Why I Killed My Best Friend

by Amanda Michalopoulou

  I’m shaking all over.

  Anna turns on her heel and leaves the bar at a run.

  “If you go after her, we’re through,” Diana says.

  But I’m already headed for the door.

  “You deserve whatever you get!” Diana shouts at my back as I go.

  We’re nineteen, but you’d think we were nine. Lying on our backs on the beach, Anna and I are digging holes in the sand with our heels, chattering away, moving from one topic to the next as if we’d never been apart, as if our friendship had never wavered. She tells me about Urlich, a German of Iranian descent, and then about some bass player who’s always high and pays absolutely no attention to her. I tell her about the rector and his wife.

  “Oh, Maria, will you introduce me to them?” she asks.

  “Maybe, we’ll see.”

  I’m afraid she’ll charm them, like she charms everyone. But I can’t just live in fear, can I? Besides, Anna doesn’t just take, she gives, too. Thanks to her irrepressible sociability, we strike up a conversation with Christophoros one night on the stairs outside Pieros’s bar. Christophoros is a bit older than us, he just finished his masters in chemistry. He talks about practical things, and uses verbs that indicate action and energy: I went, I pulled, I carried. He has a biting sense of humor and a slight hunch that makes you think his embrace must be warm and capacious. Up until now I’ve treated my relationships like stairs, one leading to the next. I wonder if Christophoros might be a landing, a place where I can at last pause and look out at the world.

  •

  Diana won’t speak to me anymore, so I unlearn my role as audience member. But she did plant her seed: the rector and his wife invite me to dinner one warm evening in September. “Bring a few friends,” they say. I bring Christophoros and Anna. Anna doesn’t waste any time: before they serve the coq au vin and salad with chèvre, she’s got her drawings spread out on the dining room table. Abstract expressionism, intense experimentation with color. Now I understand why she brought me that de Kooning poster.

  “Well, if a painting isn’t showing a story from the Bible, or some familiar scene, we all might as well be Australian aboriginals,” Christophoros says, scratching his head.

  Anna makes a face.

  The rector opens a bottle of wine. “I like people who admit their ignorance,” he says.

  “Who accept the relativity of knowledge, you mean,” Christophoros corrects him, and the two of them laugh. Our hosts have taken a shine to Christophoros. He doesn’t know anything about contemporary art, but he has a kind of natural charm. Anna has something to offer them, too: memories of their beloved France. They talk about Guy Debord and Nicos Poulantzas, about Cornelius Castoriades, about her father, Stamatis. Anna still hasn’t quite figured out whose side she’s on, whose ideas she believes in. Names and theories get mixed up together in her speech like a huge salad, with so many flavors that you can’t be quite sure what you’re eating. Is she an orthodox Communist? Is she with the situationists and against party politics? Would she align herself with Orgapolis, a new branch of the Marxist-Leninist UCFML?

  “What do you think of all this?” the rector asks me.

  “All I want is to keep my distance from the logic of parties and power.” I might have added: I’ve had more encounters and run-ins with power than I’d like, I’ve lived it in my skin, with Anna’s pinches.

  “You can’t do that—you’ll end up an apolitical being,” Anna says. For the time being I cross the situationists and Orgapolis off the list.

  “Watch out, Anna,” I reply, “you sound like any other cog in the party machine.”

  “You have to critique the system, to not give it a moment’s peace.”

  “But you’re speaking the language of the system itself! It’s as if you’re conceding that there is no other language.” I attack the coq au vin with my knife and a piece of skin slips off my plate.

  Perhaps I’m a romantic anarchist after all.

  The rector’s wife and I are clearing the table.

  “What you guys were saying earlier,” she murmurs, “it doesn’t really hold anymore.”

  “What doesn’t hold?”

  “Politics is dead. I don’t say that with any sense of nostalgia. Everyone just goes to work, comes home exhausted at night, doesn’t want to know anything.”

  “Not everyone.”

  “Everyone!”

  “What did you think of Anna’s work?” I ask her, to change the subject. It makes me sad when people reject the possibility of a revolution in our day.

  “Her technique is good, but she has no vision of her own. You, on the other hand, have vision, but could care less about technique.”

  “Should I take that as a compliment?”

  “It’s the truth, Maria. Take some art lessons, don’t let yourself get lazy. And take the entrance exams for the school.”

  “I don’t believe in art school.”

  “Neither do I. But it’ll give you a technical foundation that you can throw out later on if you want to. Right now you need it, the same way you need the illusion of a political vision. If you get too old, you’ll build up your defenses, maybe go for some psychoanalysis, and it’ll all be over. At that point no one will be able to teach you anything.”

  Merde. She’s taken it personally.

  Under the influence of Christophoros and the rector’s wife, I become a good girl again. I stop watching television entirely, cut down on cigarettes, and start taking art lessons from a guy named Terzis, a painter who drinks so much that he’s destroyed his liver. He’s an odd bird who cancels classes whenever there are anti-government workers’ strikes downtown. I can’t imagine him marching in his combat boots, with his expressionless rat’s eyes and his freakish hair.

  “I don’t march,” he says. “Not all problems can be solved through peaceful means.” That makes more sense—I can certainly imagine him throwing Molotov cocktails. But Terzis clams up and won’t say more. “Okay, time to work.”

  During the summer of 1986 I take placement exams for the School of Fine Arts, and Christophoros starts his military service. He’s used up all of his deferments. Our parting is dramatic; I make him five mix tapes full of songs about breakups and reunions. Could we possibly live together forever? Could a year of monogamy turn into a lifetime of monogamy? They send him to basic training at a camp by the Evros River, near the border with Turkey, and he calls me, nerves totally shot, after waiting in line with a hundred other conscripts to use the phone. His voice on the other end of the line keeps breaking up. I go out for beers with Terzis. The froth in the glass is unbearably sad. One thing leads to another and before I know it I’m lying naked beside him on his disgusting mattress on the floor. All I remember is his long, yellowed fingers on my body.

  “What’s his name?” Anna asks the next day on the phone.

  “I call him Terzis. That’s his last name, though, I don’t actually know his first name. Someone called him Camus.”

  “Camus? Like the writer?”

  “I have no idea. You can’t imagine how ashamed of myself I am! How can I be in love with Christophoros but sleep with Terzis?”

  “You’re ashamed of yourself because that’s how you’ve been taught to feel. You’ve been taught that a woman who sleeps with lots of men is easy, while a man who sleeps with lots of women is experienced. You can’t enjoy sex as a purely physical experience, you have to get emotionally involved, otherwise you’re a bad girl. Am I wrong?”

  “No, you’re right.”

  “And all those men who go out to clubs every night and screw whoever they can find aren’t whores? Besides, at the end of the day, what’s wrong with being a whore? Your body is yours to do what you want with, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So stop feeling guilty and get yourself over here so we can screw all of Paris!” She holds nothing sacred. I’ll have to cross orthodox Communist off the list, too.

  Then what’s left?

  Paris glistens in
the sunlight. Anna and I are sitting on her big Indian scarf in our favorite spot at Buttes-Chaumont, eating chèvre sandwiches, just like at our picnic on my sixteenth birthday. Anna can’t stop talking about men, she’s become a sex fiend. She tells me about her one-night stand with one of Basquiat’s lovers, and how sex with bisexuals is amazing because they’ve got such serious identification issues that they practically screw you with their mind.

  “It doesn’t sound like much of a turn-on . . .”

  “Oh, Maria! You have no idea what you’re missing!”

  “Me? Have you forgotten what you put me through back then with Diana?”

  Their place in Paris hasn’t changed a bit. Roman still scrubs the stove as manically as ever. Stamatis still reads in his velvet armchair, a pipe dangling from his mouth. It’s as if not a day has passed since I left. The only difference is that as Anna and I get older, her father starts to behave toward us in an old-fashioned way, as if we were young ladies from another era. “Oh, mademoiselle, welcome,” he says, and kisses my hand. I pull it away; I’m still angry at him. If he’d brought me to Paris as he’d promised, I wouldn’t feel like such a failure.

  That night Anna drags me to a bar where all hell’s broken loose: there are women undressing on barstools, men kissing. Anna elbows her way between two total strangers and signals for me to follow. I’m in no mood for planned debauchery. I head downstairs to the bathroom and literally run right into a tall, dark boy with dreadlocks. We both lose our balance and fall in a heap on the stairs, where we start to laugh uncontrollably.

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  “Kayo,” he answers.

  “Kayo, you smell like Africa.”

  He shoves me away.

  “No, you don’t understand! I was born in Nigeria.” I hug him, sink my nose into his neck and breathe in the smell of Gwendolyn, grilled suya, soil after a tropical rain. Kayo’s eyes tear up—he must be pretty drunk, too. Then he bends down and kisses my hand.

  “Maria!” Anna is standing over me, shouting in Greek: “He’s a complete fag. What’s wrong with you? Can’t you see?”

  Kayo and I, out walking, caught in a sudden August rainstorm. We don’t run for cover, just keep strolling along at the same pace. He likes to open his arms wide, lift his face to the sky and spin around with eyes closed in the middle of the Place de la Bastille. “It’s the only way to really feel the rain,” he says. He’s so beautiful that sometimes I pretend my shoe is untied so I can drop back and admire him for a minute. Heads turn when he passes by. Young people, old people, men, women, children, see in his height, in his velvet eyes, in his full lips an embodiment of pride. It’s not just about beauty: Kayo is a real prince, straight out of a fairytale. He can grant you any three wishes, with one exception—that he sleep with you.

  Like a true gentleman, whenever we cross to the other side of the street he makes sure I’m still walking on the inside. “It’s how my mother taught me,” he says. With him I forget about feminism and equal rights, because he makes me feel not just equal but better. My own obligations, in return, are to let him lean on my shoulder, to talk to him about Africa, about human rights, about Foucault, and to give him backrubs. Sometimes I can’t stand it and give him a kiss on the neck, and Kayo sighs and says, “Oh, my little African,” which only makes the moment more tender, but when I open my lips in search of something more, Kayo says, “Oh, sweetheart, get it into your head.” Get what into my head? His body responds, it’s warm, he’s always touching me. Why doesn’t he at least try, why won’t he take that risk? “There’s no way,” he says. Anna asks around and finds out it’s the first time Kayo is going around with a girl. She tries to analyze it: “Maybe because you’re tall and skinny, and wear pants and have short hair. Forget him, Maria. He wants to turn you into a boy.”

  I cut my hair even shorter and buy a man’s suit. Kayo tells me I look wonderful, asks if I want to submit a portfolio to the modeling agency he works for from time to time.

  “Kayo, I hate fashion, advertising, consumer culture. I’m not doing it for the sake of style, don’t you get it? I’m doing it so I can be with you.”

  I look at myself in the mirror, trying to see what he sees: my cheekbones protrude, you can see all of my ribs individually, like Antigone’s. There are black circles under my eyes. All I eat is fruit, my stomach has closed up entirely. In the space of a month I’ve become a ghost of myself. I found my prince, only he won’t let me up on the horse.

  Kayo is like one of those old-school reporters with connections in every social sphere, from the underworld to upper-echelon government. He finds out when the next Orgapolis meeting is and we go together to a seventh-floor apartment in Ivry. The room has high ceilings and tiny plaster cherubs in the molding. About forty men and women are passing around photocopies. Our connection is Joel, an ex of Kayo’s with eyesight so bad you can barely see his eyes through his coke-bottle glasses. Instead of thinking about politics, I find myself thinking about sex: why him and not me, that sort of thing.

  I glance down at the photocopy in my hand: A political space is the material manifestation of a particular politics. When that politics is exercised by the people, the resulting space lies outside the institutions and operations of the state. It is a free space. State-exercised politics, on the contrary, mutilates and destroys the multiplicity of spaces in order to project a single space, the space of power, of the ruling class. In Stalinist politics the only existing space is the Party. In a parliamentary system it is the state itself. Even the smallest splinter group of the opposition inevitably organizes itself around elections and appearances in the mass media. Its influence is thus limited to whatever crumbs the state throws to those marginalized by the great parliamentary machine. Orgapolis takes its own politics as a starting point; it attempts to foster conditions under which people can think and act in ways that enable us to imagine a true democracy.

  So my hope wasn’t entirely unfounded: there is a space where you can escape power relations. You carve a circle, within which you are free to think as you please, though in a manner no less political. You don’t engage in dialogue with power on its terms, in its space; rather, you cultivate your own. Power still slaps, still pinches—but if you carve that circle, it doesn’t hurt quite as much.

  “Just tell me,” Mom says. Her shrill voice says it all.

  “I got in!” I hold the receiver away from my ear so that Anna can hear too.

  “I lit a candle, I’ll have you know!”

  “Oh, Mom, prayer isn’t enough with a thing like this.”

  “It’s more than enough, young lady. God can do all things.”

  “I really wonder how you came out of a mother like that,” Anna says, after hugging me and saying a few merdes. “Does she know you take to the streets with Molotovs?”

  What about you, Anna? Do you have any idea how it feels to believe in the colonial enterprise and to have to leave Africa because a group of poor blacks, led by a schizophrenic white man, breaks into your house? Because, along with your grandmother’s jewels, not to mention your daughter, they rob you of the thing that’s most important to you in the world—your illusions? Do you have any idea how it feels to be forced to go back to a place you’d hoped never to set foot in again, thousands of kilometers away from fairytales, toga parties, afternoon tea with Mrs. Steedworthy? It’s one thing to pretend you’re English in Ikeja, another to return to Greece in 1976. You don’t speak, just stuff your mouth with food; your storage room is gone, so you pile things up in your mind. At some point you start to overflow; your thyroid goes out of whack. Your life, too.

  Anna and Kayo come to Orly to see me off. Even in this final moment, Kayo won’t kiss me for real, he just squeezes my hand and whispers in my ear, “Oh, my little African.” He promises to keep attending Orgapolis meetings and to send me their proclamations. Did someone there catch his eye? He’s not exactly the type of person to be overcome with passion for political collectives. He’s too self-absorbed to
get involved in the lives of others.

  Anna gives me a packet of chouquettes for the plane. I stare at my shoes to keep from crying. As I walk through passport control I’m afraid I’m saying goodbye to real life, going off into the unknown. I’ve forgotten all about my family back home, forgotten about Christophoros, forgotten that I’m now a student in the School of Fine Arts.

  “Oh, child, what happened to you?” Mom lets out one of her customary little cries.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re skin and bones, I hardly recognize you. And what kind of clothes are those? You look like a tomboy.”

  I shut myself up in my room to escape her complaints. Christophoros asks over the phone: “Don’t you love me anymore?” I hear myself answering woodenly: “There are lots of different kinds of love.” At night in bed, I’m restless. I try to re-discover my vagina—I don’t need a partner; the memory of Kayo, my prince, is enough. The phone rings in the night but by the time I get to it, there’s no one on the line. My mother treats me just as she should, as if I were an unhappy princess out of a fairytale: each morning she brings me my breakfast on a tray, each afternoon she takes it back, untouched. And just as in a fairytale, I only start to eat again, if only bread and jam, when a letter arrives from my prince: My little African, Paris is empty without you. Joel told me at the very last minute about an Orgapolis meeting. I called Anna. We got there late, and when we walked in someone was saying, ‘A real political gathering is intellect in action. Before the gathering, we don’t know what might happen, what will be decided. And we leave a true political gathering stronger and more capable.’ I thought you’d like that. Joel invited some of us back to his house and we dropped LSD. I suddenly saw you, as if in one of those drawings you showed me, wearing clothes that were on fire, with snakes all around, and I was so worried that I called you in the middle of the night, but no one answered. Where are you? When are you coming back?