By the time dinner comes around, it’s decided that the girls have had enough excitement for the day and no one feels like going out.
“Let’s not cook,” Nikos says, as if he would be the one slaving in the kitchen. “Let’s have Chinese.”
Lo mein, moo shu, and General Tso: The words sound comical in Greek accents, though no more comical, I’m sure, than my own pronunciation sounds to the man behind the counter at China Star. Still, I feel as if I should be an authority on this foreign food so newly arrived here, and I supervise as we put together our order. With a pang that makes me almost sob, I realize that I miss Jonah, his constant choice of shrimp dishes that congeal in an Elmer’s-colored sauce, his insistence on using chopsticks. I miss the faint crease in his neck, surprising in a man so lean, the skin so soft there when I kiss it. It is the way things are with me: The foreign things always make me think of home.
At night I can’t sleep, a victim of my long nap and my confused body clock. First Aliki and then Nikos go to bed while I stay in the living room, listening to the clicking of the television set as it cools down. I dig out my book and read for a while, and then my thoughts drift back to the conversation with my mother and to the photograph that seemed to unsettle her.
With my mind clear now, it occurs to me how odd it is that never, in all my listening to all the stories, did I form the impression that there were strangers at the farm. Not from my mother, or from Nestor, or from the aunts. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, but then why would it not have come up in all these years? Aliki and I knew about the various people who worked for my grandparents on the farm: Yannis and his wife, Irini, who served as overseer and cook both in the city and on the farm, and various farmhands whose names I can never remember. Is it possible that we were told also about a group of refugees and that our childish brains blended this group of dispossessed people together with all the others who were in our grandparents’ employ? Is it possible that, in my desire for an image of an untroubled home, I edited the refugees from my mother’s stories, cutting out the elements of the tale that would have added hints of strife and loss? Could I be the one who created the impermeable cocoon?
Tomorrow, I will ask Aliki what she knows.
7
Callie
Sunday
I pad into the kitchen in sweatpants and a T-shirt to find Demetra fully dressed, sitting at a plate of eggs and toast.
“Kaliméra, Demetraki mou,” I say, wanting to join her in this family world I feel myself getting close to. I want to be an aunt for her.
“Are you coming with us?” she asks, last night’s discomfort apparently gone. “Better hurry.”
“Where?” I say, tearing a chunk from yesterday’s bread that is sitting on the cutting board. Can the next parade be happening already?
“Church.”
Aliki comes into the room as she straightens the sleeves of her sweater.
I shift over to stand behind Demetra and mouth a question to Aliki: Church?
She frowns at me.
“Finish,” she says to Demetra, cutting a piece of egg with the girl’s fork and setting it on the plate for her. I follow Aliki out of the room.
“Since when do you go to church?”
Here was one way in which my heritage kept me apart from other Greeks. The few Greek kids I knew spent their Sunday mornings at Orthros service, joined basketball leagues and dance groups, and went to church suppers, where creamy moussaká was served with Rice-A-Roni. They were not Greek, as my mother always insisted, but Greek American. We, she would say, were the real thing, and that was completely different. I accepted this when I was young. I did not want to spend my Sunday mornings in a pew, though the fellowship of the teams and the dance groups was seductive. But if my mother said it was not the way to be a true Greek, then I would have none of it. Besides, what I knew from my summers in Greece was that only old women and the oddly, frighteningly devout went to church every Sunday. Greeks cross themselves at the start of a journey and they light a candle in the church entrance for someone who has died, but for most people that is it, aside from holidays and the main rituals in a life: baptism, wedding, funeral.
Now here is Aliki, going to Mass on Sunday with a daughter who has clearly done this enough times to take it as routine.
“Since when,” I ask her, “does anyone in our family go to church?”
“We do. This family does.”
I make a noise of protest and bewilderment, and Aliki turns around to face me.
“It’s Carnival. Great. But do you know why it’s Carnival? Because in just over a week now, Lent will begin, a time during which we prepare ourselves for the great holy day of Easter. It’s Pre-Lent now, so today, we will go to church and pray and ready ourselves to confirm our faith.”
“I didn’t know.”
“It’s not your fault, but I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t sound so aghast in front of Demetra.”
“When did this happen? When did you start?”
She continues heading toward the bathroom.
“I don’t know. Maybe after Babá died. It doesn’t matter. I just did.”
She stands before the mirror, brushing her hair. She has her mother’s sweet face, now become a little pouchy in the cheeks, and her father’s, her babá’s, hazel eyes, as always sharp and bright. Beautiful eyes that used to transfix the boys and men in her parea.
“Would you like to come?” she asks.
I would like to come, to be a part of this, but it is too strange for me. I shake my head and she raises her eyebrows at me in the mirror. At that moment, I feel a surge of delight, to be standing this way, like sisters, like mother and daughter.
“Not today,” I say. “I’m not sure how I feel about organized religion. Or about the Greek Orthodox God.”
She draws her head back in mock amazement.
“Just believe or don’t believe. It’s pretty simple.”
She turns and makes pushing gestures at me, shooing me out of the bathroom. She closes the door and I hear her peeing.
“And by the way,” she shouts through the door, “today’s the last day we eat meat until Easter.”
“You’re kidding,” I say, when she emerges.
“Believe it, Paki.”
Aliki tells Demetra I am still not feeling well—which I find embarrassing, not only because we are lying to a child, but also because it gives her the impression I was even drunker than I was. I suspect Demetra is old enough to know the cause of my discomfort.
I have the apartment to myself again, and Nestor’s key is on the counter with Aliki’s, but I don’t feel like going over there. I’ve missed my chance to ask Aliki if she knows about the refugees, but I keep thinking about the farm—a place that, like the house, had already passed out of my family’s possession before my lifetime and that no one ever took me to see. Aliki once told me it had been subdivided, but then she mentioned another time that the central part of the farm was still intact, with the low stone house still surrounded by vineyards, orchards, and fields. Surprising to think that a developer would leave this, but stranger things have happened to land in Greece, where illegal buildings are common and building codes roundly disobeyed. It was possible that the property had become enmeshed in one of the many inheritance troubles so common in a country where no one seems to prepare for death. It was a miracle, we all understood, that Nestor had left a will.
I find the slip of paper with Stelios’s and Anna’s mobile numbers on it and pick up the phone, hesitating about which one of them to call. I choose Anna.
She answers sleepily, and I realize it is quite early in the morning. I hear a man’s voice murmuring beside her, and she sighs before repeating her question.
“Neh?”
“Sorry to wake you up, Anna. It’s me. Callie.”
“Ela. Come.”
“Should I call back later?”
“No, no. What’s up?”
“Maki has a car, right?”
“Yes.”
“How would you guys like to drive out into the country?”
“What for?”
I can’t believe I’m asking people I don’t really know to help me on this mission. I’m not one of those people who form groups of friends all at once—at least, I haven’t been until this trip. My tendency is to start with one person, sidling up to him with my loneliness and comparing notes. The groups, if they come at all, come along with him. In Boston, my friends are all Jonah’s friends. A thought flashes: If we end it, I will lose them too.
I take a deep breath and explain to Anna about the farm, without mentioning the issue of the refugees. I cast it as an exploration, a Treasure Hunt of our own devising. The weather seems mild enough, I venture, to bring a picnic.
“Have you been outside?”
“No.”
“It’s freezing,” she says. “Wait.”
I hear murmuring that grows distinct enough for me to identify Stelios, Andreas, and Maki. She comes back to the phone.
“Pact! Meet you at Plateia Olgas in about an hour. We’ll bring food.”
Kolokotronis is deserted as I walk down toward the square. I was right about the weather, and Anna was being cold-blooded. February is almost over, and the air is moist and soft. I have clipped my hair up in the back to feel the air on my neck. I am wearing a close-fitting collared blouse with long sleeves and a long placket. Tucked into my jeans, it is sleek enough to make me look almost not American.
When I reach the corner of Maizonos and Kolokotronis, I see huge Maki standing by a red Renault that barely reaches his waist.
“You are a very funny man,” I call across the street.
“I try.”
The other three are already in the car, complaining about the cold. Stelios sticks his head out the passenger window, looks me in the eye, and grins.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” I tell him.
“A quest for a mysterious stranger from a foreign land,” he intones. “At least I think that’s what Anna said.”
“Shortest legs!” Andreas says. “You get the middle.”
When I climb into the back with Anna and Andreas, they squeeze against me, making a show of how uncomfortable they are.
“Where is this place?” Maki asks, as he pulls out.
“I don’t exactly know.”
But I know we need to head out of the city toward the northeast along the edge of the gulf and then probably cut in toward the foothills of Panachaïko. Maki turns the car onto a large street that I soon recognize as Korinthou. I can see the old house up ahead on the left and I lean forward, twisting sideways to watch it as we pass. I catch a glimpse of Undershirt Man’s scooter locked to the front rail.
“What’s that place?” Anna asks.
“That’s my family’s old house.”
“Your family’s, as in, they own it?”
“Not now. A long time ago. Before the war.”
Maki whistles from the driver’s seat.
“Stelios, you didn’t tell us she was an heiress.”
“I told you about her uncle’s stuff.” He turns back and gestures at me, palms up in explanation.
“Yeah, an old man’s junk. But this is a big old house,” Maki says.
“She comes from money,” Stelios says.
“What’s your family name again?” Maki asks, catching my eye in the rearview mirror.
“Notaris,” Stelios answers.
Maki tilts his head, searching. He shakes it.
“Nope. Still never heard of them.”
“That’s because your family’s so damned poor, maláka,” Andreas says, shoving Maki’s seat forward.
The real reason he doesn’t know the name is that the Notaris raisin business disappeared well before I was born, sometime around when my grandparents moved into that little house with the walled-in garden in the back.
I sit quietly as the others haggle over the best way to get clear of the ferryboat terminal and the construction for the Rio-Antirio Bridge. As we approach the area, I can see the piers striding across the gulf like platforms for a giant trapeze. When the bridge is finished in one or two years, white cables will form a web over the water.
We have reached an area that is less thickly settled when I see a familiar name on a road sign: PERIVOLI.
“There,” I shout, pointing. “Perivoli. I think that’s it.”
Maki turns off the road onto an unlined stretch of faded asphalt.
“I really have no idea,” I say.
“Doesn’t matter.”
This area reminds me of the outskirts of Athens, scattered with houses in various stages of completion, topped with uprights of rebar and odds and ends of furniture and appliances. Here, as there, the homes seem makeshift, provisional, as if the universal belief in these neighborhoods is that something better will come along. Either that or the money with which to build it.
“We’re looking for an orchard, right?” says Stelios.
“Orchards,” I say. “Plural.”
“Oh, plural,” Andreas singsongs, giving me a push.
“Maki, go that way,” Stelios says after a while, pointing to the left.
The road turns to dirt and I begin to wonder if we haven’t found the farm after all. I remember hearing about the horse-drawn carriage my family drove down dirt roads to get to the farm, as recently as wartime. Maki pulls the car over and cranks up the emergency brake.
“What?” I say, leaning forward.
“Look.”
The road ends at a chicken-wire fence, behind which is the back of a large cement-block building, a warehouse of some sort. Up ahead and to the left are posts topped with metal signs that face the other way.
“But look over there,” says Stelios.
He tugs me farther forward so I can look past him out his window. I see nothing except a field with tall blond grass and a group of cypresses on the uphill side. It’s quite lovely, actually, but it’s not my family’s farm.
We all get out of the car and stand looking around us at the warehouse, the distant mountain, and the field. Now that we’re here, I want to keep looking for the farm, hoping that some scrap of orchard remains like this tiny patch of tall grass.
“It’s probably all gone now,” Andreas says. “Redistributed from the one to the many.”
I smile at him but can’t tell if he is joking.
“More like sold off in tiny pieces for less and less money,” I say.
He shrugs and walks to the back of the car, where he pulls a shopping bag from the trunk. Anna fishes two bottles of wine from the well where the spare tire should be.
“Let’s go. Aren’t you starved?”
Andreas hands me the bag and tugs a blanket from the trunk. Now I see that they have brought bread and cheese and oranges.
“There are chocolates in there too,” Anna says.
I walk behind the others, watching their dark figures stride through the grass, their red-beaded bracelets peeking out from their sleeves as their arms extend. For some reason, I want to turn back. Perhaps because the contrast of their clothes against the wheat-colored grass makes them seem sinister, or perhaps because our dealings today are robbed of either drink or the wantonness of Carnival. In the sober light of day, these are strangers to me, and there is no clear reason why I should trust them.
“I can carry that,” Maki says. I had not counted him, and now he comes up behind me and smiles, taking the bag from my hand. He is so genial that my worries fade.
Anna spreads the blanket out and it floats above the ground, a blue-patterned square suspended on the stalks of grass. I sit down on it, feeling a slight descent onto the dirt. The untrodden stalks rise up around us, hiding us completely from anyone’s view. I think of the houses the aunts and Nestor used to play in somewhere very near here: toy houses carved out of fields of trifílli—a very tall strain of clover.
“This place is perfect for Carnival,” I say.
“You could screw for days and no one wou
ld see you,” says Stelios.
I lie on my stomach. Beside me, Anna rolls over onto her back and Stelios wraps his hand around her waist where her shirt has risen up. I pick at a chunk of bread before me on the blanket.
“It’s nice here,” Anna says after a while. “What if this turns out to be where your farm was, after all,” she muses, “and we’re lying where the stables used to be or something.”
“I hope not,” Maki says, twisting away from the blanket in mock revulsion.
“Do you think it could have been here?” Stelios asks.
“I really don’t know. I only know it from stories and pictures. I’m pretty sure it’s a big farm. We employed a lot of people, apparently.”
“How long had it been in your family before your grandfather’s time?” Andreas asks, sitting up.
“I don’t know.”
“And how did they make the money to establish it? Where did the fortune come from?”
“Raisins, I guess. I’m not sure.”
“See?” He slaps the blanket with a dull thud. “Typical rich irresponsibility. Failure even to understand the connections of their wealth to someone else’s work, someone else’s labor. The connection to all those people you employed.”
“You’re joking, right?” I look around, smiling. “He’s got the Marxist thing down pat.”
But Andreas is sitting up now. “Do you suppose your grandfather gave them a fair wage?”
“Andreas, knock it off,” Stelios says in a voice muffled by Anna’s neck.
“Why should we soften the truth for her? Just because she’s not from here?”
“She’s our guest,” says Maki.
“She’s from the most capitalist culture in the world,” says Anna dreamily, as if her words are not intended as insult.
The Clover House Page 13