Why I Killed My Best Friend (34 page)

I keep hoping you'll come over and give my cheek

a sudden kiss in this crowd of strangers.

But your sharp teeth are busy

with something else:

they're devouring a slice of napolitana.

Is that tomato sauce on your upper lip

or a new, fresh wound?

Should I come over to see or would that not be wise?

Your cheeks say no.

They're filled with something hard

something you keep replacing with something else

even harder.

But I want to be your mouthful

and the next

and the next after that.

I want to be your digestion and your hunger, too.

Look: tomato sauce stains my lips, like yours.

You bite me and make me bleed.

Anna Horn

Paris, 1989

•

It's been a week since the memorial service and the same electrified silence still reigns in the office of the house in Ekali. I've pulled the shutters closed to admit no light, to block out the trees—the nature Anna described in some of her youthful poems. This is how I punish myself for not being there, for not saving her. Sitting on the floor, I'm putting her papers in order under the cold white light of Malouhos's lamp. Every now and then tears come. The strange thing is, I don't cry over the things you'd expect—the poem she dedicated to me after our heated discussion in that awful pizzeria. I cry at the phrase
fought for a better tomorrow with beer cans and paper bags
. Or,
not a protest, over
.

The letters she never sent to me are stored in shoe boxes, along with piles of other unsent letters. The ones to me all begin with the same harsh invocation of my name—a plain
Maria
—and end with an urgent
write to me
. And now I do really feel the need to write her one of those torrential, twenty-page letters we used to exchange back when we were teenagers.

Anna
, it would begin,
you betrayed me and I betrayed you countless times. Today I found a huge stack of letters you wrote to Michel, in which you call him your only love. To me you talked about exercises in courage, about bourgeois habits, when what you were really trying to say was love. What kind of friends were we, anyhow? Years later, when I told you I'd
seen Michel in Berlin, you asked me how he was, what he was up to, if there was a woman in his life—but you couldn't even hint at the truth
.

You loved whomever I loved—Michel, Angelos, Camus—probably because you loved me, too. That's something that never crossed my mind. Sincere, passionate, oppressive love. Odiosamato. Was that it? Then why didn't you say so? Or perhaps you did, in your way, and I just didn't want to hear. I thought that people who love too passionately must be lying, maybe even on purpose. That's something you never understood about me. My reserved nature wasn't an indication of my distrust toward you, but toward life
.

You were always storming off in anger, and then coming back again. I always thought those returns were the fruit of my tireless efforts to win you back, but you would have come back anyway. You needed that cycle of emotions in order to exist: enthusiasm, betrayal, anger, despair, forgiveness, then back to enthusiasm again. Only then, only thus, were you Anna. You were afraid of earthquakes, afraid of the end of ideology. What else were you afraid of? Of your own hands, perhaps, which were capable of going so far to protect me, of pushing a man into the water, of bringing an end to ideology, of causing the earthquake that would destroy the safety of the world?

Another long cycle and you came back entirely refreshed, with new blood, new resilience, a husband and child—what better suit of armor? Now I can see it clearly: you came with a plan. You wanted us to organize the revolution we'd abandoned in the middle. When you saw me withdrawing, when I stopped being involved with the preparations for the occupation of the Attic Highway, when I became a “sheep,” as you called me right before you hung up the phone on me for the very last time, you decided to teach me a lesson. You went on television, supposedly addressing yourself to the world, but really you were talking straight at me. I've memorized what you said, I don't need a reporter to quote it: “We all have to show courage and faith in our ideals. We have to literally embody our emotions if we're going to act politically. New technologies have marginalized the body. There's
nothing more dangerous than that. We here are going to fight with our bodies, because it's the only thing we have left.” In essence, you were warning me. If I didn't show courage, you'd show me how a body can be used as the ultimate weapon. For all those years I thought you were the one who was killing me bit by bit, with your attitude toward me. That without you I could finally become the person I dreamed of being. Whereas in fact I was killing you, too
.

And now that you no longer exist, I sit here wallowing with you in an absolute nothingness. Or perhaps I'm playing the worst role of all: that of your ghost. Malouhos won't let me leave, on the pretext that your papers need to be put in order by the person who knew you best. Daphne clings to me like a leech, her hands shake my hips, punishing me for not saving you. It was bad timing, the worst timing: you see, I was trying to save myself. And part of that attempt was the decision to keep my distance from you for a while. I wanted to montage the video of women who look like Antigone; I wanted to make them walk to the tune of the Internationale. I wanted to finally look for a gallery where I could show my work
.

Now I miss you desperately and regret all that. There are times when I'm gripped by the morbid desire to open your closets, to touch all your clothes from this final phase of your life, these clothes that rustle gently, and to comfort myself with your smell—the heavy, womanly perfume you started to wear after Antigone died. Were you trying to replace her? And yet you followed her fate down to the letter. You may have acted like one of those girls who are in love with their fathers, but all along you clung pathologically to your mother's skirts
.

So, then, we lied to one another constantly. Silly, heroic lies. I never told you about my little finger, but then again did I tell anyone else? Even myself? Perhaps that was the hardest thing of all: you knew more about me than I did, and you made me spit it all out, one detail at a time, like half-chewed insects, as day broke on Amorgos. And when I'd finally realized who I was and how I'd gotten to where I was, you opened the door and left, because Mayakovsky said that's what real revolutionaries do. You'll never
know what it means to finally tell your deepest secret and have your only witness walk out the door, leaving you at your own mercy
.

“You'll never know”: I'm talking to you as if you exist, as if you just went into the kitchen for a minute to fix a round of martinis. The shock of your death is something I have no experience of, nothing to compare it to. I didn't go to the memorial service, or even to the funeral: as your casket was being lowered into the ground, I was at home drawing, like the insensitive brute I am—drawing pitch-black caves. Malouhos came by the apartment afterward and cried like a child, grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “Let me hold you, there's even more of Anna on you than there is on me.” He practically dragged me here to the house in Ekali. Kayo was standing stock-still and expressionless in the middle of the living room. Daphne was curled up in her cave. Your cigarette butts filled an ashtray in the bathroom, your satin pajamas were on the bed, though it had been a week since you last slept there. I imagine you in full gear at the occupation, sleeping in your clothes, making coffee and sweets and cursing me, the coward, for ruining your plans. Are you satisfied, at least? Deeply, existentially fulfilled? I'll never know. I only started to understand you after you left us, and the further away you get, the more unconfirmed my theories will remain. If I keep going like this, I might invent an Anna who bears no relation to the real one
.

But I owe you a real Maria. After you hung up the phone on me, I went to the rector's wife and told her something that I just as easily could have told myself—I simply needed an audience for the promise to stick: I want to make art, to take photographs, to wander station platforms with a Super 8. Do you know what I'm most afraid of? I'm afraid that all the newborns in the world might die and leave a deep wound in their mothers' hearts; I'm afraid of blood, I still have nightmares about severed fingers; I'm afraid of pretending to be brave when art is the only thing that gives me courage. Art is my revolution, the embodiment of my emotions. I know it won't change the course of history, but not all of us are cut out for grand gestures. And even your grand gestures got distorted. Our old classmate
Angeliki (who goes by Geli, now, it turns out) described you as an aesthete who frequented charity balls. I'd have thought you would rise from the grave to give her a black eye. One leftist columnist wrote that you taught us “the postmodern political language of the masses, the acceptance of paradox and the end of leaders.” You, the bossiest leader I know
.

What am I supposed to do with you? For starters, I need to settle our unfinished business. I killed you just as you killed me. I didn't push you from an open window, the way people do in movies. And besides, you're still alive—vague, elusive, the eternal Anna. When I'm overcome by a need for explanations, I'll read your poems, where the real you can't hide. In those poems you make mistakes and admit it, you love and forgive without fear. Perhaps you should have tried to write poetry instead of chasing my dream of making art. And perhaps I should have told you right from the start that only when I'm covered in paint am I truly happy
.

Write to me,

Maria

A bird flies through the garden. I prefer to think it's a good spirit flitting through the room. A witch, set free.

Daphne comes into the office, rubbing her eyes. Those eyes don't belong in her face: they're adult eyes, serious, red, surrounded by wrinkles and folds.

“Don't do that, sweetheart.”

“Why not? It makes me see colored circles. Do you know any stories about colored circles?”

I tell her whatever comes into my head. That the colored circles are soap bubbles coming from a witch's mouth, because her little apprentice witch was very mischievous and tricked her into eating a bar of magic soap.

Daphne's mouth drops open. When she's surprised, she looks just like her mother. “Soap? That little witch is even naughtier than I am!”

Yes, the apprentice witch is mad at all the other witches, she wants to take away their magic so they turn back into people.

“But won't she turn back into a person, too?”

Yes, she will. But she's tired of living in caves and riding on broomsticks, she wants a simple life, a house with a yard, where she can sit on the grass and talk to the goldfish in the pond, and work the simple magic of everyday life—like whistling, for instance.

“And the caves?”

Well, the caves can become museums about magic, where we'll put broomsticks and magic soap, and when the former witches buy a ticket to go in, they'll feel a slight dizziness in their heads, but only for an instant, since they will no longer remember the time when they could do anything they wanted.

“How does the story end?”

Oh, but the story doesn't end. Show me even just one person who will manage in the course of this life to visit all the caves there are.

TRANSLATOR'S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Translation is always a work of collaboration, but this particular book is the result of a closer collaboration than most.
Why I Killed My Best Friend
is a coming-of-age tale rooted in a succession of particular historical moments. It is uncannily prescient of the current crisis in Greece, while also hearkening back to a series of earlier crises, from the exile of many Greek citizens during the dictatorship of 1967–1974 to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s to the continual, internal ideological crises of the Greek left. The dizzying array of cultural and historical references in the novel kept me running to internet resources, to Greek historians, to countless friends in Greece and elsewhere, and of course to the author herself.

In addition to exchanging any number of email queries and responses, drafts and corrected drafts, Amanda Michalopoulou and I were fortunate to spend a week in residence at Ledig House in fall 2012, in the company of four other translator-author pairs working together in well-fed isolation. I am grateful to D. W. Gibson and the folks at Ledig House for providing this invaluable opportunity, and particularly to the other translators in residence—Neil Blackadder, Lisa Dillman, Tanya Paperny, and Joel Streicker—for the many conversations and inspirations small and large. I am also immensely grateful for Amanda's close cooperation during that week, and for her eagerness to use this translation as an excuse to revisit and even revise the original itself. (Careful readers familiar with the Greek may notice some larger-scale changes than translators usually allow themselves; these were all made with Amanda's consent and involvement.) As strange as it may be to dedicate a translation to the author of the original, I would like to dedicate this translation to her.

Other thanks are also in order: to my parents and brother, David, Helen, and Michael Emmerich, faithful readers and supporters of everything I write
and do; to Evi Haggipavlu for the many meals and so much else; to Panayiotis Pantzarelas for never tiring of my questions; to Dimitri Gondicas, always. Thanks also to Chad Post at Open Letter for believing in this book, and to Kaija Straumanis for her careful editing. And a very sincere note of gratitude must go to the FRASIS program of the Greek Ministry of Culture, which in this bleak economic moment still believes that the contemporary literature of Greece deserves a chance at life abroad.