Why I Killed My Best Friend (20 page)

It's March and the news bursts like a bomb: Papandreou is proposing Christos Sartzetakis for president. Sartzetakis is still a household name, two decades after he served as prosecutor in the case of Grigoris Lambropoulos's assassination, and Papandreou's decision creates an unlikely coalition of anti-Karamanlis forces. Two birds with one stone: Papandreou diffuses President Karamanlis's power while also challenging the excessive power exercised by the office of the president itself. The political media have a field day. I start to actually follow the news again, to take an interest in current affairs. I may be ideologically opposed to what Papandreou is doing, but it's still brilliant. The issue is power. Who will have the upper hand.

Antigone calls me to curse him up and down over the phone. It's the first time we've spoken since Anna left. Antigone is back in the trenches: committees for the abolition of the death penalty, for political prisoners in Cuba and Zaire, for human rights. She doesn't ask how I am, just vents her anger at Papandreou, calling him a cynical utopianist. I hold the receiver away from my ear—she's taken it to heart and is shouting with rage. I'm pretending to listen, but I'm actually thinking my own thoughts. Such as: if I were an administration in need of internal change and Anna were the chief executive, how would I get her out of the way? By finding a Sartzetakis of my own, of course. I wouldn't give her any warning, I'd let her think she's still in charge. I'd just dig a hole and watch with satisfaction and joy as she fell right in. After all, she deserves it. The whole family has been lying to me all these years. Studies in Paris, sure. She packed her bags, told Stamatis to get the attic room ready, and at the last minute told me, “Don't come to the airport. It'll be too painful, merde!” In my head I had imagined it all:
art school, chouquettes, boys, rallies, Les Rita Mitsouko concerts. Anna destroyed it all with a single kick.

We should both go to art school so we'll be together all day . . .

And where is she now? As far away as she could get. She writes me heartfelt letters plastered with stickers that say
Touche pas á mon pote
, to prove what a good activist she is. She comes home for Christmas with a grab bag of phony presents under her arm: Anaïs Anaïs perfume, Milan Kundera's new novel, a de Kooning poster from the Pompidou, stale chouquettes from the neighborhood bakery. She's wearing '50s black-framed glasses, though she's not the least bit nearsighted, a Les Négresses Vertes pin on her jacket, and pointy second-hand shoes, which must be all the rage over there. And, of course, dried paint on her hands: she's the very image of an art student. I, meanwhile, didn't get high enough scores on my exams to enter any department. I really did turn in a blank sheet for my essay question.

I start to hang out at Brutus, a taverna near Alexandras Avenue where I meet writers, students from the law department, and a depressed young theater director with awful teeth. That's my university: impromptu lectures on philosophy and aesthetics over a bottle of wine. Shortly before the parliamentary elections in June, I meet Diana, a painter who teaches in the School of Fine Arts. She's around forty, skinny, with beautiful almond eyes. From her warm handshake and the look of encouragement in her eye, I know I've hit the jackpot.

I've found my Sartzetakis.

“Come and audit my class starting in September,” Diana says. “You can take your exams again next year.”

“I'll think about it.”

“There's nothing to think about.”

She takes me with her to the home of the new rector of the art
school. I bring my portfolio, all of my old drawings, starting with the era of burning dresses. One of two things happens: either the rector and his wife actually like my work, or they can't bear to tell me how terrible it is, out of a French sense of courtesy. Their family just moved back from Paris, and they eat backwards, like Anna's family—main course first, then salad. The rector looks like a cross between Modigliani and one of his sculptures: curly hair falling into his face, but thin and very tall; he stoops instinctively to pass through doorways. His wife is an architect, or used to be. Now she mostly seems wrapped up in her husband's career, though she doesn't want to admit it, even to herself. Their kids are teenagers, at an age when they could care less about anyone who's already graduated from high school. They all throw in French words without even meaning to, creating a little colony of Parisian sentiment around the dinner table. I've drunk a fair bit and at some point I start to cry. The rector's wife puts an arm around me. “You're a true artist, crying at the drop of a hat!” Well, not at the drop of a hat. A backwards meal with leftists who lived in exile in France, with works by the
nouveaux réalistes
on the walls, is more or less a compendium of everything I've repressed.

Diana drives me home that night. My parents are on Aegina for the weekend—this year they're renting the Room of Sighs, as I call it after Angelos and my big disappointment in love. Aegina reminds them of Ikeja, they dream of buying property there. Diana wants to come up and see the big monochromes I've been painting. She examines them eagerly, then examines my chest even more eagerly. “Maria, they're wonderful!” Is she referring to my paintings or my breasts? I couldn't care less. By now I've started to put up a conscious fight “for even better days,” as Papandreou's slogan would have it. I guess I'm a cynical utopianist, too.

If any members of the administration saw me slathering paint on my monochromes like an overzealous housepainter, they'd surely
use me as a negative example in their austerity slogans. Look at Papamavrou, consuming more than she produces, gobbling up five kilos of paint at a single sitting, then letting the water run for hours, supposedly to clean her brushes. The epitome of the thoughtless and unscrupulous Greek citizen.

But there's good and bad waste. Instead of destroying the remote control with my nails, I let my hands guide my way to more creative acts—sometimes on paper, sometimes on Diana's body.

“Just don't tell me you're a lesbian now!” She's shrieking straight into my ear and looks as if she might start crying at any moment. We're sitting at the bar at Pieros's, shouting over the music. It's fitting, really: Depeche Mode, “Don't You Want Me.”

“I'm not a lesbian, Anna. Stop making generalizations, please.”

“Are you crazy? Completely crazy? Do you want to destroy your life?”

“Are you implying that anyone with sexual preferences different from yours is destroying her life? You've been forming some really progressive ideas in Paris, haven't you? So much for your
Touche pas á mon pote
.”

Both of us are pretty drunk, and we've taken some of those pills that are doing the rounds. We more or less let loose on one another. The others rush to pull us apart, though we manage to get some nasty scratching in first. Anna pinches me hard on the forearm and I slap her with the back of my hand.

“I'll have to put you two in handcuffs,” Diana tries to joke.

“Wouldn't you like that, you filthy, second-rate artist!” Anna shouts.

“Look who's talking! All you are is a spoiled, vulgar little girl who lives to exploit her friends. That's exactly what you are!”

Anna takes a step back. She's sobbing, spittle dribbling down her chin. For the first time in her life she's ugly, frightening.

“You have no idea what you're talking about. Maria is my best friend! She's . . . she's . . .”

I'm shaking all over.

Anna turns on her heel and leaves the bar at a run.

“If you go after her, we're through,” Diana says.

But I'm already headed for the door.

“You deserve whatever you get!” Diana shouts at my back as I go.

We're nineteen, but you'd think we were nine. Lying on our backs on the beach, Anna and I are digging holes in the sand with our heels, chattering away, moving from one topic to the next as if we'd never been apart, as if our friendship had never wavered. She tells me about Urlich, a German of Iranian descent, and then about some bass player who's always high and pays absolutely no attention to her. I tell her about the rector and his wife.

“Oh, Maria, will you introduce me to them?” she asks.

“Maybe, we'll see.”

I'm afraid she'll charm them, like she charms everyone. But I can't just live in fear, can I? Besides, Anna doesn't just take, she gives, too. Thanks to her irrepressible sociability, we strike up a conversation with Christophoros one night on the stairs outside Pieros's bar. Christophoros is a bit older than us, he just finished his masters in chemistry. He talks about practical things, and uses verbs that indicate action and energy: I went, I pulled, I carried. He has a biting sense of humor and a slight hunch that makes you think his embrace must be warm and capacious. Up until now I've treated my relationships like stairs, one leading to the next. I wonder if Christophoros might be a landing, a place where I can at last pause and look out at the world.

•

Diana won't speak to me anymore, so I unlearn my role as audience member. But she did plant her seed: the rector and his wife invite me to dinner one warm evening in September. “Bring a few friends,” they say. I bring Christophoros and Anna. Anna doesn't waste any time: before they serve the coq au vin and salad with chèvre, she's got her drawings spread out on the dining room table. Abstract expressionism, intense experimentation with color. Now I understand why she brought me that de Kooning poster.

“Well, if a painting isn't showing a story from the Bible, or some familiar scene, we all might as well be Australian aboriginals,” Christophoros says, scratching his head.

Anna makes a face.

The rector opens a bottle of wine. “I like people who admit their ignorance,” he says.

“Who accept the relativity of knowledge, you mean,” Christophoros corrects him, and the two of them laugh. Our hosts have taken a shine to Christophoros. He doesn't know anything about contemporary art, but he has a kind of natural charm. Anna has something to offer them, too: memories of their beloved France. They talk about Guy Debord and Nicos Poulantzas, about Cornelius Castoriades, about her father, Stamatis. Anna still hasn't quite figured out whose side she's on, whose ideas she believes in. Names and theories get mixed up together in her speech like a huge salad, with so many flavors that you can't be quite sure what you're eating. Is she an orthodox Communist? Is she with the situationists and against party politics? Would she align herself with Orgapolis, a new branch of the Marxist-Leninist UCFML?

“What do you think of all this?” the rector asks me.

“All I want is to keep my distance from the logic of parties and power.” I might have added:
I've had more encounters and run-ins with power than I'd like, I've lived it in my skin, with Anna's pinches
.

“You can't do that—you'll end up an apolitical being,” Anna says. For the time being I cross the situationists and Orgapolis off the list.

“Watch out, Anna,” I reply, “you sound like any other cog in the party machine.”

“You have to critique the system, to not give it a moment's peace.”

“But you're speaking the language of the system itself! It's as if you're conceding that there is no other language.” I attack the coq au vin with my knife and a piece of skin slips off my plate.

Perhaps I'm a romantic anarchist after all.

The rector's wife and I are clearing the table.

“What you guys were saying earlier,” she murmurs, “it doesn't really hold anymore.”

“What doesn't hold?”

“Politics is dead. I don't say that with any sense of nostalgia. Everyone just goes to work, comes home exhausted at night, doesn't want to know anything.”

“Not everyone.”

“Everyone!”

“What did you think of Anna's work?” I ask her, to change the subject. It makes me sad when people reject the possibility of a revolution in our day.

“Her technique is good, but she has no vision of her own. You, on the other hand, have vision, but could care less about technique.”

“Should I take that as a compliment?”

“It's the truth, Maria. Take some art lessons, don't let yourself get lazy. And take the entrance exams for the school.”

“I don't believe in art school.”

“Neither do I. But it'll give you a technical foundation that you can throw out later on if you want to. Right now you need it, the
same way you need the illusion of a political vision. If you get too old, you'll build up your defenses, maybe go for some psychoanalysis, and it'll all be over. At that point no one will be able to teach you anything.”

Merde. She's taken it personally.

Under the influence of Christophoros and the rector's wife, I become a good girl again. I stop watching television entirely, cut down on cigarettes, and start taking art lessons from a guy named Terzis, a painter who drinks so much that he's destroyed his liver. He's an odd bird who cancels classes whenever there are anti-government workers' strikes downtown. I can't imagine him marching in his combat boots, with his expressionless rat's eyes and his freakish hair.