Читать книгу Why I Killed My Best Friend - Amanda Michalopoulou - Страница 10

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 scratches 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 men 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.

She’s less emotional in the texts she writes for Exit, though they come from the heart, too. In an article about the social ecology of Murray Bookchin, Irini dreamed of a society comprised of citizen groups that would take the place of multinational corporations in an attempt to restore social desire in a world that revolves self-complacently around egos and profit margins. People want to reap without first cultivating the earth. They want rain without lightning, the ocean without the murmuring of its waves.

Is that how Anna would speak if she were a teenager today? There’s certainly no way she would end her text with an exclamation of this sort: People say cities provide freedom of choice. Freedom means doing what you want, not having what you want. Today’s cities are dominated by the logic of advertising. Our biggest source of anxiety isn’t whether or not we’ll have complete access to the sole object of our desire, but how we can consume lover after lover. Society makes sure to give you the distressing impression that, in choosing one person, you lose all others, as if people were coats to choose from, old or new.

The coat Irini wears is a shiny, silvery old leather jacket, torn and covered with ink stains. Kosmas has a kind of retro air, too: he always has on a red scarf; you’d think it was attached to his neck, like the gold necklace in Gwendolyn’s story. He’s as jittery as a marionette, hands and feet in constant motion. He might leap out of his chair unexpectedly, for instance, and shout, “Why can’t we sell the idea of revolution the same way they sell shoes? Why can’t we make revolution irresistible, like a really stylish winter coat? Don’t you want to bet that if we did, all those spoiled rich kids I went to school with would be falling all over themselves to get a revolution of their own?” Kosmas went to high school at the American College of Greece. He must’ve been one of those kids plagued by inner dilemmas: I may be rich, but I feel poor. It’s more or less how I felt as the daughter of an oil company executive.

Kosmas and Irini are the digital brains of Exit, and of our activities more generally. They’re the best hackers I’ve ever met. They can bring the Ministry of Finance to its knees in half an hour, though if you saw them waiting for the bus you’d think they were just two college kids like all the rest, headed to class with textbooks under their arms, whose biggest worry is whether they might get a pimple on their chin.

“Okay, we need to put our heads together here.” I pull my glasses down to the tip of my nose, mostly because I know they get a kick out of my schoolmarm routine. “Speaking of ruins, Irini, we might want to think about the Attic Highway—we haven’t done anything on that front.”

“The Attic Highway can wait. We’ve got over a month for that. What we really need to talk about is the metro.” Irini blinks her eyes a few times, and I can’t help but admire her perfectly arched eyebrows, her jet-black lashes, which tremble so suggestively. Then again, perhaps it’s just a matter of age. I see in Irini what Diana once saw in me: possibilities.

“What’s wrong, Maria? Are you daydreaming?” It bothers Irini if my mind wanders even for a minute. Kids of her generation always want things to operate according to schedule: now it’s time to space out, now it’s time to work.

“I met the daughter of a childhood friend of mine this afternoon. I guess I’m feeling a little nostalgic . . .”

Anna-Maria leaps up into my lap. Cats can tell when humans have become cats, too, when they’ve slipped into a furry pouch of regression. She sinks her claws into my sweater; a single prick and I’m back to my normal self. I clap to get everyone’s attention.

“Okay, people, let’s get to work! Who has the final text for the metro?”

Irini clears her throat. It’s her day. There are times when certain people shine, take the lead, while others would rather just disappear into their chairs, like me right now. Irini starts to read: “They presented it to us immaculate, marble, smelling of disinfectant, like an airport bathroom. Cold white fluorescent lighting. Private security guards. The Athens Metro is a moving walkway that transports us home after hours of low-paying, back-breaking work. It feels like the inside of a bank, exudes an air of industriousness and order. Music and food are prohibited. Human activity of any sort is avoided. In Europe people at least make themselves at home in their metro, they sing, they sleep in its warmth—after all, no European government cares enough to actually solve the problem of homelessness. We take it a step further: we hide our homeless, we kick them out of the station at Omonia. They mar the Europeanized image of prosperity we’re hoping might attract the business of multinational corporations. Sweep the dirt under the rug! Was the new metro designed for people so exhausted they’ve become zombies? Is this the new Athens we’re so proud of? This imitation of Brussels? Say no to this asphyxiating state ‘security’! Say no to the Olympic spirit being promoted by multinational corporations! Say no to the paternalistic aesthetic regulation of our city’s working class! Bring your guitars and your sandwiches. Come help us give the Athens Metro the color and life we all deserve.”

“Doesn’t it sound a little too hippie at the end?”

“Maria, you’re impossible! It’s already been printed! You’re always wanting to make changes!”

“What I certainly don’t want, Kosmas, is for them to pass our movement off as just another wave of inveterate nostalgia. For them to dismiss it as utopian thinking and all that crap.”

“You want our generation at the demonstration? You’ll have it! I guarantee you, our whole department will be there.”

“Kids whose most cherished dream is to get a job at a private television station are going to come down and occupy the metro?”

“Don’t you want them to?”

“I want young people, not bearded hypocrites from the Communist Youth.”

“Don’t be prejudiced, Maria!” Kayo says, draining the last of his wine.

I throw him a disparaging glance and stand up from the table. Whatever claws I once had are gone.

I use the tongs to agitate the photograph of Irini in the basin of developer. Her features are fluid, our little phantom of liberty. Her eyes are shining, her long hair is braided into Princess Leia buns on either side of her head, which is at a slight tilt, neck bare, inviting a kiss or a bite. Underneath we’ll print a line from Alice Walker, Resistance is the secret of joy.

All the darkroom equipment, the red light, the quiet swish of the liquid in the basin do nothing to alter the way that space echoes within me. The moment I open the door I experience a visceral sense of vertigo, a fear of falling and breaking my arm, even though there’s no stool anymore, and no salt, and I no longer believe in proverbs. When I slip into this room and close the door, something African comes and colonizes Exarheia Square. Something that brings me back to the days of crickets and caves and dismembered dolls. “What on earth do you do in there for hours on end?” Kayo sometimes asks. “I breathe in chemicals,” I answer. “I punish myself for being a racist.”

Now he opens the door just a smidge.

“Close the door, Kayo, are you crazy? You’ll ruin the photographs!”

He steals into the room and hugs me. His body is still warm from the sheets. Doesn’t he ever tire of this game of incomplete conquest? A hug, a kiss or two on the neck, then each of us to our own bed. It only exacerbates the feeling that’s been bothering me since afternoon, of having suddenly been thrown back into childhood. A six-year-old girl came and dusted off certain forgotten regions inside me: self-sacrifice, trust, admiration, disappointment, boundless love.

“Want to come and sleep in my bed tonight?”

I don’t reply. Kayo goes out of the darkroom, and I follow.

“Don’t you think it’s time you found a place of your own?”

He’s picking at the leftover potato salad, and freezes with the fork in midair. I stand on tiptoe and eat the bite off his fork.

“You really want me to leave? You’re that upset?”

“You said our living together was a temporary solution. It’s been three years.”

I enjoy crushing his dignity from time to time. Maybe the cold potato in my mouth is to blame. Or the memory of Antigone’s fake braid. Or of Anna’s high-handedness: give me Apostolos, give me your drawing, pee here, smoke this cigarette, sing whatever song I tell you to. It seems fairly obvious that I’m trying to act as Anna would, to usurp her place. You just say whatever comes into your head and everyone else takes you at your word.

“I think you should leave, Kayo. Find a place to live already. Take your life into your own hands.”

Merde. I’m a sadist.

I peek into his bedroom before leaving for school. He’s cleared all the ballerinas and plastic flowers off the desk. His suitcase is out in plain sight. Is he staging his departure to make me feel bad? I grab my coat from the rack in the hall and run down the stairs. I’m afraid that if I stop for even a second at the mirror by the front door, I’ll remember how I used to primp and preen in that exact same spot fifteen years ago, trying to be whatever it was I thought Kayo wanted. I wore men’s suits and cut my hair short, shaved the nape of my neck. I lived on an apple a day.

These days the bones in my wrists still protrude, but at least my arms are the arms of a normal person, not a ghost. I’ve gained ten kilos since my Paris days. My hair is shoulder-length now, and I use a ballpoint pen to put it up in a bun, the way Anna did during the last phase of our friendship. The only thing Kayo still likes about my looks is the way I dress. I still shop at vintage stores—sometimes for elbow-length gloves, sometimes for men’s suits. The gloves are straight out of My Fair Lady, but the suits are proof of his lingering influence. If I can survive without Kayo the way I survived without Anna, then I’ll be truly free.

I take the metro to school. I scan the platforms for potential escape routes, passages that aren’t being monitored. There are cameras everywhere. And our plan hangs by a thread: there’s no central committee controlling things, just whatever collective telepathy steers us to a certain place, to this electrified now. I’ve got copies of our proclamation tied up in a tube and tucked into my scarf. I bend down as if to brush something off my shoe and shove the tube under the seat. Right before I get off at my stop, I slice the string with a knife and the proclamations roll all over the floor, a torrent of colored paper. I guess I did learn something after all, flying on magic carpets and playing Little Wizard.

“My mom says you should call her.”

Daphne hands me a business card with both cell and land lines, of which there are four: home, work, a number in Paris, another that must be a summer house on some island. The card is warm from the girl’s sweaty palm; it practically breathes.

“Thank you, Daphne. Now go and draw with the other kids.”

“What should I draw?”

“Whatever you like.”

She plops down on her stomach and sticks her tongue out at Natasha, who, terrified, quickly draws a rainbow at the top of her page, over the family she’s been drawing, as if to protect her creation. Daphne turns her back on Natasha, hides her paper with one hand so the other girl can’t see, and starts to draw, speaking all the while in a sing-song: “Look at the lightning, colored rain, the little kid cries, waaa, waaa . . .”

She’s starting to pique my interest.

“Come on, little kid in the cave, pick a big leaf from the tree so you don’t get wet, hmmm, hmmm . . .”

Natasha is straining her neck to see, even more curious than I am.

“Walk on the grass and mud in the big brown field, plaf, plaf. Hide, hide in the cave. The big witch finds you and says, Do you want to be a witch like me? Yes, yes, la la la . . . And the big witch says: eat these crickets and then we’ll see. Mmmm, mmmm, yummy in my tummy, the little witch says. We’ll take lightning and make the crickets turn blue, la la la. We’ll sell them and make lots of money.”

“That’s stupid. Who would want to buy crickets?” Natasha asks.

Daphne looks at her imperiously. “All the vampires and ghosts will buy crickets and then at night they’ll come to your bed and eat you, too! Mmmm!”

Natasha shrieks. My eyes, meanwhile, have filled with tears.

“What’s that on the kitchen table?” Kayo asks. He’s opened his suitcase back up and put his little plastic animals back where they belong. He even made onion soup to butter me up.

“A drawing Daphne did.”

“I guess things are getting serious.”

“I brought it home so I could look at it more carefully.”

“What do you think you’re going to learn from it?”

“What goes on in their house.”

“Don’t you think you’re overestimating yourself, Maria?”

Not at all. If there’s anything I know how to interpret, it’s children’s drawings. I’ve read a lot on the subject, but more importantly, I remember. I remember the kind of need that drives you to draw caves and rain. Sure, I may have talked to her about caves and witches who eat crickets, but she was the one who thought up the lightning that slices across the page like tiny swastikas. And she added those reddish-brown splotches of mud—as if the landscape had come down with the chicken pox.

Daphne draws the way her mother did, with sweeping gestures, practically tearing the page as she goes. She’s not afraid of the color gray. She made the witch enormous and the witchlet microscopically small, suggesting a certain balance of power. A strong female presence in the family—who else but Anna? And the cave, symbolizing protection. I imagine a house ruled by underground terror. Either there’s no father at all or he’s completely powerless, since there’s no sign of him in the drawing. No siblings, either. The mother witch and the little daughter witchlet. They climb onto their magic carpet and head off to help the poor. Another witch, flying by, reaches out a hand and shakes the carpet. The witch and the witchlet grab hold of the tassels just in the nick of time. Come here, my pretty. You thought you could escape me, but you can’t.

“What’s wrong, child? Did a bakery burn down?”

That’s how Mom scolds me for my long absences. It’s a common enough idiom, but the subtext to her irony is that I only come to see them when something’s gone wrong in my life. She’s a busy woman now, fairly well-known as a children’s writer, but she still plays the stereotypical Greek mother to perfection.

“I just missed you guys, that’s all.”