It’s February, a night like any other. I’m curled up in bed reading a novel by Albert Camus that I borrowed from the library of the Institut Français. Outside stray dogs are barking, the sky is faintly red. Suddenly our apartment starts to shake as if everyone had cranked the music up to full blast in every apartment in the building all at once. A few of the books fall from my shelf into a heap on the floor. Out in the living room, Mom’s wooden elephants from Africa drop one by one from the cabinet. There’s a humming sound and then all the lights go out. It’s as if a wind picked up our apartment and set it down on a beach where huge gusts are whipping up enormous waves that threaten to engulf it. Mom lets out a cry—“My God!” Dad bursts into my room, shouts at me to hurry. I run barefoot down four flights of stairs. I’m clutching Camus to my chest as if the book were a living thing, like a kitten.
The whole neighborhood is out in the streets. Women in slips are looking around frantically. Men wrapped in sheets are deep in conversation, gesticulating, like Roman senators. So it wasn’t just our apartment. Maybe it’s the beginning of World War III? “An earthquake, an earthquake!” my mother cries as if she needs to repeat it to believe it. So that’s what a real earthquake is like.
Maybe I should cross myself every now and then and try to believe in God. Maybe I shouldn’t kiss just anyone.
Anna is in a terrible state. White as a ghost with fear, curled up into a ball in the garden. Our whole family has taken refuge at the house in Plaka because Mom is afraid the roof of our building will fall and crack open her skull. Wrapped in a blanket on a deck chair in their yard, Mom drinks the coffee Antigone brings her and repeats: “6.6 on the Richter! My Lord, how awful!” Dad and Antigone are the bravest of us all. They sit in front of the television, coming out every so often to relay the news: “The epicenter was the Halcyon islands.” “So many dead!” “Devastating property damage.”
I’m sitting on a stool beside Anna, trying to calm her down.
“It’s over, Anna, it’s over.”
“But can anyone say for sure that it won’t start up again?”
“Come on, would a real revolutionary be afraid?”
“Give me a break, Maria! Merde!”
She’s sitting on the edge of her chair, ready to leap to her feet at any moment — to go where? There’s an aftershock, practically imperceptible; Anna screeches, Antigone brings her half a tranquilizer. We all sleep outside in the yard, in sleeping bags or on mattresses we bring out from the house, except for Dad, who sleeps in the car. Under normal circumstances Anna and I would be up giggling until dawn, or would sneak off for a cigarette. But Anna isn’t Anna anymore. In the morning she wakes up with red eyes and scans the yard as if the earthquake were a wild beast lurking in some dark corner. I’ve forgotten my own fear, because I’m wrapped up in Anna’s. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Anna afraid. And her fear makes me stronger.
“I’m going to go live in France, that’s it.”
“Are you crazy? What about me?”
Anna is hunched over on the toilet, a wad of toilet paper in her hand. Even the way she pees is different: hesitant, not as noisy. She’s always prepared to jump up and race out of the house at the slightest notice.
“There are no earthquake zones in France. I’ll go live with my dad. You can come, too, if you want.”
I’ve never met Anna’s father, because he never sets foot in Athens. He and Antigone are separated, something it took me ages to figure out. They’re supposedly all modern about it, and still go out to eat together in France. “If I got a divorce from your father, I wouldn’t ever want to see him again, not even in a painting,” Mom says. “But they’re friends,” I say. “Friends? How can they be friends? It’s completely unnatural, child.”
This is one of the rare occasions on which Mom and I agree. Anna and I never talk to our exes, we call them “stuffed shirts.” We’ll go out with a boy from the Varvakeio for ten days, two weeks at most, and let them kiss us and touch our chest. Next year we’ll see about more than that. We still like peeing together, but not in parking lots anymore, in the bathroom. We shut ourselves in for hours and talk about how this or that boy kisses, or how boys unbutton your shirt, with trembling fingers.
After the earthquake, though, Anna doesn’t talk much about stuff like that. Actually she doesn’t talk much about anything. She just sits on the toilet with a wad of paper wrapped around her hand looking as if she might cry at any moment.
“How am I supposed to come to France, Anna? My family is here.”
“Aren’t I your family?”
We hug and lean silently to this side and that, Anna with her underwear around her knees, I fully dressed and strong. She smells like fear.
“What about school?”
“We don’t learn anything anyhow. Just crap about working women and how to make hats for toilet paper.”
“You’ve got a point.”
Anna looks at me pleadingly.
“Won’t you come?”
“Could I ever let you go alone?”
And yet I do. I say goodbye to her at the airport with burning eyes. Our sweaty fingers slip through one another as we part. Who will I talk to during recess? Smoke with? Pee with? I sob inconsolably in Antigone’s arms at the Hellenic Airport as my best friend’s head vanishes on the other side of passport control.
She’s leaving just for a month or two, on a trial basis. My mother says she’ll cut off my legs if I even think about leaving, she’ll have Interpol on my tail. It’s a threat she invented when I ran off for Ikeja. I imagine the agents bringing me back home in handcuffs; all the newspapers print my photograph, as if I’m another Patty Hearst.
Anna and I exchange heartbreaking letters. She sends me poems by Verlaine, I send her poems by Titos Patrikios: So, that circle we carved with a piece of a broken pitcher, is our circle. Let’s hide the cricket’s chirp in it, so we’ll know we can find it again. So we’ll be able to talk about whatever will happen in the great books of the future. She writes: Paris is so depressing without you, Maria. I go out with my father’s friends, they talk about thousands of interesting things, but their voices are just an echo of my conversations with you. Our housekeeper’s name is Roman and she’s sort of like you in some ways. So I spend hours on end in the kitchen, and while she’s cleaning the cupboards I eat an apple I’m not hungry for, drink some milk that I don’t really want, just so I can be close to her and therefore also close to you. I miss you terribly. Will you come for Easter? And I write back: I miss you terribly, too. I don’t go out with boys anymore. It’s no fun if we don’t pee together afterward and talk over all the details. My parents are always complaining, because of the long-distance calls, or because I’m always dragging myself around the house, not doing anything. On the weekends I almost always stay home, biting my nails and staring at the ceiling. At school, in religion class, I stare out the window, wishing you would appear in your uniform with the Mao collar and with a cigarette in your hand. Yesterday Antigone and I went to the movies. We saw Doctor Dolittle. She says it’s no mistake they’re playing it now, even though it’s an old film — it makes her think right away of Andreas Papandreou! We laugh a lot when it’s just the two of us, but something’s missing: you! We miss you! Come home!
I don’t know if it’s because Anna is gone or because our psychology textbook, by Evangelos Papanoutsos, the guy who also made demotic Greek the official language of education, makes no sense, but I understand pretty much nothing in that class: When we observe our fellow human beings, or when we ask them to fill out questionnaires, we’re asking them to delve deep into their emotional worlds and describe past or current experiences, while at the same time we’re placing ourselves in their situation: we imagine ourselves doing what they do, so as better to understand what is happening in their inner world. I don’t understand our philosophy textbook, either: Hermeneutic art, abstraction, and deliberate incomprehensibility in art provoke a rebellion in consciousness, by not allowing it to function aesthetically. When I read stuff like that, it makes me want to really apply myself to art again, to make the most hermeneutic art I can, to be deliberately incomprehensible all over the pages of the textbook, over those stupid sentences. I want to correct that stupidity, the way Anna once corrected the Acropolis in my Savings Day drawing to an Avgi.