belonged to her family were the crates of raisins piled in the warehouses for export.

“We’re starving,” Thalia said. “That’s what’s the matter.” She reached across Nestor’s place for the basket of warm bread from Marinelli’s bakery.

“Thalia,” her mother said, unfolding her napkin with a flourish. “Ask.”

“Can I have the bread, please, Nestor?” Thalia said, in an annoyed singsong.

“Why is your hair all wet?” asked their father.

“It’s hot out. We’re sweaty,” Clio said.

“Well, perhaps you should clean up before you return to school.”

They passed the platters of chicken in red sauce, stewed okra, and potatoes around the table while their father asked them what they had learned in school that morning.

“Nothing,” said Thalia.

“Ah,” their father said. “Then what happened to you at school on this singularly uneducational day? Nestor?”

“I had a fight with Kostas Dolos.”

“That wasn’t a fight,” Sophia said. “All you did was shove each other.”

“It was a fight. I fought him.”

“And why, Nestor, were you fighting Kostas Dolos?” their father said. He pushed his glasses up on his nose.

“He made fun of me.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a Boy Scout.”

“You
were
a Boy Scout,” her mother said, with a tight smile.

“Leave it alone, Urania,” her father said.

“It’s true, isn’t it? Or should he join the Youth Movement, Leonidas? Because that’s his only option now.”

“Metaxas can lead this country out of disorder.”

“And into fascism.”

“Urania.”

“And if our own fascism won’t do, we can join someone else’s. I hear there’s a lively movement across the Adriatic.”

“Urania, that’s enough now.” He had raised his voice so slightly that no one but Clio and her mother seemed to notice.

“At least the Metaxas Youth have a nice uniform,” Clio said. She set her glass down and cocked her head at Nestor, trying to make him smile.

Her parents both looked at her as if surprised she had heard their conversation.

“This topic is not for you, young lady,” her father said. “Or for any of us at what should be a pleasant meal.”

Clio took a long drink of water to hide her irritation. She was old enough to know what was going on, old enough to have seen Nestor crying when he had to turn his Scouting things over to the uniformed boys from Ioannis Metaxas’s Greek Youth. Old enough to recognize the fascist graffiti that was turning up on buildings she passed on her way to school.

The Greek Youth boys had come to the house in a group of three, calling themselves a battalion of national defenders. The Boy Scouts were a foreign institution, they said, and Metaxas was showing the nation how to reclaim its legacy of honor. There was one boy Clio didn’t recognize, though they all looked the same in their dark-blue uniforms and white braided bandanas. They gave her father the stiff-armed Roman salute and left with Nestor’s Scouting things, their white spats flashing as they descended the front stairs.

This meal was not the first time her parents had disagreed over Metaxas and his vision for a regimented Greece, but Clio still couldn’t make up her mind with whom she sided. Her mother would sometimes simply recite the names of authors whose books had been burned under Metaxas’s orders, the painters whose work had been removed from museums. When those lists failed to move Leonidas, Urania would remind him that Metaxas had abolished parliament, a rhetorical move that silenced Leonidas, at least temporarily. Clio wanted to take her mother’s view, but her father said Metaxas had brought order to a nation that sorely needed it. He had pushed back the dangerous forces of communism in Greece but had even so established institutions that would take care of the population. What could be bad about that?

Out in the foyer once lunch was finished, Clio checked her reflection in the walnut mirror.

“Come on,” Sophia whispered, tugging at her arm. “We need to go to the basement.”

“I’m coming. Give me one second.”

She redid her barrette. Thalia was making faces over her shoulder.

“Where’s Nestor?” Sophia asked.

“I thought he was with you.”

“Well, he’s not.”

They found Nestor in the scullery, swinging a mop at the water that had gathered by the bags of rice and flour. He was grunting with the effort—trying, Clio thought, to be valiant, like a Scout.

“Nestor.”

When he turned, she saw that he was crying.

“I’m trying to get the water away,” he said.

He let the mop fall and began to tug at one of the sodden bags. His feet scrabbled at the scullery tiles and the bag wouldn’t move.

“Come on, Clio. Help me.”

As she joined him in the corner, she heard Irini’s voice.

“What is going on here?”

Irini headed past Sophia and Thalia and straight for Clio and Nestor, who was pushing at the mop.

“What have you done, boy?”

“It’s not his fault.”

“Did you do this?”

“We were playing,” Clio said. “I’m sorry.”

“You were
playing
?”

Clio didn’t answer.

“Look at this.” Irini waved her arms wide and then brought them together over her mouth. “Just look at what you’ve done now. All this food, ruined.” She wheeled around to Clio. “Do you know what this is worth? And what it will be worth in a few months or, who knows, even weeks?”

She grabbed the mop from Nestor, who was sniveling into his sleeve. Freed of his tool, he dashed over to Clio and buried his head in her stomach.

“Sometime soon, people will kill for this,” Irini raged. “Only you’ve gone and ruined it. Spoiled children. No sense of value.”

“Irini!”

Clio’s mother stood in the doorway. Sophia and Thalia moved aside to let her pass, their eyes wide as they stared at Clio.

Nestor pressed his back against the bags, as if to hide them. Clio tried to think of what her parents would take away from Nestor as punishment. There was already no Scouting. And
what would they take away from her? The next dance? The new gown she expected?

“There’s water,” Nestor said.

Her mother gave him a bright smile, but Clio could see the dismay on her face.

“So there is! Off to school with you, though. Irini can take care of this.”

“But the bags,” Clio said.

“The bags?” She glanced over at the bags of rice and flour piled in the corner. “They’ll dry out too,” she said. “No need to worry.”

Clio squinted at her, but her mother made no acknowledgment of the look. She didn’t even acknowledge Irini, who stood fuming with the mop in one clenched hand. Instead, she shooed all four of them up the stairs to the foyer. She smiled over them as they gathered their school bags, held a handkerchief for Nestor to blow his nose into, and waved them out the door. Clio turned to watch her. She was standing in the open door, her hand held aloft in a wave. She looked like a figure in a painting. Her green dress stood out against the house’s white façade, and a large bougainvillea billowed magenta at the corner. She smiled as if there were nothing wrong at all—as if it were nothing to store hundreds of kilos of flour and rice in the basement, and nothing to find that all that food was ruined.

Once they were a block away from the house, Nestor seized Clio’s arm and began to jump up and down beside her.

“She didn’t yell at us!” he crowed. “She wasn’t mad!”

Clio let her arm hang loose as Nestor shook her body like a whip. She thought of the muted dismay behind her mother’s smile.

“No. She wasn’t.”

But her mother’s false cheer worried her. She suspected that
soon enough she would long for her mother’s run-of-the-mill anger, and for a time when there was no need for emergency supplies, or for little boys to wear uniforms except for fun, or for gangs of fascists to paint slogans on the sides of stately mansions. The time was coming when they would look back even on the strangeness of this day and yearn for its comforts.

Callie

Friday

Aliki and I make our way to Nestor’s house through streets that are now busy with people returning home from lunches at restaurants and other people’s houses. Here and there we can hear bands and small orchestras practicing music for the evening’s parade. Nestor’s house is on a quiet block of Ellinos Stratiotou, Hellenic Soldier Street.

As we approach it, I see that, at least from the outside, the house is unchanged: a squat one-story building with a tall, thin door, the whole thing nearly covered over with greenery. There is and always was something of the castle in the atmosphere of this tiny house near the harbor; surrounded by taller, grander buildings, it still projects an air of safety and strength. I stand on the sidewalk, taking it all in, while Aliki goes to unlock the door. It groans open, and she calls to me to follow.