The newspapers are calling Anna a great revolutionary, which in my opinion is a distortion of her personality. Anna was a cheerful aesthete who knew how to make you feel she was a rare diamond, even in jeans. Our paths crossed twice in the past year: once at a reception at the prime minister’s residence, and once at a charity fashion show. And no, Anna Horn didn’t breathe a word about politics. She was a radiant bohemian, looking for a French-speaking governess for her adorable little girl. I’m sure she went to the Attic Highway as enthusiastically as she came to these charity events, moved by her desire to give back. I’ll always remember her as a lively woman who knew how to have fun, who would grab her husband, Aristomenis Malouhos, by the arm, to fight with him side by side in the only real trenches we have left: the trenches we dig in the struggle against gloom and doom.
In this issue you’ll find the best of the military look that will dominate the catwalks this winter. My recommendation? Don’t give up the fight for the masterful Christian Lacroix backpack. Long live the revolution!
Editor’s note, Geli Kotaki
Vogue Greece
•
ALONE AT HOME, EATING BLACKBERRIES AND BREAD
Night falls;
it’s nice to feel you’re missing nothing by staying in
— the river, the mountain, the city that calls to you.
You turn inward, curl up on your inner branch;
outside it’s at least as dark as in.
A woman walks through the apartment upstairs,
a man nails something to the wall you share.
Night falls — a little bread to help the berries go down.
Yes, they nail into you, walk over you,
you can trust yourself to strangers’ hands.
Door locked, alone, blackberries and black bread.
You eat and are eaten, watch and are watched.
You unfold what you are and take a good look.
Day breaks again, objects harden into shapes.
The tree is a tree, the bread bread, and the berries
small and moldy at the edge of the plate.
The woman left for work,
the man surely has a seascape, now,
in his living room.
Naked and repellant, those inner branches,
and the day calls to you again.
Anna Horn
Paris, April 1981
•
ADIDAS CLASSICS
On the way home from my evening walk I passed by your house.
Lights on, windows open
and the sound of your life from the attic room
— a chair being dragged
a woman’s laugh
or perhaps you left the TV on again?
I can live with these things, I’m getting used to your absence.
What I can’t bear
are your sneakers outside the door,
worn at the heels, with muddy laces,
placed so neatly side by side
as if your mother were still alive, and pleading:
“son, some order, please.”
Your shoes remind me of all we never had—
a house, children, double-bed sheets, the TV playing.
The geography lesson of any couple:
memories to the east, boredom to the west.
Your shoes say,
“He’s not yours anymore, accept it.”
I stand in front of your locked door and accept it:
the white, worn leather
is the last sign of your existence
at the moment when your body, your airy heart,
your black t-shirt
are journeying from the attic to the sky.
Then, at the corner,
your shoes suddenly disappear,
everything disappears.
As it should.
When you have nothing, you know exactly what it is you want.
Anna Horn
Summer, 1981
•
FARMING
Am I scraping at the earth or is it scraping at me?
Am I weeding or is something inside me being uprooted?
Am I tidying hoes and watering cans in the garden shed
or is someone telling me to shut up already and go to sleep?
I have no idea what happens in nature, who does what.
Usually nothing happens.
The earth is silence.
When day breaks, I go back to weeding
flies buzzing over all my actions
in recognition of their significance and difficulty.
I tear open seed packets
to make sure the supplier hasn’t tricked me.
In the afternoon I water and listen.
Dampness is silence.
“And if it prefers to dry up?”—I wonder.
“If it got tired and wants to die?”
I’ll never know.
Silence is silence.
Anna Horn
Summer, 1984
•
PIZZA NAPOLITANA
for Maria
A large group — how many, twelve?
You’re at the far end, in a bad mood,
barely looking my way.
I look when you’re not looking, and when you’re looking, too.
I keep hoping you’ll come over and give my cheek
a sudden kiss in this crowd of strangers.
But your sharp teeth are busy
with something else:
they’re devouring a slice of napolitana.
Is that tomato sauce on your upper lip
or a new, fresh wound?
Should I come over to see or would that not be wise?
Your cheeks say no.
They’re filled with something hard
something you keep replacing with something else
even harder.
But I want to be your mouthful
and the next
and the next after that.
I want to be your digestion and your hunger, too.
Look: tomato sauce stains my lips, like yours.
You bite me and make me bleed.
Anna Horn
Paris, 1989
•
It’s been a week since the memorial service and the same electrified silence still reigns in the office of the house in Ekali. I’ve pulled the shutters closed to admit no light, to block out the trees — the nature Anna described in some of her youthful poems. This is how I punish myself for not being there, for not saving her. Sitting on the floor, I’m putting her papers in order under the cold white light of Malouhos’s lamp. Every now and then tears come. The strange thing is, I don’t cry over the things you’d expect — the poem she dedicated to me after our heated discussion in that awful pizzeria. I cry at the phrase fought for a better tomorrow with beer cans and paper bags. Or, not a protest, over.
The letters she never sent to me are stored in shoe boxes, along with piles of other unsent letters. The ones to me all begin with the same harsh invocation of my name — a plain Maria—and end with an urgent write to me. And now I do really feel the need to write her one of those torrential, twenty-page letters we used to exchange back when we were teenagers.
Anna, it would begin, you betrayed me and I betrayed you countless times. Today I found a huge stack of letters you wrote to Michel, in which you call him your only love. To me you talked about exercises in courage, about bourgeois habits, when what you were really trying to say was love. What kind of friends were we, anyhow? Years later, when I told you I’d seen Michel in Berlin, you asked me how he was, what he was up to, if there was a woman in his life — but you couldn’t even hint at the truth.