Why I Killed My Best Friend (12 page)

After the earthquake, though, Anna doesn't talk much about stuff like that. Actually she doesn't talk much about anything. She just sits on the toilet with a wad of paper wrapped around her hand looking as if she might cry at any moment.

“How am I supposed to come to France, Anna? My family is here.”

“Aren't I your family?”

We hug and lean silently to this side and that, Anna with her underwear around her knees, I fully dressed and strong. She smells like fear.

“What about school?”

“We don't learn anything anyhow. Just crap about working women and how to make hats for toilet paper.”

“You've got a point.”

Anna looks at me pleadingly.

“Won't you come?”

“Could I ever let you go alone?”

And yet I do. I say goodbye to her at the airport with burning eyes. Our sweaty fingers slip through one another as we part. Who will I talk to during recess? Smoke with? Pee with? I sob inconsolably in Antigone's arms at the Hellenic Airport as my best friend's head vanishes on the other side of passport control.

She's leaving just for a month or two, on a trial basis. My mother says she'll cut off my legs if I even think about leaving, she'll have Interpol on my tail. It's a threat she invented when I ran off for Ikeja. I imagine the agents bringing me back home in handcuffs; all the newspapers print my photograph, as if I'm another Patty Hearst.

Anna and I exchange heartbreaking letters. She sends me poems by Verlaine, I send her poems by Titos Patrikios:
So, that circle we carved with a piece of a broken pitcher, is our circle. Let's hide the cricket's chirp in it, so we'll know we can find it again. So we'll be able to talk about whatever will happen in the great books of the future
. She writes:
Paris is so depressing without you, Maria. I go out with my father's friends, they talk about thousands of interesting things, but their voices are just an echo of my conversations with you. Our housekeeper's name is Roman and she's sort of like you in some ways. So I spend hours on end in the kitchen, and while she's cleaning the cupboards I eat an apple I'm not hungry for, drink some milk that I don't really want, just so I can be close to her and therefore also close to you. I miss you terribly. Will you come for Easter?
And I write back:
I miss you terribly, too. I don't go out with boys anymore. It's no fun if we don't pee together afterward and talk over all the details. My parents are always complaining, because of the long-distance calls, or because I'm always dragging myself around the house, not doing anything. On the weekends I almost always stay home, biting my nails and staring at the ceiling. At school, in religion class, I stare out the window, wishing you would appear in your uniform with the Mao collar and with a cigarette in your hand. Yesterday Antigone and I went to the movies. We saw
Doctor Dolittle.
She says it's no mistake they're playing it now, even though it's an old film—it makes her think right away of Andreas Papandreou! We laugh a lot when it's just the two of us, but something's missing: you! We miss you! Come home!

I don't know if it's because Anna is gone or because our psychology textbook, by Evangelos Papanoutsos, the guy who also made demotic Greek the official language of education, makes no sense, but I understand pretty much nothing in that class:
When we observe our fellow human beings, or when we ask them to fill out questionnaires, we're asking them to delve deep into their emotional worlds and describe past or current experiences, while at the same time we're placing ourselves
in their situation: we imagine ourselves doing what they do, so as better to understand what is happening in their inner world
. I don't understand our philosophy textbook, either:
Hermeneutic art, abstraction, and deliberate incomprehensibility in art provoke a rebellion in consciousness, by not allowing it to function aesthetically
. When I read stuff like that, it makes me want to really apply myself to art again, to make the most hermeneutic art I can, to be deliberately incomprehensible all over the pages of the textbook, over those stupid sentences. I want to correct that stupidity, the way Anna once corrected the
Acropolis
in my Savings Day drawing to an
Avgi
.

I spend my entire allowance on Da Vinci watercolors, on charcoals, sketch pads. It's been five whole years since I drew, since that fiasco with the Savings Day prize. But it's as if I've been drawing on the inside the whole time: where did these color combinations come from? The splashes of yellow, the animals, the women in long dresses, the urgent need for black? I paint like a construction worker pouring cement, thick layers of color on larger and larger sheets of paper. I want to paint the walls of my room black and then cover that black with pictures of snakes wearing crowns, leaky pirogues, female figures in long skirts whose hems blaze with flames. Indigent families warm themselves by that fire, children reach up to pluck fabric fruit off the skirts. The snakes with crowns are Anna's father. The pirogues are my parents. The women are Antigone, who this year has taken to wearing long, tasseled skirts. And the fire on the hem, of course, is Anna.

As for me, I'm the hungry child in the background, reaching for a piece of fruit.

“What kind of crap is this?”

I've unrolled my drawings on the table in the round room in the apartment in Paris, next to a pile of books by Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Guy Debord, directly beneath a photograph of
Poulantzas and a poster that reads:
I take my desires for reality, because I believe in the reality of my desires
. It's Easter. I came to visit precisely because I believe in the reality of my desires. I had the cylindrical container between my legs for the entire flight and this is what I get for my trouble. Anna is back to making her familiar old faces. She's not afraid anymore.

“What don't you like about it?” I ask.

“Why don't you ask what I
do
like? It's easy, quick, ornamental. You're better than this.”

“Do you want me to explain the symbolism?”

“Symbolism shouldn't be something you have to explain.”

I have to admit, she has a point.

“Come on, I'll show you something that doesn't need explaining.” She grabs me by the hand and literally pulls me up to her room, which for the next ten days will be our room. It's a tiny attic with a slanting ceiling and a double bed strewn with woven Moroccan pillows. She lifts the bedspread, revealing a wooden drawer in the base of the bed. She pulls open the drawer and hands me a photograph of a skinny boy with liquid eyes and short hair.

“Well? Does that need explaining?”

“You guys are a thing?”

“His name is Raoul. He's half French, half Algerian. Aren't those the most amazing eyes? I want you to meet him, Maria.”

“Have you guys gone far?”

“Yes, I have to tell you about that, too . . . He touched me all over!”

“You didn't write to me about that!”

“There are some things you can't write about.”

Anna confuses me the older we get. She's always telling me what to do—to kiss her, to break up with Kostas—and meanwhile she does whatever she likes. If I were the one who'd let a boy touch me everywhere, I'd have had her to reckon with.

“I think we're old enough now. It's so amazing, to be touched like that.”

She explains in detail how a boy pushes aside your skirt, then your underwear, then slips his finger into your vagina. It sounds disgusting.

“And it doesn't hurt?” I ask.

“Just at first.”

“What do you like about it?”

“It's a way of getting closer to someone.”

Before we leave the house I shut myself in the bathroom for a little while. I lock the door and try to find my vagina, some depression that would admit a finger. If it brings you closer to someone else, maybe it could bring me closer to myself, too. But I can't find an opening. It's solid everywhere.

“What, you started locking the door?” Anna shouts, pounding on the door with her fists. “What kind of friends are we, anyhow? We don't pee together anymore?”

Raoul opens the door and kisses us the French way, three times, on alternating cheeks. He lives by Blanche station, in a tiny room with an unmade bed, posters for the band Bazooka, and books about Fassbinder, Godard, and Pasolini. His window looks onto the rooftops across the way and while the two of them kiss, I stare out at the depthless, tiled horizon. He's really very handsome and he's a university student, too, studying graphic design. From the very beginning, with Apostolos the plumber, I knew Anna would go for older guys. He's twenty years old, just imagine!

Raoul is very polite to me. “Anna talks about you all the time,” he says, then opens a beer with his teeth and offers it to me. It's eleven in the morning and we're drinking beer; the day is off to a strange start. We go out into the freezing Parisian air, pull our hats down over our ears, and they take me to see Beaubourg. We
wear ourselves out with walking, stop every few hours for coffee, mussels with pommes frites, or pear tarte, we climb Montmartre, Raoul and Anna kiss, I stare at my coffee spoon or the hem of my coat.

“We have to find you a boyfriend, too,” Anna says slyly.

They decide to introduce me to Michel.

Michel dresses exactly the same way Raoul does—black shirt, a chain on his pants, a leather jacket with Sex Pistol patches—but his ears stick out and he has a sad look in his eyes. A similarity in dress says a lot about a friendship. Anna and I, meanwhile, are in our goth phase—romantic white blouses with lots of lace, white powder on our faces. It's not healthy, to consume such large doses of The Cure and Verlaine all at once.

“How did the two of you meet?” I ask.

Raoul tells me they went to the same boarding school. One day, during room check, when they were supposed to be cleaning their rooms, Michel picked up all his trash off the floor and pinned it to the wall, like butterflies. The monitor had no idea how to react. The rumor spread from mouth to mouth and Raoul was impressed. He learned everything about the Sex Pistols from Michel, about the situationists and the
Marche des Beurs
anti-racism movement, even formed ties with some people in squats in Berlin. I figure all that learning must have happened in sign language, because Michel barely ever opens his mouth. Could I fall for someone so silent? For now it's enough that he's active in the anti-racist movement and that he rides his bicycle all over Paris, and if he wants to tell me something he just draws it, as if he were mute. He wears glasses, too, like me. How do two people with glasses kiss, anyhow?

I find out that very same night. They take off their glasses, place them on the table by Raoul's bed and slowly sink into the pillows, half blind. If you're nearsighted, the other person always looks better when you're not wearing your glasses. His skin looks softer,
his eyes sort of hazy, as if you're only dreaming them. Until the others come back bearing pizza, Michel and I kiss, just kiss. I try to unbutton his shirt. “Aren't we moving sort of fast?” he asks.

We sit on the floor eating pizza and Anna sings “
Avanti Popolo
” at the top of her lungs. Is that really a song that goes with pizza? Is it possible to say yes and no at the same time? I want and don't want? Can you curse your home economics class while touching up your lip gloss in the bathroom? Dream of freedom but be unable to find your own vagina? That night, when Anna and I crawl into bed in the attic room, I speak to her in a disjointed rush, still tipsy from the morning beers and the vodka we drank at Raoul's. Anna crosses her arms over the comforter and listens to me carefully. She's thinking.

“What do you say, Anna?”

She doesn't say anything. And it's not because she's still thinking.

She's asleep.

I pad downstairs to the bathroom in bare feet. Anna is still sleeping, but her father is awake, sitting in his velvet armchair with the worn upholstery. It's as if he stepped right out of the photographs: he's smoking a pipe and reading
Liberation
.

“So here I am, finally meeting my daughter's alter ego,” he says, and holds out a hand to me. His handshake is so warm it makes my knuckles crack.

“I propose we go out for breakfast. What do you say? It's a beautiful day today.” He points out the window at a little café across the street. “That's my favorite place right there.”

“What about Anna?”

“She's not a cripple. When she wakes up, she'll come find us.”

We sit in the window and look out at the passersby, and they look back at us. I order hot chocolate and a croissant, Anna's father
drinks a coffee but doesn't eat anything. I try to picture him with Antigone, in one of those moments that grown-up couples share. Him putting a finger in her vagina, for instance.

“What are you laughing about?” he asks.

“Nothing, I just thought of something funny.”

“You're not going to tell me, are you? That's fine, I respect people who protect their thoughts.”

Anna's father doesn't talk about leftist politics all the time, as I had imagined, about separatist movements and revolutionary tactics. He mostly just strokes his beard and tells me funny stories about when he first moved to France, how he got the metro stations confused, or would forget his keys and have to spend the night on the steps of his apartment building. He does tells me a political joke, though: “A leftist gets into a taxi. He tells the driver: turn left here, then left again, then the other way.” At some point his face clouds over. He takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes and stares at me, deep in thought. A minute or two pass before he speaks.