Why I Killed My Best Friend (29 page)

She walks over to the television and turns it on. We silently watch the commercials as night falls outside.

“Shhh! Listen!”

What's there to listen to? A blond woman is chopping onions to show how natural and healthy a particular brand of instant soup is.

“Don't you hear what she's saying?”

“No, Amalia, what's she saying?”

“I'll chop you to pieces just like these onions, if you don't do what we tell you to!”

I light a cigarette. Aunt Amalia claps.

“That's the idea, a smoke screen!” She apparently knows her James Bond, too.

I hug her, exhaling the smoke behind her back, down onto an empty candle holder sitting on a side table that looks like a God's eye from above. A proud, unforgiving god, who has completely forgotten his servant Amalia. Forgotten my mother, too.

“Where did you disappear to this time?”

Mom doesn't really enjoy my visits. We spend the whole time discussing my lengthy absences, my indifference toward my family.

“I have something for you.” She hands me an envelope covered with little angels and roses.

“Who's getting married?”

“The wedding already happened. Your old friend from Aegina, Martha. I called you for days. Aren't you ever at home?”

“I was in Paris, with Anna.”

“One logical individual meeting another . . .”

“How was the wedding?” I know she likes that kind of thing.

“It was nice, lots of people came. We went to the reception afterward, too.”

She's talking to me, but looking at the television. Her soap operas have expanded to take over the whole middle of the day. Mom lives a life of weddings and divorces, dastardly deeds of revenge, silk sheets and champagne.

“When are you going to give me that joy?”

On the screen we see a couple in profile, kissing—a redhead with thick, gorgeous eyelashes and a blond guy with a square jaw who's probably gay in real life. The kind of people you want to throw a bomb at.

“You're twenty-six, when are you planning on getting married? Do you want to end up like Aunt Amalia?”

“I don't want to end up like her, or like you, either.”

Mom gives me a hurt look, a perfect imitation of the women on her soaps. She doesn't wear makeup or curl her hair, but she's mastered that wounded look of middle-aged actresses watching as their daughters or lovers walk off, leaving them helpless. It makes me want to smash the screen. I don't know anything more satisfying than the act of throwing a television through a shop window.

“Are we going on vacation together this year?”

Anna's voice sounds pinched on the other end of the line.

“What happened?”

“Thierry and I broke up. Won't you comfort your old friend?”

It turns out Thierry was more interested in whales, turtles and oil spills than in Anna. “Merde, he can go live with his turtles, I've had enough!” She tells me that I was right, environmentalism is dangerous, because it distances you from people's real problems. Now she's working for a lawyer, a friend of hers from the collective, who defends large families in Paris from eviction.

“So, should I come to Greece and we can go crazy this year?”

“We'll see.”

Vacations are a bourgeois habit that's out of keeping with my new way of life. I tell Camus about my conversation with Anna. “You're overdoing it,” he replies. “You're always talking about that friend of yours, Anna, but you're not that different from her, in the end. You let your ideas take over your life. No one throws bombs all the time.”

He takes off his shirt. There are no wings sprouting from his back. It turns out he's only human, too. He pulls me down onto the tattered mattress, in the room where he once gave me drawing lessons. His fingers reek of nicotine, his breath of coffee. His smell brings me down to earth with a bang. Usually, for me, Camus is as portable as a slogan.

I bleed, therefore I am.

It's entirely logical for me to sink my fingernails into his back.

“Maria, you're the only one who understands me. They installed a transmitter in my TV and are broadcasting the most terrible words. They curse at me, ridicule me. If I don't escape, they'll drag me naked through the streets to Syntagma, to the guillotine. Where can I go? I have no where to go!”

But she does. She jumps from her third-story balcony, finally headed elsewhere, to some dark refuge. She's in a coma when they take her to the hospital, with contusions in her brain and all her ribs broken. Dad is waving the note in his hand when I arrive. Mom's eyes are red and swollen from crying.

“Our Amalia,” she says.

Dad brings us coffee. Mom is holding an old photograph with crumpled edges that she's had in her wallet for as long as I've been alive. She and Amalia are sitting on the stoop of Mom's childhood house in Kypseli, laughing, their mouths open in gap-toothed grins. Their knees are filthy, but their braids gleam. They're each proudly holding a rag doll. “We were like sisters, just like you and Anna.” She starts in on the stories: how they grew up on that stoop, swapping those dolls for trading cards of Hollywood actors, and later for actual men.

“You mean she had a boyfriend once?”

“Amalia had more marriage proposals than I could count. She loved to be taken out for walks, to have men promise her this or that. But that's as far as it ever went. She'd found her prince.” Amalia slept with the crown prince's photograph under her pillow. It started as a family joke: Amalia was going to marry Konstantinos and on Sundays they would all go out for rides in the palace gardens. Those idyllic daydreams had led to others, about social welfare: Amalia would distribute soup and children's toys to the poor.
She wasn't a royalist, she was a romantic. A proletarian royalist, as Anna always said. Toward the end of her life, a whole army of religious panhandlers had paraded through her house, praying for her and pocketing her pension.

“What happened when you and Dad left for Africa?”

“She cried, begged me to think it over. It was a real drama. I told her to come with us. But she couldn't possibly, because one day her prince was going to come for her. Even at the airport she tried to get me to stay. She said she would die. And now she's made good on that threat!”

“Mom, please. She's not dead yet.” Though deep down I don't think Amalia will live, either. Besides, if you jump off a balcony, what's the use in surviving?

We're sitting on an uncomfortable hospital bench, in a narrow hallway with the same harsh lighting you find in butcher's shops, or prisons. Mom and I are finally sharing something, if only the cell of the same emotional helplessness. The women in Mom's soap operas go to the hospital dressed to the nines, their emotions overflowing everywhere—rage, pain, sadness, despair. Mom just silently twists a handkerchief in her hand, one she embroidered back in Africa.

At last they let us into the ICU. They give us masks. We're like aliens, bending over the bed of a relative who's been infected by contact with earthlings. Aunt Amalia, hooked up to machines, with an IV and an unrecognizable face, looks like a martyred saint who's finally at rest. No black dress with doo-dads on it, no buns or curlers in her hair. If I were to say “fart on my balls,” would the shock of it wake her up?

I bend over and whisper all the bad words I can think of in her ear, a free association of filth.

“What did you say?” Dad asks.

“A prayer.”

“Amen,” Mom says, crossing herself. “May the Virgin protect her.”

Aunt Amalia has been lying in the same position, eyes closed and with a drip in her arm, for five days. All of Dad's siblings came to see her, and some of her old girlfriends, and Kyria Pavlina, Fotini, Martha. Even Antigone comes. She hugs me, serious and emotional. She's wearing a suit and jewelry. The braid is gone; her hair is short now, with red highlights.

“What's going on?” I ask.

“I met someone.” In all the years I've known Antigone, I've never seen her with a man. “It's not the right time,” she whispers, catching sight of Aunt Amalia behind the glass in the ICU. “She looks like a caterpillar in a cocoon. Or a baby.” Amalia is in fact wrapped tightly in the sheets, her head just barely poking out. Only this caterpillar won't ever turn into a butterfly. And the baby won't ever grow up.

Antigone brought roses. I take them back to the apartment on Stournari and change the water obsessively. If they survive, maybe Amalia will come back to us. For now she's in an in-between state—as she was her whole life long, for that matter: between her world and ours, in a tunnel of voices and darkness.

“I'll take the next plane,” Anna says.

There's no need to rush.

Anna, in a white mask, bends down over the bed.

“Wake up, Amalia, we're going out to find you a man,” she says, her voice breaking. She wipes away a tear and takes a step backward toward the door.

“We have to do something about this. Write books, I don't know. Ban princes from fairytales. March against monarchy, against
the ridiculous consumerist production of dreams. Set them all on fire, merde, on fire!”

Anna kicks the wastebasket. The head nurse gives her a stern look. I bite my lip until the top layer peels—it's the only aggression I allow myself when I don't have a kerchief tied around my face.

“You really want to set them on fire?” I ask.

“More than anything!”

“Fine, then. Come with me.”

I take her by the hand and literally drag her out of the ICU.

“Where are you taking me?”

Where she asked me to. Where the fires start.

Camus's eyes shoot daggers.

“How dare you? How stupid are you?”

“Let me explain!”

“Explain what? That you brought your little friend here without giving us warning, just because you felt like it? Who are you going to bring along next time, your dad?”

“But you guys can bring your girlfriends, huh? Did anyone ask my permission? And I sit here and put up with your phallocratic bullshit!”

It's a screaming match; Anna is standing off to one side. For the first time, someone doesn't want her around and I'm doing my best to convince him.

“On a trial basis,” Camus says. “Just one meeting. Got it?”

Anna gazes at him in awe, but Camus sends us packing.

“Maria, tell me everything, from the beginning.”

We're walking in the Field of Ares, kicking stones. I keep looking around, paranoid that I'm being followed. I don't know where to start. The name of our group is
Amesi Drasi
, Direct Action. Our emblem looks like the anarchy symbol, only the alpha has another line at its base, so that it's nested inside a delta. Our slogan is “I
bleed, therefore I am,” and it comes from a bizarre description of police violence that Camus read somewhere:
The policeman's riot club functions like a magic wand under whose hard caress the banal soul grows vivid and the nameless recover their authenticity—a bestower, this wand, of the lost charisma of the modern self: I bleed, therefore I am
.

No theory is airtight. At some point I tell them we need to talk about feminism, and one of them replies: “Thanks, Emma Goldman, but as they say, when the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at his finger.” They're all men, around Camus's age, so they're apparently the moon, and I'm the finger. The severed finger. Sometimes they bring admirers. I wonder how big those girls' mouths are. Of course we take precautions: we call one another from phone booths, we never meet in the same place twice, we ignore one another if we pass in the street and refer to one another by pseudonyms. Antonis is Bertrand Russell, since he believes that happiness is to be found in idleness. We call Paris Altol, a cross between Aldus Huxley and Tolstoy. We've got our Chomsky, too, otherwise known as Telemachus. Sakis's pseudonym is Debord, because he considers vandalism a work of art. As for Terzis, Camus is the perfect name for him. He offers us a solid philosophical grounding whenever we get lost in nihilistic conversations: anyone who seeks to destroy everything, he says, ends up self-destructing. So I sleep with him every now and then, to keep from self-destructing.

Camus only allowed me into the group after I'd sufficiently earned his trust. At first I thought I'd entered a den of fools. They wanted to march against the cops carrying huge mirrors, the way the riot police carry bulletproof shields. They were going to have their girlfriends dance topless, too, like maenads.

“Are you guys nuts?” I said. “Are you really that naive? All those sensitive cops are going to be shocked by the sight of their own violence? And you're going to ask women to act out the fantasies of men in uniform?”

We come from various backgrounds and are always at loggerheads. If we go too far, someone—usually Altol—reminds us that we have a common enemy: the state, the capitalist system. Chomsky always objects that the word “enemy” is too emotionally loaded and we should use the term “opponent” instead, and an argument ensues, until Camus calls us back to order.