How is it that sometimes, on starry nights, you move backward in time, and feel as if it was only yesterday when you stuck your head between the bars, when you felt powerless and angry and tried to run away, with two cracked eggs in your suitcase and a head full of Gwendolyn’s proverbs? When a ripe fruit sees an honest person, it falls. Only there’s no ripe fruit anymore, and no honest people, either.
It’s 1993. PASOK is back in power, the salt is as worm-ridden as it gets. In a few days I’ll be turning twenty-six and I’m not afraid of states of emergency anymore, of political unrest. On the contrary, I’m a person who causes unrest.
I bleed, therefore I am.
“Oh, Maria! I’m so glad you guys came.”
I toss my backpack on the floor, sink my face into her hair and breathe in her new scent — bergamot and cinnamon. As always, Anna is both tart and sweet: she hugs me tightly, but pinches my arm. She kisses Thanos three times, French style. He doesn’t know anything about the French way of greeting and keeps on going, kissing the air after she’s pulled away. Anna is blindingly beautiful at the end of her first communist period. She has on Moroccan leather flip-flops and a see-through dress printed with starfish. Her hair is in a bun, held in place by a pair of chopsticks — a blonde version of Antigone. The famous Thierry, barefoot, is slicing tomatoes at the kitchen table. He’s tall and attractive, an Aryan Kayo with curly hair down to his shoulders. He winks at me and my heart does a backflip. She’s found the best, yet again. In the most beautiful city, in a sun-drenched apartment with half-circle balconies near Buttes-Chaumont. The apartment is all hers now; not even Stamatis’s ghost inhabits it anymore. Where the photograph of Poulantzas used to be, now there’s one of her as a child, at some celebration after the fall of the junta in Greece: the Arc de Triomphe in the background, Anna’s fingers making the victory sign. Unbuttoned pea coat, red cheeks, white eyebrow, dimple in her chin, tortoiseshell barrette in her bangs. The wunderkind of the exiled Greek left.
One of Anna’s pieces has displaced the poster about the reality of desires. She’s done a whole series: she buys old, romantic landscapes from junk shops — snow-capped peaks, forest streams, houses perched on mountainsides — and alters them with her brush. She adds bits of an anarchist’s city plan, paints in factories or toxic waste, dirties the waters of a lake, ravishes the landscape with acid rain. She’s become a romantic again, just as she was with Angelos. She wants to save nature, like a medieval knight fighting to protect a princess who never expressed the slightest desire to be saved.
Thierry is a Greenpeace activist. Anna goes with him on missions to save endangered animals, follows him to Kuwait and Venezuela to protest oil spills. She sends me postcards with laconic messages, signed “with love.” But I no longer believe in Anna’s love. What she really wants is to show me how well she’s doing, moving from one revolution to the next — from sexual freedom to communism, and now to her new tree-hugging routine.
“What’s wrong with that?” Thanos asks when we’ve shut the door of the attic room, which is now the guest room. Anna’s charmed him, too.
“Neither one of them cares at all about the slaves who work in the fields all day, handling all those toxic chemicals. They swoop in after the fact and act like stars, play the ecological activists, the official protectors of nature.”
“Aren’t they just doing their job?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying: Anna and Thierry are just doing their job. The two of them are drowning in money, and they spend so much effort trying to hide it.”
“What would you prefer? For them to give it to you?”
“They could give it away. Or just spend it without feeling guilty all the time.”
They painted the apartment themselves, and they remind us of it whenever they can, so we don’t think they’re too bourgeois. They sing the praises of a dirt cheap pizzeria they discovered. After lunch, Anna drags me to a thrift store.
“Well, are you going to tell me about Thanos?” she says, trying on a red kimono with holes at the elbows.
What could I possibly tell her about Thanos? He’s a bank teller, the absolute personification of mediocrity. He only goes out on weekends, he lives with his parents, he provides me with the cover I need. If I tell her about Thanos, I’ll have to tell her about Camus, too, about who I really am, what kind of life I lead. For the first time since my locking-myself-in-the-bathroom phase, I have secrets from Anna. Only back then it was a personal revolution. Now I’m fighting for others.
“He’s good to me,” I say.
“Goodness never mattered to you, Maria. If anything, I’d say you preferred to be a little bit mistreated, you always wanted the ones who pushed you away. .”
“Isn’t it amazing how a person can change?”
She frowns. “You’re up to something,” she says. “There’s something you’re hiding.”
I’m hiding it from my parents, from my art school friends, from the police, and you think you’re going to figure it out?
“I’m bored, Anna, that’s all. My life isn’t as fascinating as yours is.”
So this is how we’ll live in peace: if you ever start to suspect anything, I’ll just break out the passive-aggressive complaints. I’ve been afraid of her all my life, but it turns out she’s a known quantity. She’s predictable.
As Gwendolyn would say, a bird doesn’t change its feathers when winter comes.
“Senegal is amazing,” Thierry says.
I look up from my pizza. “When did you guys go?”
We’re eating at the cheap pizzeria, with some French friends of theirs, such colorless people that you’d think Anna and Thierry chose them on purpose, to set off their own personalities, their brilliance, their joy.
“I went alone, Anna didn’t come. But I came back with Seidu, a Senegalese who was traveling to Europe for the first time, on a scholarship.”
Anna is shaking with laughter. “Do we need this? Do we need that?”
It’s apparently a private joke, because Thierry laughs, too. He explains that Seidu was from a remote village in Senegal that didn’t have a supermarket. When they first went to pick up a few things for his apartment in Paris, Seidu completely lost it. He didn’t know what any of the products were, or what they were used for, and kept asking, “Do we need this? Do we need that?” Seidu, they kept saying, how are you going to go to the bathroom without toilet paper, or cook without oil? And Seidu kept walking, hypnotized, down aisles full of carefully arranged goods.
“Nice joke, guys. It’s so funny, isn’t it, to make fun of people from the third world?” I say, biting angrily into my slice.
Anna shoots me a piercing glance. “Maria, you don’t get it. Seidu’s better off, not us. He gets aesthetic pleasure from the washing machine!” Thierry explains that Seidu used to spend hours in front of the washing machine, entranced by the centripetal movement as it spun. Thanos finds that extraordinarily amusing, too. I feel like shoving the entire pizza in their faces.
Anyone who makes fun of Africa is making fun of me.
We’re dancing tango at a retro café-theater that Thierry and Anna discovered, somewhere in Pigalle. Two drunk prostitutes walk by outside, blowing kisses through the window. Thierry gestures for them to come inside and they lift their skirts in an improvised cancan. Thanos is dancing in place, a bizarre combination of heavy metal and the kalamatiano. I laugh, forget myself, feel normal for a while. But all it takes is for someone’s gaze to linger on me a bit too long for me to freeze in fear. They’re following me. They know.