We scatter his ashes in Trouville, off a pier where Anna used to count boats as a little girl. He hadn’t specified a place in his will, just “in the sea.” For some reason I remember the joke he once told using a tea bag. The missile that takes off by a miracle, out of sheer poetry, without any fuel, and flutters back down to our hands as ash. I close my eyes so as not to see Stamatis vanishing. I’m still not sure whether or not I believe in a God. When Anna and I used to talk about the power organized religion exercises over the masses, we were never holding an urn full of ashes that a short while before were an actual human being, with a beard, glasses, and boisterous laugh—ashes that a short while before were her father.
“Listen, we need slogans that reflect our era. That whole ‘Bread, education, freedom’ thing is old news: we’ve seen for ourselves how public education can destroy a perfectly healthy mind. As for the association of freedom with bread, these days we have all the freedom we want to die of starvation.”
It’s been a month since Stamatis died and Anna won’t let me go home to Athens. This whole time I’ve been wearing her clothes, which are all too small for me; I struggle each morning to fit my breats into one of her bras. At first it was because she wanted help with various bureaucratic, practical matters. Now she wants for the two of us to sit and read her father’s unfinished book about anarchist thought. All these years she was living in the same apartment with him, but it turns out she barely knew anything about his political beliefs. In a recess in the wall behind his bed she finds a complete run of Provo, a magazine put out in the mid-1960s by the Dutch anarchist organization of that name. She flips through them, then starts to read more carefully, almost angrily, trying to crack the code, to find some “message.”
“What message?” I ask. “Your dad was writing a book, it’s called research.”
“But why didn’t he ever talk to me about it? You think he was . . . you know, mixed up in something?”
“Anna, don’t be ridiculous, he was writing the book right in front of your eyes. He wasn’t hiding anything from you.”
“Are you saying it’s my fault for not taking an interest?”
She cries at the drop of a hat. Because she burnt the toast, because she has to wait in line at the bank, because she thinks I’m implying that she treated Stamatis with indifference.
“I’m sure he was involved in something,” she says, wiping the tears from her eyes.
“Well, if so, it’s the kind of involvement you should be proud of.”
“You know how I feel about anarcho-autonomists, Maria. They have no discipline, and no political vision. They reject power but don’t put forward any kind of just solution of their own.”
“What on earth does justice mean, Anna? You sound like a mayor, or a minister of parliament.”
She frowns at me, then turns back to the manuscript. Every now and then she lifts her head and says something as if thinking out loud: “The Black Panthers were replicating the Maoist Marxism of the third world? Give me a break!” She loses it completely when her father starts to analyze the 1952 public debate between Camus and Sartre in a manner that supports anarcho-syndicalist ideas, which, he contends, are “the only way out between the nihilism of the bourgeoisie and the arbitrary actions of the socialist system.”
“But the leftist intellectuals all sided with Sartre back then!” she shouts, stomping her foot on the floor. “It was enough for them that the French Communist Party had the support of the working class. Stamatis always considered Stalinism a necessary evil, even after the invasion of Hungary. I don’t understand what changed!”
Everything, everything changed. Even the weather. The Parisian summer slips in through the windows. Anna sits in Stamatis’s armchair with the manuscript in her lap, biting her nails. I open the curtains, she closes them again. But the sunlight still sneaks in, lighting her from behind as if she were a Madonna in a fresco, which of course would make her mad, since she despises religion. Her white eyebrow, the dimple in her chin: a Madonna who’s angry at her painter. At her father.
“What do you say, should we go to an island this summer?”
Anna raises her head and looks at me as if I’ve said something vulgar.
Every so often some of her friends from the collective come by. One brings a couple of tomatoes, another a bottle of wine. Beatrice, a girl with a high forehead and sunken eyes, brings roses, which she proceeds to crush into the tablecloth, in a message of consolation and militancy, the way Frida Kahlo did when she first met Trotsky. But Beatrice is no Kahlo, and Anna no Trotsky.
In the newspapers we read about Papandreou’s open-heart surgery, about Koskotas’s conviction. Such sickness and decay, and I’m here strolling down Parisian avenues? I want to go back to Athens, to reality. I say as much to Anna.
“We’ve got a whole house to ourselves, merde! It’s our childhood dream come true. Why do you want to leave?”
Because if dreams don’t come true when you dream them, they might as well never come true.
1989 is a red-letter year for us all. For Anna because she finds the political movement that suits her best—the green movement, the fight to protect nature and the environment. She abandons hard-core communism, returns to art, organizes happenings in Paris involving the spontaneous planting of trees, and of course gets mad when I don’t go to help her. For Antigone because 1989 sees the formation of a new party, Synaspismos, the Coalition of the Left. For my parents because they finally buy their plot on Aegina; they plant a palm tree to mark the boundary of their own private Africa. For Aunt Amalia because she goes completely and utterly mad: she hears voices coming from the cooking hood, men saying all kinds of filthy things, and she laughs and laughs. For Kayo because he’s been chosen to play a shyster in some low-budget film.
As for me, after the parliamentary elections in June and the formation of an interim government with its project of anti-corruption “catharsis” to clean up the political sphere, I finally have a good idea: I build a metal suitcase with lots of little compartments, load it up with cleaning fluid, Brillo pads, dust cloths, latex gloves, and transform myself into a cleaning lady. I ring doorbells and buzzers, tell whoever answers that I’m doing a performance piece called Catharsis, and that I’m offering to clean their bathrooms and kitchens for free. Most of the people I encounter have no idea what performance art is, or conceptual art: they assume I’m crazy and slam the door in my face. The ones who accept my services insist on treating me to something, or on giving me a tip. I throw myself into the scrubbing of sinks and toilets. My hands smell of bleach and latex. A few newspaper columnists mention my piece, I do some interviews, and journalists start to write stupid stuff about the rebirth of political art. One day I ring a bell and the man in the house calls to his wife, “Come quick, Eleni, it’s the girl we saw on TV! She came to clean our house!”
No idea lasts long in 1989, in all that madness, in the desperate desire for publicity. Catharsis ends then and there, on that couple’s doorstep: I turn on my heel and walk away, leaving the man and his Eleni high and dry. I wander aimlessly through the streets, until eventually I set my suitcase down on the ground and sit on it, just like when I was nine years old and the police came and brought me home. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if they showed up again and told me to move on, that I’m disturbing the peace. The only way not to disturb the peace is to shut yourself up in your house. To listen to the voices coming from the cooking hood.
Merde, I need to find another Ikeja, before I start hearing voices, too.
Seven
I push off the covers. I couldn’t possibly get out of bed. My legs are logs, the room is dark, the time impossible to gauge. Am I still in the cave? Is that Gwendolyn pushing open the bedroom door to peer in, or the burglar with the stocking over his head, or the Albanian’s ghost?
“Are you sleeping?” Kayo whispers.
What a stupid question. If you’re sleeping you can’t answer; if you’re awake, what’s the point of asking?
“You’re sleeping,” he says.
I shut my eyes. I apparently haven’t outgrown my childish stubbornness. That’s what happens when a person grows up alongside someone like Anna. Kayo tiptoes over to the bed, pulls the covers up to my chin and tucks me in. Then he leaves the room, half closing the door behind him, and I’m once again wrapped in darkness. I hear voices coming from the kitchen, someone coughs, there’s a sound of cups clinking. People are drinking coffee. But that bit of information doesn’t help: it could be morning, afternoon, evening. All I know is that it’s a time of day when people aren’t usually asleep. Which places me automatically in the category of the sick.
That cough again. A smoker’s cough. Anna’s here.
•
She’s perched on the kitchen table, the way Kyria Kontomina used to sit on her desk when we were back in high school. She’s wearing high-heeled pumps with ankle straps and a forest green, eighties-style satin dress with puff sleeves. You’d think she was on her way out to one of the disco clubs on the Aegina of our youth. She’s smoking, and blowing smoke rings into the air that break one by one on the ceiling. Kayo, Kosmas, Irini, and Irini’s younger sister Fiona are sitting in a circle around her, like rapt schoolchildren. Anna doesn’t even need words—she speaks with her hands, her eyes, her mouth. Lesson One from Little Wizard: how to hold a magic wand. Half the battle with magic tricks is creating the proper ambiance.
Suddenly Anna hops down from the table. “Oh, my, I remember that blanket!”
I’m standing in the doorway of the kitchen wrapped in the blanket I had as a girl, the one with red flowers. Anna and I used to make tents with it, or play house under it, or whatever else crossed our minds. Later we would wrap it around our legs for warmth, since if you sit still for too long, if you get lost in labyrinthine conversations about the meaning of life, you end up getting cold.
“Are you okay?” Kosmas asks.
“She just fell, it was like . . .” says Irini.
Kayo comes over and rubs my back. “How do you feel?”
“Better.”
I’m not really sure, though, I have nothing to compare my current state to. I shuffle out of the kitchen and over to the mirror in the hall, which reflects the following image: a green wig with bangs, slightly askew. Bone-white skin. Purple circles under my eyes. As for the eyes themselves, they’re blurry, nearly overflowing with inexplicable tears. I look like a Martian that missed its spaceship. Or a ghost.
“Don’t worry, you’re still Miss Inner Beauty,” Anna says. She’s standing behind me. Even in heels, she knows how to glide soundlessly on her magic carpet.
“Should I fix you something to eat?” Irini calls from the kitchen.
“No, I want to go out.”
“I know a place with decent food,” Anna says. “Let’s all go, we need to get something in your stomach.”
Today she’s driving Malouhos’s Jeep, which is big enough for us all. Anna and Kayo are up front, I’m in back with Irini and Kosmas.
“I’ve never ridden in a Jeep before,” Irini says.
“And you never will again,” I say. “Life is hard.”
“I’ll take you for a ride whenever you like,” Anna promises, adjusting the mirror. She wants to keep an eye on me. Apparently she still worries when I’m tired, or angry, or acting unpredictably.
“Why are you here, anyhow?” I ask.
“I was passing by and decided to ring the bell. Sixth sense, I guess.”
“You live way out in Ekali and you were just passing by?”
“I’m pretty sure we still have freedom of movement in this country.”
Irini is looking at me questioningly. Someday, if I manage to figure out the why and the how, I’ll write a novel. I’ll tell the whole story, all that we lived through, from my point of view. I’ll let Anna have the title, though: Why I Killed My Best Friend. If you don’t feel like reading it, the cover should be enough, you can skip the story: one friend kills another, big deal, human beings are killing one another every day all over the world. Sometimes, to give a logical structure to these conflicts, they fight body to body, hand to hand with the police. Or they fall down the stairs in a metro station without even having been pushed. They’ll even fight themselves, if there’s no other worthy opponent around.
They bleed, therefore they exist, as Camus would say.
The car in front of ours brakes abruptly. A toy dog on the dashboard bobs its head frantically as if agreeing with me, as if signing my proclamation on behalf of the inanimate world.
“Hold on tight,” Anna shouts.
We hold on.
We drive toward Syntagma, slipping between cars as if down a playground slide. The Grande Bretagne is to our right, Parliament to our left. As we look for a place to park, they tell me what happened: I fell down the stairs in the station at Syntagma, just before the demonstration hit its stride. Irini and Kayo carried me outside and laid me down on the grass.
“I don’t know what happened, I just couldn’t breathe. It felt like claustrophobia, or a panic attack.”
“Maybe you saw blood?” Anna asks, holding the restaurant door open for me to go inside. “Maria faints whenever she sees blood.”
“What happened next?” I say, ignoring her.
After that the demonstration erupted into a spontaneous party. Everyone loved the whistles, they were acting like little kids. The police beat up two teenagers they caught spray-painting something on the platform wall. They handcuffed a gypsy, who spat at them. They confiscated as many whistles as they could. They carried one half-crazed old woman to a police van, with her shouting the whole time, “You call yourselves men?”
“The question is, what’s the long-term effect of all that?” Anna asks.
“The conviction that we’re strong. That’s not enough for you?” Kosmas says.
“And the conviction that we can participate in social life without being controlled by bureaucrats or career politicians,” Irini adds.
“Sure, fine, they let you blow off some steam for an afternoon,” Anna says. “Look over there, though.” A gypsy kid has come into the restaurant, and the waiter runs over to shoo him out. “Just look at how one outcast treats another. We cut off our nose to spite our face.”
“Why would you call the waiter an outcast?” Fiona asks.
“The kid isn’t allowed to join the meal, and the waiter isn’t, either. They’re both here to serve us,” Anna says. “Over here, kid!”
The gypsy kid dodges the waiter and comes over to our table. He’s carrying a bunch of carnations whose stems are mere stubs wrapped in aluminum foil. Probably stolen from cemetery wreaths.
“Do you want a carnation?” the boy asks.
“What do you want?” Anna says.
“What’s that?” he says, motioning to her plate with his chin.
“Zucchini.”
“Can I have some?” the boy asks.
Anna motions for him to sit beside her and feeds him a bite from her fork. Her three young acolytes stare at her, mouths hanging open. Yes, the woman in the evening gown is a bit eccentric. One bite for her, one for the gypsy kid.
“I have to go,” the boy says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He runs to the door, stops short, comes back and offers her a mutilated carnation. Anna, protectress of the scorned. A local Frida Kahlo. People at nearby tables are looking at us in annoyance.
“Look at that,” Anna says. “We destroyed the illusion of a safe, bourgeois life. And now they’ve lost their appetites.”
Is it really that easy to charm people? Irini and Kostas trust her already, they’re opening up and telling her about their lives, their families, their dreams. Fiona, who’s usually bored by our meetings, is gazing at her with eyes like saucers. Even Kayo is enjoying himself. He leans over and whispers to me: “She’s an eternal nineteen-year-old.” Nineteen? More like nine. Your character is more or less formed by the time you’re nine.
I’m beginning to understand
the mechanism behind her charm: she does something insane, something out of keeping with her beauty, her image, the way she dresses. Then she uses that conspicuous act like a blanket: she wraps herself up in it, becomes that act. In the eyes of others, Anna is an allegory for generosity, courage, resourcefulness. She does things that occur to other people only fleetingly, enacts scenarios from the realm of instinct. She charms, she torments, she curses, she kills.
Yes, kills.
The face of the Albanian shapes itself for an instant in the bowl of soup before me. His harsh cheekbones flicker in and out of visibility between floating carrots. The broth has the metallic taste of blood. Cave. Metro. Prison. A place that’s underground, dark, deep. My temples grow numb, my tongue is dry.
“Anna, we have to talk about it.”
“About what?” Anna says.
“That thing. It’s suffocating me. I don’t know how you can live with it. I—”
She grabs me by the arm and pinches me, hard. “Let’s go outside, merde!” Her voice breaks into a sudden coughing fit. She practically spits her vowels.
“Take a deep breath!” she shrieks when we’re out in the pedestrian street outside the restaurant.
I can’t breathe at all.
She rubs my hands between hers. I feel a bit better. We smoke, pacing up and down. The lighted shop windows along the street look like the mouths of whales. All kinds of things seem to have washed up in there: torn clothing, hanging threads, tattered linings like the one from Aunt Amalia’s coat. It’s back in fashion. Meta-punk.
“It was an accident, get it into your head. An ac-ci-dent!” Anna says. “We’ve gone over this a thousand times.”
“You may have, with your shrink, maybe you’re over it now. But I just dug a hole in my head, dug a hole, do you understand? Inside me! And now it’s all seeping out. It’s coming back out, all of it! Like an overstuffed suitcase that just pops open on its own, you know?”
Why I Killed My Best Friend Page 18
