The Clover House (6 page)

“So who is your
fiancé
?” Stelios asks, exaggerating the French accent.

“Jonah.”

Stelios and Anna look at each other, murmuring Jonah’s name and searching for the Greek equivalent.

“In the Bible,” I say. “With the whale.”

“Ah.”

I brace myself for the next question—when is the wedding—but the bus is crossing over the Corinth Canal and, though the new highway makes it hard to see, Stelios and Anna turn to look for the channel through the window.

“Behold Peloponnesos!” Stelios announces to the whole bus. We have crossed from Attica to the square-shaped landmass near whose northwestern corner Patras sits.

The highway drops one lane, and then another. The bus moves to the right, straddling the solid white line that marks the breakdown lane. Speeding cars and motorcycles pass us, pinching in as traffic flies by on the other side. This is the main road to one of the country’s largest cities, and it is an undivided two-lane highway.

The people in the front rows of the bus are singing a song about the Carnival.

“You should come with us, Callie,” Anna says. “I’m the only woman with these
men
.”

“Where?”

“The Carnival!”

I shake my head.

“I have work to do. My uncle was a big collector. There’s lots of stuff to go through.”

“You’re going to want to take a break. Let me call you.”

“You just met me.”

“That’s what Carnival’s for: making new friends. What’s your mobile?”

“I don’t have one. Not here.”

Anna groans.

“Your cousin’s number?”

Aliki’s number comes back to me in the musical chant I memorized as a child when the house belonged to my aunt Thalia and my uncle Demetris.

“Two, three, eleven. Forty-four, seven.”

Anna enters the number into her phone.

“Done.”

Dusk falls and my eyes begin to close, even though it is only nine-thirty in the morning in Boston. Jonah will be at his desk, looking for his chance to grab the morning’s second coffee.

“I’m falling asleep,” I tell Anna.

“Sleep now. There’s no time for sleep once you get to
Karnavali
.”

As I drift off, I think about the fact that, though I have been in the country for just a few hours, I have already made friends on my own, and the heaviness of my American consonants is beginning to disappear. I have the absurd thought that Nestor will be proud of me.

I wake up to find the bus at a stoplight and I realize I’ve been asleep for more than an hour. We are surrounded by traffic—motorcycles, cars, scooters—and the street is decorated with lights and streamers. Stelios and Anna and their friends are singing again, pushing toward the doors at the front, and the driver is telling them to get back to their seats. Outside, I can hear not just the horns and revving of the street but the hum of a crowd and of different kinds of music coming
from every direction. When the bus starts up again, everyone at the front stumbles in the aisle and joins in a loud cheer. Stelios comes back down the aisle, velvet hat pushed low on his head, and falls into the seat. He calls someone on his cellphone.

“Hey,
maláka
! Where are you, you wanker? Get your sorry ass down to the bus station! We have arrived!” This last he shouts to the entire bus.

The bus stops at the station with a hiss of air brakes, and we all gather up our bags and push toward the door. Or, rather, the others push, and I let myself be nudged along. All my earlier enthusiasm is fading now as I step down into the bustle of the station, down into my mother’s city.

Anna and Stelios are drawing their jackets tight around them, but to me the air feels balmy, blowing a faint salt aroma from the harbor.

“Callie,” she says, “we’ll call you.”

“All right,” I say, certain that she’ll forget.

“We’ll call you,” Stelios repeats. “Have fun with your inheritance!”

They kiss me on the cheeks and head off. I watch the velvet hat bob through the crowd until it disappears in the dark.

I decide to walk rather than take a taxi to Aliki’s house. This is foolish, I soon realize, because the streets are packed with people going to the various celebrations for Roasting Thursday, and the Carnival has rendered everything unrecognizable. Banners obscure the façades of the boxlike apartment buildings, and strings of lights throw strange shadows on the city’s distinctive colonnaded sidewalks. Every doorway seems to hold a shop whose windows are covered in neon-colored cardboard letters. Motorcycles are chained to every lamppost and door grate. Cars are parked nose-in, many of them over the curb and
resting just feet from a rack of clothes or a table of women’s shoes set up beneath the colonnades. Where is Plateia Olgas, Olga’s Square, where I used to play with Aliki in the mulberry trees? Where are the streets whose small section of Patras’s grid I knew by heart: Riga Ferraiou, Kolokotronis, Maizonos?

People are blowing whistles and shaking tambourines and rattles, and samba music booms from loudspeakers on every corner. It seems that everyone throughout Patras is dancing to the same joyful rhythm. I twist through the dancers, heading in the direction I think is west. It is nearly seven o’clock, and I am sweating beneath my knapsack. My hair is frizzing in the humidity and I imagine I have begun to resemble the mop-headed little girl and teenager of my summers here. Finally, I find Kolokotronis Street and start the last few blocks to Aliki’s apartment on Kanakaris. The air beneath the colonnade is thick with greasy smoke from street grills on which costumed men are turning spits of
souvlaki
and sausage. I shake my head to get the hair out of my eyes, and the scent of grease blows across my face.

I am hungry, and I think of stopping for a
souvlaki
, but I know I will be in Aliki’s kitchen in a moment or two. She will take me in, feed me, and show me to a well-made bed with ample blankets.

I press the bell by the door and, after a pause, a man’s voice comes over the intercom as the buzzer sounds.

“Get up here,
maláka
, we’re all starving.”
Maláka:
the Greek man’s term of insult and endearment.

“Wait,” I say. I wedge the door open with my foot and strain to shout backward into the intercom. “It’s me. It’s Calliope.”

The intercom goes dead, so I go into the lobby and toward the two elevators at the back. It is as if I never left—never
stopped riding the elevators with Aliki during the siesta, to the consternation of Mario, the superintendent; never stopped coming back from the Plateia with a comic book and standing on tiptoes by the intercom; never stopped falling into Thalia’s open arms when the elevator let me out on her floor for the first time each summer. Nothing has changed except that this is Aliki’s house, now that widowed Thalia lives with her never-married sister, Sophia. I swing my arm up in the perfect arc to press the call button, and I tug the heavy metal door open and step aside with exactly the right timing. My body fits this place just so, with ease and grace, the way it fits against the hard planes of Jonah’s hips.

There is noise and cigarette smoke coming from an open door at the end of the hall. Through it, I can see Aliki’s living room and beyond into the dining room, where a group of adults and children is standing around the carved walnut table that used to be Thalia’s. The rest of the furniture that I can see is light and airy: blond-wood chairs, an ash sideboard, and a beige canvas couch. It was a good apartment decades ago, when Aliki’s father bought it on the earnings from his taverna, and it’s a good apartment still.

Aliki comes out of the kitchen with a platter, sees me, and gasps.

“Calliope!
Ré
, Nikos,” she says, “it’s Calliope.”

She puts the platter down on a side table and embraces me, then holds me out in front of her to take a closer look. As she studies my face and body, she gives me a look that is both welcoming and cataloging, taking stock. I can tell Aliki sees not only the passage of time but traces of America on me. I dress in what passes as stylish for a WASP-y private school: small earrings, medium heels, and layered tops. I wear my hair long and straight with feathered bangs, and my jeans and sweater,
though slim, are just a shade looser and more rugged than those of the women I have seen today.

“You must be exhausted,” Aliki says, and I laugh, suddenly aware of how true this is.

A large man has come over to stand beside Aliki and I recognize Nikos, whom she married when she was only twenty-four. She takes his arm.

“How good is her Greek?” he says quietly to Aliki.

“Pretty good,” I whisper, leaning forward.

Aliki tugs his arm.

“Sorry,” he says, then adds to Aliki, “It’s been so long, I forgot.” He turns to me again. “It’s good to see you, cousin.”

He kisses me on the cheeks and I can feel the stubble on his face. He is dark and tall; his face is almost perfectly round, with round eyes and a double chin. Standing beside him, Aliki looks tiny. I see now that she is wearing an apron and that Nikos is wearing slippers, while she is in shoes.

“Do you know it’s been almost ten years, Paki?”

“Five,” I say, as if that will make it better.

“We missed you last time,” Nikos says. “Weren’t you supposed to stay with us?”

I look at Aliki. I shouldn’t blame Nikos for not knowing the whole story.

“You know I couldn’t stay in Patras.”

“I know.”

“Not after what she said to me.”

“I know, Paki.” Aliki puts her hand on my arm.

Nikos looks from me to his wife and back again, then shrugs.

“You’ll tell me what I need to know when I need to know.”

Aliki smiles and rubs her hand up and down my arm briskly, as if erasing the troubling past.

“Demetra,” she calls, “come see your aunt Calliope.”

Three girls wander over, two looking curious, the third guarded. Aliki pulls the third girl forward.

“This is Demetra. She turned nine last week.”

Demetra was named after her grandfather Demetris, who was always busy at his taverna but whom I remember as a kindly figure, redolent of the kitchen. We would stop sometimes at his place for lunch on beach days, and he would bring us wedges of juicy watermelon or heaping plates of fried anchovies that we would eat whole. Demetra is tall, like her father, and I hardly have to lean down to kiss her. I wish her happy birthday and glance over at the dining room, where the other adults are talking loudly.

“You hungry?” Nikos says. “
Tsiknopempti
. We all eat meat.”

I want to tell him that I know all about
Tsiknopempti
—as of this afternoon—and that he doesn’t need to revert to idiot’s Greek, but I am too tired.

Aliki leads me into the dining room and introduces me to the two other couples: Marina and Phillipos, Lena and Elias, and their collective children, one boy and two girls.

“Here,” she says, and drags her chair to the corner, pulling a heavy armchair to the head of the table for me.

“You don’t have to move,” I say.

“No, no.” She opens a drawer in the sideboard and pulls out a place setting. “You’re the guest of honor,” she says, as she slides the heavy silver into position on the tablecloth.

It’s my aunt Thalia’s silver; I remember it from special occasions when we were little. I smile at the others around the table and realize everyone else has knives and forks with bright red Bakelite handles.

After a brief silence while Aliki takes her new seat, we all begin passing platters of meat and bottles of red wine.

“Nikos caught this,” Aliki says, as she hands me a platter of some sort of poultry.

“Caught it?”

“She means I killed it,” Nikos says, “but she doesn’t like to say that. Daughter of a taverna owner and she doesn’t want to know where the food comes from. Who wants some Mavrodaphne?” he adds, brandishing a bottle of the local vintage.

“I’ll make an exception,” Elias says, and leans toward me. “Avoid the stuff if you can, Calliope. It should never be drunk unless—”

“It should never be drunk, period,” I say. The wine is cloyingly sweet and has always given me a blinding headache.

“Oh, so you’ve been to Greece often?” asks Marina.

“Most of my life, for the summers.” I glance at Aliki, though it’s not her job to confirm this.

“Calliope and I were great summer playmates,” Aliki says. “Every day, it was the two of us with my mother and Sophia buzzing around us. Imagine, Marina, a little swarm of women.”

“Your parents sent you alone?” Marina asks.

Aliki looks at me.

“Her mother came too,” she says.

“She just didn’t buzz quite like the other two.” I laugh, and so do Marina and the others.

“What do you do for work, cousin? I can’t remember.” This is Nikos. He’s smiling, as if he’s playing some sort of game with me.

I think of simply translating my title—Assistant Director of Development—but then explain, “I raise money for a school.”

“What do you mean?” asks Phillipos.

“I identify wealthy people and ask them to contribute money to a school.”

Nikos raises his eyebrows. “You mean you beg rich people for money.”

“Nikos! Calliope is tired,” Aliki says. She is trying to protect me, but only because she finds the idea of asking wealthy people for money a shade distasteful.

“Yes,” I say. “You could put it that way.”

“Like the Arsakeion,
ré
, Nikos,” Aliki says, naming the old Athens girls’ school founded by one family’s donation.

The meal winds down and Aliki begins to clear the dishes as the children, who have been coming and going all through dinner, scramble off again toward Demetra’s room. Nikos pushes his chair back from the table and lights a cigarette.

“Let me help,” I say, but Aliki presses my shoulder.

“Sit. You’ve traveled far today, Calliope.” She takes a load of plates into the kitchen.

“Besides,” Nikos says, “guest of honor.”

Marina follows Aliki with an empty platter in each hand.

“What do we have for dessert?” Nikos asks when they return.

“Karythopita,”
she says.