The Clover House (42 page)

“A gift from Marinelli,” her father had said.

Clio’s mother had put the sack on a high shelf. Nestor would occasionally remember it and beg for some raisins, but no one ever brought the sack down.

Clio heard Thalia’s and Sophia’s laughter above her. The girls emerged from their room and started down the stairs, only
to hush suddenly when they saw their older sister in the foyer. They wore their hair in identical bobs now, Sophia’s sleek and Thalia’s still crazed with curls.

“What?” Clio said.

“Nothing.” They said it together, and Thalia began to giggle again. Sophia elbowed her.

“Fine,” Clio said. “Where are you off to?” There was no school, no Girl Guides. There were no parties. A trip out of the house could only involve choosing a particular square in which to stand around where the Germans wouldn’t harass you.

“Psilalónia,” Thalia said, naming the square on the heights above the center of the city. After a pause, she added, “Do you want to come?”

But Clio could sense that her sister had asked only out of obligation. Thalia and Sophia ran with a different crowd now. Or, rather, they ran with a crowd, and Clio spent much of her time alone, thinking. Often she drew, sketching memories of the farm or drawing portraits of Irini and Yannis, smiling at their faces as they drifted up from the paper. She was good at this, and she found comfort in the way her body curled around the paper, sealing it and herself off from the world outside.

“I’m staying here,” she said.

Thalia and Sophia headed for the door.

“We told
Mamá
,” Thalia said.

Clio shrugged. It wasn’t her job to monitor her sisters’ travels. She returned to the kitchen, putting off the moment when she would have to decide how to spend the day.

Nestor was eating a slice of bread. Clio could see the package he’d wrapped before still stuffed into his pocket. He grinned at her, then opened his mouth wide.

“That’s disgusting, Nestor. Shut your mouth.”

He chewed vigorously, smacking his lips.

In another second, he would be hoisting himself up onto the counter beside the sink, only to have Urania swat him down. Urania barely seemed to look at him anymore, simply flinging out a hand at him in silent reprimand while she bent over a pot of cracked wheat, or plucked a chicken, or hand-lettered one of the many signs the Germans brought to her for painting.
Müller, Stettner, Lanz
. Clio’s mother’s delicate hand painted the serifs and umlauts on each one.

If Urania had looked, she would have seen Nestor’s features sharpened by time and war. Though only thirteen, he had adopted the swagger and the smirk that had become typical of the city’s boys. Clio knew he sometimes went out with his friends to pour sugar into the gas tanks of the German staff cars. The Germans could kill a boy for a stunt like that. He pretended to listen to Clio when she told him to quit, but she knew he snuck into the kitchen at night to scoop some of their precious brown sugar into that handkerchief of his.

“Clio,” her mother said, “take Nestor out of here, please. He’s constantly in my way.”

“No need,
Mamá
,” he said. “I’m leaving.”

“Take your sister with you.”

“I can go out by myself.”

Urania was washing her hands and reaching for a jar of paintbrushes. She would take them down to the basement, where she kept the German signs.

“Come on,” Clio said to Nestor. “I’ll take you.”

He scowled, but she signaled to him to go along with her. Their mother’s jaw was set, and she had the abstracted look Clio had come to know.

Out on the street, Nestor tugged his arm from Clio’s grasp.

“I don’t need babysitting.”

“You know she doesn’t like us to see her when she’s painting.”

“She would have been in the basement. You could have stayed upstairs.”

“She doesn’t want us in the house, Nestor. Just let her have that.”

One day, Clio had heard her parents’ voices raised in the basement and had crept down the stairs to see what the trouble was.

Her mother was bending over a pale-green sign with black Gothic letters marching across its surface.

“I can’t let you do this anymore,” her father was saying. “Urania, stop.”

“I’m not stopping, Leonidas. This has to get done.”

He pulled at her hand that held the paintbrush, but Urania snatched it back.

“Damn it!” She grabbed a white rag from the table and dabbed furiously at the black paint that had spattered onto the sign. “That’s all I needed.”

“Who cares if their sign gets damaged?”

“Just stay away,” Urania said. She rubbed her free hand over her eyes. “Go upstairs and have one of the girls get you something to eat.” As Clio crept upstairs, she heard her mother say, “You’re tired, Leonidas. Go and rest.”

“The girls need the food more than I do.”

Her father had been right. Thalia and Sophia had been losing weight, and though they had initially greeted this development with glee and had posed for each other in the walnut mirror, it was now clear that, like Clio herself, they had grown too thin.

Clio looked over at Nestor walking by her side, his cheekbones jutting from his face.

“So, where to?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

He began to walk away from the center of the city, to the east, and for a moment Clio thought he might be trying to go to the farm. They walked in silence. It was sunny, and, though her father had put on his scarf and coat, the air was warm. If they had been at the farm now, the air would have borne the oily scent of Yannis’s brush fire, burning the windfall of autumn leaves and branches. The grass would have been soft beneath their feet, briefly green again after summer’s heat.

Up ahead, a man lay on the street, his clothes loose and ragged. The man looked at them with sunken eyes, and Clio saw that there were flies resting on his lower lids and around his ears. She pulled Nestor away, hating herself for her fear.

“Nestor, we shouldn’t be here,” she said, fighting the urge to vomit.

But on this new street she had led him down, they found themselves in a current of men and women all walking in the same direction, toward a large building that filled the entire block. She realized where they were. The building used to be a school, but the Italians had turned it into a prisoner-of-war camp, ringing it with wire fencing and hanging giant padlocks on the gates. Now it was the Italians themselves who were in the camp, forced there by the Germans. Giorgio might be among the prisoners. If he wasn’t, did that mean he’d been killed?

“Nestor, we’re leaving.”

“Wait! I want to see!”

“They’re prisoners, Nestor. Let’s go home.”

“Come on, Clio,” he said, tugging against her. “I just want to look.”

He broke from her and came to a stop a few yards from the main gate.

“Nestor!”

He jerked his shoulder as if she were actually holding on to him. He wouldn’t turn around. She walked over to him with the intent to hustle him away.

The Italians stood by the fence, their collars turned up and their heads bare, stripped of their extravagant feathered hats. They called out to the Greeks who were passing by.

“Ciao, bella.”

“Signore, ho fame.”

“Ecco una bella ragazza.”

One soldier sat on an upturned barrel and sang.

As she drew closer, Clio saw that the Greeks weren’t simply passing by the camp. They were stopping, and they were handing things through the wire fence. She looked around for Germans, but there were none in sight. She watched as one woman in a black dress and down-at-heel shoes held out a loaf of bread to an Italian, who bit into it hungrily. A man walked by quickly and, without breaking his stride, tossed a potato over the fence, where two soldiers scrambled for it.

She began to look for Giorgio, in spite of herself. It had been a year and a half since that night on the roof, a night she kept replaying over and over in her mind. She realized now how foolish she had been to think theirs would be some sort of courtly passion. She no longer even saw the appeal of such an idealized, spiritual love. Giorgio had humiliated her, that was true. But she was a little embarrassed at her old self too. Naïveté like hers had been misplaced then; it was a luxury now. Especially given what it had cost her family.

This was where her thinking always stopped. She had to
ignore the fact that her mistake had brought such hardship upon them all. How could she even sleep under the same roof, eat the same meager food, as the rest of her family if she kept her guilt clearly in her mind? With the exception of Nestor, the others already stood at a distance to her in some way that they would not acknowledge but that she felt daily. If she allowed her mind to dwell on the significance of what she had done, her life among them would be impossible.

“Nestor,” a voice called.

Clio turned, and there was Giorgio, coming over to the fence.

“Nestor, my friend. My old ally.”

“Leave him alone,” Clio said. “Come on, Nestor.”

“I can talk to my friend Nestor if I want to,” Giorgio said. “Can’t I, pal?” Giorgio’s Greek was more fluent now. All that time occupying the country had made him a linguist.

“You weren’t so friendly last time I saw you,” Nestor said.

“What did you do to him?” she said to Giorgio.

“Me? Nothing. Ask
him
.”

“You’re the loser now,
fannullone
,” Nestor said.

“Fannullone!”
Giorgio said. “Good one.”

And he seemed legitimately pleased, almost impressed that this young boy had called him a do-nothing in his own language. Giorgio stepped back a bit from the fence, hugging himself as if it were cold out. He had a beard, and his hair had grown to loose curls that covered the tops of his ears. He looked older now—more than simply twenty months older—and he was thinner, though he couldn’t have been in the camp for more than a few weeks. The Italians had surrendered in September, and since then the Germans had either been taking them prisoner or, if the stories were true, executing them in cold blood. If Giorgio were truly the pacifist he had claimed to
be, he would have given up without a fight. And now who knew how his compliance would turn out?

Clio took Nestor’s arm. “That’s it, Nestor. We’re going. Let this prisoner stew in his memories.”

“Nestor,” Giorgio called, coming to the fence again. “It’s a war. Times change. Now Greeks and Italians, we’re on the same side. It’s official. We even gave you Greeks our guns.” He smiled. Then, growing serious, he reached a hand through the fence and touched Nestor’s collar. Clio saw the fear in Giorgio’s eyes. “These
krauts
,” he said. “They’re a bunch of bastards. There’s no food here, not really. Nestor, I’m hungry.”

“Get food from someone else. We don’t have anything either,” Clio said, turning away. Nestor was still standing there. She called to him. He was reaching into his pocket, and she saw him pull out the handkerchief he’d wrapped around the slice of bread.

“Here,” he said, and shoved the handkerchief through the fence.

Giorgio held the bundle to his heart with both hands and kissed it, waving the kiss not only to Nestor but to Clio as well. Her face burned, and she wasn’t sure if she was angry or ready to cry.

“Come on, Nestor,” she said, and tugged him away.

Once they were out of sight of the prison, she stopped and spun around to face him.

“Don’t you ever do that to me again. I don’t know why I didn’t leave you there alone, except I somehow thought a little boy standing near where Germans patrol would be a bad idea.”

“I’m not a little boy.”

“Did you plan this?”

“I swear I didn’t. We weren’t even going this way. You’re the one who made us turn.”

He was right. She had pulled him away from that emaciated figure in the street. Had it been safer here?

“And now you don’t even have your slice of bread,” she said. “Or your handkerchief.”

“They’re hungry, Clio. Hungrier than we are.”

“I know that,” she said. “But they were against us. Remember? Your
foe
?”

“Not yours.”

“He was just one soldier, and I was stupid. You need to understand that.”

“They hate the Germans as much as we do. We have a common enemy. You heard what Giorgio said: They gave us their guns. They’re arming the partisans.”

“Where are you hearing language like that?”

“Like what?”

“
Common enemy. Arming the partisans
. That sounds like resistance talk.”

“Does it?” He resumed walking.

“Nestor,” she said, running up to him. “I know about the sugar. Even that is bad enough, but if you go mixing with any resistance groups, that’s serious trouble.”

Just the week before, partisan fighters had killed two German soldiers on patrol. The next day, four Greek men were found hanging from a tree in a small square out by the railway station. As they always did now with such warnings, the Germans had tied signs reading T
RAITOR
to each noose.

“Nestor!”

He kept walking, and all he said was, “I’m not a little boy.”

A
few days later, Thalia and Sophia went to Psilalónia again, and after lingering in the kitchen for a few moments, Clio decided
to seek them out. It was a long way to Psilalónia, but she was bored. She crossed the city, skirting Plateia Georgiou, where a group of Germans lolled by the fountain, and reached Trión Navarchon, the street of the Three Admirals, with its narrow mall of plantings. Trión Navarchon was a ribbon of park that ran from the harbor straight to Psilalónia Square. She followed it up the hill, breathing in the mineral scent of the damp earth. She realized she had no idea who the three admirals were from some other war.

When she reached the top, she waited until she had caught her breath and then scanned the square. Over to her right, beneath the mulberry trees and date palms that ringed the open space, she made out Sophia and Thalia in a group of four other girls, Sophia’s dark bob looming above everyone else’s. A larger group of boys stood at some small distance. The girls crowded in tight and then darted apart, in a rhythm of alternating confidences and surprise. If they were telling secrets, Clio didn’t want to join them. Instead she kept to the edge and walked all the way around to the square’s most secluded part, behind the monument to Bishop Germanos. The name made her laugh. He had started the War of Independence in 1821, raising the Greek flag in defiance against the Ottomans, and that past spring the Germans had raised their flag over the Acropolis. She had never thought about any of this before this war had started. But now, everywhere she looked, there was war—not just the one she was living, but all the others that had tossed Greece back and forth like a playground ball.