Why I Killed My Best Friend (4 page)

“Please, Anna . . .”

“It's over, we're through. I won't be friends with a racist.”

It's recess and we've stayed behind in the classroom to talk, but now Anna storms off in a huff and goes out to play with Angeliki, her new friend. I cry for a while, then tear a sheet out of my penmanship notebook. At the top of the page I write a line by Dionysios Solomos, our national poet:
Freedom requires daring and grace
. Underneath that, in fancy letters, taking care to stay inside the ruled lines, I write:
Dear Mrs. Anna's Mother, We aren't racists!!! I love Gwendolyn even more than my own life. (And Gwendolyn is very black.) I'm an African. Love, Maria
. In the margin I draw two black tears, or dark blue, anyhow, with my pen. At the bottom of the page I sketch the man-made jetty in the harbor in Tarkwa Bay. I
draw lots of tiny black people, too, like ants, stretched out in the sun under the palm trees. The sun is smiling, but its teeth are black. Its rays are squiggly, rastafarian. I fold the page in fours and slip it into Anna's primer. She'll find it when she gets home, and I'm sure she'll be mad, but I bet she'll show it to her mother, too.

The rest of the day is hell. Angeliki keeps hissing “teapot, teapot, teapot” behind my back. Kyria Aphrodite doesn't hear, but she catches me sticking my tongue out and sends me to the blackboard until the bell rings. I'm facing the world map again, but this time I don't even look at Africa. I keep my eyes trained on a country in Europe that's exactly the same shape as Nigeria—a country called France.

“My mom says you should come to our house for lunch, if your mother will let you. Do you want to come?”

Anna is looking at Kyria Aphrodite, but she's talking to me.

“So you believe me that I'm not a racist?”

“Do you want to or not?”

“Okay!”

“Only my mother is a ballet dancer and we don't eat things with sauces.”

“I don't like sauces.”

During recess we stick together and ignore Angeliki. We share Anna's sandwich—the rotten cheese tastes better today—and swear to be friends forever. I'm so happy my nose starts to bleed. I think I'm going to faint, because I can't stand the sight of blood. But I have to seem strong. Anna uses some of the blood to write our names in her notebook as if it were a single name, Anna-Maria.

“It's an oath, you know, now that it's written in blood,” she says.

We go back to our anti-junta skipping game. I'm the happiest girl in all of Greece, and in all of Africa, too! When school is
out we walk to her house holding hands, our palms slippery with sweat.

“How far is your house, anyway?”

“I'll tell you a secret. Promise not to tell? We lied and said I live where the bakery is, the one across the street from school. I actually live in Plaka. We gave a fake address because our school is experimental and I ab-so-lute-ly
had
to go there. See?”

“If our school is so good, I wonder what the bad ones are like. You mean there are worse teachers than Kyria Aphrodite?”

Anna laughs with her whole face: with her eyes, her cheeks, the dimple in her chin.

“You're so beautiful!” I tell her.

“What matters most is inner beauty,” Anna replies. She must've heard it somewhere, it's the kind of thing grown-ups say. But since it's Anna saying it now, I learn it by heart.

Anna's house is like one of the smaller houses in Ikeja. It has a yard with stone walls. Anna unlocks the door with her own key, tosses her bag on the floor and her mother yells “
Allooo
” from the kitchen. Anna runs in and hugs her. When she lets go, the most beautiful mother in the world suddenly appears before me: plump lips, sort of liquid eyes, like Gwendolyn's, hair braided into a shiny black rope that comes all the way down to her waist. She's wearing a black leotard and burgundy tights. She's barefoot and very skinny, like all ballerinas. She bends down and smiles at me. I can see all of her ribs through the leotard, like an X-ray.

“You must be Maria. I'm Antigone.”

So I'll call her by her first name, like I did with Gwendolyn! Anna calls her Antigone, too, only she says it funny, with a French accent. They talk in French for a while as I take off my raincoat.

“Where should I put my backpack?”

Anna gestures toward the living room. I can leave my bag wherever I want? On the floor, on the sofa, on the table by the bookshelf? At our house my backpack belongs only in my bedroom, on the floor by my desk.

“Maria, you told your mother you'd be eating with us, right?” Antigone asks.

I pretend not to hear. I didn't tell my mother, but I won't be here that long, will I? I put my backpack on the table, which is buried in books and electricity bills, papers covered with scrawled writing, overflowing ashtrays. Antigone smokes a brand called Gauloises. The pack is a pretty color. Everything in their house is beautiful and strange. They have African statues, like we do, and huge worry beads made out of amber. The tables all have wheels on the legs, because when Antigone practices she needs to roll the furniture out of the way. There's a poster on the wall of a little boy peeing on a crown, and beside it a long, narrow, black-and-white picture with lots of people. All their faces look the same, they're sad because they're carrying a wounded girl on their hands. She might even be dead.

“Do you like that woodblock? It's by Tasos,” Antigone says, lighting a cigarette.

“It's nice.”

“Do you see how many people suffered in the name of justice and democracy?”

“All those people suffered?”

“Oh, many, many more . . .”

“When we were in Africa and you were in Paris?”

Antigone nods. Her forehead fills with tiny wrinkles. She doesn't have any eyebrows, she draws them on with a pencil.

“Why don't you put something happier on the walls, now that we have democracy?”

“Like what?”

“I don't know, fruit. Or the old guy with the pipe.”

“We have to remember those who sacrificed their lives for us, Maria.”

She's right. She's beautiful, but she also has what Anna was talking about: inner beauty.

We eat our lunch backwards. First the main dish, chicken with mushrooms, then salad. And then some strange cheeses and Jell-O with chunks of fruit. Antigone eats the way Aunt Amalia does, absentmindedly, a bite now and again, when she remembers. But Anna and I are starving! Their kitchen is so cheerful, with blue walls and yellow cabinets. Like a nursery school.

“I owe you an apology, Maria,” Antigone says while she's doing the dishes. Anna has gone out to bring her a newspaper from the kiosk on the corner.

“What for?” I ask.

“For what Anna said to you. You know, apart from good people like you and your parents, there are also lots of bad white people in Africa. Ones who want to take black people's land away and turn them into servants.”

I feel my face getting hot. Gwendolyn and Unto Punto
are
servants. But they don't mind.

“What were you doing in Africa?”

“Riding my bike, mostly. Our house was even bigger than yours!”

“Oh my!” Antigone says and bursts out laughing. “What about your parents?”

“Dad worked all the time. Sometimes Mom would sew me dresses. Or she would go for tea with Miss Steedworthy who had a glass eye because her husband hit her. Now she doesn't do anything. She doesn't have any friends in Athens.”

Maybe if Antigone feels sorry for Mom she'll want to be her friend, and convince her to go on a diet so she can wear her dress with the daisies again.

Antigone's face gets all wrinkled again. Whenever she's thinking, her face looks like a crumpled piece of paper. “Do you think your mother might be interested in joining the League of Democratic Women? It's an organization for women on the left.”

“What do they do?”

“They talk about their rights, discuss domestic violence . . .”

“If they sew, too, I'm sure she would go.”

“Here, let's give her a call together.”

Fantastic! Mom and Antigone will meet and become friends, just like me and Anna. Dola and Bambi, minus the jealousy. I carefully dial the six numbers.

“Hi, Mom, Anna's mom wants to know if you want to know about the League of Democratic Women.”

“What I want to know, Maria Papamavrou, is where in heaven's name are you? If you think it's okay to go traipsing around wherever you want, you've got another think coming! You'd better come home this instant! Now!” Mom is shouting. I cover the receiver with my hand so her voice won't be heard all the way down in Plaka.

“Well, what does she say?” Antigone asks.

“She says she's not feeling well and I should come home right away to take care of her.”

Antigone drives me home in her Beetle—a car that looks like a turtle and shudders all over as it moves. In my head I hear Gwendolyn say:
The fear of tomorrow makes the turtle carry its home wherever it goes
. That's what I want for myself, too. To have a house I can carry on my back, like my red backpack with its shoulder straps. To not live with Mom and have to do whatever she says. Anna and I are in the back seat of the Beetle. She keeps stroking my hand, though
avoiding my pinky finger, since it's kind of scary. “Poor thing, I hope your mother hasn't gotten malaria and lost any of her fingers, like you.” I lied and told her my finger rotted and fell off because of a terrible African sickness.

Antigone wants to come upstairs to the apartment and bring Anna, too. “Women's solidarity,” she says. I tell her my mother doesn't like to have people around when she's sick, and to make it more dramatic I say that sometimes Mom breaks plates when she's annoyed. That's pretty revolutionary, the League of Democratic Women will love it. When we pull up outside our building in Exarheia I shoot from the car like a bullet, I forget to say thank you, and by the time I'm at the top of the stairs to the front door it's too late: Antigone steps on the gas and the exhaust pipe belches a thick cloud of fumes. A tiny hand waves to me out the car window. It's the hand of Anna, my friend!

I'm being punished. Not in front of the world map, but in the kitchen pantry. So I'll learn that we never, ever go anywhere unless we call home first. I'm sitting on a stool, taking an inventory of the food on the shelves. Misko pasta, twenty boxes. Swan tomato paste, twelve cans. Nounou sweetened condensed milk, twenty cans. Alsa chocolate mousse and Yiotis cornflower, three boxes each. If only we had a storage room as big as the one in Ikeja! There you could never get bored. Sometimes it was hard to buy things at the market, so we had our own supermarket at home. It would take days to read all the names of the things we bought at the American base. Of course back then I was practically never punished. Mom was much more patient and at the very most would call me “silly girl,” never “Maria Papamavrou,” which is what she says when she's mad. Now, though, things are different. The salt might even have worms. I climb onto the stool and open a cardboard box of Kalas sea salt to check. No worms yet. A few cans shift and fall. I lose my
balance, the stool clatters to the ground, and suddenly I'm on the floor. I prop myself on one elbow but my other arm, from elbow to wrist, has taken on a funny shape, it's looking off somewhere else. By the time I realize how much it hurts, my mother has unlocked the pantry door and is looking first at my face, then at my arm, and shouting, “Dear God!”

The cast makes me stand out. Even the kids in the fifth and sixth grades who never talk to fourth-graders want to know what happened. “Oh, it's nothing, I just broke my arm,” I say with a heroic sigh. “At least it's your left arm,” says one of the fifth-grade girls. How is she supposed to know I'm left-handed? Anna is my bodyguard. During recess she clears a path for me to pass, shouting, “Come on, guys, can't you see we've got a wounded person on our hands? Merde, merde!” Merde means shit in French. It's what we call Angeliki, too. Anna told her that “merde” is how you say Angeliki in French and she fell for it. Today I feel sort of sorry for Angeliki. She asked me what my sign is. “Sagittarius,” I said, and she didn't make any jokes about natives hunting in the jungle with bows and arrows, just picked two archers out of her box of zodiac crackers and gave them to me.

One big pro of the cast: I'm off the hook during penmanship class, and I get to draw instead. Drawing with my right hand is really hard, especially since I only have four fingers. My circles come out wobbly, my lines tremble, but I'd rather draw than practice my penmanship. Plus this way, if there's ever another dictatorship and we have to fight the tanks and the soldiers break one of my arms, I'll already know how to draw with the other hand. Every day my mother pulls my hair back into a ponytail and cooks food you can eat with your fingers: biftekia, fries, and puff puffs, at last! Antigone drew a peace sign on my cast. Anna wrote “merde,” but this time it doesn't mean shit, it means good luck.

“Do you want me to teach you French, now that we can't play during recess?” she asks. “When we grow up we'll go to study in France, Greek universities are terrible.”