“Fine, I’ll start,” she says. “After that thing with the Albanian. .”
So she calls it “that thing,” too. I never gave it a name, either.
After “that thing,” she left for France. She packed her bags, went back to her father’s place. She spent two months crying and staring at the ceiling. It took her half an hour to drag herself from the bed to the bathroom. First I’ll stand up, she’d say, and then I’ll lean against the wall. All with the utmost gravity, as if she were conducting a military operation. At some point she started psychoanalysis. According to Anna, psychoanalysis means admitting you’ve got holes in your heart and in your head, and then plugging them up with whatever you find, so you can live at peace with yourself. She discovered she wanted a child. She met Malouhos, a Greek architect living in Paris who was twenty years her senior, and within a year they had Daphne, while I was still holed up on Aegina knitting hats for Stella. She abandoned politics altogether. She lived an entirely private life, within the four walls of a two-story apartment on Champs-Élysées with double-glazed windows and shag carpet. For five years she didn’t let the little girl out of her sight, except to go to her therapist, forty-five minutes three times a week. And after her appointment, straight home to the two-story apartment.
“A bourgeois life,” I say.
“The bourgeois life came later. I’m getting there.”
She would sit for hours at the window, Daphne in her arms. She looked out at the leaves on the trees, at the cars that slid soundlessly down the avenue, thanks to the double-glazed windows. At the passersby, bundled up in overcoats and scarves. She started to invent little stories for Daphne. “See that old man walking his dog? Well, the dog used to be the old man, but since he was always kicking his dog, a witch switched their places as punishment.” Daphne believed so deeply in Anna’s stories that she would bark at people and talk to dogs. And she wasn’t alone: everyone believed Anna’s stories. Everyone wanted to be like her. The little girl clung to her mother, taking shelter in a world of improvised fairytales. Hence the cave in her drawing: witch and witchlet joined forces in turning whatever they didn’t like into a frog, whatever they did like into a prince. At some point things got out of hand. The world of elves and magic wands almost turned them, too, into unearthly creatures. Her therapist kept hinting that Anna’s fairytales were turning reality into fantasy. That she had to sever the pathological umbilical cord that still tied her to her daughter. If he’d asked me, I could have told him that pathological umbilical cords are Anna’s specialty: she was always attaching herself to someone or something, to me, to her father, to this boy or that, to Marx, to feminism. And finally, to Daphne.
“My mom became a professional storyteller,” I say.
“Your mother? The same mother I know?”
Anna would never have thought my mother capable of anything more than knitting and filling the house with incense. So I exaggerate a bit as I describe her success, her Stories from Africa series, the prize for illustration she was awarded by some association of second-rate illustrators.
Anna nods as if bored, then returns to the period of her life when she finally let go of Daphne enough to entrust her to day care. She opened their two-story apartment to her architect husband’s connections in the business world, came to terms with the thought that her father would be rolling over in his grave if he hadn’t been cremated, started to accompany Malouhos to the apartments he was working on and to select works of art to match the interior design. In the end she decided to go and work at his firm.
She reacquainted herself with the social world, remembered the proper way to hold a champagne glass by its stem, got accustomed to entrusting her daughter to others’ embraces. The girl was confused by this sudden passage from asphyxiating love to indifference. That’s when the tantrums started, the shrieking and kicking. Anna decided it was time to make her peace with the past. The solution for Daphne’s tantrums was the Greek sun: the Mediterranean lifestyle, a house with a yard in the swank northern suburbs of Athens. She convinced her husband that they should move back to Greece and make a fresh start. Though it wasn’t actually all that fresh: for years Malouhos had been collaborating with major construction companies all over Europe, he has an iron in almost every fire around. He’s a one-man multinational, responsible for some of those hideous glass monstrosities on Kifisias Avenue. We’ve even referred to him indirectly in Exit, in a piece about the new style of luxury office buildings: The hothouses on Kifisias have constant climate control instead of windows you can open, the better to transform their workers into faithful reproductions of houseplants.
“I want you to understand why I did it,” she says. “Why I left, then.”
“I do understand.”
“No, you don’t. You’re still angry with me.”
“I can understand and still be angry.”
“What can I say, Maria, I was scared. It was like an earthquake for me. As if a house had fallen on top of me.”
“You’re still afraid of earthquakes?”
“It’s fine, I’ve got it under control. But what about you? Tell me what you did.”
Well, I returned to the favorite occupation of my teenage years: staring at the ceiling. After a while I convinced myself I could hide out on Aegina, at Martha’s house, with Stella in my arms. It worked for a while, and then it stopped working. So I went to Paris, then to Berlin. I lived literally without anything, in squats in East Berlin. I ran into Michel after all those years. We shared a helping of pasta with spoiled tomato sauce that we found in a tin pot.
“Michel! How did you recognize him?” Anna asks.
“People have a way of sniffing one another out. He still had that same wreck of a bicycle.”
“How was he? As sad as ever? Did he have a girlfriend? Tell me everything!”
“How should I know, Anna? Michel is a zombie, it’s impossible to get him to open up. Anyhow, that situation had gone on too long. I went to New York, to Kayo. I couldn’t stand it there, either. So I came back to Exarheia. Oh, and Kayo followed. We live together in the blue building.”
“You live with Kayo?”
“Kayo has his life, I have mine.”
“What about men?”
“Men? Rarely. . I didn’t go to therapy. I never learned how to plug up the holes.”
It’s not a complaint, it’s a statement. But Anna reaches out both arms and literally falls onto me. Apparently she still has that same need for dramatic reconciliations. Her body is lighter than I had imagined. Lighter than she was when that thing happened. She strokes my hair, and I stroke hers. She probably dyes hers; it’s brittle in the way hair is that’s been damaged by dyes and hair dryers.
“Dirty lesbians!” a man hisses as he walks past our table.
“Ever since they started to feel like they’re Europeans and stopped hitting on foreign women all the time, they’ve become so aggressive. .” Anna says and sighs, without relaxing her hold on me. Her breath sends waves of warmth down the nape of my neck. Just like back when we would smoke to keep warm during recess, curled up in one another’s arms. Or in the double bed in Aegina, when she would wrap herself around me and beg me to forgive her.
Odiosamato.
Four
We’re smoking in the girls’ room of the Varvakeio middle school, all in a tizzy. Our school is supposedly “experimental,” but Anna calls it a “bastion of phallocentrism.” And she’s right. The boys can wear whatever they want, but we have to wear the same blue smock every day. “Stupid old magpies! They’ve blinded themselves willingly, they’ve scratched their own eyes out — and now they want to turn us into good little housewives, too!” Today she’s got it in for Sartzekaki, our home economics teacher. Anna refused to make the little crocheted cap that keeps the dust off the extra roll of toilet paper, and she got what was coming to her. “I pity the man who marries you, Anna Horn,” Sartzekaki said. “And I pity the one who married you,” Anna replied, and got a slap on the face for her trouble. She ran out of the classroom, bright red with rage, and I ran after her to calm her down.