The student exhibit is a big hit. The rector gives a speech telling us not to sell out entirely to the system. The rector’s wife gets drunk and takes off her shoes. One of my fellow students, Loukas, douses me with champagne. Diana tells me I ruined my piece by turning it into an installation with actual phones and wires, that the real strength of the work was the idea of the wiretaps, of the voices layered over one another. All the rest is mere decoration.
“You have to choose.” She’s not just talking about art, she’s talking about relationships, too.
Perhaps she’s expecting me to choose her. But I choose Loukas. He’s small, always smiling, with hands weathered by paint. He comes back to my apartment and immediately starts playing with my things — what’s this, what’s that. I have no patience for something that has to pass through all the usual stages — first a drink, then a kiss, then a hand on the chest. I pull him toward me, onto the chair in the middle of the room, and my mind strays to Kayo and all that never happened. I close my eyes, conjure him up, bite his tongue all over again.
“Slow down, little animal,” says Loukas.
My desire evaporates.
“Did Anna call you?” As usual, Antigone is practically shrieking. I hold the receiver away from my ear.
“No. What happened?”
Stamatis. A heart attack. He was lying in bed, working on his notes for his book, and died on the spot.
“Was Anna with him?”
“She’s the one who found him. She’s completely lost it.”
For the first time in my life I rush to the airport without a suitcase, without even a change of clothes. It’s something Anna and I used to dream of when we were kids: flying off to Paris for a coffee. But what we had in mind wasn’t the coffee they serve at funerals, and certainly not at the funeral of her father.
She’s a mess, nothing but a pile of bones. She’s wearing a long nightgown that’s the exact same shade of pink as the liquid antibiotic they give to kids. She won’t budge from Stamatis’s armchair, where she sits absentmindedly stroking the worn velvet. I haven’t seen her like this since the earthquake, or at least since the abortion. I make her tea, I bring her chouquettes from across the street, she doesn’t touch any of it. The house has been overrun by friends and colleagues of Stamatis who wander around in hysterics. My gaze falls on the old, familiar poster on the walclass="underline" I treat my desires as realities, because I believe in the reality of my desires. I’d like for us to leave, to escape all this. That’s the reality of my desires.
“Should we go to the park?” I say.
Anna puts on a pair of sneakers and pulls a long orange hooded raincoat over her nightgown. She looks like a patient just let out for her first walk in the hospital grounds after an operation. She lies down on the grass in Buttes-Chaumont and crosses her hands over her stomach. The ball-point pen falls from her hair. I grab it and draw a heart on her hand.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“A confession of love.”
I lie down beside her, grab her and hold her tight.
“I’m here for you, whenever you need me.”
“And you’ll make all my wishes come true?”
“Every single one.”
“Then help me die. I want to die.” Anna clings to me and starts to sob, heartrending sobs that sweep me along with them. At first I’m crying for Stamatis, who will never call me mademoiselle again, never take me for coffee at the café across the street, never make false promises to anyone. And then I’m crying for Kayo, and for Angelos. For my butchered hair, my butchered finger, my vagina. For the uniforms that made us look like Maoist schoolgirls, for all the ridiculous things we learned in home economics and in religion class. For Aunt Amalia, serving strawberries with mayonnaise. For my father, who can’t tell the good guys from the bad. For my mother, for Gwendolyn, for all of Ikeja. And finally for Anna, my best friend.
We scatter his ashes in Trouville, off a pier where Anna used to count boats as a little girl. He hadn’t specified a place in his will, just “in the sea.” For some reason I remember the joke he once told using a tea bag. The missile that takes off by a miracle, out of sheer poetry, without any fuel, and flutters back down to our hands as ash. I close my eyes so as not to see Stamatis vanishing. I’m still not sure whether or not I believe in a God. When Anna and I used to talk about the power organized religion exercises over the masses, we were never holding an urn full of ashes that a short while before were an actual human being, with a beard, glasses, and boisterous laugh — ashes that a short while before were her father.
“Listen, we need slogans that reflect our era. That whole ‘Bread, education, freedom’ thing is old news: we’ve seen for ourselves how public education can destroy a perfectly healthy mind. As for the association of freedom with bread, these days we have all the freedom we want to die of starvation.”
It’s been a month since Stamatis died and Anna won’t let me go home to Athens. This whole time I’ve been wearing her clothes, which are all too small for me; I struggle each morning to fit my breats into one of her bras. At first it was because she wanted help with various bureaucratic, practical matters. Now she wants for the two of us to sit and read her father’s unfinished book about anarchist thought. All these years she was living in the same apartment with him, but it turns out she barely knew anything about his political beliefs. In a recess in the wall behind his bed she finds a complete run of Provo, a magazine put out in the mid-1960s by the Dutch anarchist organization of that name. She flips through them, then starts to read more carefully, almost angrily, trying to crack the code, to find some “message.”
“What message?” I ask. “Your dad was writing a book, it’s called research.”
“But why didn’t he ever talk to me about it? You think he was. . you know, mixed up in something?”
“Anna, don’t be ridiculous, he was writing the book right in front of your eyes. He wasn’t hiding anything from you.”
“Are you saying it’s my fault for not taking an interest?”
She cries at the drop of a hat. Because she burnt the toast, because she has to wait in line at the bank, because she thinks I’m implying that she treated Stamatis with indifference.
“I’m sure he was involved in something,” she says, wiping the tears from her eyes.
“Well, if so, it’s the kind of involvement you should be proud of.”
“You know how I feel about anarcho-autonomists, Maria. They have no discipline, and no political vision. They reject power but don’t put forward any kind of just solution of their own.”
“What on earth does justice mean, Anna? You sound like a mayor, or a minister of parliament.”
She frowns at me, then turns back to the manuscript. Every now and then she lifts her head and says something as if thinking out loud: “The Black Panthers were replicating the Maoist Marxism of the third world? Give me a break!” She loses it completely when her father starts to analyze the 1952 public debate between Camus and Sartre in a manner that supports anarcho-syndicalist ideas, which, he contends, are “the only way out between the nihilism of the bourgeoisie and the arbitrary actions of the socialist system.”
“But the leftist intellectuals all sided with Sartre back then!” she shouts, stomping her foot on the floor. “It was enough for them that the French Communist Party had the support of the working class. Stamatis always considered Stalinism a necessary evil, even after the invasion of Hungary. I don’t understand what changed!”
Everything, everything changed. Even the weather. The Parisian summer slips in through the windows. Anna sits in Stamatis’s armchair with the manuscript in her lap, biting her nails. I open the curtains, she closes them again. But the sunlight still sneaks in, lighting her from behind as if she were a Madonna in a fresco, which of course would make her mad, since she despises religion. Her white eyebrow, the dimple in her chin: a Madonna who’s angry at her painter. At her father.