“Since when are you Russian?”
Anna heaves a sigh, takes the stairs two at a time and shuts herself in her room. I run after her.
“Leave me alone, merde!” she says, her head under a pillow.
“Anna, why don’t you come home? Isn’t it time we were both back in Athens?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about we go across the street for a hot chocolate and maybe you’ll figure it out?” We wrap scarves around our necks and clomp down the stairs.
“I supposedly came here to bring you home,” I say to her, stirring my hot chocolate.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re completely impossible, but I can’t live without you.”
We’re sitting in the window with the latest issue of Actuel, on Michel’s recommendation. Anna shoots daggers at an old man reading Le Figaro across the way, then turns to me with a huge grin, as if what I said has just sunk in.
“Really? You really can’t live without me?”
She adores hyperbole. She swings from one emotion to the next as if all flipping a switch in her brain: rage, tenderness, jealousy, love. Whereas I need time to collect my thoughts, to swallow my anger. This time Anna has gone too far. I don’t like the way she tells me who to kiss and for how long. I wonder: do I really want her to come back to Athens? Or am I only doing it for the free studies Stamatis promised?
“Can you live without me?” I throw the question back at her.
“I don’t think so.”
“Well?”
“Okay, fine, I’ll come.”
We hug. But instead of relief, what I feel is unease.
Michel and Anna kiss. Raoul opens cans of beer with his teeth and flips through Bourdieu’s La Distinction. I’m sitting in Stamatis’s armchair, fingernails sunk into the worn velvet. I don’t want to read, I don’t want to be kissed. I don’t want to drink beer, either. I want to cry. I jump to my feet, throw open the front door and slam it behind me.
The air outside is freezing and I’ve left the house with no coat. I need to find an Ikeja, whatever Ikeja still has room for me. By now I’ve learned how to pack a suitcase properly, I won’t try to bring eggs or other breakables, I won’t ask bus drivers irrelevant questions. I’ll board a train, slide my suitcase onto the rack above my seat and watch as one landscape gives way to the next. As the trees whip past into the distance behind me, my thoughts, too, will fly out of my head one by one—zzzmmm, zzzmmm—until my mind is entirely empty—sssssshhhh—and I’ll be nothing more than a girl on a train.
It’s cold, absurdly cold. So I tweak the story slightly: a boy comes into the train car and wraps a blanket with red flowers on it around my shoulders. It’s my baby blanket, and I’m sorry to have been defeated by my own limitations, but I needed someone to come and cover me with something. The boy’s eyes are as liquid as Raoul’s, he has Michel’s bicycle with him, and he metes out attention with an eyedropper, like Angelos — just enough for me to fall in love without his lifting a finger — and because I don’t like the story I’ve invented, I duck into the metro station and huddle in its relative warmth, shake my head so that every last thought will leave, curl into a ball on the tiled floor and start to cry. No one talks to me, no one asks me what’s wrong. We’re in Paris, after all, and — how did Anna put it? — people here aren’t bourgeois.
“Where were you?” Anna asks. She’s at the sink washing dishes and doesn’t even turn to look at me.
“I wanted to be alone.”
“You should say something first, so people don’t worry.”
“What’s the sense in talking it over when the whole point is that you want to be alone?”
“You’re a member of society, not a wolf. Besides, even wolves travel in packs.”
“You’re right, I’m not a wolf. You’re the wolf.”
“Excuse me?”
“You tear everyone else to pieces. You want everything for yourself!”
Anna turns off the tap and puts her hands on her waist. Her eyes are spitting fire, her one white eyebrow is raised. The dimple in her cheek deepens.
“What you’re talking about is called communalism, it’s called liberty. It’s everything we’ve been fighting for, merde!” Right, like she’s been out digging trenches. Like she only just put down the shovel this instant.
“You only say those things when it suits you, Anna.”
“Try me. Ask for something, anything.”
“I don’t play those games.”
But Anna does. She looks around frantically — for what? A rope to hang herself with, to show me how much she’ll sacrifice for my sake? A weapon to use in the next revolution? She grabs a back issue of Actuel and holds it up to my face, pointing to a phrase by Foucault: Our action, on the contrary, isn’t concerned with the soul or the man behind the convict, but it seeks to obliterate the deep division that lies between innocence and guilt.
“Fine. And?”
She sweeps all of Stamatis’s books off the table onto the floor. They aren’t even hers.
“Merde, merde! Look at you, lecturing me in ethics!”
“Me?”
“Are you trying to provoke a crisis of conscience? What do I have to do to convince you? Go out into the street and beg?” She grabs her coat and rushes for the stairs. I run after her. She dashes across the street without even checking for cars, takes the stairs down into the metro station two at a time, sits on the ground and starts to sing a song by Françoise Hardy: “Que sont devenus tous mes amis, et la maison où j’ ai vecu?” Someone tosses her a half franc, someone else a handful of centimes. It’s all on purpose, of course. She chose her song wisely, it’s a sentimental one. Eventually she collects five francs. I’m standing across from her the whole time, leaning against the wall. What is she trying to prove?
“So you’ll understand what communalism means, I’ll treat you to chocolat à l’ancienne,” she says. She opens her arms and I fall into her embrace. Two poor little beggars of love.
Because at the end of the day, Anna loves me. She’s willing to lay herself bare for me.
Roman cleans Stamatis’s apartment twice a week. I watch her as she scrubs the toilet. She’s a plump African woman of indeterminate age, and she doesn’t look the least bit like me. But maybe the similarity lies in Africa, our mutual starting point, or in the deep sighs she’s always heaving.
“Where are you from, Roman?”
“Kenya, Nairobi.”
“Do you like it here?”
“It’s fine, I have a job.”
“Do you know the saying, when a ripe fruit sees an honest person, it falls?”
“No, mademoiselle.”
“Don’t call me mademoiselle, I’m not a mademoiselle.”
“Of course you are,” Anna calls, running down the stairs. “We’re all ladies.” It’s something Antigone says.
“Do you know how to make puff puffs?”
Roman laughs. “How do you know about puff puffs?”
I tell her about Gwendolyn, Unto Punto, and the house in Ikeja. But it’s like I’m talking about someone else, not myself. My memories have faded. They feel like an Antonioni film: devoid of realism, and devoid of emotion, too.
Anna grabs me by the hand, pulls me out of the apartment.
“I’m guessing you need something sweet.”
We duck into a patisserie and she orders a dozen chouquettes, little hollow balls of warm dough sprinkled with crystallized sugar. We polish them off in five minutes.
“When we come back to Paris to study, I’ll buy you chouquettes every day,” she says, her mouth full.