The Clover House

by Henriette Lazaridis Power

  The following day, after Thalia had dragged Nestor and Sophia home to cadge some candy from Irini, Clio was lying on her back inside her house, resting her head on her hands and looking up at the way the sunlight showed in stripes through the roof. She became aware of a faint rasping in the clover beside her. She turned her head toward the sound and stiffened at the sight of a man looking through her window. He had a small head and wore a bluish shirt with a frayed collar. A cloth cap drooped over his eyes. She held her breath, not daring to move. It seemed to her that eye contact was what he wanted, so she forced herself to look away and stare at the beaten clover on the floor. Moving only one hand, she reached down and tugged at the hem of her skirt, which had hiked up during her rest.

  In her mind, Clio ran through the dangers her parents had been warning of all summer: There were tramps about, and the beggars were getting bolder. This man must be a tramp; he was not a farmhand she recognized. Again, she heard the clover hissing and felt a change in the light of the house. From the corner of her eye, she saw that the man was crouching in the doorway of the clover house now, completely blocking the rectangle sized for a child to pass through. She clenched her fists, realizing with the first real fear in her life that she had nothing to protect herself with.

  Without thinking, she sprang up into a squat. “Get out!” she shouted, her neck muscles straining. For an instant, she saw a kind of scornful surprise on the man’s face, and then he turned and slipped into the field.

  She fell back onto the floor of the house, wiping away a sudden flow of tears. When she had collected herself, she ran back to the farmhouse, not minding the twigs and brambles that caught at her clothes. Twisting to look behind her, she saw only fields and sky, empty and unmoving. She found her sisters and brother in the kitchen, peeling strips of cooled caramel syrup from the marble counter.

  “Where have you been? You’re all out of breath,” Sophia said.

  “The cow was looking strange again. I ran from the barn.”

  They laughed and rolled the candy strips up into little barrels.

  “It’s not funny,” Clio snapped.

  “Yes, it is,” said Thalia. She licked her fingers one by one. “It was funny when the cow chased Irini.”

  “Well, it’s not funny now.” Clio looked down at the rolls of candy, realizing she had shown too much emotion.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Nestor murmured.

  She wheeled on him. “I heard someone in the clover field. A stranger.”

  The children stopped what they were doing and stared at her. She narrowed her eyes, determined not to say anything more. Still staring, Sophia began to nod.

  “Me too,” she said. “I heard some strange noises by the edge of the pasture a couple of days ago.”

  “Like twigs snapping. I heard it when I was sitting in my house today,” said Thalia.

  Nestor slowly peeled another strip of candy from the counter.

  “Me too,” he said, as he rolled it up into a cylinder. “Someone was moving around in the clover field.” He held the candy up to admire it. “It didn’t look like anyone we know.”

  “You dope.” Sophia shoved him. “You didn’t see anybody!”

  “I did too.” He put the candy down and took on a serious look. “And he looked scary. Dangerous.”

  Clio waited, not knowing what to say but anxious to reclaim the story she had paid for in fear. She flushed suddenly at the thought of how she had screamed at the man, crouching like an animal.

  Thalia took Nestor by the arm. “I wonder if there were more than one. He probably wasn’t alone.”

  “They could be trying to steal food,” Nestor said, “or the tractor.”

  “Or the cow,” Sophia laughed.

  “I know who they are,” Clio jumped in finally. She didn’t raise her voice but spoke firmly enough to cut the others off. “I saw them.”

  Sophia squinted at her, but Clio concentrated on the widening eyes of Thalia and Nestor.

  “You saw them?”

  “What did they look like?”

  “Who are they?”

  Clio took a deep breath, feeling her lungs fill and push her rib cage out, and watched for the precise instant when the others’ anticipation was almost ready to dissolve into impatience.

  “They’re spies,” she said, exhaling as the other children drew their breath sharply in, unable to forget the disdain with which the man had looked at her.

  She elaborated, explaining that she had seen enough of these people at the edges of the farm to suspect that they had formed a network and established a system of message posts throughout the property. She speculated on the meaning of certain coded flashes of light at night and convinced the others that traitors were planning an attack on the harbor later in the summer.

  “If I had known you had all seen them too,” she added, “I would have said something earlier.”

  A few days later, Clio’s father suggested they gather fireflies again for an experiment.

  “Come on, Nestor.” Leonidas waved at the boy. “Go on and get the jars for us.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  This surprised everyone, since Nestor was always first to seize whatever equipment was necessary for an exploration.

  “Nestor,” Urania said, “do as you’re told.”

  Clio braced herself for what she suspected was coming.

  “It’s dark now. What about the spies?”

  “What spies?” her father laughed, and began to head into the kitchen to get the jars himself.

  “The ones by the clover houses.”

  The girls had been moving toward him to keep him quiet, but now they backed away quickly, as if by reversing their movement they could undo their brother’s speech. Leonidas turned back into the room.

  “What clover houses?”

  And Nestor told him.

  Clio watched her father’s mouth set and the mustache become a straight bar across his lip as he listened. She saw with dismay that her spy story had given her brother exactly the ingredients with which to finish the job the intruder had started. Nestor drew himself up straighter with each answer to his father’s questions, as if he fancied himself to be defending the farmhouse with his information. Her father seemed to be under no such illusion. He summoned Yannis to come with a flashlight and frog-marched Nestor through the dark pastures to the clover field. The others followed, feeling their way in the night while Yannis swept the flashlight beam in front.

  They stopped in a loose circle before the invisible door of the clover village, and their father took the flashlight from Yannis, raking the clover for a hint of the way in.

  “Go on. Where’s the door?”

  “There isn’t one,” Nestor sniveled, and Leonidas pushed him forward by the shoulders.

  “It’s not his fault,” Sophia said. “It was all of us. We do it every summer.”

  Clio’s father stopped listening and plunged through the clover. The glow of his flashlight moved like a giant firefly through the hidden houses. Nestor was sobbing now, and Sophia and Thalia wept quietly. Clio wept too, but her thoughts were stuck on the image of the strange man whose real presence had led to the undoing of their game. What if she had drawn him to the houses somehow? What if her nighttime forays had attracted him to the field in the first place? It was her need to be alone that had started everything. Had she not found satisfaction in that first discovery of a sky full of watching stars, she would never have returned for a second visit, and the man would never have gotten the sense that she would be there, available for him somehow.

  Clio’s father ordered Yannis to cut the clover field down. Her mother told the children this was a way to keep them safe from the prying eyes of destitute strangers. The mowing would serve as a message to any men wandering the countryside that this particular farm could offer them no harbor.

  It was a large enough operation that Yannis required farmhands to help mow as well as to tie up the bales and store them in the barn f
or silage. He left a message at the taverna in the nearest village, and word spread among the gaunt beggars who gathered each day behind the kitchen for scraps of food. The next morning, six men, their clothes draped loosely over their frames, appeared in the farmyard. One of them held a scythe at his side. The rest would borrow tools from Yannis’s supply in the barn. For three days, under Yannis’s watch, these men chopped the swaying clover down to a plain of stubble, their scythes flashing in the sun. At the end of each day’s work, they huddled in the farmyard so Irini could feed them chunks of bread and bowls of stewed vegetables, but then Yannis dispersed them, making sure they understood they were not to linger on the premises.

  As soon as the mowing began, Nestor, Sophia, and Thalia moved on to other pastimes on the other side of the farm, but Clio couldn’t stay away. She climbed her apricot tree and turned toward the pasture, watching the slow advance of the cutting line and the bales tossed in the air onto the cart. Climbing the tree seemed childish to her, in a way that had not seemed childish at all just a week ago, but she could think of no better way to see and not be seen. For she couldn’t be sure that the stranger—her stranger, as she had come to think of him despite herself—was not among them. Peering through the leaves at the men moving in the distance, she chose one man whose silhouette most resembled the lanky shape of her stranger and followed him up and down the rows. She wasn’t sure why, perhaps to catch him in an attempt to come looking for her. Whenever he straightened his back to gaze around him, she remembered the moment her stranger had moved into the child-sized doorway of the clover house. She remembered his frayed collar and the dark edge of his cap and imagined his grimy fingers tugging on the cap to remove it in the presence of his superiors. But most of all, she remembered that instant in which she had seen a flash of scorn cross his face, and she wondered, with some indignation, what he had seen to be scornful of.

  9

  Callie

  Monday

  Today I can call Constantopoulos, the lawyer, and make some progress on what I have actually come here to do. I get the slip of paper my mother gave me on my first day here and dial the number.

  “Embros.” Proceed: another commanding invitation on the telephone.

  I tell him who I am and what I need. He sounds as though he has never heard of my case before.

  “It’s about Nestor Notaris,” I say. “I am his niece from Boston.”

  “Ah, Notaris,” he says, emphasizing the name. “Miss Notaris—”

  “Brown.”

  “Sorry?”

  “It’s Brown. My father was American.”

  “So, Miss Brown.” He pronounces it Braoun. “I’m happy to help you, and I can have the document drawn up by the end of the week for you to sign.”

  “The end of the week! I thought the document was already drawn up. My uncle died almost two weeks ago.”

  “On February eighteenth, actually. Ten days ago.”

  He is doing this to prove to me that he is efficient. While we have been on the phone, he has scrambled for my uncle’s file and has just managed to read the date of death in time to quote it to me officiously.

  “If it is possible,” I say sweetly, remembering Aliki’s warning about fickle lawyers, “it would be very useful to have the document drawn up before too long so that I don’t have to change my airline ticket.”

  He agrees to try.

  I go to an Internet café on the near end of Korinthou Street and check email for the first time since last Wednesday. There is a message from Jonah. My scalp buzzes with adrenaline, but I force myself to save his for last. I delete the spam and read through the messages from work—about prospects to pursue, upcoming events in the annual campaign, letters to check. I skim through the messages from certain friends. There is one from Marcus that includes a picture, taken just yesterday, of all the rugby guys covered in snow on the Esplanade. Jonah’s rounded cheeks are bright red in the cold, and he seems to be shouting a joke at the photographer. I don’t know how I expected Jonah to look, but somehow I didn’t expect him to look this contented. I’m not even sure which I’d prefer—for him to be destroyed with pining for me, or for him to be the happy, relaxed man I might be coming back to.

  I click on Jonah’s message. It’s brief and, to my embarrassment, makes tears form in my eyes. I love you, he writes, even though I don’t think you always know what that means—to me or to you. There’s no need to respond. He sent the email days ago, before our phone call, knowing I might not read it for a while. But then, there is nothing time-sensitive about what he has said. And that is, I suppose, part of the point: He’s telling me there is no expiration date on his emotions. I can’t deny that the idea terrifies and excites me, both. In the end, this is what I write to him. I just got your email today. I love you too. But I don’t know yet whether that’s enough for either of us.

  The rest of the morning I spend alone in Nestor’s house, working through the boxes and listening to a soft rain tapping on the black and white tiles of the back garden. It’s afternoon when I open the door and let the smell of moist dirt seep into the house. All during my childhood, the aroma of rain-dampened dirt could send the aunts into speechless rapture. Even for me, who grew up with plenty of rain and damp; even I have always drunk in the smell. As if the aroma sent me, like them, back to summer afternoons on the farm, when the rain would soak the dirt beneath the almond trees.

  I pull Nestor’s chair out from the desk and turn it so that it faces the garden. I try to do nothing but notice—notice the furniture, the garden, the room, the papers, the homemade gadgets on the desk. This place will change completely in a few short weeks, and I want to remember it as it is now, as it used to be, almost my whole life. After a while, I rise to close the garden door against the chill.

  Beyond the yellow lamplight falling on the desk, I am surrounded by darkness in which I can make out the towerlike shapes of Nestor’s boxes and books, like crenellations on a fortification. I switch on the half-domed light on the ceiling and wander back to Nestor’s things, not quite ready to plunge into another box but not wanting to leave just yet either.

  I think about the simple fact of refugees on the farm. I know why my mother never told me about them: because to acknowledge the presence of someone else in that idyll would diminish or destroy the childish pleasure she could take, even now, in her memories of the place. Admitting a stranger would be like admitting an adult into a children’s game.

  My mother began with so much. Her father a raisin exporter with warehouses by the docks. Her mother a socialite, accomplished in the arts and in the practice of philanthropy. Enough beauty to go around the family, parents and children, so that when the aunts walked out in the evenings during their teenage years, they gathered boys and young men in a growing wake. And property that sustained and demonstrated their wealth and that could have been passed down through the generations to preserve it. We didn’t lack for comfort when I was growing up either. Two cars in the garage, overseas airfare, college tuition. The ingredients were all there, provided by my father’s engineering salary. But by then there was such poverty in my mother’s spirit that her life sucked the joy out of my father’s spirit too. Long before he finally left for good, he had vowed never to return to Greece.

  I think of Andreas’s politics from yesterday, his accusation that families like mine had inflicted harm on others. What exactly is a family like mine? We never became one of the little dynasties that rule Greek life. We were no Gounaris, or Niarchos, or Karamanlis or Papandreou. The Notaris name means nothing in Patras now. When my family had wealth, they did what they could; they were generous. My grandparents offered the refugees on the farm shelter and food. Yes, in exchange for work, according to my mother’s new story. But Andreas turned what could have been a fair and simple exchange into exploitation.

  Andreas would have me believe that the wealthy families choke off the routes to success for the rest of Greece. The truth is that there is plenty of grabbing and snatching to go a
round today among rich and poor alike. And the government is just as eager to buy patronage from the shopkeeper as it is from the yacht owner. When Nestor used to sigh over preferments given to his politically aligned fellow teachers, or when Nikos fumed years ago about his competitor’s attempts to block his new business, I was listening. Wealthy families are not the problem in Greece. The problem is a lack of generosity, a poverty of spirit like my mother’s.

  Outside I hear the hiss of tires on wet asphalt. It is six o’clock, and people are heading out after their long siesta. Soon phones will start to ring again, voices will be raised, television sets turned up. With the “Auld Lang Syne” key in my hand, I lock up and head home.

  “It’s just us tonight,” Aliki announces when I greet her in the kitchen. “Nikos is at a dinner for work, and Demetra is spending the night at a friend’s house to work on their kites for Clean Monday.”

  “They make them themselves?”

  “People sell them on the Sunday, but we make them. Tradition.”

  I pull out a chair from the small round table, grunting a little at the stiffness in my neck and shoulders.

  “Tired?”

  “Yes,” I groan.

  “You must be drowning in Nestor’s life.”

  Aliki pours us each a glass of wine and dribbles some olive oil into a skillet that she sets on the stove. Moving with habits learned from her father, she beats eggs for an omelet while the sweet, rich smell of the heated oil sails up from the pan. I am caught in a rapid succession of memories, all centered on that earthy fragrance: french fries eaten at Demetris’s taverna, eggs scrambled with tomatoes that Thalia would make when we were tired, the bread we dredged through the juices at the bottom of the salad bowl. Aliki’s thoughts are elsewhere.