Why I Killed My Best Friend

by Amanda Michalopoulou

  “Come on in, sit down and tell me about it.”

  “About what?”

  “You seem disappointed.”

  “I’m not disappointed, I’m confused.”

  “Have a kiwi. It’s comfort food.”

  I chew slowly. “It’s ridiculous for me to be running around to protests all the time. I’m afraid of blood. What kind of activist faints at the sight of blood? In the metro the other day, I have no idea what came over me, I just fainted, like an old lady. I’d like to start painting again, but I’m too old for that kind of thing.”

  “Too old?”

  “I’m almost thirty-five, I’m not a kid anymore. Either you really pursue something or you don’t. You can’t just drop things and pick them up again whenever you like.”

  “Who says? Take your friend. Now that she’s found an opening, she’s in all the way. She was raised to care, to offer herself.”

  “To offer herself?”

  Aristomenis tugs on his beard when he’s thinking. He’s shaped his own mental image of Anna, one that’s significantly different from mine. He remembers her in the apartment in Paris, for instance, making soup and coffee for everyone. Once he saw her standing on the steps outside the building, talking to an unshaven man wrapped in a blanket. Aristomenis had been moved by how Anna knelt down so as to be at the same height as the man. She pulled him by the hand, telling him to come in off the street to where it was warm. “They’ll just put me out again,” he said. “Then they’ll have me to reckon with,” Anna had shot back, putting her hands on her hips to show how tough she was. According to his theory, Anna had been born into a house where people were always talking about revolution. When she wanted ice cream as a kid, she would draw a rocket pop and run to her parents, shouting her own version of the rallying cry of the Polytechnic: “Ice cream, education, freedom!” She would be woken up late at night by voices in the living room, the voices of strangers smoking and talking about democracy. She dreamed of being a heroine from the French Revolution, barefoot and in rags, carrying a flag in her hands. She would pick up bits of conversation, terminology, slogans, and then say whatever came into her head, as long as it included the word “equality.” She misinterpreted her father’s political theory because her thinking was superficial, she hadn’t read enough to understand. For Anna, politics was a way of getting attention and love. After Antigone’s death, she withdrew into herself, didn’t give a damn about anyone, as if that circle of love had closed. But she was used to getting involved, to working, organizing. She just needed the right opportunity.

  “How did Antigone die?”

  When she and the CEO parted ways, Antigone went back into action. She was the old, good Antigone again, with an added element: the obstinacy of someone who sacrifices one thing for another that turns out not to be worth the trouble. When she figured out that the CEO didn’t deserve her love, Antigone threw herself back into organizing for all kinds of causes—against nuclear energy, for the rights of political prisoners, for refugees in Rwanda and Kosovo. She wrote texts, organized conferences, and eventually pitched a tent outside the university, as parts of a hunger strike for human rights. Though she was participating under medical supervision, she quickly became entirely dehydrated and suffered a shock to her system. She died in the most romantic way, in a tent in a public square with a drip in her arm.

  Aristomenis shields me from my annoyed comrades who don’t understand why I suddenly want to leave. He says he’ll drop me at the metro station in Kifisia. As we drive, Antigones of various ages pass by my window, bony women with anxious eyes. It’s in style now for women to be tall and skinny, to look withdrawn. Back then Antigone was alone, an anorexic monster of circumstance. She takes shape clearly in my mind: peeling carrots, smoking her Gauloises cigarettes, giving us ballet lessons, telling us: It’s our duty to remember those who sacrificed their lives for us. Now that she sacrificed her own life, in a manner of speaking, her words sound almost prophetic. On the station platform I see yet another Antigone pacing up and down. Sad, distracted, a fur stole wrapped around her neck like a scarf. I take the Super 8 out of my bag, record the way she moves: she sways on her expensive heels, a walking advertisement for an untenable utopia. We’ve written proclamations about this kind of thing—but the Albanian woman in the metro the other day didn’t know how to read. So I’ll try again, to say something in images.

  That night I project the film on the wall of Kayo’s empty room. Black and white calves, pacing back and forth. The woman is on her way to a protest, to her own personal insurrection—only she’s lost her way.

  Eight

  “Look at those bums!”

  Dad is in front of the TV, watching what’s become of the anniversary march at the Athens Polytechnic. Molotov cocktails, fires, overturned police barricades. I feel nauseated. Even televised tear gas makes my eyes sting.

  “If only they would hand them over to me, just for a day!”

  You have one of them right under your nose, Dad. You’re sharing a bowl of pumpkin seeds with her, mumbling “Change the channel,” “Fine,” “No.”

  “I just think of their poor parents,” Mom sighs.

  I’ll just bet she does. I get up and go out onto the balcony. I rest my knee in the hole in the railing, from back when I got my head stuck and the man had to cut through the metal to get me out. You’re a handful, eh? Yes, a handful. More and more of one.

  How is it that sometimes, on starry nights, you move backward in time, and feel as if it was only yesterday when you stuck your head between the bars, when you felt powerless and angry and tried to run away, with two cracked eggs in your suitcase and a head full of Gwendolyn’s proverbs? When a ripe fruit sees an honest person, it falls. Only there’s no ripe fruit anymore, and no honest people, either.

  It’s 1993. PASOK is back in power, the salt is as worm-ridden as it gets. In a few days I’ll be turning twenty-six and I’m not afraid of states of emergency anymore, of political unrest. On the contrary, I’m a person who causes unrest.

  I bleed, therefore I am.

  “Oh, Maria! I’m so glad you guys came.”

  I toss my backpack on the floor, sink my face into her hair and breathe in her new scent—bergamot and cinnamon. As always, Anna is both tart and sweet: she hugs me tightly, but pinches my arm. She kisses Thanos three times, French style. He doesn’t know anything about the French way of greeting and keeps on going, kissing the air after she’s pulled away. Anna is blindingly beautiful at the end of her first communist period. She has on Moroccan leather flip-flops and a see-through dress printed with starfish. Her hair is in a bun, held in place by a pair of chopsticks—a blonde version of Antigone. The famous Thierry, barefoot, is slicing tomatoes at the kitchen table. He’s tall and attractive, an Aryan Kayo with curly hair down to his shoulders. He winks at me and my heart does a backflip. She’s found the best, yet again. In the most beautiful city, in a sun-drenched apartment with half-circle balconies near Buttes-Chaumont. The apartment is all hers now; not even Stamatis’s ghost inhabits it anymore. Where the photograph of Poulantzas used to be, now there’s one of her as a child, at some celebration after the fall of the junta in Greece: the Arc de Triomphe in the background, Anna’s fingers making the victory sign. Unbuttoned pea coat, red cheeks, white eyebrow, dimple in her chin, tortoiseshell barrette in her bangs. The wunderkind of the exiled Greek left.

  One of Anna’s pieces has displaced the poster about the reality of desires. She’s done a whole series: she buys old, romantic landscapes from junk shops—snow-capped peaks, forest streams, houses perched on mountainsides—and alters them with her brush. She adds bits of an anarchist’s city plan, paints in factories or toxic waste, dirties the waters of a lake, ravishes the landscape with acid rain. She’s become a romantic again, just as she was with Angelos. She wants to save nature, like a medieval knight fighting to protect a princess who never expressed the slightest desire to be saved.

  Thierry is a Greenpeace activist. Anna goes wit
h him on missions to save endangered animals, follows him to Kuwait and Venezuela to protest oil spills. She sends me postcards with laconic messages, signed “with love.” But I no longer believe in Anna’s love. What she really wants is to show me how well she’s doing, moving from one revolution to the next—from sexual freedom to communism, and now to her new tree-hugging routine.

  “What’s wrong with that?” Thanos asks when we’ve shut the door of the attic room, which is now the guest room. Anna’s charmed him, too.

  “Neither one of them cares at all about the slaves who work in the fields all day, handling all those toxic chemicals. They swoop in after the fact and act like stars, play the ecological activists, the official protectors of nature.”

  “Aren’t they just doing their job?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying: Anna and Thierry are just doing their job. The two of them are drowning in money, and they spend so much effort trying to hide it.”

  “What would you prefer? For them to give it to you?”

  “They could give it away. Or just spend it without feeling guilty all the time.”

  They painted the apartment themselves, and they remind us of it whenever they can, so we don’t think they’re too bourgeois. They sing the praises of a dirt cheap pizzeria they discovered. After lunch, Anna drags me to a thrift store.

  “Well, are you going to tell me about Thanos?” she says, trying on a red kimono with holes at the elbows.

  What could I possibly tell her about Thanos? He’s a bank teller, the absolute personification of mediocrity. He only goes out on weekends, he lives with his parents, he provides me with the cover I need. If I tell her about Thanos, I’ll have to tell her about Camus, too, about who I really am, what kind of life I lead. For the first time since my locking-myself-in-the-bathroom phase, I have secrets from Anna. Only back then it was a personal revolution. Now I’m fighting for others.

  “He’s good to me,” I say.

  “Goodness never mattered to you, Maria. If anything, I’d say you preferred to be a little bit mistreated, you always wanted the ones who pushed you away . . .”

  “Isn’t it amazing how a person can change?”

  She frowns. “You’re up to something,” she says. “There’s something you’re hiding.”

  I’m hiding it from my parents, from my art school friends, from the police, and you think you’re going to figure it out?

  “I’m bored, Anna, that’s all. My life isn’t as fascinating as yours is.”

  So this is how we’ll live in peace: if you ever start to suspect anything, I’ll just break out the passive-aggressive complaints. I’ve been afraid of her all my life, but it turns out she’s a known quantity. She’s predictable.

  As Gwendolyn would say, a bird doesn’t change its feathers when winter comes.

  “Senegal is amazing,” Thierry says.

  I look up from my pizza. “When did you guys go?”

  We’re eating at the cheap pizzeria, with some French friends of theirs, such colorless people that you’d think Anna and Thierry chose them on purpose, to set off their own personalities, their brilliance, their joy.

  “I went alone, Anna didn’t come. But I came back with Seidu, a Senegalese who was traveling to Europe for the first time, on a scholarship.”

  Anna is shaking with laughter. “Do we need this? Do we need that?”

  It’s apparently a private joke, because Thierry laughs, too. He explains that Seidu was from a remote village in Senegal that didn’t have a supermarket. When they first went to pick up a few things for his apartment in Paris, Seidu completely lost it. He didn’t know what any of the products were, or what they were used for, and kept asking, “Do we need this? Do we need that?” Seidu, they kept saying, how are you going to go to the bathroom without toilet paper, or cook without oil? And Seidu kept walking, hypnotized, down aisles full of carefully arranged goods.

  “Nice joke, guys. It’s so funny, isn’t it, to make fun of people from the third world?” I say, biting angrily into my slice.

  Anna shoots me a piercing glance. “Maria, you don’t get it. Seidu’s better off, not us. He gets aesthetic pleasure from the washing machine!” Thierry explains that Seidu used to spend hours in front of the washing machine, entranced by the centripetal movement as it spun. Thanos finds that extraordinarily amusing, too. I feel like shoving the entire pizza in their faces.

  Anyone who makes fun of Africa is making fun of me.

  We’re dancing tango at a retro café-theater that Thierry and Anna discovered, somewhere in Pigalle. Two drunk prostitutes walk by outside, blowing kisses through the window. Thierry gestures for them to come inside and they lift their skirts in an improvised cancan. Thanos is dancing in place, a bizarre combination of heavy metal and the kalamatiano. I laugh, forget myself, feel normal for a while. But all it takes is for someone’s gaze to linger on me a bit too long for me to freeze in fear. They’re following me. They know.

  Camus says I’ve lost it completely. He practically ordered me to go to Paris for a few days. Sometimes I get so scared I think I might stop breathing. It happens at relatively safe moments, like when we’re putting up posters in the streets. When things get serious, I forget my fear. I concentrate on my arms, my legs, I turn into a machine that’s running, or trampling something, someone.

  “Want to go pee?” Anna says. Her hair is a mess, she’s bright red from dancing, but she’s gorgeous. A tiny vein pulses on her forehead.

  She sits on the toilet, I lean against the wall. Our favorite positions.

  “Thierry wants us to go and live in Africa,” she says dreamily.

  No, merde! Africa is mine!

  “He says if you don’t live where the real problems are, you’re a tourist.”

  “Paris has real problems, too. Unemployment, homelessness, racism . . .”

  “We’re working toward other goals, Maria.”

  “Oh, I forgot, none of that’s in fashion. This year everyone’s wearing aboriginals and ecological disasters.”

  Anna reaches out a hand and pinches me hard on the arm. “I’ll kick you out of the house! You can go and sleep in the metro, with your precious homeless people!”

  “Don’t bother kicking me out, I’ll leave on my own!”

  I rush out into the street. The cold Parisian air stings my face, my hands, as if dozens of Annas are pinching me over and over in the dark.

  “Are you crazy, merde? Come here!”

  She runs after me, catches up, and tosses Thierry’s coat over my shoulders. Her ecological worries have sensitized her to the needs of endangered species—even childhood best friends who, if you leave them for too long without food and water, turn feral.

  •

  We mend our friendship at the kitchen counter with kir royals and stale chouquettes. Thanos and Thierry have gone to bed, the girls are having their own little party. We’re listening to old French songs on Stamatis’s record player. Anna mimics a few moves from our childhood dance routines, from back when we did arabesques and pretended to leave carnations on the graves of students killed at the Polytechnic.

  “Be serious, Anna. We’re not nine anymore.”

  “If you think like that, you’ll age before your time.”

  “Well, I certainly don’t feel all that young these days.”

  “Because you’ve lost your faith in our friendship, that’s why.” Anna hugs me tightly and whispers in my ear, “If you think distance always means separation, you’ll spend your whole life looking for replacements. I for one am tired of looking for replacements. You’re my best friend, and that’s that!”

  “Forever?”

  “Forever!”

  Anna strokes my hair, plants a sloppy kiss on my ear and weaves her fingers through mine. We lie down on the cold kitchen floor, wrapped in one another’s embrace. An entire Buttes-Chaumont, with its gentle slopes and trees, springs up around us.

  Dear Kayo, Paris continues to feel small without you. I miss you incredibly, p
articularly when it rains. I open my arms and pretend you’re by my side. But I’m with Anna. She’s changed again: this year she’s full of love and in a generous mood. A chic, bourgeois leftist. She reads the same books, but interprets them however it suits her. That’s her problem, though, not mine. I can’t live in her shadow anymore. For me, that’s the worst form of captivity. I tear the postcard into pieces. I’m too old for schoolgirl confessions.

  “Come in here so we can do your hair,” Anna calls from the bedroom.

  We’re back in an era of grooming, an acceptance of female beauty. She sits me down in a chair and runs a comb through my hair, as if I were a doll.

  “See that?” she says. “You look good with a bit more volume.” Is she implying that my hair is thin?

  She opens the closet and tells me to choose something.

  “I’ve brought plenty of clothes with me . . .”

  “But I want to give you something.”

  I know these gifts well. They carry a price, she demands emotional sacrifice in return. I have nothing left to give her. My inner world has been flattened, it’s one long row of dusty ruins. I read, think, and do only what aids Direct Action.

  “Please, Maria.”

  Just to shut her up, I grab a black striped button-down.

  “When you wear black you look sadder, more serious,” Anna says.

  But I am sadder, more serious than ever.

  “What exactly is going on with Kayo?”

  She’s on her knees, trying to piece together my torn-up postcard.

  “Anna, I can’t believe you! What right did you have?”

  Fortunately the piece with her name on it is missing. She thinks “the worst form of captivity” refers to my feelings for Kayo. I grudgingly tell her his news: Kayo is living with a much older man in Manhattan, doing lots of drugs, pursuing his dream of being an artist, at least to a point: he goes to galleries, hangs out with artists, but in a superficial way, to see and be seen, as if he hasn’t figured out how to submerge himself in real life.