They lead me back to the cave. I put my head in my hands and cry and cry. And since it’s raining, it’s as if all of Ikeja, all of Africa, is mourning with me. Bambi, Bambi, you can’t talk anymore? Did they kill you? Did you turn back into a doll? I dig a hole in the sand and bury her, the same way we buried our baby.
“What baby?” Anna asks. She’s still stroking my hair.
“My little sister.”
She was a tiny baby, like a worm. Before she was born she seemed enormous. She would stretch her legs in Mom’s belly and Mom would put my hand on her belly button and ask if I felt her kicking. “Why is she kicking?” I’d ask. Dad would say that that’s how babies are, they do naughty things, but I should set a good example. I couldn’t wait for her to finally be born, so we could play together in the garden and draw houses and banana trees and peeing gods. In the end she was born prematurely. “She couldn’t wait to meet us, either,” Dad said. In the hall outside the emergency room I kept standing on tiptoe to see our baby better: she looked like a sleeping cat. I made up stories in my head: we would play hide-and-seek with Unto Punto, we would sneak into the storage room and put one another’s hair in ponytails. But the baby wanted to sleep forever. Mom said she went up to heaven to be with the angels. Gwendolyn said they put her in a nice white house, with photographs of us, and lollipops, candies, and teddy bears, and lowered her deep into the ground. “Why?” I asked. “Because the light of Africa hurt her eyes. She was used to the darkness in your mother’s belly.” Mom started to believe more and more in God, and to cry and get fat. Dad stayed at work later and later. Gwendolyn talked more than ever about salt and worms. Mrs. Steedworthy brought me Bambi so I’d have someone to play with. I couldn’t save our baby, but I made Bambi talk, and she told me all the time how I’d saved her from her boring doll’s life.
“It’s not your fault,” Anna says, and hugs me so tightly I think I might break into a thousand pieces. I’m not paying any attention to her. After all these years I’m right back in that cave. Night falls; Bambi is buried in the sand; the men gesture, argue, smoke. I’m little, they won’t see me in the dark. I’ll just go as far as the main road, some car full of good guys will stop and pick me up and give me a blanket so I’m not cold. We’ll go to another beach far away, we’ll light a big bonfire to dry my clothes, they’re gypsies, they’ll tell me stories, and I’ll tell them about my adventures with the burglars and our baby, and the gypsies will have lots and lots of kids, so many that they won’t mind giving me one to be my little sister. In the morning we’ll eat bananas and then they’ll take me back home to Ikeja, and Mom and Dad will cry with joy. We’ll all give the gypsy baby a bath and teach her Greek and English and the salt won’t ever get worms again.
I get up and start to walk. I’m not running as I was before, just walking to go meet my gypsies. But the bad white man catches up with me. “What did I say would happen to you if you didn’t listen?” he shouts in my face, and before I can say a word, he slices off part of my little finger. Just a little bit, not even half, but there’s blood running everywhere. The other two, the black men who aren’t as bad as the white man, punch the white man in the face. One tears off part of his shirt and wraps it around my finger and says, “Sorry, girl, sorry.” Then all three of them leave, disappearing into the dark.
The blood has seeped through the shirt of the better bad guy. It hurts a lot and I’m crying. Eventually I run out of tears, and my voice is gone, too. I sit and listen to the wind howl. The sand is cold from the storm and looks like the crystallized sugar we have in our storage room. Mom will yell at me for not bringing a coat. Something moves in the back of the cave. Is it a snake? A dragon? A hobgoblin? In the end it’s a cricket. It climbs up on my knee, and I play with it, I ruffle its wings. I’m very hungry. What if I ate it? I bite into it and chew as quickly as I can. It tastes good, like a potato chip. The sound of the cricket in my mouth is reassuring, like company.
They find me in the morning. First the Ikeja police come and wrap me in a blanket, since my teeth are chattering and I’m trembling. They ask me about the white man. Then my parents show up in the Mercedes. Mom runs toward me with open arms and kisses me all over, even my eyes and ears. “I was afraid I’d lost my other child, too,” she whispers. When she sees my finger, she lets out the loudest scream! Dad pounds his fist in his open palm like he’s beating himself up. The police say that the white man is an American from the base who went crazy, and that the burglars didn’t think anyone would be home. They took me with them for ransom, and when I tried to run away they panicked. They didn’t know what to do. “Well, I know exactly what I’ll do!” Dad shouts. He curses all the blacks in the world and says we’re going to get out of Africa as soon as we can.
“But, Dad, the murderer was white!”
“What murderer?”
“He killed Bambi.”
I show them where I buried her. Mom is sobbing. Dad asks, “What is that?”
“A piece of cricket, so she has something to eat in her grave. I didn’t have any candy or lollipops.” I made a mistake, again. Bambi’s head is in the sea. She has no mouth to chew with.
This year Walkmans are all the rage. At the beach you see girls with headphones drumming their fingers against their knees. They tap their feet to the rhythm, whistle or sing off-key, in a world of their own. And when they take the headphones off, they look surprised, dazed by the sudden onslaught of reality. That’s how I’ve been living all these years: with headphones on. And then Anna, who always knows better, who’s always one step ahead, comes along and yanks my headphones off: “It’s not another little girl, Maria, it’s your doll!”
“How did you know about any of that?” I ask. It’s past dawn now, and we’re lying in bed, wrapped tightly in the sheets. Exhausted mummies.
“Your mother told Antigone, back when we found you on the beach in Aegina. You know, after Angelos and I . . . She was crying because you were eating crickets and grinding your teeth, just like back then.”
“She told you about that, too?”
“How could you eat crickets, Maria?”
“Think of it as practice, for prison.”
“You really think they’ll put us in jail?” She wraps herself even tighter in her sheet, curling into the corner of an imaginary cell and looking at me despairingly. The room smells of mildew, just how I imagine a jail cell would smell. I picture Antigone and Mom sobbing during visiting hours. Anna and I in rags, gnawing on crusts of bread, plagued by guilt. Direct Action has been discovered and the media are distorting our cause in light of our crime. They describe us an anarchist fringe group whose members include fanatic nationalists. They blame us for the recent attacks on Albanians. “Young people with confused ideas and no vision for the future,” the newscasters declare.
“We have to split up,” Anna says. She’s pacing up and down in the room, biting her thumb.
“What?”
“We have to leave here right away, and never speak again.”
“You mean to one another?”
“Yes, to say goodbye forever. Abandon Direct Action. Forget it all. It’s the only way.”
We have to dig a hole in our heads, as Aunt Amalia would say. Put in the Albanian who didn’t know how to swim. And then we’ll bury one another, too. I’ll bury Anna in her marinière, holding her drawing of Patty Hearst. And she’ll bury me in my school uniform with the Mao collar and my Savings Day prize.
Anna leaves first. She packs silently, shoving her clothes into her duffle bag as if they were dirty laundry. She makes a vague gesture with her hand. She doesn’t kiss me, doesn’t hug me; for once there’s no drama. She just stands in the doorway long enough for some parting words: “You know what Mayakovsky said? That a true revolutionary burns all bridges behind him.” And then she shuts the door.
I sit on the bed, I don’t know for how long. Hours. A whole line of Annas parade by me, at all ages, striking pose after pose, making faces, with their white eyebrows, the dimpl
es in their chins, those big blue eyes, deceptively calm. Then I pack my suitcase as hurriedly as she had, tossing in books and clothes. I understand the plan: she’ll head to Paris and never look back. I, meanwhile, need to go someplace where Direct Action won’t find me. Somewhere with sand, heat, tropical rain.
For a start, Aegina will do.
“I want to ask you something. But I want a french fry first.”
Martha gets up from the sofa in a funny way: first her stomach, then her. She chooses a french fry off the plate—she prefers the underdone ones—and bites into it with pleasure, with her front teeth, like a beaver. A butterball beaver that purrs, rubbing its belly. She has on a loose dress of gray flannel and tattered cotton socks. She’s turned out exactly as I would have guessed: she and her husband live in what used to be her family’s summer home, that two-story house with the stuccoed walls, sliding doors and watercolors of angry seascapes on the walls. The only thing she’s gotten rid of is Kyria Pavlina’s flypaper. And their goat has long since died of old age. Her husband is so shy he blushes whenever you talk to him. He’s a notary public who works in Pireus.
Martha used to work at a travel agency by the port, but now, about to give birth and naturally chubby to begin with, the most she can manage is to stand up and sit back down again. She has no one to help her. Fotini is living in Thessaloniki with an out-of-work actor, the absolute opposite of the Harlequin romances the two sisters used to read. Kyria Pavlina is confined to her bed, suffering one kidney stone after another. As for Angelos, he married an Italian, Romina, and took over the management of her family farm somewhere outside of Sienna. They smile at us every day from a gold-framed photograph, brandishing muddy shovels as if they were tridents.
All day long I fry potatoes. Martha has a weakness for fries. The smell of hot oil makes me queasy, but it suits the melancholy familiarity of this house, with the television always on in the afternoon, a housewife curled up on the couch.
“You’re going to stay with us, right?” Martha asks the same question every afternoon while I drink my coffee and she eats her fries. Nanny, governess—now there’s a job that never crossed my mind. The older I get, the closer life brings me to Gwendolyn. “You’ll have your own room, you can do your art in there and play with the baby, right?” Ever since she was little Martha has spoken almost exclusively in questions. She opens her eyes wide and looks at you as if the end of the world has arrived.
“We’ll see.”
My room is Angelos’s childhood room. There are still pencils and erasers in his desk from when he was a teenager and would shut himself up for hours, before he started breaking girls’ hearts. There’s still something masculine in the air, a lingering smell of stale aftershave. Martha brings in roses from the garden and little pots of basil, but to no avail. Only when winter has finally come and in place of those flowers Stella’s toys sprout one by one do I forget that I’m sleeping in Angelos’s old bed.
At first I don’t go near her crib. I’m afraid of those tiny fingers that shape themselves into fists, afraid of the furrowed skin, the tongue that paints her toothless gums with spittle. Then she starts to make the most thrilling sounds: deep vowels full of existential doubt, guttural noises that sound like attempts at a laugh. I could watch her for hours on end and never get bored. Now that the hole in my head has opened and let out the cave and the burglars, Stella is a comfort, a replacement for lost siblings, dolls, and childhood friends.
Martha senses it, and has stopped asking.
“You’ll stay,” she says.
•
I knit socks and hats for Stella. The only art I still remember is this circular form of fencing: knit, purl, slip stich. I knit until my needles spark. Beside me on the sofa, Martha is nursing the baby, watching her afternoon shows out the corner of her eye. The baby drinks greedily, eyes closed, like a cat. For an instant I feel like I’ve returned to my childhood house and am watching my mother nurse my little sister. I’m afraid I might be losing it. It wouldn’t take much, just a few more holes in my head to unbury themselves all at once.
I miss Anna. She visits me now and then in my dreams, smacks kisses on both of my cheeks, so hard that my cheekbones shatter as if they were made of glass. I guess we didn’t say a proper goodbye. We buried each other hurriedly, so that afterward we both simply stood up from our imposed graves and shook off the dirt. This Aztec pattern with the orange zigzags I’m knitting would look good on her. I could send her a hat in the mail. Or I could call.
No one picks up at the apartment in Paris. I try every half hour, it becomes an obsession. It seems to me that the phone is ringing directly in Anna’s gut, in her heart, and that she’s not picking up because she no longer cares. She’d rather pretend I don’t exist. I remind her of the weakest, darkest part of herself. As she does for me: if I shook myself like a tree, whatever still clung to the branches would have something to do with Anna. All the heaviest, saddest things. And heaviest of all would be the dead body of the Albanian. The corpse of our friendship. He did turn out to be Albanian, after all—brief articles buried in the back pages of the daily papers said it was probably a crime perpetrated by the Albanian mafia. He appears regularly in my dreams, too, or in my nightmares, face-down in stagnant water. His shirt pops like a balloon and giant crickets crawl out.
I devote myself wholeheartedly to Stella. We have vowel competitions, play airplane on the sofa, count how many hops the bunny of my hand takes to reach her neck for a drink of water. In early summer Martha goes back to work at the travel agency and Stella starts to confuse me with her mother, the way I once did with Gwendolyn. For the umpteenth time in my life, I have something that I also don’t have. I had and didn’t have a sister, a doll, a friend. I had and didn’t have a personal revolution. I had and didn’t have Angelos, Kayo, Camus. I’m sure Camus is still chain-smoking in his apartment. Kayo is living his fake life in New York. As for Angelos, he now belongs to a classic Italian wife who is unrepentantly Catholic and jealous.
These are the kinds of thoughts I think as I push Stella’s stroller down to the wharf. We stay there awhile, I sing a lullaby, the baby stretches her arms out to grab the sun—“thun.” My ears are numb from the heat, my heart numb with borrowed happiness. I’ve lost everything, but Stella gives me the illusion of a new life.
Until one day, on our usual walk, something sticks in my throat, my heart contracts. The sun, the soft, steady breaking of the waves, Stella’s smile—nothing can calm me down. I turn my head, pretending to be looking for something I dropped. Twenty meters behind me a man is walking and smoking, a newspaper under his arm. I don’t need to look a second time. The quiet rage in his eyes, the invisible revolutionary’s wings sprouting from his shoulder blades. And his fingers, yellowed for sure. I bleed, therefore I am.
He found me.
I wonder how fast a person can buy a ticket for New York.
Nine
PROTESTING THE SYSTEM
With slogans and . . . laundry hundreds occupy the Attic Highway
“This is not a protest. I repeat: This is not a protest. These are artists and students. Over.” The message being broadcast over the walkie-talkies in patrol cars yesterday at the height of the demonstration on the Attic Highway wasn’t entirely correct. Artists, students, and workers flooded the highway near the Sorou exit in Marousi, carrying colorful banners with slogans such as “The streets belong to us, not to the cars,” and, “Resistance is the secret to happiness.” Alongside them marched some of the rowdier action groups, such as the infamous Bears, who lent a carnivalesque tone to the protests, wearing furry masks and banging on pots and pans. Their goal was to impede the work crews that had come to bulldoze the remaining residences in the area—most of them illegally built shacks.
For the demonstrators, however, what matters isn’t so much zoning laws as the symbolism the highway encapsulates, at least in their view: “In the name of progress, modernization and the Olympic ideal, the average Greek citizen has been led to
believe that the swift Europeanization of his daily life, in the service of rabid profit-seeking, is the only way to proceed.” These are the words of twenty-year-old mass media student Irini Mantoglou, who is helping to construct a tunnel through the shared walls of the shacks that will unite the individual dwellings and facilitate communication among demonstrators.
Asked why they’re destroying the very buildings they are fighting to save, the demonstrators reply, “This isn’t destruction, it’s a return to an older form of neighborliness, of mutual support and interdependence that we’ve shut out of our lives in the name of parliamentary democracy and political representation. We refuse to continue to leave our fate in the hands of politicians who might as well be investment bankers, industrialists, or corporate lawyers.”
At present several hundred demonstrators and spectators have gathered at the site of the protest. At night they throw impromptu parties with loud music, and in the morning the street is transformed into a “neighborhood” with laundry hung out to dry. The occupation is raising serious concerns in the administration, largely because of how rapidly it has grown in the past twenty-four hours, and the attention it has drawn from ordinary citizens and mass media alike.
Dimos Hatzidis
The News
•
OUTRAGE ON THE ATTIC HIGHWAY
It’s an outrage! A few hundred anarchists have once again managed to wreak havoc on the law-abiding citizenry. Where’s the state? Where’s our police force? Hippies, remnants of days gone by, dazed-and-confused kids like the ones we see roaming around Exarheia, have disrupted our lives by hanging laundry out in front of houses along the Attic Highway, painted with ridiculous slogans inviting people to take part in their “anti-establishment celebration.” My question is: Don’t these children have parents? If not, isn’t our police force capable of dispersing them? Does the footage we’ve been seeing on television project the image of a civilized country? Bulldozers and digging machines at a standstill, lined up in front of youths flailing around to the sounds of rave music and the banging of pots and pans?
Why I Killed My Best Friend Page 23
