Only today there’s a man in the car next to us. He slowly opens his door and says, “Girls, do you want to see my ice cream?” Anna vanishes, but I feel like it wouldn’t be polite to run away. The man is holding his ice cream down low, between his legs, a reddish-brown rocket pop with a little cream at the top. Something isn’t right. I take a few steps backward. When I’m far enough away, my heart starts beating loudly in my ears. Now is the time to use a phrase only good-for-nothings say. I make my hands into a megaphone and shout, “Fart on my balls!”
Anna holds out her hand. She’s pale as a ghost. We wrap an arm around each other and run in no particular direction.
“All men are monsters,” Anna says.
Merde, merde. All of them?
“He tricked you, Paraskevoula, the mayor’s son . . .” We’re dancing a kalamatiano in the schoolyard. We’re still so upset about the perversion of men that we’re not really paying attention to the words. The song gets stuck in our heads. The whole way home, all the way to Plaka, we dance the kalamatiano instead of walking. Our favorite bit is the little leap at the beginning when you lunge at the sidewalk and stomp your foot. At home, too, while Antigone is making us lunch, we’re in the living room dancing. Suddenly she rushes into the room holding a half-peeled potato and a knife.
“What is this nonsense?”
We don’t understand.
“Who taught you that?”
We shrug.
Antigone says that the kalamatiano was what people who supported the junta used to dance. And that the song we’re singing is about a rich man taking advantage of a poor girl and if that’s the kind of thing we like, we deserve whatever we get. Haven’t we come into this world to fight hypocrisy? She’ll take us to the Peroke Theater and give us something to think about: they’re presenting two one-act plays, Chekov’s A Marriage Proposal and Brecht’s A Respectable Wedding.
We eat somberly, in silence. After lunch I go to the bathroom to wash my hands and through the open door I see Antigone sitting at the dressing table in her bedroom. Should I tell her I’m sorry for dancing the kalamatiano? She’s fixing her hair, only her shiny braid is lying on the bed, and there’s a little bun at the back of her head full of hairpins and clips. Antigone has short hair! The braid is a wig!
Then why did she tell us we’ve come into the world to fight hypocrisy?
Antigone takes us with her to the anniversary of the events at the Athens Polytechnic, when the dictators sent in tanks to kill the students who’d occupied the building. We bought red carnations to bring with us to the peace march. I told Mom I was going to Anna’s house to do my homework, because she doesn’t like demonstrations. She won’t join the League of Democratic Women, either. She doesn’t have time, she’s too busy knitting her blanket for the contest in Woman. “Such a waste of time,” Mom says. “Anna’s mother has her head in the clouds.” I still like Antigone, even if she’s lying about her braid. She’s skinny and she’s fighting for justice, working to make the world a better place. Sometimes I dream that she’s my real mother, and I always feel proud when strangers in the street say, “What lovely daughters you have.”
“You should take off your glasses,” Anna whispers. “There might be trouble.”
Trouble? Like a state of emergency? Like with the Igbo and Hausa, people setting fires? What if someone grabs Antigone by the hair and her secret is revealed?
A man tells us that people are throwing stones over by the American embassy. But outside the Polytechnic things are calm. The huge bust in front of the building is festooned with carnations and the protesters are singing a Mikis Theodorakis song in unison: “Life keeps climbing upward, life keeps climbing upward. With flags, with flags and drums.” Luckily Anna already taught me that song. I don’t want to sing about boys and love anymore. I could care less! We sing ourselves hoarse, red in the face from trying to sing louder than anyone else. We’re the biggest revolutionaries in all of Athens! That’s the only way we’ll get a scholarship from the Institut Français to go study painting in Paris for free. Anna doesn’t want to be a lawyer like Gisèle Halimi anymore. She decided to study art, too. She wants us to be exactly alike.
We play our anti-junta skipping game all the way home. Then, at the house in Plaka, Anna puts on a Manos Loizos record while Antigone peels carrots.
“What would you like for your birthday?” Antigone asks me.
I’m happy that she remembered my birthday. “I don’t know, whatever you think . . .”
“You don’t want anything in particular? Come on, tell me.”
Her knife flashes like lightning, she’s barely scratching the peel, since that’s where all the vitamins are. What I’d like most of all is to be able to peel carrots as gracefully as Antigone, then to toss them in water, boil them, and make a yummy sauce with lemon.
“Okay, then, I’d like a tea set, or dishes.”
“A tea set? Oh, don’t disappoint me, Maria. I’ll get you The Carousel, okay?”
“What’s The Carousel?”
“It’s a record. The text is by Georges Sarri.”
I’m ashamed of having disappointed her by wanting a tea set. It’s easy to disappoint Antigone. She yells at us if she catches us reading Patty’s World. But what does Patty do that’s so terrible? She just loves Johnny Vowden, goes around town with her friend Sharon, and wants to be a nurse when she grows up. Antigone doesn’t like women who become nurses and take care of men.
Sometimes I wish I were a boy.
I blow out all ten candles at once. Anna does a wolf whistle, Fotini and Martha clap. It’s too bad Angelos didn’t come. I wipe my sweaty palms on my velvet dress with the cherries. I’m more grown-up than ever now!
Dad takes pictures. Mom holds out a tray of bite-sized cheese pies to Kyria Pavlina. Mom is happy, the way she used to be, because she won second prize in the knitting contest. She hung a photograph from the awards ceremony in the hall, next to the coat rack.
Aunt Amalia doesn’t want any cheese pies. Antigone doesn’t, either. She puts on The Carousel and tells us to listen carefully to the lyrics: “If all the children of the world held hands, boys and girls all in a row, and began to dance, the circle would grow and grow until it hugged the whole world.” We girls form a circle and dance around the dining room table with all the other kids all over the world. When we’re out of breath, we crawl under the table and play house. Anna is the dad, I’m the mom, and Martha and Fotini are our kids. We live in Africa, not in a house but in the jungle with the tigers. Then we live in Paris and drink coffee at Café de Flore. Martha starts whining because she wants us to live on Aegina, too, but Anna says, “Merde, we’re not rednecks!”
We go into my room and play doctor. Anna is the doctor. She examines our behinds and pinches us with her nails when she has to give an injection. She writes us prescriptions for eye drops. Suddenly, as if she’s just remembered something very important, she jumps to her feet and shouts, “Enough of this silly stuff! Let’s go to the demonstration! We’re the League of Democratic Women!”
“I’m not coming to the demonstration,” says Fotini. “I don’t like that game.”
Anna’s face clouds over. “It’s not a game, merde. It’s the struggle for a better life!”
“No way am I playing,” Fotini says.
Anna goes over and pinches her. “I said, it’s not a game.”
Fotini doesn’t cry, just opens her mouth wide.
Three
“Close your mouth, Daphne. A fly might get in.”
I don’t have to say it twice.
“Where do witches live?” she asks.
She’s frozen in place, twirling a lock of her hair. That particular vanity seems to run in the family: Antigone’s braid, Anna’s barrettes.
“In caves.”
“What do they eat?”
“Grasshoppers!”
She gasps in wonder. That must run in the family, too—Anna was always drawn to strange people, bizarre stories. The little girl s
cratches at her knee, takes a step backward, and stumbles.
“Watch where you’re going! Why don’t you walk normally, silly?”
“I’m scared you might turn me into a tiger, miss.”
“As long as you behave, there’s no reason to be afraid.”
Daphne nods her head frantically, then runs out of the classroom, pulling the door shut behind her. I listen as her footsteps clatter down the stairs.
The room looks as if a bomb went off. Surprised by Daphne’s sudden attack, the children left colored pencils, papers, markers, erasers lying everywhere. I pick it all up, leave everything in an ordered pile on the desk and go to find Saroglou.
“Have you ever seen such a child?” she exclaims.
“I know her mother. She used to be a friend of mine.”
“She must be paying for some pretty juicy sins, to have a child like that.”
“Oh, I don’t know . . .”
“Why, was she a bookworm or something?”
“Not at all. She was captivating,” I say.
“Well then, it’s nature punishing her.”
That’s it. Daphne torments Anna the way Anna once tormented me. History repeats itself.
“Don’t you dare switch on the light!” Kayo pulls a pillow over his face. Beside him, Anna-Maria does the same: she puts a leg over her eyes and starts to lick herself.
“But it’s almost evening! You’re still in bed?”
Kayo stretches and twists a few times under the sheet. I stroke his hair: thousands of tiny rasta braids, rough to the touch, like everything about Kayo. He’s changed. New York brought him down, made him melancholy. His beauty dried up from within. Only his eyes still spark the way they used to.
“Get up! I’ve got news.”
“Anna?”
“How did you know it’s about Anna?”
“You’ve got this look on your face as if you were nineteen years old again.”
In actuality, I’m almost thirty-five. But if we see life as a cycle, I’m still right where I was. I live in the same apartment in the blue building, not with my parents anymore, but with a depressed homosexual. The gap between the balcony rails has been there for nearly a quarter of a century, mocking my useless attempts at escape. Nothing else from that era remains. The pantry is a darkroom, where we print our posters. The house hasn’t smelled of lavender or steam irons since my parents decided to move to Aegina for good. Kayo brought an air of healthy living when he came: he doesn’t smoke and gets high off scentless little pills. The bathroom smells of aftershave, the kitchen of cat food. I hate cats, but there was nothing I could do: when he showed up with an angora that was just skin and bones, as lost in life as he was, I had to either take both of them in or send them both away. “Her name is Anna-Maria,” he’d said. “Why? She doesn’t look much like a princess.” “Yes, but she’s an odd mix of daring and timid,” he answered slyly. Apparently the cat had Anna’s daring, but my timidity.
Kayo, Anna-Maria, and I have been living together since New Year’s, 1997. That day when he showed up, it had been roughly twenty years since I swallowed my luck in the form of the coin from a New Year’s pie, and ten years since the show for graduates of the School of Fine Arts, when I thought painting was the most important thing in the world. Just five years since Aunt Amalia died, and since we adopted the slogan “I bleed, therefore I am.” The socialists are still in charge of the country, they built a subway and a few highways to placate the populace. But we didn’t give in: we made posters urging an occupation of the Attic Highway. We painted the facades of a few banks with Day-Glo paint. Lots of people still think we’re just pranksters. That a revolution based on colors, music, and demands for a better life is childish. And of course those were difficult years to be launching protests in Greece: all of a sudden the country was flooded with new money, fresh capital that pulled the wool over people’s eyes, tricked them into thinking the prosperity was real. So we started to attend demonstrations in more affluent countries, where people had a better sense of what it meant for that flood of money to drown you, in the end. In 1998, in Geneva, Kayo and some others overturned the Central Bank director’s Mercedes and we spent two nights in jail. In 1999 we sat on a crowded bus for days just to go back and shake the hands of the Zapatistas, members of the Indian KRRS, the landless of Bangladesh, people of all stripes who were protesting third world debt, genetically modified food, and the colonization of the global South. In June of that same year we flew to Nigeria to shout slogans against the oil companies, standing in a crowd of thousands to welcome Owens Wiwa as he returned to his homeland from exile. I was hesitant, but in the end I decided to go to Ikeja, where I located our old house. Kayo and I stood there for a while watching a couple of white kids playing in the yard. But that’s another story.
Five months later was Seattle. Kayo and I vomited side by side at the barricades. It was the most tear gas we’d ever experienced. And yet it was a perfect moment: no central committees, no leaders, no dogma. Look, Anna, I kept thinking, it’s happening, it’s actually happening. It had proven impossible to follow her parting advice, to live like an amoeba.
In the breaks between protests we come home, take hot footbaths, look for work. This year I found the school, Kayo is doing some underwear modeling. At night he prints T-shirts with old situationist slogans: In a society that has abolished any kind of adventure, the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society. In the morning I find him curled up with Anna-Maria in my parents’ old bedroom, a Kodachrome icon of the Virgin Mary that my mother left to protect me hanging on the wall above him. Kayo adores it. It’s a bad habit he picked up in New York: he’s always coming home with the cheapest, kitschiest junk. A mismatched family of characters, childish yet lurid, occupies his bedside table: a pink plastic Hello Kitty, a music box topped by a fake ballerina with gold pointe shoes, a plastic camera that squirts water, one of those flowers that bobs up and down on its stem when there’s music playing, a Statue of Liberty made of hot pink foam.
I sleep in my childhood room. There’s nothing angelic or little-girlish about it. “It’s an absolute mess in here,” Kayo mutters when he’s in a bad mood. But I like it that way. Amid the newspaper clippings, posters, books, packs of anti-capitalist stickers, I’m somehow able to find myself. “Lose yourself, you mean,” he says. To keep myself from hitting him I psychologize his own mania for cleanliness: he’s biracial, the son of a white woman who washed him incessantly when he was a kid, and ironed a new shirt for him every day so that none of the other kids could say he smelled bad. Kayo smells wonderful, in fact, even when he’s in a funk. I’m the one who always seems to need a shower.
“Where’d you see her?” he asks, tossing the sheet aside. He sleeps naked, but the sight has long since ceased to affect me. These days I just give him a cool once-over, as if he were soft porn on TV. Or an underwear ad.
“I haven’t seen her. Yet.” The thought of us meeting in person makes me shudder—the thought that she might come in to ask how Daphne is doing in class, or how I ended up there, an art teacher at a private school. She’s presumably living a more noteworthy life than mine, doing more important things.
“Will you just tell me what happened?”
I tell him about Daphne.
“A miniature Anna? My lord, what a nightmare!” Kayo is one of the few men Anna never managed to charm. After all, he was always even more beautiful, more daring than she. Kayo stretches and yawns beneath the icon of the Virgin, a faded woman with a halo looking down on him from above, smiling a restrained smile. The way the icon artist painted her, she always seems to know more than we do.
A short while later, Irini and Kosmas show up with a Tupperware of warm potato salad. They hug us tightly, just like every night, as if we haven’t seen one another in ages. It’s nice: their young bodies give us a forgotten energy, a brief dose of electroshock that I otherwise only experience at protests. It must be how Kayo feels on those rare occasions when he approaches young me
n in bars.
Irini is nineteen, Kosmas twenty; they’re both students in the Department of Mass Media. They’re tall and skinny and have a healthy glow on their cheeks, though they’re sworn vegetarians. Irini has a small mouth with full lips and teeth even whiter than Kayo’s. Kosmas is like a happy alien. Now that he’s cut his hair short, you can’t help but admire his beautiful ears. The two of them aren’t sleeping together yet, or with anyone else for that matter, and so they shriek and chase one another around the table. They dish out the potato salad, open a bottle of red wine, and wait for us to take a bite before they dig in.
“That’s what I call respect for the aged,” Kayo says. He’ll be turning forty this year. Like all narcissists, he’s got issues with his age.
Irini gives him a mournful look. She’s probably a little bit in love with him; I certainly was at her age. When you’re nineteen you fall for people like Kayo. All it tends to get you are some wrinkles around your eyes and a deep well of hopelessness in your gaze.
“Do you want to say grace today, old man?” she asks.
“I’m still sleeping,” Kayo growls.
“Okay, then I will,” Irini says. She clears her throat. Her eyelashes quiver in the light of the candles we always set out on the kitchen table. “We’re not afraid of ruins. We’re the ones who will inherit the earth. So they can go ahead and destroy their world before they walk off the stage set of history. We carry a new world in our hearts.” Some of the words she uses hover midway between sentiment and sentimentality. The word “heart,” for instance. Irini knows how to pronounce it properly, to give it meaning. At her age, if Anna and I ever said “heart” we surely would have burst out laughing.
Why I Killed My Best Friend Page 5