“What’s up?” I ask.
“Angelos and I had a fight.”
It doesn’t even occur to her that this news might make me happy, that he actually meant something to me.
“Again?”
“Merde! We’re just so different. He says white, I say black.”
“What happened this time?”
“He wants me to go to a wedding with him next Sunday.”
“Blech!”
“His cousin is getting married.”
“Don’t go, Anna. Marriage is the greatest social hypocrisy there is.”
I’m parroting her own words back at her. Ever since Antigone took us to see those one-act plays at the Peroke, we’ve always sworn that we’d never go to a wedding, no matter what, because it’s like silently accepting the history of the oppression of women. Anna bows her head and crosses her arms. In that position she looks like a good little Christian, even a bride. I take a drag on my cigarette, inhaling her image along with the smoke. Anna a bride? Impossible!
“I promised I would go in a moment of weakness and now I want to take it back.”
“Weakness?”
“Yeah, we were in bed, you know how it is . . . but it was so stupid of me!”
I try to mimic the tone Anna takes when she’s rebuffing me. “Really stupid,” I say.
“Do you think it matters, just this once?”
“It’s not the frequency that counts.”
“What about what Nietzsche said, Einmal ist keinmal?”
This year Anna started taking German lessons so that she can read philosophy in the original. But if she keeps going the way she is, she won’t need German at all, or philosophy, for that matter. The most she’ll be reading is wedding magazines and cheap romances. I tell her that—admittedly with a dose of glee. Anna takes a deep drag and blows the smoke in my face. Then she crushes the butt of her cigarette under her shoe with such rage that you’d think she was crushing me.
•
“Was the bride pretty?” I whisper, mimicking my mother’s tone of voice, from her days of drinking tea with Mrs. Steedworthy. They were always chattering about weddings, babies, and dress patterns. Anna gives me a look like a wounded dog. Her silence only encourages me. “And the wedding dress? Oh, tell me about the wedding dress, please!”
She slaps her palm against the desk. “Shut up, Maria!” The whole class turns to look. We’re in essay-writing class and she and I always finish first. I mean, how much is there to say about something like: In the context of our nation’s entry into the European Economic Community, certain historical changes are unquestionably taking place. Greeks themselves, no less than other Europeans, are being called upon to protect our cultural heritage and to proceed with the modernization of Greek society. Please present your views on this subject. The topics are always as demagogic as PASOK proclamations: context, unquestionably, modernization. Anna and I react by writing as formally as we can, and Kyria Zapa, our writing teacher, scrawls at the bottom of our papers: Mediocre. Try to express your ideas more simply. Or: Don’t forget, there’s only one accent mark now! The government recently abolished the polytonic system of accent marks, but we still use graves and circumflexes out of habit.
“If you’re finished, you can go out to the yard and work out your differences there,” Kyria Zapa says.
She doesn’t need to say it twice. We run to the girls’ room, hop up on the windowsill and light cigarettes. Anna gives me a pinch to end all pinches. Then she changes tack, droops on the sill, pale as a sheet.
“What’s wrong? Was there an earthquake and I didn’t notice?”
“Don’t be so hard on me,” she says.
“Don’t be such an idiot,” I say.
“I’m not an idiot, I’m pregnant.”
I swallow hard, the smoke trapped in my lungs.
“Will you come with me for the abortion?” she asks.
Merde, an earthquake all right. Off the Richter scale.
What our religion textbook has to say about abortion: An individual’s sense of self-importance leads to an arbitrary intervention in the progress and preservation of the world. Anna ostentatiously burns that page over the cinders we’ve heaped up over our potatoes. We’re sitting by the fireplace at the house in Plaka, pretending to be brave. Tomorrow is the big day. Angelos doesn’t know a thing. Anna broke up with him for good and doesn’t ever want to see him again. Anything having to do with children and marriage makes her sick.
“But he needs to accept his responsibility,” Antigone says.
“I don’t want him to!” Anna shouts, so loudly and hysterically that the conversation ends there.
I get kind of hysterical, too, with Pavlos. I check all our condoms to make sure they didn’t break, I wash myself obsessively after sex and keep having this recurring nightmare. There’s a store that sells sperm in little plastic containers. If you buy just the right amount you don’t have to worry about an unwanted pregnancy. So women come to shop there, only they go all gaga over the sperm, buy too much and end up getting into trouble. Among them is a girl who looks like Anna. I watch all this unfold and decide I can live without sperm, it’s not the end of the world.
“Be careful,” says the girl who looks like Anna. “All men are monsters.”
I haven’t heard that phrase since we were nine years old.
Digenis struggles for his life and the earth terrifies him. I don’t know why that line from a folk song in our Greek literature textbook comes to my mind as Anna opens her eyes on the stretcher and whispers, “Antigone? Maria?” We stand over her, each of us holding one of her hands, until the nurses push us aside and lift her swiftly and surely from the gurney onto the bed. In the other bed is a forty-year-old woman from the provinces. She has five kids already and doesn’t want a sixth. She’s watching The Bold and the Beautiful with the sound off. Fortunately Anna is completely out of it from the drugs. She hates soap operas. Still, I stand over her in such a way as to block her view of the television. Anna doesn’t open her eyes. When she speaks, she just mouths the words, as soundless as the actors on the show.
“Water . . .”
Antigone dabs some water on her lips. I’m afraid I might faint. It’s only the second time I’ve been inside a hospital, the first was after Mom’s thyroid operation. Hospitals terrify me, and back then I swore to myself that if anyone ever tried to make me visit a sick person again I would emigrate to Africa. But this isn’t just any sick person. It’s Anna. She needs me. She’s not strong anymore.
“I’ll never forget . . .” Anna says, still without sound.
“Shhh,” I say.
“. . . you’re the best friend in the world.”
I hug her tightly. Outside the rain is falling hard. The woman in the other bed turns up the volume with the remote control. The music from the show envelops the room but we don’t make fun, don’t pinch one another, don’t make faces.
Tomorrow this might strike us as funny, we might say, “Einmal ist keinmal.” But what if we actually get into trouble for real? What if we start to watch soap operas, to cry, to not have abortions? What if we get tired of being kids and want to be women?
I can’t even think about it.
Antigone gives me Yiorgos Ioannou’s latest book for my birthday, Of Adolescents and Others. Adults just love to remind you that you’re not one of them yet. “From now on we get to celebrate your birthday and the Greek National Resistance together!” she says, popping a bottle of champagne. There’s no picnic this year. These days nature disgusts Anna, and she doesn’t like to walk, either. She’s gotten listless and lethargic.
“Yeah, except that I was actually born in November, whereas they just chose the 25th as a symbolic date for the resistance.”
This year the government has declared November 25th an official holiday in honor of armed resistance against the Axis occupation, because on that day in 1942 a group of Greek partisans blew up a bridge in the village of Gorgopotamos. I worry that Antigone is hap
pier about that anniversary than about my birthday. Anna, meanwhile, isn’t happy about anything anymore. She pokes at the fire like a modern-day Cinderella weighed down with worries. She broke up with Angelos, she quit smoking, started again, quit again, then finally started up for good and is reading a book of poetry by Yiannis Patilis called Non-smoker in a Land of Smokers. She has a deep need for symbolic gestures and symbolic speech.
“Did you hear that Evangelos Papanoutsos died?” she says to me.
“And?”
“I thought you might give it some more thought, about studying psychology.”
“Anna, I’ve made up my mind. I want to study art.”
“Fine, I get it.”
“We’ll still go to campus together every morning. And spend our evenings together. We’ll eat our chouquettes. What more do you want?”
“I want to not be alone for even a second.”
Antigone folds Anna in her arms and strokes her hair, which is long enough now to be pulled back into a short ponytail. Antigone calls her “my little girl.”
You’d think it was Anna’s birthday, not mine.
Five
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
She’s driving an old Porsche. The seats are deep, our bodies reclined at an unusual angle. The smell of the fake croissants from that café is still clinging to our clothes. When we reach Kifisias Avenue, she points out the buildings her husband designed. Precisely what I expected: tinted glass and marble columns, with hideous public art outside.
“Did you choose those sculptures?”
“Yeah, aren’t they awful?”
“The worst I’ve ever seen. Why did you pick them?”
“It’s my only way of fighting the system, Maria.”
“Are you kidding? By throwing money and opportunities at talentless artists?”
“You want to know exactly what I do?” She shifts into fifth and the Porsche darts down the avenue, passing on the left and right, weaving between cars. We’re flying. Her face hardens and I get a glimpse of the old Anna. The wind musses her hair and she laughs a guttural laugh—laughs, then coughs. “I shape the image of our company’s taste. A bronze statue holding a cell phone—can you think of anything more kitsch than that?”
“Did you ever think of the people who have to see that shitty sculpture every day on their way to work?”
“That’s why I put it there. To make them furious. When they get mad enough, when they can’t stand the idiocy and the terrible taste a second longer, when they’re sunk up to their chins in shit, they’ll finally go and smash that statue with crowbars. All you can do is push things to the limit, cross your arms and wait.”
“And build office complexes out of glass? Greenhouses for the workers?”
“As Malouhos says, glass buildings are the easiest to break.”
“Wait, you mean your husband’s in on it, too? He builds and sells for the good of the revolution?”
“Malouhos is a genius!”
She’s lost it. She still wants to save the world, but in a way only a crazy person could think up. We’re back on our magic carpet, flying at a thousand kilometers an hour. Instead of a table on wheels, it’s a Porsche. Instead of the songs of Françoise Hardy, the wedding march for the marriage of two lunatics.
The house in Ekali looks as if it hasn’t been touched since the ’70s, though of course that’s the style now. It’s full of shag rugs and shiny leather couches without a single scratch on them—the opposite of Irini’s jacket. Orange stools with dull metal legs, straight from the junk shop. Futuristic white floor lamps. In the kitchen, stainless steel cabinets and recessed lighting. In a heavy gold frame with a red velvet border, the poster from the house in Plaka: the kid peeing on the crown. They’ve hung it in the dining room.
“We take that down whenever we have royalist investors to dinner,” Anna says with restrained pride.
The table is completely white, with leather stools.
“What happens if you spill sauce on it?”
“We don’t eat sauces, remember? We eat healthy, lots of salads. Old habits die hard.”
“How is Antigone these days?”
She lights a cigarette. She blows the smoke as far from her as she can, squinting her eyes. There’s no white eyebrow anymore to give that old dramatic effect. But her face is white, an expressionless mask.
“Antigone died.”
“What? I hadn’t heard! When? How?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. Can I fix you a drink?”
“Anna, what’s wrong with you? I’m asking because I loved her!”
“You loved her! Everyone loved her. But did she love anyone? Now there’s the rub.”
She tosses her boots onto one of the rugs. The shag is thick, but the thud still echoes through the minimalist house.
The sun is setting and Anna is fixing a second round of martinis when we hear a key fumbling in the lock. Daphne bursts into the house, raising a ruckus with her roller skates. After her comes a pregnant woman with beads of sweat on her forehead.
“Daphne, didn’t I tell you not to tire Svetlana out? She has a baby in her tummy!”
Daphne keeps on skating as if she hasn’t heard, until she practically runs right into me. “Oh, it’s my teacher! Are you friends with my mother again? Come here, I want to show you something!”
The little girl pulls me by the hand. We clamber upstairs and she takes me straight to her room. She’s even messier than I am, there are things scattered everywhere: pieces from board games, stuffed animals, clothes, hair bands, broken pastels, lumps of plasticine.
“This is my cave!” she says, pulling me down to peer into the space between her bed and her desk. She’s padded it with a blanket and put her teddy bears in there, and a tea set in one corner. Directly opposite is a heap of sweaters, piled into a woolen barricade.
“With all this thunder and lighting, we have to keep warm, see?”
“I see.”
“Do you want some tea?”
Anna finds us in her daughter’s cave. We’re sitting cross-legged, sipping non-existent tea from cups the size of thimbles.
“Come on out,” she says to me. “You’re a grown-up now.”
Well, not so grown up. Not too big for a child’s cave.
Anna insists on my staying to meet Malouhos.
“Yes, yes!” Daphne says, hanging from my forearm.
“Another time.”
“How about another martini?”
“Anna, really! We’ve already had two.”
“You mean you can’t count to three?”
She’s giving me the evil eye. I remember that look well. All those years of psychoanalysis didn’t do a thing for her. When Anna wants something, there’s no messing with her.
“Okay, fine, one for the road.”
Their refrigerator has an ice maker. From across the room, with the shaker in her hand, Anna looks like some carefree housewife from a commercial. Self-sufficient, charming, a barefoot woman in jeans who’s discovered the meaning of life in the circular movement of a cocktail shaker. And the olive, too: it sinks and rises back to the surface, hovering there in a region of transparent meaning. That’s it, I’m drunk.
Anna goes upstairs to put Daphne to bed and for a little while I’m enveloped in the solitude of their vast living room. The space throbs around me like a huge, white, sanitized heart. I rest my cheeks in my palms, start to make plans: I’ll go away, I’ll disappear and cover my tracks so she won’t ever find me. I’ll quit my job. I’ll go to live in some other country, as far from here as possible. Anna was always a harmful presence in my life, I have to free myself from her influence. She can’t come and go whenever she pleases, completely destroy me, shake me up the way she shook up our drinks.
She comes down the stairs like a Hollywood star, hips swaying, cigarette clinging to her lips. She has an incredible mouth, there’s no doubt about that. But it borders on brazen, too, as if she’s co
nstantly offering herself to anyone and everyone who comes along. She’s changed into a robe. She points at the logo of a horse embroidered on the chest.
“See? That makes all the difference.”
My plan to run away makes me more tolerant than I might otherwise be. “If you say so,” I respond. But that just annoys her. She wants me to disagree so she can convince me bit by bit.
“You think I’ve lost it, don’t you?”
“You’re eccentric, you always were.”
“I’m exploiting capital, Maria. It’s what I always do. It’s what I know how to do best. I can live without any money at all. Do you doubt me on that?”
She picks up an empty crystal vase from the coffee table.
“Look at this. Such a simple design, yet so expensive! Just look what money can buy. Where did the materials come from? How was it made? By whom? How different are those people’s lives from your own?”
She opens her hands in a theatrical gesture, and the vase drops to the floor and breaks into a thousand pieces. A shard of glass sticks into her calf. She picks it out, licks a finger and wipes away the blood, casting an uneasy glance my way. She apparently still remembers my fear of blood. Though ever since I figured out the reason behind that fear, it’s not so bad. Just a brief spike in my pulse, that’s all.
I drain the last of my martini, sink my teeth into the olive. “I don’t understand.”
“What’s to understand? I enjoyed that. It’s been too long since I broke something.”
“So you married him?” We’re on our fourth martini and by now I can say whatever comes into my head.
“Stop it, Maria!”
“I mean, in a church?”
She curses theatrically and brings over a photograph album. “Here, if you really need proof. We got married at city hall in the sixth arrondissement. What kind of question is that, if we got married in a church?” As she bends to show me, her robe falls open. She’s got on a matching nightgown underneath.
Why I Killed My Best Friend Page 12