A Short Tale of Shame

[2]

What crazy good luck — to get picked up by someone who can drive them wherever they want to go, and he’s not just some jerk, but Elena’s dad! If she hadn’t been sitting, Maya would’ve jumped for joy. When I get home, I’m gonna sit down and write her an email. Now here’s a good reason, it was stupid of them not to write, to avoid each other because of some childish stunts from two whole years ago. Elena’s dad looked like her — with ash-blond hair and a round Slavic face, whose features were perhaps too soft for a man, but which for that reason lent it a pleasant warmth, dignifying the otherwise severe nose and habitually pursed lips. It was strange, of course, to take off in your car just like that, aimlessly, on a long drive, that’s what he told them, and a couple times he seemed to hint at some problems, indeed, he didn’t look at all like a happy person, maybe it has something to do with Elena, she often created problems, why lie, although it could also have something to do with his wife, his health, his business. Maya wondered how rich he was. The car — she couldn’t see the make, and she didn’t know anything about cars anyway — was big, nice, comfortable, it drove smoothly but did not look luxurious by any stretch of the imagination. Elena, at least back then, hadn’t had a lot of money. But their house was positively mind-blowing: spacious, light, opening out onto a huge garden, where she had met Dobrin at one of Elena’s parties, lots of Elena’s friends were Slavs and that surely made sense at the end of the day, and Dobrin in particular was really a good guy, fully in keeping with his name, which meant “good” in Slavic, but, of course, nothing lasts forever. And Boril Krustev was surely rich, but he didn’t like showing it off with luxury and that definitely spoke well of him. How old was he? He looked young, definitely younger than her own father, with an almost athletic build, in fact, with a clean conscience you could say he was a good-looking man, yes, Elena was also pretty, a little too pretty, and she had been ever since she was a kid. Maya stared at the man’s hands on the wheel, despite the fact that he was relatively husky, his fingers were rather delicate, a musician’s fingers, after all, she told herself, even though B.B. King played divinely with his fat little sausages.

So Sirma was of Lydian descent. Maya couldn’t have been more surprised if Sirma had suddenly mentioned casually that Sirma wasn’t her real name, but instead something entirely different. Because her Lydian descent wasn’t what mattered here, but the absurd fact that Sirma hadn’t talked about it during all the years they had known one another, not only known one another, but had become a common organism, the three of them with Spartacus. It’s like your right leg blurting out to your left hand something it had never suspected, hmm, maybe that isn’t the best comparison, but given that it was something that wasn’t important in the least, why hadn’t she mentioned it until now? Was this some sort of secret, which had broken the skin that had concealed it suddenly and without resistance? In that case, Maya likely would have taken it better, she would’ve acknowledged her friend’s right to have secrets, things she didn’t want to talk about; but to keep quiet about something that didn’t matter, that wasn’t OK, because it puts you in a privileged position and Maya was taken aback by the whole pointlessness of the miscarried secret.

Elena’s dad picked exactly that moment in her thoughts to ask how the three of them had met. They had met on the first day of high school, so it had been almost seven years now, which wasn’t such a short time at all. Maya remembered very well how, curious, flustered and slightly scared, she had gone into the yard of her new school, a wide paved space swarming with unfamiliar faces, buzzing with unfamiliar voices — nobody here knew what they were in for, nobody knew what their class would be like, whether they’d make friends quickly, nobody knew who they’d end up sharing a desk with, who would be peeking into their notebook and whether that desk-mate would reek like garlic, here there were no longstanding desk-mates, everyone — OK, fine, with a few minor exceptions, but that only confirmed the rule — everyone was a stranger, everything was new for everyone, and everything had to start from the beginning, the first day of school was the first day of the world. Maya was convinced that she would screw something up and later it turned out that she really had screwed something up: she had gone to the wrong line, right next to the one her future class was forming, the faces in both lines were equally unfamiliar and there was no way to recognize her mistake, she timidly started talking to the girl next to her, who looked extremely bored with the welcoming ceremony, she wasn’t carrying a backpack, but a canvas army-surplus bag like soldiers used, and actually she looked quite sketchy to Maya, but still she had to shoot the breeze with someone, and it turns out that was Sirma. Maya realized her mistake only when the classes started off towards their respective homerooms, so that the rabbits could introduce themselves to one another in peace, then she saw that 8-IV was written above the door her line was going into, and not 8-III, this was an additional muddle on top of everything else; this year the Ministry was instituting some reform which nobody understood, but in any case, the preparatory classes at the language high schools would now be called “eighth grade,” and in contrast to the already-existing eighth grade classes, which had been preparatory the previous year, they would be divided up not by letters, but by Roman numerals, such that the chaos was total: if they asked you what grade you were in, you could no longer just say “eighth,” you had to explain whether you were from the letter ones or the numeral ones, the latter, of course, were younger, and in the end the upper grades thought up their own way of differentiating the two grades: the established eighth graders were just eighth graders, while the new eighth graders, who really should have been preparatory… Sirma had told her one day some time at the end of the fall. You know what the older kids call us? Fakes. Why fakes, Maya didn’t get it. Because those guys are the real eighth-graders, while we’re pretending to be eighth-graders, we’re trying to fake them out, get it, when in fact we’re nothing but a prep class — fakes. I’m not trying to fake anybody out, Maya said, and I don’t get it at all, it’s not like we decided what they’d call our classes. We didn’t, said Sirma, but that’s how it is, just go try to talk to one of the upperclassmen and when you tell him you’re in eighth grade, he’ll ask you: Are you an eighth or a fake? Maya didn’t know any of the upperclassmen and had nothing to say to any of them, but she was indignant nonetheless. Why the hell fakes? They stayed fakes, however, right up until the class ahead of them graduated: eighth-fakes, ninth-fakes, tenth-fakes, eleventh-fakes, and only then did they suddenly become the one and only twelfth grade, liberated from that shameful suffix, a change which surely could have offered some kind of gratification, if they had cared in the least. Back then, however, on the first day of the new world, Maya stopped, groaned and almost burst out crying, not because it was so fatal that she had missed out on talking to some girl from her own class instead of the neighboring one, but because she really, and I mean really, had known that something would get screwed up, and look, that’s exactly what happened. She pulled away from the line and set out against the human stream to get to the previous room. She took a deep breath and felt relief when she saw that the students there looked just as random and nondescript as the others, empty blackboards for acquaintance, just waiting for friendships, bad blood, crushes, and inanity to be written on them. Since was the last to come in, all the seats were taken, except one — in the back row, next to a tall and gangly boy with black hair and a dorky prepubescent moustache on his upper lip. Maya hesitated, because she preferred not to sit next to a boy, but she didn’t have a choice and everyone, including the teacher, was starting to look at her. She went all the way to the other end of the room, smiled and sat down. With a breaking voice like the buzzing of a fly hitting glass, the boy introduced himself: Spartacus.

On the road, Spartacus was digging around in his backpack for water, his backpack had stayed in the back seat, Krustev couldn’t fit them all in the trunk, and Spartacus had to untie his mat and loosen the straps to get the bottle out, while Sirma made fun of him for not putting his water in a side pocket. From that first day when Maya had met Spartacus, he was constantly digging around in all sorts of backpacks, bags, satchels, plastic bags, and pulling the most bizarre things out of them: rare CDs and even cassettes, wax figures, which he crafted himself at home, pieces of candy that looked suspiciously like pills, flying sheets of paper, which he wrote funny sayings on, used bus tickets, ketchup-stained cash. When she had sat down next to him in the back row, she was convinced he would annoy her. Lord only knows what he’d come up with to show off, to impress her, most likely he’d draw on the desk. The desk, however, had already been covered by Spartacus’s predecessor (someone from the real eighth grade), and the boy did nothing more notable than chewing on his pen. The introductions had begun. Each person got up, turned towards the class and said a few words about himself: usually only his name, what school he was coming from and how many years he had been studying English, now and then somebody would brag that he was on the basketball team or played guitar. Maya diligently tried to remember the connections between the faces and names, but when the introductions were finally over, she discovered that most of the desks remained blank spaces and only here and there did she manage to connect the two most visible constituent parts of her new classmates. Spartacus turned to her for the first time: Do you remember anybody? No one said anything that might help me remember their name. His or her name, Maya corrected him and he fell silent, flustered. What’s my name, she asked him. Uhh… Joanna? No, no I’m just kidding, I remember you for sure, you’re Diana. He chuckled in satisfaction at his own joke. Very funny, Maya said.

There were two reasons to stay at the same desk with Spartacus. First, she felt awkward moving, it would have seemed rude. Second, there was nowhere for her to move to: did everyone really like their new desk-mates so much or did everyone feel the same awkwardness or perhaps they were just lazy, but no pair from the first day changed places until much later. Quite soon the others began whispering, look, the first romance in the class had already sprung up. Maya could not imagine falling in love with Spartacus, nor did he show any particular interest in her. They cautiously felt out some shared terrain: he was into soccer and rock, Maya had nothing to say about the first topic, but they more or less saw eye-to-eye where rock was concerned. Maya smiled, how had their conversations gone in those first days, maximally reduced to the catechistic formula. Have you heard so-and-so? Yeah. And have you heard so-and-so? Nope. Oh man, you gotta hear ’em. Okay. And have you heard so-and-so? They went on like that for fifteen minutes and felt immense satisfaction upon grasping even the most superficial signals marking them as kindred souls. At thirteen, Maya thought to herself, you really can become friends with someone merely because you both listen to Zeppelin. Which might sound unfair towards someone you have grown so close to, but after all, there had been some beginning when you were strangers and it had to start from somewhere. It had taken quite some time, however. For the first few months, Maya mainly hung out with a couple girls who walked home in the same direction, they got on the bus together, only to scatter at different stops, yes, that was the other automatic system for establishing initial relationships when you were a rabbit-fake: one became friends with the people one walked home from school with, and not the other way around.

Is it too windy back there, Elena’s father asked. He had opened his window and Maya watched him thirstily drinking in the mountain air, heavy with the scent of pine sap. Spartacus and Sirma said it wasn’t. They discussed the Rhodope mountain chalets. Or rather, they recalled shared stories, because, of course, they had made the rounds of the Rhodope chalets in question together, the three of them. Maya struggled to think of when exactly she had met them: strange, she remembered everything so clearly, but precisely this, such a key moment, escaped her. Had she and Spartacus gone to the snack bar and there, in front of them in line, was that girl from the neighboring class with the army-surplus bag and the ironic smile? Even though back then, in that first month, the math teacher was on extended leave and the gym teacher had agreed to combined their classes, so neither group would have big holes in their schedules, so they had had gym together, forming huge mobs on the soccer field or basketball court, and in general everything had turned into one big goof-off fest, she might have met them then, or perhaps as late as the green school in December, although that was unlikely, it had to have been earlier, because by the time of the green school the three of them were already hanging out together. On the other hand, Maya remembered very well when and how things had abruptly gotten complicated and how she, to her own most sincere astonishment, had felt helpless and biting jealousy.

She and her mother had gone out to buy her some jeans. They had already been making the rounds of the stores on the main shopping street for more than an hour in the March slush and they couldn’t find anything that fit both her and her budget, as well as fulfilling Maya’s light-beige color requirement. They were just coming out of yet another store and Maya was about to tell her mother that she couldn’t take it anymore and was ready to acquiesce to the most pedestrian blue denim just to get it over with, when Sirma and Spartacus appeared on the sidewalk in front of her. They were absorbed in conversation, Spartacus jutted up a whole head above her and was nodding so vigorously that his poofy hair, which he was trying to grow out, bobbed rhythmically and made him look a bit like a poodle. Sirma was explaining something excitedly and looked unusually pleased with herself. Maya stared. She would’ve pretended not to see them, she would’ve let them pass and given them the third degree on Monday, but from his height Spartacus noticed her, at first he jumped, but then he started waving ecstatically. Talk about theatrics! Sirma’s black curls were positively glowing. Hey, what are you doing here, Maya? I’d ask the same of you; Mom, these are my schoolmates; ohhh, it’s so nice to meet you, so you’re Sirma and Spartacus, I’ve heard a lot about you, why don’t you come over some time, in a matter of seconds her mother’s sharp eye had managed to look them over carefully, pausing on Sirma’s scrawl-covered army-surplus bag and the pins on Spartacus’s jacket, while they giggled idiotically and explained that a new music store had opened up further down the street. Maya was livid. She wished them a pleasant afternoon, went into the next store with her mom and — oh, parody of wonders! — finally discovered the yearned-for light-beige jeans, which according to her mother fit her perfectly, really, said Maya, well, Okay then.

And on Monday she headed for school in her light-beige jeans, while under her coat, unbeknownst to her mother, who would have been shocked at such recklessness, it was still winter, after all, she wore only a tight pink shirt, which had shrunk sufficiently to accentuate her breasts and show her navel, she put on lipstick, she would’ve put on more make-up if her mother had already left for work, but there was no way to do so now, she made herself up for the first time a whole three months later for a party and the results were catastrophic, so she went to school like that, purposely dawdling on the way so she would arrive a minute or two after the teacher, she took off her jacket and was left in her pink shirt, she burst into the classroom triumphantly and… Spartacus wasn’t there. She sat at the desk alone. Ways for expressing repeated past action: past continuous tense, used to, would. I used to go out often with my friends. During the break, Sirma herself popped into their room, hugged her and informed her that the music store was great and that Spartacus was sick with the flu.

When Spartacus returned to school, however, everything seemed to continue as before, the three of them went out together and Maya didn’t see any signs of a greater intimacy between Sirma and him, which annoyed her all the more, because the awful anticipation of seeing them kissing at any moment ate away at her. One afternoon, when she was home alone, she sat down in front of the mirror with a cup of coffee and started asking herself questions out loud. The goal of the interrogation was to find out what was bothering her. Did she like Spartacus? If she didn’t like him, what did she have against Sirma going with him? She couldn’t really expect all of their relations to develop in a triangle, in which no corner was ever left out. Well yes, she told herself, in fact, that was exactly what she expected. And to be frank, from a certain moment on things really did begin to happen that way, they did everything as a trio and Maya didn’t find it strange, she had never found it strange, but that really had begun later. A whole month passed before Spartacus and Sirma announced they were a couple. Maya kept hanging out with them and they didn’t seem to have anything against it. What’s more: Sirma started acting warmer, trusting her with more things, her eyes seemed less and less like mocking blue beads when she talked to her. Maya admitted that Sirma was very pretty, but she also thought that she herself was nothing to be scoffed at, either. Maya got used to Sirma and Spartacus being together and no longer shuddered when they kissed, but, in fact, this happened only rarely. Besides, at that same party where she had gone slathered with foundation and with eye-shadow ringing her eyes, looking as if her father had beaten her, she drank vodka for the first time, as an experiment, since at the previous party another girl had gotten drunk on vodka and hooked up with the host’s neighbor; and the experiment suggested that perhaps vodka has an automatic effect because after she got drunk at one point she suddenly found herself in the parents’ bedroom with the birthday boy pawing her, which was actually quite pleasant, Maya let him dig his huge, hot tongue into her mouth and sensed a warmth creeping along her spine when he unclasped her bra with astonishing dexterity, but she had already sobered up enough not to allow him to undress her. When they reappeared in the living room, Sirma looked at her with respect, while Spartacus went out on the balcony and tried to smoke with some unfamiliar boys. Maya never figured out how that unsuccessful attempt at smoking had led them to the brink of a fistfight, but she and Sirma quickly dragged Spartacus away, who also turned out to be quite drunk, they dragged him into the bathroom, and Sirma started pouring cold water over him, while he alternately snorted, laughed, yelled and shook his fists, his whole T-shirt was soaking and Maya, still mellow from her adventure with the birthday boy, suddenly said he was very sexy all wet like that, and Sirma burst out laughing, come on, girl, isn’t one a night enough for you, but Spartacus was not in good shape at all and they slipped out with him, walking on either side and holding him up, while he howled ’70s songs at the top of his lungs and when he couldn’t remember how the lyrics went, he would simply repeat the same verse ad nauseum; Maya and Sirma were enjoying themselves thoroughly, ecstatic when some elderly passerby looked after them and clucked his tongue indignantly. But Spartacus sobered up quite quickly, growing gloomy and shame-faced. They argued for some time over how to see one another home without anyone coming to harm, since they found themselves more or less equidistant from their respective apartments. In the end, Spartacus and Sirma walked Maya home. It turned out to be barely nine, her mother and father were watching television in the dark living room and praised her for coming home on time, horrified, she expected them to bust her for drinking, but they were too engrossed in the film, only her brother met her in the hallway and said, whoa, Maya, just take a look at yourself; scram, twerp, she replied, but she went into the bathroom and was horrified to discover a degenerate whore with smeared make-up looking back at her from the mirror. If that’s how you look after a hook-up, thanks, but I’ll pass.

The guy called her the next day and asked her out. There was no trace of the frenzy and freedom of the previous evening and when he tried to draw her to him and kiss her after a long walk that made her calves ache, she herself was amazed at how easily she managed to slip away, explaining that while it had been fun and she didn’t regret it, she preferred to remain just friends; perhaps she would have liked him to act more disappointed, but it was fine this way, too: she had gotten smashed, she had hooked up, and she had dumped him, the three beats naturally followed one another, and now Sirma could tell her welcome to the club, if she dared.

Incidentally, over the summer Sirma and Spartacus’s relationship melted away in the same vague way as it had begun. Maya once again spent a whole month nursing suspicions that they were no longer together, until they finally told her that they really weren’t. Shortly before that, Sirma had gone to the seaside with her parents and she seemed to have met some guy there. As far as Maya could tell, Spartacus didn’t seem to be suffering particularly, he was the same as ever, crafting clay monsters and constantly discovering new bands, the three of them would go out in the heat, stop in front of the knocked-out window of some cellar-cum-convenience-store, buy beer from the clerks, who were scowling yet eager for business, and sit sweltering by the monument to the Scythian Army, as if deliberately daring the sun to suck the moisture from their bodies, the beer turned to bland broth before they managed to finish it, but they would sit there on the marble edge of the enormous monument, and in the later hours, more people would arrive along with the mercifully cool evening air, amorphous, noisy groups would form and they would join them, hanging out at the monument, drinking a beer or two and talking until their evening curfew approached, that’s how more and more days passed and Maya’s parents grumbled that she was wasting her time instead of taking a German class, but they weren’t very insistent, because she had finished the school year with straight As, and also because, as she found out later, they were already planning their divorce.

Spartacus also took off, first for the sea, after which he was supposed to go straight to his grandparents’ village, apparently it was somewhere close to the Sea of Marmara, and spend two whole weeks there. The first day after he left, it was a Saturday, Maya’s brand new cell phone, whose primary purpose was to allow her mother to find her at all times, remained mute. She had nothing to do, so she went to her father and asked him for a book. He scratched his head and pulled a soft, tattered little book with the strange title The Catcher in the Rye off his bookshelf. Maya chased her brother out to play soccer with the neighborhood kids, closed herself up in their bedroom and read the book from cover to cover in one day, already halfway through she decided that she wanted to go with Holden Caulfield, at one point she wasn’t so sure anymore that he even liked girls, at the very least his disgust at the ass-wagging Sally’s short skirt was highly suspicious. She decided to call Sirma the next day and tell her about Holden, except that in the morning, while she was still eating breakfast, Sirma beat her to it and merely said three o’clock at the monument, right. It turned out that Sirma had read The Catcher in the Rye and Maya was slightly indignant that her friend had not felt the same frantic desire to share her experience, but it turned out that Sirma had something far more substantial to share. She really had met another guy at the seaside. And not only had they met, they had slept together — Sirma said we fucked, and now Maya suddenly and sharply recalled the shock that word had evoked in her, not the word itself, but its place in the whole situation, Sirma’s ability, her desire to impart so much aggression and contempt on the intimacy of her own body, she turned away slightly, glanced at her furtively and smiled, Sirma really was a bitch then, most of all to herself. That afternoon at the monument Maya couldn’t think of anything more intelligent to ask other than how was it and Sirma with the same biting irony described the act as if it were a scene from a silent comedy, filled with slips, pratfalls and stumbles, and Maya, despite her disbelief, started laughing, albeit nervously, Sirma also started laughing and without that air of superiority, no less, which usually tinged her laugh, how strange that it was devoid of that superiority right then, at the moment when Maya most keenly felt how much her friend had outstripped her, she kept telling herself what a baby she was. She lost hers quite a bit later and now it seemed normal to her, but then, during that summer of the monument they had been only fourteen and she, with all of her feelings of inferiority, had wondered at Sirma, why was she in such a rush, especially when she found out it had all happened in one night, the guy was actually from Philippopolis and they surely wouldn’t see each other again, which, Sirma said, was for the best. Maya didn’t think she would sleep with a man just like that, for one night, especially not for the first time, but decided to keep quiet, instead she asked about the details, since Sirma clearly relished telling them: where had they done it, so did he have an apartment, he had rented a room, they had met on the beach, in the evening she had convinced her parents to let her go out with Eugenia, the daughter of the friends they were at the seaside with, and that’s how it had happened, Eugenia was also fooling around with another dude, but she was eighteen, just like Sirma’s guy had been, in fact. Maya now felt somehow jealous, but not of the nameless stud from Philippopolis, but of this Eugenia, who had surely given her friend advice, who had taken her and shoved her into the hands of that wanker. Sirma didn’t mention anything more about her. Maya asked her whether Spartacus knew. Yeah, Sirma said, I told him before he left, so is that why you broke up, actually, no, Sirma said, anyway, what does breaking up mean, what does leaving mean, you, me, and Spartacus are much closer than we could ever be with anyone else, and a single fuck isn’t going to change that. Maya felt a warm wave engulf her, she surely blushed, her stomach clenched, she wanted to say something fitting, but she couldn’t, Sirma had articulated what she had been thinking the whole time, what she had wanted to be, and now here it was alive and real, the truth itself; just then her phone buzzed, it was a text from Spartacus, it’s really lame here, the sea is choppy and you can’t swim, Chris Cornell has a new band, the album’s coming out this fall.