Читать книгу Why I Killed My Best Friend - Amanda Michalopoulou - Страница 9

Two

I’m crouching on the lawn under the palm trees at our house in Ikeja. I’m eating something green and crunchy, using both hands because, as Gwendolyn says, you can’t catch fleas with one finger. Across from me is the stone pond with the goldfish, only it’s empty now. We can’t bring our fish with us to Athens. Where do fish go when people move? I hope they go down a pipe into the sea to find their long-lost families, and hug by rubbing their scales together since they don’t have any arms. When fish move to a new place, there are no suitcases, no tears. Mom and I have the handkerchiefs she embroidered with our initials in case we want to cry, and a shipping container for our things. Unto Punto carries everything out of the house, even my roller skates. Except for Dad’s things. Dad’s going to stay in Nigeria with the empty goldfish pond.

It’s summer and the rainy season has started. We have to leave before the beginning of the school year so I can adjust to the “Greek system.” In the Greek system the blackboard isn’t divided in half and all the kids in the class are the same age. That’s because there are lots of kids of every age. Mom says I won’t have to leave for school at five-thirty every morning. In the Greek system the schools are close to your house. So what time will I leave? More like seven-fifteen. But then I’ll be out in the heat, I’ll be all sweaty when I get to school. Oh, silly, it’s not hot in Greece. In winter people wear sweaters, heavy clothes. They go to movies and plays.

Greece is our real home, Africa is the fake one. In Ikeja there are periods of political unrest. Whenever you hear the words “state of emergency,” or “Igbo and Hausa,” or the name General Ojuku, you know there won’t be any school. In Greece there’s been democracy for two straight years, so there’s no escaping homework. Why should I have to go to school every day in a place where it’s cold? What do I care about movies and plays? I’m happy with the squash club and the Marine Club where the U. S. Marines have real Coca-Cola at their parties on Fridays. I don’t want for us to lose Gwendolyn and Unto Punto and go and live in an “apartment,” as Mom whispers to Aunt Amalia over the phone. I want to ride my bike in the house, do slalom turns around the columns, ring my bell drin-dran-drin and have Gwendolyn say, “You crazy girl! I thought someone was at the door again!” and laugh out loud, holding her belly.

Mom comes up behind me silently, grabs my hair and slaps my face twice, fast. Then she pries my mouth open with her fingers.

“What’s gotten into you? Spit it out! Now!”

A green pulp dribbles from my mouth, mixing with tears and snot.

“Haven’t I told you to never, ever eat crickets again?”

I eat crickets because Africa is my real home. Greece, the fake one.

I’m on the balcony of our apartment, crying and crying. I stuck my head through the railing and now I can’t get it out. I was just playing, I sucked in my cheeks, held my breath, and, oop, popped my head between the bars, which are as hot as the sand at the beach in Badagri or at Tarkwa Bay. Right away the floral-patterned lounge chairs sprang up before me, the banana boats and the bar that sells suya. A two-naira suya, please. With onions! Now my ears are as hot as the suya grill.

Exarheia Square is the ugliest place in the whole world. We live in a building that was designed by someone important. Everyone calls it the “blue building.” On the ground floor is Floral, a patisserie where mostly old people sit. The cars rev their engines and honk. At night I can’t sleep from the screeching of brakes in the street. The apartment is called a quad because there are four rooms in total. There’s a porthole window in the front door. The whole place is the size of one of the rooms in our house in Ikeja, only it’s divided into smaller rooms. There are two bedrooms, not five. One bathroom, not three. There’s no game room and no storage room, just a tiny pantry off the kitchen. And I’m not allowed to ride my bicycle in the apartment, because there are “people” living downstairs. Besides, even if I were allowed, how can you ride your bike in a quad? There are no columns to do turns around. If I want to ride my bike, I go to the Field of Ares with Mom and her cousin, Aunt Amalia, who’s an old maid, like Gwendolyn. But that’s where the similarity ends: Aunt Amalia is thin as a rail and very pale, like she’s sick. Sure, she knows the names of all the movie stars, but she laughs with her mouth closed. I miss Gwendolyn so much, with her belly laughs and her proverbs! Which one would she tell me now to make me feel better? No matter how wrong things go, salt never gets worms? Gwendolyn equals joy. Joy equals Africa. So I’m crying for lots of reasons, not just because my head got stuck in the railing.

I hear Mom letting herself into the apartment. Her footsteps echo down the hall.

“Maria! Mariiiia!”

When she finally finds me she lets out a shriek. “Maria, why do you do this to me? You’re nine years old, practically a woman! It’s time you grew up!”

A man saws through the bars and sets me free. As he saws he keeps saying, “You’re quite a handful, aren’t you?” Mom is pacing up and down in the hall. She’s angry, I can tell from the click of her heels. When she sees me come running inside she grabs me with both hands and shakes me, squeezing my wrists. No, I’m not going to cry. I’m nine years old now, practically a woman.

I wait for Mom to lie down for her afternoon siesta, go into my room and close the door. I take off all my clothes, then put on the white uniform from my school in Nigeria so the stewardesses will know I go to school in Ikeja and let me onto the plane. I have a whole bunch of naira in my pocket. How much can a child’s ticket to Africa cost? Five naira? Six? Or maybe it’ll be really expensive, and since I don’t have any money, they’ll make me work in the fields until my feet are all callused. I pull my suitcase out of my closet and pack a dress that Mom and Gwendolyn sewed, two monogrammed handkerchiefs, and my colored pencils. I can’t find any drawing paper, but that’s okay, they’ll give me some on the plane. I sneak into the kitchen and take two cans of Nounou evaporated milk, a box of Alsa Mousse, a package of Miranda cookies, and two eggs. If we land in Lagos late and I have to sleep on the beach, I’ll fry the eggs in the sand. There’ll be plenty of bananas to pick, but I might as well bring a few for the road. I wrap my roller skates in a towel so the wheels won’t clatter. Dear Mom, I write in a note, I’m going to see Gwendolyn and Dad for a few days. Come as soon as you can! And bring my bicycle. Love, Maria. On the bottom of the page I draw the stone pond in Ikeja, with the goldfish flopping around on the ground, out of the water. If she doesn’t feel sorry for me, maybe she’ll at least feel sorry for our fish.

Lots of busses are passing by. I get on the one the most people are waiting for. The eggs roll around in my suitcase. I hope they don’t break.

“A ticket for the airport, please. Can I pay in naira?”

The ticket collector smiles. He looks like Unto Punto, only he’s white. Neither one of them has many teeth. “You give someone the slip?” he asks.

“Excuse me?” Giving someone the slip doesn’t mean anything to me. My Greek isn’t very good.

“Where do you live, miss?”

“In Exarheia, but right now I’m going to Nigeria, to see Gwendolyn and Dad.”

“Nigeria? The black people will eat you!”

“Black people don’t eat!”

“Oh, they eat, all right.”

“Yes, but they eat yams or amala or moyin-moyin, not other people!”

“But you’re so small and tender, they’ll open their mouths, mmmm, and gobble you up in a single bite, because people in Africa are very hungry. Haven’t you heard?”

Heard what? Has there been more unrest? Another state of emergency? Did General Ojuku come back? Maybe the ticket collector is right, and instead of hugging me Gwendolyn will sink her teeth into me, saying, “The fear of tomorrow makes the snail carry its home wherever it goes.” How could the world have changed so much in just two weeks? Does salt really not get worms? I get off at the next stop, on the verge of tears. But I’m not going to cry. I’m nine years old, practically a woman.

I sit down on my suitcase and eat my banana as slowly as I can, running my tongue over my broken tooth. The story is that I broke it just now, during my adventures, I’m the heroine of a fairytale who has to endure various trials. I squint my eyes and pretend I’m on our covered veranda in Ikeja, under the bougainvillea. I’m eating vanilla ice cream, my favorite flavor. Gwendolyn is ironing in the shade and telling me my favorite story, the one about the two friends, Dola and Bambi. Dola has a walnut tree and animals are always eating its leaves. Bambi gives her a big pot with a hole in the bottom to plant her tree in, so the animals won’t be able to get at the leaves. When Dola starts to make lots of money from selling her walnuts, Bambi gets jealous and wants her pot back. But for that to happen they have to kill the tree, since now it’s rooted in the pot. Bambi is stubborn. She wants her pot back! The village judge decides in her favor—Bambi will get her pot. So the poor walnut tree dies. The next year, Dola gives Bambi a gold necklace for her birthday. Ten years later she decides she wants it back. But in order to get at the necklace, Bambi’s head will have to come off. They go back to the village judge and he says that since Dola insists, they’ll have to cut off Bambi’s head, and that’s that. Bambi cries a river of tears, Dola takes pity on her, and in the end Bambi lives. No one is jealous of anyone anymore, because jealousy is the worst thing of all.

Two police officers appear just as it’s getting dark. They say they’ll take me home in their patrol car and ask if I’ve thought about how my mother must feel. I have thought about that, I think about it all the time, we’re not happy in this country and we need to go home soon, while Gwendolyn is still our friend and cares about us and doesn’t have the heart to eat us.

Mom has been crying. Her eyes are puffy. She doesn’t shake me, doesn’t squeeze my wrists, just combs her fingers through my hair.

“I think the eggs in my suitcase broke,” I say.

“No use crying over broken eggs,” Mom replies, which is almost as clever as one of Gwendolyn’s proverbs. Then she hugs me. Her hugs still smell just as warm, just as African as ever.

•

I’m wearing a light blue school smock out of Laura Peiraiki-Patraiki fabric that we bought at Mignon. It has two sashes at the sides that tie in a bow at the back, like Gwendolyn’s aprons. I’ve got my red backpack over both shoulders so I don’t get a hunchback. My ponytail bounces up and down, creating a breeze that cools the nape of my neck. Mom and I are walking hand in hand down Themistocles Street. For the first little while she’ll take me to school and pick me up at the end of the day, but I have to learn the route in case she’s sick one day and can’t come. “If you get sick, I’ll stay home and take care of you,” I say. Mom laughs with her whole body, since she’s wearing her dress with the big yellow daisies and the pleats on the front. In that dress she laughs even when she’s not laughing.

She drops me off at the entrance to my new elementary school. I wave to her from inside the fence like a tiger in a cage. We’re supposed to line up according to grade, so I get into line with the other fourth graders for the annual blessing, the national anthem, and morning prayer. After that we do drills—at ease! attention! at ease! attention!—and then finally file into our classrooms, which all have doors that open onto the schoolyard. Mine is D3, a room that’s painted green halfway up and white the rest of the way, with a world map hanging from a nail over the blackboard. Whenever we have to write on the board the map gets rolled up to make space. My teacher’s name is Aphrodite Dikaiakou and she looks sort of African, which is a good sign. She has short, curly hair and dark skin. I go sit at a desk in the last row, in the empty seat next to a girl with braids who tells me her name is Angeliki Kotaki. She has a mole on her eyebrow that looks like a smushed turd. I feel sorry for her because of the mole and decide to protect her. I’ll become her best friend and if people dare to make fun of her, they’ll have me to deal with.

“You, new girl, stand up!”

Kyria Aphrodite is talking to me.

“Well, where have you come to us from?”

“From Africa.”

“Are you sure you didn’t come from the moon?”

The other kids laugh. The boy in front of me turns around and makes animal faces. I gather my courage and cry, “I came from Africa! From Nigeria!”

“Fine, there’s no need to shout. Come sit up front so I can keep an eye on you.”

I sit all by myself at a desk in the front row. The desk is green, the color of Papoutsanis soap, and covered in doodles and carved notes: lots of names and love forever, the names of the soccer teams Olympiakos and Panathinaikos, and then fuck you and fart on my balls. A high school class meets in the same room in the evening. Someone has written, I’m Apostolos. What’s your name? In beautiful round letters I spell out the only two words I’ve mastered in Greek: Maria Papamavrou.

Kyria Aphrodite tells us what we’re going to learn in the fourth grade and why it will be a challenging year. We’re going to have to work our very hardest at arithmetic, grammar, penmanship, and geography. Then she gives us a spelling test by dictation: “The children eat their breakfast and go to school. They are diligent students. Mother prepares the afternoon meal. Father works very hard. At lunchtime they eat all together as a family and then relax. In the afternoon they go for a walk in the park.” It’s almost right, except that we don’t all eat together anymore. Mom and I eat on the balcony with the sawed-off railing. Now that no one is there to see, Dad probably eats on the covered veranda in Ikeja with his tie loosened, without washing his hands. And Gwendolyn, standing at the kitchen counter—“Oh dear, like a goat!” Mom sighs.

Recess is the worst part of the day. The kids gather around me and ask if my father is a black priest, since that’s what my last name means. Someone notices that half of my pinky finger is missing and shouts: “Look, guys! A lion ate her finger!” Petros, the boy who was making animal faces, asks if we brought our hut with us from Africa. Angeliki, who I thought would be my friend, says that there’s no toilet paper in Africa so people poo in the jungle and wipe themselves with leaves from the trees.

“That’s not true!” I say, stamping my foot on the schoolyard cement. “We have three bathrooms in Ikeja, and pink toilet paper, pink!”

“Liar! There’s no such thing as pink toilet paper, or a house with three bathrooms!” Angeliki says.

I pull her hair to shut her up and she starts to cry. “You’re a chicken, Kotaki!” I say, because chicken in Greek is kota. Then I stick out my tongue and run to the other end of the yard where the canteen is. I should really get in line, but I’m so angry I just push my way to the front. The canteen sells zodiac crackers, orangeade, koulouria, which are like bread only round with a hole in the middle, and . . . rocket pops! For only fifty lepta! Two drachmas of pocket money a day equals four rocket pops! I buy my ice cream and sink my teeth into something sugary that’s not at all cold. It only looks like an ice cream pop, it’s actually stale marzipan. I throw it in the trash and feel like crying, for the hundredth time since we came to Athens.

As soon as we file back into the classroom, Kyria Aphrodite grabs me by the ear and drags me to the blackboard.

“Why did you hit Angeliki during recess? Why did you tear her sash?”

“I didn’t tear her sash. I just pulled her hair a little . . .”

“You pulled out a whole clump of my hair and you twisted my ear and you ruined my uniform, too!”

“Liar! Your uniform was already torn!”

“Now listen to me, Maria. You have the greatest number of mistakes of anyone on your spelling test, and let’s not even mention your behavior. I don’t know what your school in Africa was like, but this is a civilized country. Go and stand in the corner until the bell rings, and if you ever do anything like that again, you’ll get what’s coming to you.”

So now I’m standing in front of the blackboard, facing the world map. It’s the most wonderful part of the whole day. I can stare for hours at Nigeria, which is yellow, like my mother’s dress, or like the banana boats at the beach. In the middle is the flag with its three stripes, two green ones that stand for agriculture and a white one that stands for unity and peace. I don’t know what’s happening behind my back, and I don’t care, either. I’ll become the worst student in the entire school, so I can spend my days standing and staring at the map of Africa.

“Aunt Amalia, what does ‘fart on my balls’ mean?”

“Christ and the Virgin Mary!” Aunt Amalia puts her hand over her mouth as if she’s afraid something bad might come out. She’s frozen in place on the path with the statues, in front of the bust of Manto Mavrogenous, who fought in the Greek War of Independence even though she was a woman. Aunt Amalia brought me to the Field of Ares to ride my bike because Mom is busy. Busy means shutting herself up in her room and crying as she strokes her belly and sighs. At the very most she might throw a glance at the biftekia cooking on the stove, then go lie down on the couch.

Aunt Amalia has her hair in a bun under a net and is wearing her camelhair overcoat with the collar up. I can’t stand overcoats. I wear my yellow raincoat and galoshes even when it isn’t raining. A bird doesn’t change its feathers when winter comes, as Gwendolyn says.

“Where did you learn that, child?”

“It says it on my desk. It’s been there since September.”

“Those are very naughty words, Maria. It’s the kind of thing only good-for-nothings would say. Now listen, I want you to dig a hole in your head, put those words in there, and forget all about them. And tomorrow at school I want you to rub it out with an eraser, you hear?”

Aunt Amalia looks like one of those actresses who plays the role of the old maid in Greek movies. But she’s a very modern old maid: she goes to the movies alone, takes off one shoe in the middle of the street to scratch her foot with the heel, whistles old songs like “Let Your Hair Down” or “In the Morning You’ll Wake Me with Kisses.” When she was young she got an idea in her head: she wanted to marry Constantine, who back then was prince and later became king. She didn’t want anyone else. When Constantine married Anna-Maria—who’s from Denmark, where they call her Anne-Marie—Aunt Amalia told my parents that she was giving up on marriage: she dug a hole in her head and buried all the bouquets and wedding dresses. Whenever anything bad happens, she digs a hole in her head and shoves it in there. Now she’s telling me to do exactly the same.

We’re headed to the lake to feed the swans. Aunt Amalia always buys two koulouria, one for me and one for her, but she doesn’t eat hers, just crumbles it up and throws it to the swans. “Pssst, pssst,” she hisses as if they were cats, but these particular swans understand and waddle over. Then they swim back to their little wooden house, fold up their wings and go to sleep.

“Aunt Amalia, if you dig a hole in your head, how many things will it fit?”

“Oh, lots. Lots and lots . . .”

I imagine a hole that’s not very big but not very small, either, maybe the size of the wooden house where the swans live. Only I have to fit all of Africa in there: the goldfish pond, the badminton court, Carnival that isn’t really Carnival, the puff puffs at Mrs. Fatoba’s house. Then I’ll squash it all down and put our apartment on top, and Kyria Aphrodite, and the ice cream that isn’t really ice cream, and Angeliki and Petros, and our spelling lessons in school.

And I won’t remember anything anymore.

Kyria Aphrodite is giving us our first penmanship lesson. We copy out the sentence “Andron epifanon pasa gi tafos” in our notebooks with curlicued letters. It’s ancient Greek and I only understand the last two words, gi, earth, and tafos, grave, since they’re the same in modern Greek. I would rather write “I hate Angeliki because she’s a stupid brat,” but I’d get in trouble. So I finish my exercise and write a reply to Apostolos, the boy who sits at my desk during the evening high school. He’s my only friend in Greece. Each Monday we erase our notes from the previous week and start fresh. I told him I was in the sixth grade, because Apostolos is in the ninth grade and wouldn’t want to be writing to a little kid.

I read over last week’s correspondence one last time:

Me: I don’t know. I hope we can at least go to Ikeja for Christmas!

Apostolos: Why don’t you like Greece?

Me: 1) It’s cold. 2) I’m not allowed to ride my bike in the house. 3) There’s school every day. 4) There are too many cars. 5) Our teacher is strict and doesn’t have a parrot.

Apostolos: Did your teacher in Nigeria have a parrot?

Me: Yes, our English teacher, Mrs. Fatoba, had a parrot that talked! And she made us puff puffs, which is round fried dough with sugar on top.

Apostolos: Why don’t you ask your mother to make some?

Me: Mom is sad, she doesn’t sew anymore, and barely cooks. Only frozen biftekia and lentils, for iron.

Apostolos: Are you going to the Polytechnic on November 17?

Me: I don’t know. Are you?

Apostolos: Of course. Give the junta to the people!!!

I’m not sure what I’m going to ask him next, but I go ahead and start to erase. Kyria Aphrodite grabs me by the wrist the way Mom does, only harder. The eraser falls from my hand.

“What are you doing, Maria?”

She bends down and reads over my shoulder.

“That’s it, go stand at the board! And tell your mother to come see me tomorrow.”

Mom and Kyria Aphrodite are standing in the yard, talking. Mom is wearing her denim skirt with the horizontal red stripes, which makes her look even bigger than she already is. Kyria Aphrodite is tiny, half a mouthful, but she gestures as if she’s the boss and Mom bows her head. The whole scene reminds me of one of Gwendolyn’s sayings: The elephant and the tiger don’t hunt in the same place. Mom is the elephant, she’s been getting fatter and fatter since we got to Athens.

“What did she say?” I ask Mom when they’re done talking.

Kyria Aphrodite said she’d done her research and discovered that I have “relations” with a seventeen-year-old plumber who goes to night school. She also said that at my age I shouldn’t be getting involved in politics. I feel like showing off, so I tell Mom all the things I learned from Apostolos.

“But Mom, the dictators killed the students, don’t you get it? They ran them over with tanks!”

“That’s none of your concern.”

Angeliki comes over and tries to kiss up to my mother. When there are no adults around I call her Diaboliki. She calls me Teapot, ever since the first day of school with the toilet paper and the jungle. She says “teapot” over and over until it sounds like “potty.” Who’s she to speak, with that smushed turd on her eyebrow?

“Are you Maria’s mom?”

“Yes, dear. Who are you?”

“I’m Maria’s friend, Angeliki.”

“See, here’s a nice girl for you to be friends with. No more scribbling on desks. Will you promise me that?”

And that’s how I lose my only friend, Apostolos. I had no idea he was seventeen years old, and studying to be plumber. Now that I know, I invent a dramatic story in my head. He’s Hausa, I’m Yoruba, and we can’t get married because we’re from different tribes. Apostolos climbs onto the gate of the Athens Polytechnic and shouts: “Give the junta to the people!” Then he pulls me up beside him and I shout: “No matter how wrong things go, salt never gets worms!” The police beat us up a little bit, but the worst that happens is that they break my tooth and cut off one of my fingers, and in the end we win. All the dictators from Greece and Nigeria come pouring out of the tanks and run off as fast as they can. Then we climb into one of the tanks, which turns into a house-submarine, and before we even realize what’s happening the current has carried us all the way across the Atlantic and, oops, here we are on the coast of Nigeria. We wring out our clothes, spread them on the sand to dry and eat a couple of bananas. The tank is a tank again and we head toward Ikeja. Dad and Gwendolyn are waiting for us on the covered veranda, under the bougainvillea. Apostolos will help Unto Punto with the plumbing in the house. Until we get married, that is. Because afterward he’s going to be a doctor and I’ll be a painter and we’ll have lots of kids, and Gwendolyn will take care of them. On second thought, we won’t have any kids, because one of them might die and then what would become of us? We would pull our hair and cry and eat nothing but lentils and biftekia.

A tear rolls down my cheek, then another. I keep forgetting to bring my monogrammed handkerchiefs with me to school.

When a ripe fruit sees an honest person, it falls, Gwendolyn always said. I decide to forget all the dramatic stories and say an honest person’s prayer. I stand in front of Mom’s little shrine of icons, cross my hands on my chest the way I’ve been taught, and say, “Lord have mercy, the Father and the Son, let us go back to Ikeja and I’ll never ask you for anything else ever again. Amen.”

One Sunday morning when he’s probably still lying in bed, like me, without much of anything to do, God actually listens.

“Wake up, Maria! I have a surprise for you!” Mom calls from the kitchen.

I jump out of bed and run into the hall in my pajamas.

“Your father can’t come to Athens for Christmas, so we’ll go and see him. How does that sound?”

I jump up and down and twirl around in circles and dance a dance I made up myself, singing tourourou and lalala and heyhey. Out of habit, I glance up at the ceiling, too, to see if some piece of fruit might be about to fall on my head.

I’m honest, and Ikeja is my ripe fruit.

I squeeze my eyes shut and swear I’ll die. It’s another Sunday, we just got back from Nigeria, Mom is making her biftekia, cars are screeching to a stop outside the blue building. I try to hold my breath as if I were swimming underwater at the beach in Tarkwa, only for longer. If I can just die a little, if I can at least make myself turn blue, they’ll bring me back to Nigeria for good. But I can’t: my cheeks burst and I gasp in air through my mouth, my nose, even my ears.

Christmas vacation is over. Tomorrow school starts again. I feel as if I only dreamed the Mercedes at the airport in Lagos; Dad standing and smiling in the doorway of our house in a new pair of beige shorts and socks pulled up to his knees; Gwendolyn’s hugs; hide-and-seek with Unto Punto behind the badminton court; my blue flippers; diving off the dock at Tarkwa; the New Year’s pie we cut on the beach. My piece had the lucky coin.

“I don’t see what’s lucky about it,” I said to Gwendolyn. “They’re still making me go back to Greece.”

“Don’t be ungrateful,” Gwendolyn had replied without lifting her eyes from the iron. “The big iroko tree sprouts from a small seed.”

The coin is as small as a fingernail. It says 1977, and it’s supposed to bring me luck for this whole year. Mom hung it on the gold ID bracelet I wear on my wrist. I take it off and as I’m lying there snuggled in bed, I use it to pick my nose a little, then put it in my mouth and suck on it. I have no idea how it happens: it just slips gently down my throat, like a fresh, warm puff puff. Oh no, what have I done? I swallowed my luck!

So it isn’t strange that the very next day Anna Horn enters my life.

Anna slides into the other seat at my desk in the front row and winks at me. She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my life! An angel—blond, with eyes like the waters of Tarkwa Bay and a tortoiseshell clip holding her bangs back. She has a dimple in her chin and half of one of her eyebrows is totally white, as if it’s been dyed, which makes her look wise and just, exactly how a person should look who’s waiting for a ripe fruit to fall on her head. She’s wearing a marinière, as she tells me with a sort of foreign accent—which is to say, a shirt with blue and white stripes.

“You in the front row, new girl,” Kyria Aphrodite says. I’m glad Anna is here so I’m not the new girl anymore.

“Yes?” Anna answers imperiously.

“Make sure to wear your uniform to school tomorrow.”

“I don’t have a uniform. We haven’t had a chance to go shopping yet.”

“Perhaps you’ve come from Africa, too, like Maria?”

“No, I came from Paris.”

“What am I going to do with all you immigrants?”

“We’re not immigrants, Kyria, we’re dissidents. My father had a scholarship from the Institut Français. My mother had me in Paris so I wouldn’t be a child of the dictatorship. Now that Greece is free again, we came home. Well, not my father. My mother and I. My father is so busy he doesn’t even have time to sleep. He has a huge office with over a thousand books, all in French. And he’s read them all twice!”

The words come rushing out in a torrent. Kyria Aphrodite doesn’t dare interrupt. You could hear a pin drop in the classroom. Anna is a human bee buzzing around, bringing back stories like pollen: about how beautiful the gardens in Paris are, about eating breakfast on Sundays at Café de Flore, or how kind and funny Melina Merkouri is in real life, how you pronounce the French r as if it’s coming from the inside, from a well in your chest. During recess all the kids flock to her. But Anna chooses me.

“First, because you’re my deskmate, and second, because you came from somewhere else, too. Were you guys dissidents in Africa?”

“Kind of,” I murmur as we run hand in hand through the schoolyard. Dissidents resist, and resistance is the opposite of dictatorship. Dictators are bad guys, so dissidents must be good guys, and we’re with the good guys, for sure. I holler Apostolos’s slogan in a sing-song—“Give the junta to the peeeeople!”—and Anna hugs me enthusiastically. We play a skipping game where you sing this song with nonsense words, only instead of “one franc a violet” we chant our new slogan. When we get tired we sit down on the steps in front of our classroom and Anna tears her sandwich in half so we can share it. I’m not sure I really want it because it smells like rotten cheese but Anna insists. “Eat! Comrades share everything!” Why on earth did I ever want to be friends with Angeliki, the smushed turd, when there are girls like Anna in the world? All of a sudden Greece feels wonderful, African.

The big iroko tree sprouts from a small seed.

Anna isn’t speaking to me. She wants to divide our desk down the middle. I’m not supposed to let even my elbow creep over onto her half.

“But what did I do? What?”

“You lied to me. There are no dissidents in Africa. My mother says you’re racists who exploit black people.”

That’s going too far! I blurt out all the proverbs Gwendolyn taught me and tell Anna about the games I used to play with Unto Punto. Anna just puts her hands over her ears and sings, “I’m not listening, I’m not listening, I can’t hear you!” My eyes fill with tears.

“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.”

“Where will we live?”

“In Paris, of course! At our house.”

First we learn the numbers and the days of the week. Then how to answer the phone (haalloooo, qui est à l’appareil?), bonjour, bonsoir, I’m hungry (j’ai faim), I’m sleeping (je dors). I call hide-and-seek cache-cache now, not dezi like I did in Africa. Ripe fruit is fruit mûr, and honest person is personne honnête. Pretty soon I’ll be able to translate Gwendolyn’s proverbs!

The best French lessons are the ones with music. Anna and I sit on the coffee table with wheels and move it gently with our feet. We pretend it’s a magic carpet and that we’re revolutionary witches. Our carpet goes wherever we tell it to as we sing songs about the wretched of the earth: “Du passé faisons table rase, foule esclave, debout! Debout! Le monde va changer de base! Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout!” Or we listen to the sad songs of Françoise Hardy: “Que sont devenus tous mes amis et la maison où j’ai vecu . . .” A woman is feeling sad because she’s living far from home. Just like us.

Anna talks about her dad all the time, about the apartment in Paris, about all the books he’s read, about the French and Greek people who used to come over every night with wine and cigarettes to brainstorm anti-dictatorship slogans.

“The smoke didn’t bother you?”

“Are you crazy, merde? Smoking helps you think.”

We try to light a Gauloises in the kitchen.

“Suck in!” Anna shouts. “You have to suck in!”

I suck in and choke. I do whatever she tells me because she knows all about history and penmanship and how to fly a magic carpet, she knows revolutionary songs and can do all of the exercises in The Key to Practical Arithmetic. She has a beautiful, skinny mother with no eyebrows and a dad who thinks all day long. She has the blondest hair in the world. Thank goodness I’m better at drawing. Otherwise I’d be jealous and then there’d be trouble, like with Dola and Bambi.

Carnival in Greece reminds me of the theme parties we used to have in Ikeja. One morning we’d say, Hey, why don’t we all wear polka dots to the Marine Club tomorrow, and then next week we can dress up as Robinson Crusoe? Only Carnival lasts a long time, so you get to dress up a lot. For the parties at school my mother dresses me as a nun. The boys decide I’m a Catholic nurse and ask if I want to join their war effort. Anna gets annoyed. She’s dressed as a flower child, and no one wants a hippie on the front lines. Whereas I can treat their wounds in the washbasins in the yard. Besides, my cast means I’m a wounded nurse, and that means I’m a true heroine. Not to mention my missing finger . . .

“Forget about that stupid war,” Anna says, trying to pull me away. “We’re going to a protest.”

“What protest?”

“For the League of Democratic Women.”

She starts pinching all the boys so they’ll let me go. Then she insists on us singing the song about Petros, Yiohan, and Frantz working together in the factory. But isn’t that what we do every day? War is more original.

“War is what babies and Americans play,” Anna says.

With a heavy heart I leave the front line and go back to protesting. Angeliki wants to march with us but she’s dressed as a harem woman. Anna tells her that women in harems are the slaves of men and any woman who does men’s bidding deserves only pity. Angeliki starts to cry and takes off her fez. Her hair is a mess and her nose is running. I feel like hugging her, I always feel sorry for people when they cry, but Anna gets between us and shakes a finger in my face, saying, “She’s crying now, but later she’ll be calling you Teapot.” What can I say? She’s right. A bird doesn’t change its feathers when winter comes.

After the protest we drink an orangeade, the kind without fizz. Anna is sunk in thought. “What’s wrong?” I ask. She tells me that we should be going to real protests and hanging out with older boys from the working class, like Apostolos the plumber. She makes me write and propose a meeting. Apostolos, do you want to meet the day after tomorrow, when school lets out? He writes back, How will I recognize you?, and I reply, I’ll be dressed as a nun.

We wait outside the gate, a nun and a hippie. Apostolos is pretty cute, but he has two chipped teeth, so he could never be my husband. Besides, he pays absolutely no attention to me. He asks Anna who drew the beautiful daisies on her cheeks. “Me!” I cry, but Apostolos just asks about Paris and if she liked living there, as if he didn’t hear me at all. Anna goes on and on about the Fourth International, the proletariat, the League of Democratic Women and Georges Brassens, throwing in whatever she knows, and Apostolos gazes at her admiringly. I, meanwhile, am bored to tears. I sit on the curb, eyes glued to my knees, waiting for them to be done so we can finally leave.

Every Friday afternoon Antigone gives us ballet lessons in the living room of their house in Plaka. So I learn even more French words, like pas de chat, which means step of the cat. First, second, and third position. Plié, to bend. Relevé, to lift. In the end Antigone does a split and we clap and shout “Encore!” Then we go out for a walk. Antigone wears embroidered shirts and holds us by the hand as if we were both her daughters.

“We’re Anna-Maria!” I say, laughing.

“Don’t ever say that again!” Antigone says. “That’s the name of that fool of a princess.”

Sometimes, on the weekend, Mom lets me sleep at Anna’s. We take a bath together, then Antigone dries our hair with a towel and does it up in little braids or buns or ponytails. Then she smokes her Gauloises cigarettes or calls Paris, and while she’s not paying attention we play house, or sometimes build a fort with a blanket. Anna always wants the houses we live in to have special furniture, special music, a special atmosphere. “You should be thankful, if I had my way we wouldn’t live in a house at all,” she says, “we’d just fly around on our magic carpet!” The conversations about revolution are kind of boring, but I let her have her way on that, at least. After all, even in the half-light under the blanket, Anna can see right through me. If I disagree, she’ll pinch.

Shortly before the end of the school year, Aunt Amalia buys me a game called Little Wizard, a box full of magic tricks. You learn how to make colorful bits of paper disappear or do card tricks or hide plastic animals in a hat with a false bottom. Anna and I climb onto the magic carpet and do magic tricks for an imaginary audience of poor kids. Everything always has to be about the poor. That’s why Anna gets mad when Aunt Amalia takes us to see My Fair Lady, a movie about Eliza Doolittle, who starts out as a beggar but by the end is a real princess, after an aristocrat takes her in off the street and teaches her how to speak properly. Eliza’s name in real life is Audrey Hepburn. She has a very long neck and wears her hair in a bun. Aunt Amalia gets tears in her eyes, probably because she’s thinking how if things had turned out differently, she too could have lived like a princess. I want to tell her that the princess Constantine married was a fool, but Aunt Amalia says, “Shhh, don’t talk in the movie theater.” My favorite scene is when Eliza Doolittle can’t sleep because she’s in love with the aristocrat. The maid puts her to bed but she keeps popping back up to her feet like a spring. Anna grunts in disgust and says that Eliza was happier back when she was selling flowers in the street and hadn’t gotten so hoity-toity. “But she’s not!” I cry. “Of course she is,” Anna says, “just like you.”

“Where is your family going to spend the summer?” Aunt Amalia asks Anna on the way home.

“A Paris”

“I’m going to Ikeja, right?”

“No, honey. You’re coming to Aegina with me.”

Merde, merde.

Martha and I are sitting on the low wall in the garden, playing beauty pageant. Martha and Fotini are sisters, and they’re my summer friends on Aegina. Only today Fotini is grounded: she stole a teacup from Martha’s tea set, hid it in the yard, and won’t say where. Her punishment is that she has to stay in her room until it’s time for the live broadcast of the Thessaloniki Song Festival. The girls have an older brother, Angelos, who is in high school, but he doesn’t talk to us. Each summer Aunt Amalia rents a room on the ground floor of the girls’ house, where their grandfather used to live before he died. She and I sleep together in the double bed. We leave the windows open and the bougainvilleas outside shape the shadows of junta fascists, or the grandfather’s ghost. One night I got scared and woke up Aunt Amalia, who sleeps with curlers in her hair. “Oh, Maria, there’s no reason to be scared, with these curlers I’d frighten even a ghost away!”

In the mornings we have breakfast together. The girls’ mother, Kyria Pavlina, has a goat and makes her own yogurt. The only bad part is that we eat it at their kitchen table, under a strip of fly paper covered with dead flies. Kyria Pavlina doesn’t like to kill flies with a fly swatter. She prefers for them to get stuck on the paper and die on their own.

After breakfast we go down to the beach to swim or to dig deep holes in the sand. Fotini and Martha are always singing a song by the child star Manos: You don’t live in my time, Mom, you don’t live in my time, Dad . . . I like it a lot but I also know it would annoy Anna. In fact we do all kinds of things that Anna wouldn’t like. We watch Little House on the Prairie and wear cherry lip gloss during our beauty contests. There are three titles, one for each of us: Miss Beauty, Miss Inner Beauty, and Miss Youth. Fotini always ends up being Miss Youth because she’s the youngest. Martha likes being Miss Beauty, and I’m happy with Miss Inner Beauty, so it works out just fine for us all.

“Girls, the festival is starting!” Kyria Pavlina calls. Martha and I abandon our beauty pageant in the middle and run to the television. Fotini comes, too, since her punishment is over. We’re rooting for a girl, Roula, who sings in the commercial for Roli cleaning powder. Please tell me, Dad, is love good or bad? Today he gave me my first kiss, and I cried with bliss . . . Her father gives his approval and Roula gets as excited as Eliza Doolittle: Well, then, I’ll say it, I love a boy, I love him and I want him tons!

This summer I’m in love with Angelos. He’s very serious and wants to be a nuclear physicist. We only see him in the morning when he wakes up and at night before he goes to bed. The whole rest of the day he’s out roaming around with his friends. I’ve lost all interest in tanks and submarines. No more lies. Mom has gone to help Dad empty out the house in Ikeja. She left me behind, with Aunt Amalia.

Next fall Gwendolyn will be telling her proverbs to other kids.

I keep whistling the tune to “Please Tell Me, Dad,” but Anna covers her ears when she hears it. Of course I don’t tell her about the beauty pageants.

“Aegina ruined you,” she says, raising an eyebrow, the one with the white streak.

“Why?”

“It made you dumb.”

I look down at my shoes. She’s right, after all.

“But maybe it’s not your fault, it’s those girls, what were their names again? Fotini and Martha.”

Anna lectures me about how the Socialist Party in Sweden lost power after forty-four years and how the Workers’ Party in Great Britain is weaker than ever before, as if I were to blame. She tells me that in Paris she made some important decisions, when she grows up she wants to be like Gisèle Halimi, Sartre, and de Beauvoir’s lawyer who risked imprisonment for supporting the Algerian National Liberation Front. I understand barely half of what she says, but I keep nodding my head. She’s determined to bring me back to the proper path, and tells me about Patty Hearst, who disowned her rich father and started robbing banks, and sixteen-year-old Nadia Comăneci, the human rubber band from the Montreal Olympics. We braid our hair to look like Comăneci, put on our gym clothes, roll aside the portable table in the living room and practice our splits. Next is modern dance. Anna always chooses the theme. Our choreographies have names like “Long Live the Revolution” or “The Students” or “A Carnation on the Polytechnic Memorial.” The dances are full of pas de chat and when we start to sweat, we lie down on the rug and stare at the ceiling.

“A perfect score!” Anna tells me. “You’re not dumb anymore.” I hug her and we roll like barrels into the hall, splitting our sides with laughter. That’s where Antigone finds us when she opens the front door.

“You crazy girls, on va manger quelque chose?”

We eat backwards this year, too, main course first, then salad. Antigone shows me pictures from their summer in France. The whole family went to Deauville, to the house of some friends. Anna’s father has a blondish beard. In all of the photographs he’s smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper. Anna is sitting in his lap, arms wrapped around his neck.

“Do you love your dad a lot?”

“What do you mean, don’t you love yours?”

“Sure, I love him, only I’ve forgotten what he’s like.”

And yet that very same night, Mom and Dad come home from the airport. I cling to my father’s neck, just like Anna, and burst into tears.

“Why are you crying, little grasshopper?” Dad says.

“Don’t call her that, please!” Mom says, and she starts crying, too.

I’m afraid that now that he’s come back to Athens Dad might start calling me Maria Papamavrou and saying that I’m a naughty girl, the way Mom does. I’m afraid that now that we live in Athens I might actually be turning into a naughty girl, not to mention a dumb one. That I might have left all my goodness and smarts in Africa.

This fall we have a man for a teacher, Kyrios Stavros. He’s short and wears silk vests that barely contain his big belly. The fifth-grade reader is called The High Mountains and Kyrios Stavros says we’re going to like it a lot because it’s full of adventures. My biggest adventure, though, is the week when Anna stays home because she has the mumps. Angeliki keeps saying “teapot” over and over until it sounds like “potty,” and Petros picks his nose, chases me down, and wipes his snot on my legs.

“When are you coming back to school?” I ask Anna over the phone.

“Not until my cheeks aren’t swollen anymore.”

“Anna, you have to come back. It’s awful without you!”

I tell her about the things the other kids do to me during recess and Anna plots our revenge: we’ll handcuff them to the fence and tickle them, we’ll spit in their food.

Since she’s been sick in bed, Anna finished the entire fifth-grade reader. She says it’s almost as good as Petros’s War or Wildcat under Glass.

“What are they?”

“You mean you’ve never heard of Alki Zei? Merde!”

I make Mom buy me all of Alki Zei’s books and I read them at night in bed. Anna’s right. They’re wonderful, especially Wildcat under Glass, with the two sisters who say ve-ha, ve-sa when they want to show whether they’re very happy or very sad.

“Ve-ha? Ve-sa?” I ask Anna over the phone, so she’ll know I read Wildcat under Glass.

“Ve-sa, because I have the mumps.”

I puff up my cheeks, trying to imagine what it would be like to have the mumps. Sometimes I’d like to be Anna, for better or for worse.

Kyrios Stavros tells us Savings Day is coming up and there are going to be two contests, for best essay and best drawing; the prize is a money-box from the postal bank. Anna and I both enter the drawing contest. Anna draws a bank all in pastel colors. The teller is giving money away to everyone. There’s a cloud over his head with the words “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!” There are doves flying all around, and Patty Hearst is standing in one corner with her machine gun. Over her head it says, “With so much justice in the world, who needs me?”

“You didn’t follow the theme,” Kyrios Stavros tells her, and Anna sticks her tongue out at him when his back is turned.

My drawing is in colored pencil, of the storage room in Ikeja and a family living in there. I make the mother like Antigone, skinny, with a braid and fake eyebrows, only she’s wearing Mom’s dress with the yellow daisies. The dad has a beard, he’s smoking a pipe and reading the newspaper Acropolis, which is the newspaper my father reads. The little girl has long blond hair, bangs, and a dimple in her chin. She’s taking a can of milk down off the shelf and handing it to her little brother, a tiny baby who can’t walk yet. The baby is hard to draw, it comes out looking like a caterpillar. I keep erasing it and trying again. When I finally get it right, my picture is beautiful. Up top I draw a rainbow that’s raining drachmas, naira, and francs, which all turn into daisies as they fall to earth.

Kyrios Stavros comes into the classroom with the school superintendent.

“Will Maria Papamavrou please stand up?” the superintendent says.

What did I do now?

“Your drawing won first prize for our school. Come up front to accept your prize.”

I walk toward the teacher’s desk with bowed head. The superintendent congratulates me, kisses the top of my head, and hands me a blue money-box with a metal handle.

“Now applaud your classmate,” Kyrios Stavros says.

Everyone claps, except for Angeliki and Anna.

“You’re a thief!” Anna says. “You stole my family.”

“But your family is better than mine, that’s why.”

She wants to split our desk down the middle again. I’m so happy about the prize that I don’t object. When the bell rings at the end of the day Anna says, “I’ll forgive you, but only if you give me your drawing.”

“What if my parents want it?”

“Tell them you lost it.”

Fortunately my drawing gets published in Acropolis. Dad clips it out carefully so he can have it framed.

“When I grow up, I’m going to be an artist,” I tell him.

“That’s not a job,” Mom says. “You should choose a proper career, you can make art in your free time.”

“But if I have some other job, where will I find free time?”

“You’ll manage. Don’t I find time to shop and to cook, and to take you to the park?”

“Yeah, but all you cook is biftekia and lentils, and you don’t take me to the park all that much, either.”

Mom gives me a threatening look, but she doesn’t punish me. After I broke my arm she got rid of the key to the pantry. Now when she gets angry it’s different: she just clenches her fists, lifts her eyes to the ceiling, and mutters under her breath.

Anna ruined my drawing!

“I didn’t ruin it, I corrected it!” she shouts.

She drew doves all over the top of the page. She crossed out Dad’s Acropolis with red poster paint and made it into an Avgi, the left-wing paper her parents read. She colored in the baby entirely, turned it into a coffee table and added Gauloises cigarettes and an ashtray on top.

“We’re both only children, don’t forget,” she says.

I don’t like being an only child. It’s like saying lonely child. I’m jealous of Fotini and Martha, who share a room and can say ve-ha, ve-sa every night, like the sisters in Wildcat under Glass.

“I’d like to have a little brother or sister,” I say.

“We’re like sisters, aren’t we?”

“Sure, but only on weekends.”

And there’s something else, too: when Fotini hid Martha’s teacup in the yard, Kyria Pavlina sent her to her room. But who’s going to punish Anna for destroying my drawing?

•

This year I’m sitting at the third desk from the front and I can’t see the board very well. The letters are blurry and I have to squint to read our exercises.

“What’s wrong, Maria?” Kyrios Stavros asks. “Do you think you need to see an eye doctor?”

Antigone gives Mom the name of a pediatric optometrist who studied in Paris. We go and sit in the waiting room. Mom is happy because there’s a recent issue of Woman in the stack of magazines with an announcement for an embroidery and knitting contest. “I’ll knit a blanket,” she says. “Our family will sweep up every prize around!”

A man with a white coat and glasses shakes our hands.

“Come this way, miss.”

He tells me to rest my forehead on a metal surface with little plastic bits for your eyes and use a knob to put a parrot in a cage. He jots something down in his notes. Then he tells me to read some numbers on a lighted board across the room. The numbers are kind of blurry so he puts these little lenses in front of my eyes and asks, “Is it better now? Or now?” With some of the lenses I can read even the tiniest numbers on the board. The doctor says I’m nearsighted, enough that I need glasses. I feel like crying.

“What’s wrong, miss? Don’t you know how stylish glasses can be?”

Yeah, sure.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“I’m going to be a painter,” I say, and then, looking at Mom, “and something else, too.”

“How wonderful! All artists wear glasses, didn’t you know?”

“All of them?”

“Anyone who thinks a lot, dear,” the eye doctor says, tapping his own glasses.

Well, then. If I’m going to be a great painter, I guess I might as well wear glasses.

The next day Mom, Aunt Amalia, and I go to Metaxas Eyewear near Omonia Square. Mom insists on black tortoiseshell frames with wavy bits of red. The saleswoman says they look great on me, but I can’t really see my face, I look blurry in the mirror.

“I really look good?”

“Miss Inner Beauty!” Aunt Amalia says.

These days inner beauty isn’t enough. I want to be beautiful on the outside, too. We order the glasses. They’ll be ready in a week.

“I’m so jealous that you get to wear glasses!” Anna says.

“Wait until you see them first.”

“Glasses are always pretty,” Anna says, and I sigh with relief.

“You’re an owl, Teapot!” Angeliki says.

“An African owl,” says Petros.

Anna and I pinch them as hard as we can so they’ll stop, but they just put their hands over their mouths and dissolve into laughter.

“You’re an ugly four-eyes!” Angeliki shouts.

“She has inner beauty!” Anna shouts back.

“Only inner?” I ask, but Anna is busy pinching the others and doesn’t respond.

“I’m sure Angelos will fall for you,” she says when the bell rings at the end of the day. “You look older, more mature. A ripe fruit!”

“And when a ripe fruit sees an honest person, it falls.”

Anna loves it when I use Gwendolyn’s proverbs. She gives me a sloppy kiss on the cheek.

“You’re my best friend!”

“And you’re mine!”

“Want to go pee?” she says.

When we’re best best friends, like today, we go and pee in a parking lot on the next street over from our school. We slip between the cars, pull down our underwear and a little fountain of pee spurts onto the ground, splashing our socks and shoes. We never pee at the same time, so that whoever’s not peeing can be the lookout. Anna wiggles her tush and sings Françoise Hardy. I don’t move at all and only sing on the inside, Well then, I’ll say it, I love a boy . . . I always take off my glasses, too, so they don’t get splashed.

Only today there’s a man in the car next to us. He slowly opens his door and says, “Girls, do you want to see my ice cream?” Anna vanishes, but I feel like it wouldn’t be polite to run away. The man is holding his ice cream down low, between his legs, a reddish-brown rocket pop with a little cream at the top. Something isn’t right. I take a few steps backward. When I’m far enough away, my heart starts beating loudly in my ears. Now is the time to use a phrase only good-for-nothings say. I make my hands into a megaphone and shout, “Fart on my balls!”

Anna holds out her hand. She’s pale as a ghost. We wrap an arm around each other and run in no particular direction.

“All men are monsters,” Anna says.

Merde, merde. All of them?

“He tricked you, Paraskevoula, the mayor’s son . . .” We’re dancing a kalamatiano in the schoolyard. We’re still so upset about the perversion of men that we’re not really paying attention to the words. The song gets stuck in our heads. The whole way home, all the way to Plaka, we dance the kalamatiano instead of walking. Our favorite bit is the little leap at the beginning when you lunge at the sidewalk and stomp your foot. At home, too, while Antigone is making us lunch, we’re in the living room dancing. Suddenly she rushes into the room holding a half-peeled potato and a knife.

“What is this nonsense?”

We don’t understand.

“Who taught you that?”

We shrug.

Antigone says that the kalamatiano was what people who supported the junta used to dance. And that the song we’re singing is about a rich man taking advantage of a poor girl and if that’s the kind of thing we like, we deserve whatever we get. Haven’t we come into this world to fight hypocrisy? She’ll take us to the Peroke Theater and give us something to think about: they’re presenting two one-act plays, Chekov’s A Marriage Proposal and Brecht’s A Respectable Wedding.

We eat somberly, in silence. After lunch I go to the bathroom to wash my hands and through the open door I see Antigone sitting at the dressing table in her bedroom. Should I tell her I’m sorry for dancing the kalamatiano? She’s fixing her hair, only her shiny braid is lying on the bed, and there’s a little bun at the back of her head full of hairpins and clips. Antigone has short hair! The braid is a wig!

Then why did she tell us we’ve come into the world to fight hypocrisy?

Antigone takes us with her to the anniversary of the events at the Athens Polytechnic, when the dictators sent in tanks to kill the students who’d occupied the building. We bought red carnations to bring with us to the peace march. I told Mom I was going to Anna’s house to do my homework, because she doesn’t like demonstrations. She won’t join the League of Democratic Women, either. She doesn’t have time, she’s too busy knitting her blanket for the contest in Woman. “Such a waste of time,” Mom says. “Anna’s mother has her head in the clouds.” I still like Antigone, even if she’s lying about her braid. She’s skinny and she’s fighting for justice, working to make the world a better place. Sometimes I dream that she’s my real mother, and I always feel proud when strangers in the street say, “What lovely daughters you have.”

“You should take off your glasses,” Anna whispers. “There might be trouble.”

Trouble? Like a state of emergency? Like with the Igbo and Hausa, people setting fires? What if someone grabs Antigone by the hair and her secret is revealed?

A man tells us that people are throwing stones over by the American embassy. But outside the Polytechnic things are calm. The huge bust in front of the building is festooned with carnations and the protesters are singing a Mikis Theodorakis song in unison: “Life keeps climbing upward, life keeps climbing upward. With flags, with flags and drums.” Luckily Anna already taught me that song. I don’t want to sing about boys and love anymore. I could care less! We sing ourselves hoarse, red in the face from trying to sing louder than anyone else. We’re the biggest revolutionaries in all of Athens! That’s the only way we’ll get a scholarship from the Institut Français to go study painting in Paris for free. Anna doesn’t want to be a lawyer like Gisèle Halimi anymore. She decided to study art, too. She wants us to be exactly alike.

We play our anti-junta skipping game all the way home. Then, at the house in Plaka, Anna puts on a Manos Loizos record while Antigone peels carrots.

“What would you like for your birthday?” Antigone asks me.

I’m happy that she remembered my birthday. “I don’t know, whatever you think . . .”

“You don’t want anything in particular? Come on, tell me.”

Her knife flashes like lightning, she’s barely scratching the peel, since that’s where all the vitamins are. What I’d like most of all is to be able to peel carrots as gracefully as Antigone, then to toss them in water, boil them, and make a yummy sauce with lemon.

“Okay, then, I’d like a tea set, or dishes.”

“A tea set? Oh, don’t disappoint me, Maria. I’ll get you The Carousel, okay?”

“What’s The Carousel?”

“It’s a record. The text is by Georges Sarri.”

I’m ashamed of having disappointed her by wanting a tea set. It’s easy to disappoint Antigone. She yells at us if she catches us reading Patty’s World. But what does Patty do that’s so terrible? She just loves Johnny Vowden, goes around town with her friend Sharon, and wants to be a nurse when she grows up. Antigone doesn’t like women who become nurses and take care of men.

Sometimes I wish I were a boy.

I blow out all ten candles at once. Anna does a wolf whistle, Fotini and Martha clap. It’s too bad Angelos didn’t come. I wipe my sweaty palms on my velvet dress with the cherries. I’m more grown-up than ever now!

Dad takes pictures. Mom holds out a tray of bite-sized cheese pies to Kyria Pavlina. Mom is happy, the way she used to be, because she won second prize in the knitting contest. She hung a photograph from the awards ceremony in the hall, next to the coat rack.

Aunt Amalia doesn’t want any cheese pies. Antigone doesn’t, either. She puts on The Carousel and tells us to listen carefully to the lyrics: “If all the children of the world held hands, boys and girls all in a row, and began to dance, the circle would grow and grow until it hugged the whole world.” We girls form a circle and dance around the dining room table with all the other kids all over the world. When we’re out of breath, we crawl under the table and play house. Anna is the dad, I’m the mom, and Martha and Fotini are our kids. We live in Africa, not in a house but in the jungle with the tigers. Then we live in Paris and drink coffee at Café de Flore. Martha starts whining because she wants us to live on Aegina, too, but Anna says, “Merde, we’re not rednecks!”

We go into my room and play doctor. Anna is the doctor. She examines our behinds and pinches us with her nails when she has to give an injection. She writes us prescriptions for eye drops. Suddenly, as if she’s just remembered something very important, she jumps to her feet and shouts, “Enough of this silly stuff! Let’s go to the demonstration! We’re the League of Democratic Women!”

“I’m not coming to the demonstration,” says Fotini. “I don’t like that game.”

Anna’s face clouds over. “It’s not a game, merde. It’s the struggle for a better life!”

“No way am I playing,” Fotini says.

Anna goes over and pinches her. “I said, it’s not a game.”

Fotini doesn’t cry, just opens her mouth wide.