Then she shouldn’t smoke so much. What am I, her nurse? I’m tired of dealing with Anna’s problems. “Spring can be tricky,” I say. “It’s so easy to catch cold when the weather changes.”
Aristomenis shuts off the engine and looks at me with big, sad eyes. “I’m worried it might be something more than just spring. I’m worried she might be self-destructing.”
Everyone’s always worried about Anna. Something about her still shouts, Look out, merde! I’m not like other people!
“Look out!” Kayo shouts in the darkness. He’s lying on the sofa and I almost sit down on him. I don’t turn on the light. I take off my shoes the way Anna did, trying to toss them onto the rug with a similar flair. I light a cigarette.
“What’s wrong with you? You’re smoking now?”
“I saw Anna and her husband today.”
Kayo, me, and the glowing tip of my cigarette. A silent agreement: he doesn’t ask any questions, just waits for me to start.
“They have a nice house.”
“I had no doubt.”
“And they’ve planned a bourgeois revolution.”
“I wouldn’t put anything past Anna. What’s he like?”
“Strange, smart. Sort of paranoid.”
I tell him the whole story, more or less.
“Just don’t get sucked in again,” Kayo says.
“I don’t have time for any of that. I’ve wasted too many years of my life that way.”
“So what exactly are you doing?”
“I’m curious, that’s all.”
“Curiosity killed the cat,” he says in English. Usually Kayo and I speak French to one another. Like all French people, he sounds funny when he speaks in English.
“Where is the cat, anyhow?”
“She had another freak-out. She scratched me on the arm.”
I turn on the light. There’s a long line of dried blood on his arm. I bring cotton balls and hydrogen peroxide from the bathroom.
“I don’t understand. We’ve had our heads bashed in by the police more times than I can count and you still can’t take care of a wound?”
“I was waiting for you to come home,” he says.
All things considered, it seems sort of unlikely that he’ll actually move out. I lean my head on his shoulder, rest my palm on the scratch on his arm, and the loneliness fades.
I’m wearing jeans and sneakers so I can move quickly. My shoulder bag is stuffed with bright green wigs, goggles and confetti. Kayo has the proclamations. Irini and the group with the yellow wigs will be waiting for us on the platform in Syntagma. The plan is to have three in each car, so there are enough of us to fill the whole train. Music right away so that people don’t get scared. We don’t have instruments, we’ll just hand out whistles. We also brought rain sticks, which in a pinch can serve as batons to fight the police. The Bears will give the rhythm with lids from pots and pans. At Syntagma we’ll all head toward the exit, to meet Kosmas and the Reds. From there we’ll see how things go.
Kayo winks at me as he steps into his car, with two of Irini and Kosmas’s classmates. I board my car, too, with two kids from Exit. As soon as the doors close, we pass out our proclamations and whistles. With our goggles and wigs on, suddenly we’re the Greens. Kind of ironic, if you consider that green is the color of the socialist party, and I used to be in love with a PASOK youth organizer.
The first few seconds are crucial. There are always more young people out in the afternoon, but that’s no guarantee of success. Things could go either way. “Are you a theater troupe?” asks one woman who looks like Aunt Amalia toward the end of her life. The lining of her coat is torn, like Amalia’s was. “It’s not theater,” I reply, gently squeezing her wrist, “it’s life!”
“The metro is ours!” the kids shout. “It belongs to us all. Athens belongs to us! Say no to a dry life!”
It was Kayo’s idea, he’s crazy about rain. Dry life on the one hand, rain sticks on the other. “A cataclysm of joy,” is what he called it. The idea for the wigs came to us in a kind of free association from that—it seemed important to have color involved, since people always associate anarchists with black.
The rhythm works its magic. We shake our rain sticks and impromptu sambas break out all over the train. From neighboring cars, the Bears accompany us with spoons and pot lids. The sound is deafening, pleasantly primitive. We keep passing out whistles. A few girls in office attire start laughing; the mood is contagious. A window breaks somewhere nearby and a woman cries, “My God!” but her voice is drowned out by rhythmic clapping from the rest of the crowd.
Most people are on our side, I can now say with certainty. Of course some are pale with fear, mouths hanging open. I never understood why people freak out when a window breaks. As if it were the most precious, irreplaceable thing.
The train doors don’t open at the next station. The people waiting on the platform stare at us through the windows as if we were aliens. “We’re for real! We’re for real!” shout the kids in the next car, and the new slogan makes its way from car to car until the whole train is shuddering with the noise. A few terrified older passengers are reading the proclamation. The train is moving now, and doesn’t stop at the next station, either. It’s clear: they’re bringing us straight to our destination, the last stop, just a little bit faster. By now the platforms in the stations we’re passing through are completely empty. At the fifth station we bypass there are policemen lining the platform. We open the windows and douse them in confetti.
One woman pounds on the windows with her fists, gesticulating at the policemen in despair. “Don’t expect them to do anything,” I say to her. “We’re not doing anything wrong. Here, read this!” I hand her Irini’s text about the homeless. My favorite part is this: A girl was walking absentmindedly through Syntagma Square, probably headed home after work, loaded down with grocery bags. She almost walked straight into a group of homeless people. She jumped back with an expression of disgust on her face. Our greatest fear is absolute poverty. Today people with no jobs and no homes are suddenly appearing in front of us: they’re not hidden anymore, they’re not ghosts, and they’re not creatures out of our worst nightmares. They’re real people. And since they continue to exist, they can free us from our greatest fear: that we’ll cease to exist if we ever lose our jobs. The state actively contributes to the creation of that illusion. It hides the homeless, pushes them away, considers them a miasma. Restaurant owners chase beggars away, just as people used to chase away lepers. Let the homeless sleep in the metro. Or else give them a home.
The woman is tugging at my sleeve, waving the proclamation in my face. She’s trying to tell me something, but I can’t hear her over the din.
“What?” I ask, cocking an ear.
“What I said, love—I don’t know how to read.”
She speaks with an accent. Ten to one she’s Albanian.
I’m gliding along on a magic carpet. The crowd is pushing me. Even if I refused to walk, all these elbows and hands would get me to the escalator somehow. The whistles are blasting, teenagers are jumping up and down in place as if it were a concert. It must be nice, but I can’t tell, can’t judge. I’m gripping the woman’s hand, the same hand that just now tugged at my sleeve. I can hardly breathe.
“Where are we going, love?”
Maybe it’s the word she uses: love. Her difficulty pronouncing the “l.” The simplicity of the phrase, “I don’t know how to read.” It’s getting harder and harder for me to breathe. The stairs quiver before me. People’s faces, too. The sound of the whistles is distorted now, almost demonic in my ears. I feel hemmed in, claustrophobic. I have to take care of this woman and then get out of here. But where will I go?
Anna, the Albanian’s face still haunts me. I see it behind the reflective guards the riot police wear over their eyes. I see it in the bathroom sink when I’m washing my face. On the proclamations we write about equality and justice. In pots of boiling water. Even in the toilet bowl. I flush
twice, three times to make it disappear. How did Camus put it in our charter? Direct Action means having the passion necessary to embody your emotions, to dramatize your political thought. Well, I’ve embodied my emotions completely: I’m trembling all over. My heart doesn’t fit in its usual place. There’s no one here to bring me back to myself. Only this woman, a stranger. She reaches into her purse to take something out and cuts her hand on a slip of paper; a drop of blood springs from her fingertip. That’s all it takes. I faint.
“What happened?” asks a girl with bright green eyes and a yellow wig. A giant cricket. She shakes me, undoes the top button of my shirt. It’s all over, she’s going to eat me.
“Maria, can you hear me?” She slaps my face once, twice. “Can you hear me? Maria? It’s Irini!”
I’m falling into Daphne’s drawing. Running across brown fields, plashing through mud, headed for the cave. My feet sink deeper and deeper into the mud. I can’t breathe at all. I’m not a witch, not even an apprentice witch. I’m swimming in slow motion through a bog, my head the only part of me that’s above water, and I can barely keep it up. I’m beginning to understand: my head is the mouth of the cave. My body isn’t just numb, it’s made of stone.
The cave is me.
Six
I keep having this recurring nightmare: university qualification exams, essay question. Topic: In our contemporary era, interpersonal relationships are complex. Evaluate the importance of true friendship in this context. Everyone else has turned in their papers; the room is empty except for me, still sitting before a blank page. My left arm is completely paralyzed, as if it were back in the cast from the third grade. I attempt to scribble something with my right hand. Kyria Fotaki, our literature teacher, is standing over me, looking at her watch. “Your time is up, Papamavrou.” She’s right, it is.
Ever since Anna left for the École des Beaux Arts in Paris I kill entire days watching television—sitcoms, MTV, commercials. I don’t read, don’t draw, barely leave the house. I just smoke and change channels manically, leaving nail-marks on the plastic buttons of the remote control. I scarf down chips and chocolate bars, get fat, start to resemble my mother. I’m hoping not to enter the next phase, when you give yourself over to God’s care, cross yourself all the time and hang incense over your bed. Deep down, I actually do believe that someone, something, will come to my rescue.
And once again, that someone is Andreas Papandreou. He comes into the apartment, grabs me by the hair and gives me the push I need to reenter the world. By all rights I should have joined PASOK out of gratitude for that alone.
It’s March and the news bursts like a bomb: Papandreou is proposing Christos Sartzetakis for president. Sartzetakis is still a household name, two decades after he served as prosecutor in the case of Grigoris Lambropoulos’s assassination, and Papandreou’s decision creates an unlikely coalition of anti-Karamanlis forces. Two birds with one stone: Papandreou diffuses President Karamanlis’s power while also challenging the excessive power exercised by the office of the president itself. The political media have a field day. I start to actually follow the news again, to take an interest in current affairs. I may be ideologically opposed to what Papandreou is doing, but it’s still brilliant. The issue is power. Who will have the upper hand.
Antigone calls me to curse him up and down over the phone. It’s the first time we’ve spoken since Anna left. Antigone is back in the trenches: committees for the abolition of the death penalty, for political prisoners in Cuba and Zaire, for human rights. She doesn’t ask how I am, just vents her anger at Papandreou, calling him a cynical utopianist. I hold the receiver away from my ear—she’s taken it to heart and is shouting with rage. I’m pretending to listen, but I’m actually thinking my own thoughts. Such as: if I were an administration in need of internal change and Anna were the chief executive, how would I get her out of the way? By finding a Sartzetakis of my own, of course. I wouldn’t give her any warning, I’d let her think she’s still in charge. I’d just dig a hole and watch with satisfaction and joy as she fell right in. After all, she deserves it. The whole family has been lying to me all these years. Studies in Paris, sure. She packed her bags, told Stamatis to get the attic room ready, and at the last minute told me, “Don’t come to the airport. It’ll be too painful, merde!” In my head I had imagined it all: art school, chouquettes, boys, rallies, Les Rita Mitsouko concerts. Anna destroyed it all with a single kick.
We should both go to art school so we’ll be together all day . . .
And where is she now? As far away as she could get. She writes me heartfelt letters plastered with stickers that say Touche pas á mon pote, to prove what a good activist she is. She comes home for Christmas with a grab bag of phony presents under her arm: Anaïs Anaïs perfume, Milan Kundera’s new novel, a de Kooning poster from the Pompidou, stale chouquettes from the neighborhood bakery. She’s wearing ’50s black-framed glasses, though she’s not the least bit nearsighted, a Les Négresses Vertes pin on her jacket, and pointy second-hand shoes, which must be all the rage over there. And, of course, dried paint on her hands: she’s the very image of an art student. I, meanwhile, didn’t get high enough scores on my exams to enter any department. I really did turn in a blank sheet for my essay question.
I start to hang out at Brutus, a taverna near Alexandras Avenue where I meet writers, students from the law department, and a depressed young theater director with awful teeth. That’s my university: impromptu lectures on philosophy and aesthetics over a bottle of wine. Shortly before the parliamentary elections in June, I meet Diana, a painter who teaches in the School of Fine Arts. She’s around forty, skinny, with beautiful almond eyes. From her warm handshake and the look of encouragement in her eye, I know I’ve hit the jackpot.
I’ve found my Sartzetakis.
“Come and audit my class starting in September,” Diana says. “You can take your exams again next year.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“There’s nothing to think about.”
She takes me with her to the home of the new rector of the art school. I bring my portfolio, all of my old drawings, starting with the era of burning dresses. One of two things happens: either the rector and his wife actually like my work, or they can’t bear to tell me how terrible it is, out of a French sense of courtesy. Their family just moved back from Paris, and they eat backwards, like Anna’s family—main course first, then salad. The rector looks like a cross between Modigliani and one of his sculptures: curly hair falling into his face, but thin and very tall; he stoops instinctively to pass through doorways. His wife is an architect, or used to be. Now she mostly seems wrapped up in her husband’s career, though she doesn’t want to admit it, even to herself. Their kids are teenagers, at an age when they could care less about anyone who’s already graduated from high school. They all throw in French words without even meaning to, creating a little colony of Parisian sentiment around the dinner table. I’ve drunk a fair bit and at some point I start to cry. The rector’s wife puts an arm around me. “You’re a true artist, crying at the drop of a hat!” Well, not at the drop of a hat. A backwards meal with leftists who lived in exile in France, with works by the nouveaux réalistes on the walls, is more or less a compendium of everything I’ve repressed.
Diana drives me home that night. My parents are on Aegina for the weekend—this year they’re renting the Room of Sighs, as I call it after Angelos and my big disappointment in love. Aegina reminds them of Ikeja, they dream of buying property there. Diana wants to come up and see the big monochromes I’ve been painting. She examines them eagerly, then examines my chest even more eagerly. “Maria, they’re wonderful!” Is she referring to my paintings or my breasts? I couldn’t care less. By now I’ve started to put up a conscious fight “for even better days,” as Papandreou’s slogan would have it. I guess I’m a cynical utopianist, too.
If any members of the administration saw me slathering paint on my monochromes like an overzealous housepainter, they’d su
rely use me as a negative example in their austerity slogans. Look at Papamavrou, consuming more than she produces, gobbling up five kilos of paint at a single sitting, then letting the water run for hours, supposedly to clean her brushes. The epitome of the thoughtless and unscrupulous Greek citizen.
But there’s good and bad waste. Instead of destroying the remote control with my nails, I let my hands guide my way to more creative acts—sometimes on paper, sometimes on Diana’s body.
“Just don’t tell me you’re a lesbian now!” She’s shrieking straight into my ear and looks as if she might start crying at any moment. We’re sitting at the bar at Pieros’s, shouting over the music. It’s fitting, really: Depeche Mode, “Don’t You Want Me.”
“I’m not a lesbian, Anna. Stop making generalizations, please.”
“Are you crazy? Completely crazy? Do you want to destroy your life?”
“Are you implying that anyone with sexual preferences different from yours is destroying her life? You’ve been forming some really progressive ideas in Paris, haven’t you? So much for your Touche pas á mon pote.”
Both of us are pretty drunk, and we’ve taken some of those pills that are doing the rounds. We more or less let loose on one another. The others rush to pull us apart, though we manage to get some nasty scratching in first. Anna pinches me hard on the forearm and I slap her with the back of my hand.
“I’ll have to put you two in handcuffs,” Diana tries to joke.
“Wouldn’t you like that, you filthy, second-rate artist!” Anna shouts.
“Look who’s talking! All you are is a spoiled, vulgar little girl who lives to exploit her friends. That’s exactly what you are!”
Anna takes a step back. She’s sobbing, spittle dribbling down her chin. For the first time in her life she’s ugly, frightening.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about. Maria is my best friend! She’s . . . she’s . . .”
Why I Killed My Best Friend Page 14
