Why I Killed My Best Friend. Amanda Michalopoulou
So I’ll learn that we never, ever go anywhere unless we call home first. I’m sitting on a stool, taking an inventory of the food on the shelves. Misko pasta, twenty boxes. Swan tomato paste, twelve cans. Nounou sweetened condensed milk, twenty cans. Alsa chocolate mousse and Yiotis cornflower, three boxes each. If only we had a storage room as big as the one in Ikeja! There you could never get bored. Sometimes it was hard to buy things at the market, so we had our own supermarket at home. It would take days to read all the names of the things we bought at the American base. Of course back then I was practically never punished. Mom was much more patient and at the very most would call me “silly girl,” never “Maria Papamavrou,” which is what she says when she’s mad. Now, though, things are different. The salt might even have worms. I climb onto the stool and open a cardboard box of Kalas sea salt to check. No worms yet. A few cans shift and fall. I lose my balance, the stool clatters to the ground, and suddenly I’m on the floor. I prop myself on one elbow but my other arm, from elbow to wrist, has taken on a funny shape, it’s looking off somewhere else. By the time I realize how much it hurts, my mother has unlocked the pantry door and is looking first at my face, then at my arm, and shouting, “Dear God!”
The cast makes me stand out. Even the kids in the fifth and sixth grades who never talk to fourth-graders want to know what happened. “Oh, it’s nothing, I just broke my arm,” I say with a heroic sigh. “At least it’s your left arm,” says one of the fifth-grade girls. How is she supposed to know I’m left-handed? Anna is my bodyguard. During recess she clears a path for me to pass, shouting, “Come on, guys, can’t you see we’ve got a wounded person on our hands? Merde, merde!” Merde means shit in French. It’s what we call Angeliki, too. Anna told her that “merde” is how you say Angeliki in French and she fell for it. Today I feel sort of sorry for Angeliki. She asked me what my sign is. “Sagittarius,” I said, and she didn’t make any jokes about natives hunting in the jungle with bows and arrows, just picked two archers out of her box of zodiac crackers and gave them to me.
One big pro of the cast: I’m off the hook during penmanship class, and I get to draw instead. Drawing with my right hand is really hard, especially since I only have four fingers. My circles come out wobbly, my lines tremble, but I’d rather draw than practice my penmanship. Plus this way, if there’s ever another dictatorship and we have to fight the tanks and the soldiers break one of my arms, I’ll already know how to draw with the other hand. Every day my mother pulls my hair back into a ponytail and cooks food you can eat with your fingers: biftekia, fries, and puff puffs, at last! Antigone drew a peace sign on my cast. Anna wrote “merde,” but this time it doesn’t mean shit, it means good luck.
“Do you want me to teach you French, now that we can’t play during recess?” she asks. “When we grow up we’ll go to study in France, Greek universities are terrible.”
“Where will we live?”
“In Paris, of course! At our house.”
First we learn the numbers and the days of the week. Then how to answer the phone (haalloooo, qui est à l’appareil?), bonjour, bonsoir, I’m hungry (j’ai faim), I’m sleeping (je dors). I call hide-and-seek cache-cache now, not dezi like I did in Africa. Ripe fruit is fruit mûr, and honest person is personne honnête. Pretty soon I’ll be able to translate Gwendolyn’s proverbs!
The best French lessons are the ones with music. Anna and I sit on the coffee table with wheels and move it gently with our feet. We pretend it’s a magic carpet and that we’re revolutionary witches. Our carpet goes wherever we tell it to as we sing songs about the wretched of the earth: “Du passé faisons table rase, foule esclave, debout! Debout! Le monde va changer de base! Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout!” Or we listen to the sad songs of Françoise Hardy: “Que sont devenus tous mes amis et la maison où j’ai vecu . . .” A woman is feeling sad because she’s living far from home. Just like us.
Anna talks about her dad all the time, about the apartment in Paris, about all the books he’s read, about the French and Greek people who used to come over every night with wine and cigarettes to brainstorm anti-dictatorship slogans.
“The smoke didn’t bother you?”
“Are you crazy, merde? Smoking helps you think.”
We try to light a Gauloises in the kitchen.
“Suck in!” Anna shouts. “You have to suck in!”
I suck in and choke. I do whatever she tells me because she knows all about history and penmanship and how to fly a magic carpet, she knows revolutionary songs and can do all of the exercises in The Key to Practical Arithmetic. She has a beautiful, skinny mother with no eyebrows and a dad who thinks all day long. She has the blondest hair in the world. Thank goodness I’m better at drawing. Otherwise I’d be jealous and then there’d be trouble, like with Dola and Bambi.
Carnival in Greece reminds me of the theme parties we used to have in Ikeja. One morning we’d say, Hey, why don’t we all wear polka dots to the Marine Club tomorrow, and then next week we can dress up as Robinson Crusoe? Only Carnival lasts a long time, so you get to dress up a lot. For the parties at school my mother dresses me as a nun. The boys decide I’m a Catholic nurse and ask if I want to join their war effort. Anna gets annoyed. She’s dressed as a flower child, and no one wants a hippie on the front lines. Whereas I can treat their wounds in the washbasins in the yard. Besides, my cast means I’m a wounded nurse, and that means I’m a true heroine. Not to mention my missing finger . . .
“Forget about that stupid war,” Anna says, trying to pull me away. “We’re going to a protest.”
“What protest?”
“For the League of Democratic Women.”
She starts pinching all the boys so they’ll let me go. Then she insists on us singing the song about Petros, Yiohan, and Frantz working together in the factory. But isn’t that what we do every day? War is more original.
“War is what babies and Americans play,” Anna says.
With a heavy heart I leave the front line and go back to protesting. Angeliki wants to march with us but she’s dressed as a harem woman. Anna tells her that women in harems are the slaves of men and any woman who does men’s bidding deserves only pity. Angeliki starts to cry and takes off her fez. Her hair is a mess and her nose is running. I feel like hugging her, I always feel sorry for people when they cry, but Anna gets between us and shakes a finger in my face, saying, “She’s crying now, but later she’ll be calling you Teapot.” What can I say? She’s right. A bird doesn’t change its feathers when winter comes.
After the protest we drink an orangeade, the kind without fizz. Anna is sunk in thought. “What’s wrong?” I ask. She tells me that we should be going to real protests and hanging out with older boys from the working class, like Apostolos the plumber. She makes me write and propose a meeting. Apostolos, do you want to meet the day after tomorrow, when school lets out? He writes back, How will I recognize you?, and I reply, I’ll be dressed as a nun.
We wait outside the gate, a nun and a hippie. Apostolos is pretty cute, but he has two chipped teeth, so he could never be my husband. Besides, he pays absolutely no attention to me. He asks Anna who drew the beautiful daisies on her cheeks. “Me!” I cry, but Apostolos just asks about Paris and if she liked living there, as if he didn’t hear me at all. Anna goes on and on about the Fourth International, the proletariat, the League of Democratic Women and Georges Brassens, throwing in whatever she knows, and Apostolos gazes at her admiringly. I, meanwhile, am bored to tears. I sit on the curb, eyes glued to my knees, waiting for them to be done so we can finally leave.
Every Friday afternoon Antigone gives us ballet lessons in the living room of their house in Plaka. So I learn even more French words, like pas de chat, which means step of the cat. First, second, and third position. Plié, to bend. Relevé, to lift. In the end Antigone does a split and we clap and shout “Encore!” Then we go out for a walk. Antigone wears embroidered shirts and holds us by the hand as if we were both her daughters.
“We’re