Amanda Michalopoulou - Why I Killed My Best Friend

“Fine. And?”

She sweeps all of Stamatis’s books off the table onto the floor. They aren’t even hers.

“Merde, merde! Look at you, lecturing me in ethics!”

“Me?”

“Are you trying to provoke a crisis of conscience? What do I have to do to convince you? Go out into the street and beg?” She grabs her coat and rushes for the stairs. I run after her. She dashes across the street without even checking for cars, takes the stairs down into the metro station two at a time, sits on the ground and starts to sing a song by Françoise Hardy: “ Que sont devenus tous mes amis, et la maison où j’ ai vecu ?” Someone tosses her a half franc, someone else a handful of centimes. It’s all on purpose, of course. She chose her song wisely, it’s a sentimental one. Eventually she collects five francs. I’m standing across from her the whole time, leaning against the wall. What is she trying to prove?

“So you’ll understand what communalism means, I’ll treat you to chocolat à l’ancienne ,” she says. She opens her arms and I fall into her embrace. Two poor little beggars of love.

Because at the end of the day, Anna loves me. She’s willing to lay herself bare for me.

Roman cleans Stamatis’s apartment twice a week. I watch her as she scrubs the toilet. She’s a plump African woman of indeterminate age, and she doesn’t look the least bit like me. But maybe the similarity lies in Africa, our mutual starting point, or in the deep sighs she’s always heaving.

“Where are you from, Roman?”

“Kenya, Nairobi.”

“Do you like it here?”

“It’s fine, I have a job.”

“Do you know the saying, when a ripe fruit sees an honest person, it falls?”

“No, mademoiselle.”

“Don’t call me mademoiselle, I’m not a mademoiselle.”

“Of course you are,” Anna calls, running down the stairs. “We’re all ladies.” It’s something Antigone says.

“Do you know how to make puff puffs?”

Roman laughs. “How do you know about puff puffs?”

I tell her about Gwendolyn, Unto Punto, and the house in Ikeja. But it’s like I’m talking about someone else, not myself. My memories have faded. They feel like an Antonioni film: devoid of realism, and devoid of emotion, too.

Anna grabs me by the hand, pulls me out of the apartment.

“I’m guessing you need something sweet.”

We duck into a patisserie and she orders a dozen chouquettes, little hollow balls of warm dough sprinkled with crystallized sugar. We polish them off in five minutes.

“When we come back to Paris to study, I’ll buy you chouquettes every day,” she says, her mouth full.

“I decided to study art, did I tell you?”

“What, so you can paint nonsense on black backgrounds?”

“No, I’ll improve, you’ll see.”

“What about me?”

“What about you? Aren’t you going to study psychology?”

“The way I see it, you and I are working together toward the same goal. We support one another.”

Merde, Anna, no. Please.

In order to discover your body, you’ll need a fair bit of time, and privacy , reads the first issue of Erotic Harmony . Mom and Dad have gone to a wedding with Aunt Amalia. The house is all mine until evening. I shut myself up in the bathroom. It’s now or never. You’ll need a mirror , I read. Spread the outer lips of your vagina and look at your body in the mirror. Love your body . There’s no way I can do all that at once, I can either spread the lips of my vagina or hold the mirror. Your clitoris is concealed at the spot where the two inner lips meet. Massage it gently, patiently, and feel it grow more and more firm with each circular motion of your finger .

It’s kind of like drawing. Like spreading lines of charcoal again and again on a small surface until the tendons in your arm start to hurt. The repetition effects a change: the skin tightens, becomes electric. At some point, unexpectedly, your body opens up into a series of trembling slices, or ripples. My whole belly has turned inside out like a piece of clothing and I can see all the seams, what it’s made of. I’m floating underneath my skin, in a deep, elastic space of darkness and nerve endings. The moment I realize what’s happening, tsaf ! I’m back in my body. Only nothing is quite the same. It’s sort of how I imagine absolute happiness would be. You fight for it, you achieve it for a few seconds, and then it slips from your grasp and you’ve got to start all over again from the beginning. Each time I try it takes longer and longer; my head swells and goes numb. Night falls and I’m still sitting there on the toilet. The bathroom is stuffy, my sweat is heavier than usual. My feet are pins and needles on the bathroom tiles; in the mirror a tiny wet cave reveals itself to me.

So that’s my vagina. A half-open mussel. God, I’ll never eat shellfish again.

I get up and wash my hands, exhausted. I use soap, but the mussel smell sticks to my fingers, like the smell from roasting meat on your clothes after a meal at a badly-ventilated taverna. The phone rings and I drag myself into the hall. The receiver smells like my vagina, too.

“What are you doing right now?” Anna says.

I shudder at that right now . “Nothing,” I answer.

“Want to go for a walk?”

At last I have a secret. A new Ikeja, a chewed-up cricket in my mouth, a broken egg starting to smell in my suitcase.

“You’re somewhere else today,” Anna says when we meet.

“I’m tired.”

We sit on a bench in Exarheia Square, her head on my knees.

“I decided to study art, too.”

“Oh, nice.”

“That’s all you have to say?” Anna gives me a sideways glance. Since we got back she’s touchier than ever, perpetually on edge. If a floorboard creaks, her whole body tightens and she asks, “Earthquake?” Fear makes her even prettier. Annoyance, too. Her eyes widen, she tosses her hair and bites her lip as if she’s in the midst of an existential crisis.

“I think we could study different things and still be best friends.”

“Oh, really?”

“We don’t always need to do exactly the same thing, Anna.”

“But then we’ll grow apart, we won’t be so close anymore, like your mother and Mrs. Steedworthy. Or Antigone and Françoise.”

Françoise used to be Antigone’s best friend. She was an activist, too, but then she got married and had three kids and ended up doing two loads of laundry a day. She didn’t have time anymore to go out for coffee or talk about revolution.

“We’ll always be together, Anna.”

“What about this summer?”

“I’ll take you with me to Aegina.”

“Yeah, right. You’ll be busy with Angelos all day.”

I’ve been dreaming of him all year.

“You’ll be the death of me, child!” Mom says.

She’s standing in the doorway, gesturing toward the heaps of clothes and books on the floor of my room, at my drawings, at the records strewn around the stereo.

“Just look at this mess. Really, is this what a young lady’s room looks like?”

Mom thinks that anyone female should dust and sew dresses and cook lentils all day.

“I told you, I’ll clean it up. Stop being hysterical.”

She takes off one of her slippers and throws it at my head. I push her out into the hallway, but she manages to stick her other slipper through the crack and so I slam the door on her foot by mistake. Mom shrieks. She stands there before me, an awful look on her face, sobbing. These days she’s always crying. Because I don’t pick up my clothes, because I stay out late and go around with good-for-nothings, because I never think about how she might feel. She wanders through the apartment in a plastic suit that’s supposed to help her lose weight, though all it does is make her look like an overweight astronaut. The suit rustles like a trash bag. It’s an incredibly annoying noise that only stops when Mom lies down on the sofa to read the latest installment of some romance story in Woman .