“What do you say, should we go to an island this summer?”
Anna raises her head and looks at me as if I’ve said something vulgar.
Every so often some of her friends from the collective come by. One brings a couple of tomatoes, another a bottle of wine. Beatrice, a girl with a high forehead and sunken eyes, brings roses, which she proceeds to crush into the tablecloth, in a message of consolation and militancy, the way Frida Kahlo did when she first met Trotsky. But Beatrice is no Kahlo, and Anna no Trotsky.
In the newspapers we read about Papandreou’s open-heart surgery, about Koskotas’s conviction. Such sickness and decay, and I’m here strolling down Parisian avenues? I want to go back to Athens, to reality. I say as much to Anna.
“We’ve got a whole house to ourselves, merde! It’s our childhood dream come true. Why do you want to leave?”
Because if dreams don’t come true when you dream them, they might as well never come true.
1989 is a red-letter year for us all. For Anna because she finds the political movement that suits her best — the green movement, the fight to protect nature and the environment. She abandons hard-core communism, returns to art, organizes happenings in Paris involving the spontaneous planting of trees, and of course gets mad when I don’t go to help her. For Antigone because 1989 sees the formation of a new party, Synaspismos, the Coalition of the Left. For my parents because they finally buy their plot on Aegina; they plant a palm tree to mark the boundary of their own private Africa. For Aunt Amalia because she goes completely and utterly mad: she hears voices coming from the cooking hood, men saying all kinds of filthy things, and she laughs and laughs. For Kayo because he’s been chosen to play a shyster in some low-budget film.
As for me, after the parliamentary elections in June and the formation of an interim government with its project of anti-corruption “catharsis” to clean up the political sphere, I finally have a good idea: I build a metal suitcase with lots of little compartments, load it up with cleaning fluid, Brillo pads, dust cloths, latex gloves, and transform myself into a cleaning lady. I ring doorbells and buzzers, tell whoever answers that I’m doing a performance piece called Catharsis, and that I’m offering to clean their bathrooms and kitchens for free. Most of the people I encounter have no idea what performance art is, or conceptual art: they assume I’m crazy and slam the door in my face. The ones who accept my services insist on treating me to something, or on giving me a tip. I throw myself into the scrubbing of sinks and toilets. My hands smell of bleach and latex. A few newspaper columnists mention my piece, I do some interviews, and journalists start to write stupid stuff about the rebirth of political art. One day I ring a bell and the man in the house calls to his wife, “Come quick, Eleni, it’s the girl we saw on TV! She came to clean our house!”
No idea lasts long in 1989, in all that madness, in the desperate desire for publicity. Catharsis ends then and there, on that couple’s doorstep: I turn on my heel and walk away, leaving the man and his Eleni high and dry. I wander aimlessly through the streets, until eventually I set my suitcase down on the ground and sit on it, just like when I was nine years old and the police came and brought me home. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if they showed up again and told me to move on, that I’m disturbing the peace. The only way not to disturb the peace is to shut yourself up in your house. To listen to the voices coming from the cooking hood.
Merde, I need to find another Ikeja, before I start hearing voices, too.
Seven
I push off the covers. I couldn’t possibly get out of bed. My legs are logs, the room is dark, the time impossible to gauge. Am I still in the cave? Is that Gwendolyn pushing open the bedroom door to peer in, or the burglar with the stocking over his head, or the Albanian’s ghost?
“Are you sleeping?” Kayo whispers.
What a stupid question. If you’re sleeping you can’t answer; if you’re awake, what’s the point of asking?
“You’re sleeping,” he says.
I shut my eyes. I apparently haven’t outgrown my childish stubbornness. That’s what happens when a person grows up alongside someone like Anna. Kayo tiptoes over to the bed, pulls the covers up to my chin and tucks me in. Then he leaves the room, half closing the door behind him, and I’m once again wrapped in darkness. I hear voices coming from the kitchen, someone coughs, there’s a sound of cups clinking. People are drinking coffee. But that bit of information doesn’t help: it could be morning, afternoon, evening. All I know is that it’s a time of day when people aren’t usually asleep. Which places me automatically in the category of the sick.
That cough again. A smoker’s cough. Anna’s here.
•
She’s perched on the kitchen table, the way Kyria Kontomina used to sit on her desk when we were back in high school. She’s wearing high-heeled pumps with ankle straps and a forest green, eighties-style satin dress with puff sleeves. You’d think she was on her way out to one of the disco clubs on the Aegina of our youth. She’s smoking, and blowing smoke rings into the air that break one by one on the ceiling. Kayo, Kosmas, Irini, and Irini’s younger sister Fiona are sitting in a circle around her, like rapt schoolchildren. Anna doesn’t even need words — she speaks with her hands, her eyes, her mouth. Lesson One from Little Wizard: how to hold a magic wand. Half the battle with magic tricks is creating the proper ambiance.
Suddenly Anna hops down from the table. “Oh, my, I remember that blanket!”
I’m standing in the doorway of the kitchen wrapped in the blanket I had as a girl, the one with red flowers. Anna and I used to make tents with it, or play house under it, or whatever else crossed our minds. Later we would wrap it around our legs for warmth, since if you sit still for too long, if you get lost in labyrinthine conversations about the meaning of life, you end up getting cold.
“Are you okay?” Kosmas asks.
“She just fell, it was like. .” says Irini.
Kayo comes over and rubs my back. “How do you feel?”
“Better.”
I’m not really sure, though, I have nothing to compare my current state to. I shuffle out of the kitchen and over to the mirror in the hall, which reflects the following image: a green wig with bangs, slightly askew. Bone-white skin. Purple circles under my eyes. As for the eyes themselves, they’re blurry, nearly overflowing with inexplicable tears. I look like a Martian that missed its spaceship. Or a ghost.
“Don’t worry, you’re still Miss Inner Beauty,” Anna says. She’s standing behind me. Even in heels, she knows how to glide soundlessly on her magic carpet.
“Should I fix you something to eat?” Irini calls from the kitchen.
“No, I want to go out.”
“I know a place with decent food,” Anna says. “Let’s all go, we need to get something in your stomach.”
Today she’s driving Malouhos’s Jeep, which is big enough for us all. Anna and Kayo are up front, I’m in back with Irini and Kosmas.
“I’ve never ridden in a Jeep before,” Irini says.
“And you never will again,” I say. “Life is hard.”
“I’ll take you for a ride whenever you like,” Anna promises, adjusting the mirror. She wants to keep an eye on me. Apparently she still worries when I’m tired, or angry, or acting unpredictably.