A Short Tale of Shame

[6]

She let Sirma and Spartacus swim out and calmly began paddling along the beach, from time to time simply relaxing onto the water, it would look bad if all three of them rushed out to sea, while Elena’s dad had to sit there and wait for them, and he was clearly worried, actually his attempt to play the fatherly role was pretty laughable, it didn’t fit him, he seemed too nice to be their father, he was a musician, maybe in the business world he had learned to act older than he was, and surely it had strained his nerves, but he was interesting, not only because of his secret, which they had quickly figured out, despite the fact that he didn’t want to talk about it, yes, it would be pretty absurd to pick up three hitchhikers and tell them: My wife just died. Sirma had brought it up on the ferryboat while he was gone, Maya had also noticed that he was wearing his wedding ring on his left hand, only Spartacus hadn’t paid attention, as was to be expected. And now Sirma had once again put her, put them all in an awkward position with her decision to romp around the beach topless; while she was getting ready, Maya wondered what to wear, she usually went topless, too, she almost laughed out loud in the water, remembering how, the first time the two of them had come out of their tents topless, Spartacus, at the height of his testosterone-drenched teenage years, had helplessly gotten a hard-on and had tried to hide it by burying himself in the sand, but since he was so thin and bony, it was painfully obvious, it was cute, of course, he was already used to it, but now it wasn’t just the three of them, they were with Elena’s dad, after all, when there’s an outsider they should at least take that into consideration a little, or else maybe Sirma had gotten it in her head to hook up with him, despite the fact that he was Elena’s father, or precisely because of it; but her breasts were nicer than Sirma’s, Maya was quite sure of this — just as firm, but still significantly larger, weren’t they, no, they weren’t gigantic knockers, of course, and thank goodness for that, but they were larger.

She got out of the water a little dazed and lay down on her towel, she loved that feeling, coming out of the sea wet and letting the sun suck the moisture from your skin, drop by drop, leaving only the salt, the salty sun on her skin, but the exact nuances of that sensation had changed over the years, it had been one thing then, when she was little, she would sink onto the sand, spilling out over it, losing herself amid the countless grains, then that red shiver had appeared, the goose bumps, that warmth behind the eyelids that gradually washed over your whole body and hid between your thighs, even now it wasn’t bad at all, yes, the wind was blowing, licking her moist, salty skin, then from somewhere close by she heard the rhythmic bouncing of a ball, accompanied by a shout from time to time, Maya turned over onto her stomach and lifted her head, a little way down the beach there was a volleyball court and four young men were playing, their dark, sweaty bodies glistened in the sun as if smeared with honey, she stared at their flinching, carved muscles, why not, last year on the Black Sea there’d been that cutie with the blue eyes from Serdika, she again dropped her head onto the towel and closed her eyes, the salty sun behind her eyelids, she heard footsteps nearby and sensed someone’s shadow on her body. Toasting a bit, eh, said Spartacus, you didn’t swim much at all, we went all the way to the buoy, where’s Sirma she asked and Spartacus pointed at the sea over his shoulder, still in the water, she thinks she’s a fish. Move, you’re blocking my sun, she said. Spartacus toweled himself off thoroughly, but afterwards sat down right on the sand, scooped up a handful and watched the grains pouring out between his fingers. Elena’s father also showed up, walking slowly with his arms crossed over his chest, his round face had lost some of its anxiousness. They had to think up something to distract him, the three of them never got tired of being together, but he would surely get bored. With a reflex already honed from communicating with men old enough for the purpose, Maya tried to imagine Boril Krustev in the role of her father. Perhaps he’d do a better job than her real one. Her parents had gotten divorced when she was fifteen, inhabiting the twilight of the fake ninth-grade and periodically falling into funks, which had seemed unique in their scope and intensity before she realized that nothing more typical could possibly happen to her, and even for her, she thought to herself now, the collisions with the hypocrisy of that world, which from the depths of her childhood had looked so coveted and captivating, but which later seemed so nightmarish, even they had passed considerably more easily, because she hadn’t been alone, because she had had Sirma and Spartacus, then they had really begun turning into a single organism. For some unknown reason she remembered far fewer details from her second year of high school than from her first, that time got lost in some vague, rainy autumn evenings, waterlogged by the bland fluorescent lighting in the classrooms, which were completely identical and nobody could figure out why they had to move from one to the other every hour. Her classmates were already resigned to the fact that she and Spartacus were not a couple, even though they shared a desk. But, yes, it was a time when both she and Spartacus slightly envied Sirma for getting way ahead of them after her summer adventure, otherwise Spartacus didn’t seem to be suffering at all and clearly their springtime romance had simply been an experiment which had somehow transformed into the relationship between the three of them, making their current unity possible, there was a girl in their class who was a bit of a metalhead and seemed to be giving Spartacus the eye, and Maya thought it was really funny that because of her the girl didn’t dare venture close to the object of her desire, she talked to Spartacus about it once, why don’t you go out with her, well, actually, I can’t really imagine it, he said, scratching his head, what exactly can’t you imagine, she giggled, but he explained to her in full seriousness that I can’t imagine changing places and going to sit by her. She was struck by this. So does that mean you’re never going to date anybody from our class? And she also asked him in complete seriousness, because the external world to a great extent still began and ended with their class, but he shrugged, they probably all want a serious relationship, while that doesn’t really interest me, I’d rather keep things as they are now with you and Sirma. She didn’t doubt that Spartacus truly took his decision as a sacrifice, although she had already understood one thing: guys are always afraid that girls want a serious relationship and that fear is a projection of their own desire for the same thing. Interesting, Maya wondered, staring at the sand pouring from Spartacus’s hand, if things hadn’t worked out this way, if their triangle didn’t exist, how many serious relationships would she have gone through between her fourteenth and twentieth years? And how many of them would she have naively thought would lead to a logical marriage, however, as early as fifteen she realized that a logical marriage could also lead to a logical divorce, her parents had been together since high school, they had gotten married young, they must be only slightly older than Krustev, and clearly their marriage had not survived beyond the withering of their youthful love, in that case it was surely preferable to get married later or not to get married at all, and can you imagine, Maya suddenly said to herself and inwardly burst out laughing, marrying Spartacus, but they had better first become politicians and take control of the government so as to allow marriages between three people and issue a decree in support of fornication. Around the time she started high school, when she became a fake, she started drawing certain conclusions and suspecting that her mother was having an affair, there were those hushed phone conversations, business trips and cold silences in the living room, and Maya instinctively took her father’s side, even though, thinking back on it logically, he surely was having an affair, too, at that time. By the end of the summer, her father and mother avoided sitting down at the table together and she was sure that if they had had the space at home and an extra room, her father would have moved out of the nuptial bed (but why her father, actually, why shouldn’t her mother be the one to move out?). And in the end the evening rolled around when she came home from school and caught sight of her brother watching cartoons on TV, she suddenly felt a rush of affection, he was still a kid, he had no idea what he was in for, she sat down by him and they watched cartoons together, where are Mom and Dad, she asked and he shrugged and said there’s a note in the kitchen saying they’re going out and will be back around eight-thirty, Maya was quite surprised, because the last thing she would’ve expected her parents to do at that point was to go out together, but, as it turns out, they wanted to sit down in neutral territory, at some nearby restaurant and, with the help of a nice dinner, admit that there was no point in being together anymore and that yes, the kids were already old enough, they would understand… Maya made sandwiches for herself and her brother and sent him off to play on the computer, while she sat down to read, she had started in on Tender Is the Night, now there’s another ruined marriage for you, but at least her mother wasn’t crazy or at least not that much, she jumped when she heard the click of the key in the lock and went to meet the awkward expressions pasted to her parents’ faces, her brother ran up and asked them where they had been, but they asked instead whether he and Maya had eaten, praised her for the sandwiches, went into the living room and began coughing nervously. Okay, they’re going to tell us now that they’re getting a divorce, Maya thought, and froze in absurd, anxious expectation, as if she were about to witness some extremely solemn, holy ritual, and indeed, they clearly had decided to do it, they started out with some general chitchat, beating around the bush and surely-you’ve-noticed, well yes, they had noticed, Maya thought to herself, they had even discussed it and her brother really was only a child, but he was old enough to understand. At a certain moment, everything hung in an abrupt pause. Then her father started in again, you are both old enough, I think you’ll understand, actually, her mother finished off in a tired voice, your father and I are thinking of getting a divorce. The lack of drama was shocking. In films, in books, people suffered, broke down, screamed and smashed china. But this wasn’t a film, nor a book, this was real life, colorless and dull, and the sacred ritual crumbled to the floor like dust, the earth did not tremble and the world did not blaze up in supernatural conflagration, their parents looked at them helplessly and Maya, too, could not find anything to say, while her brother shifted his gaze between the three of them, unfairly thrust by their silence into a position which he should never have had to be in at all, finally he got up and with a slightly quavering voice said well, I already knew you were gonna get divorced, it’s not news to me, for your information, so fine, if that’s what you want, go ahead and get divorced, so be it. So be it, he must have gotten that from some film about epic battles and wise sorcerers.

Sirma showed up with her nipples. You’re gonna grow flippers, Spartacus said. Maya was watching Krustev, he was obviously trying not to stare at Sirma’s tits, wondering where to look and in the end his gaze found refuge in hers, and then, when their eyes met, his suddenly became impenetrable, until that moment this man had seemed quite simple, gloomy, suffering and sweetly uncertain, but now all of that suddenly disappeared, the warm dusk of his brown eyes stepped aside and in its place something emerged that could only be called nothingness. The nothingness had captured those exhausted, melancholy, slightly elongated Slavic eyes, but her father had a Slavic girlfriend, too, he lived with her now, and from the very beginning Maya had taken it as a double betrayal, a Slav of all things, what did these Slavic women have that made them so much better than her mother, and even Maya herself, she thought of Elena again, it was impossible not to think of Elena as she looked at her father, and in the end she looked away, so as not to think about Elena, but she kept thinking and remembered how when they were both little, her parents had treated her friend with some reserve, yes, now she very clearly recalled her mother once telling her that Elena was half Slav and to Maya that had seemed very strange, how could you be half something, apples could be divided in half with a knife, peaches only when you twisted them, as long as you were lucky, but even then the halves were still more or less identical, perhaps with slightly different outlines, but with the same taste in any case, so what was this mysterious half of Elena that was so different from the other one? She watched her friend with curiosity as she carefully wrote out her letters in her notebook, looking for some kind of visible difference in the two halves of her face, but when they sat together at their desk, she could usually only see one side of her, while when they stood up, Elena’s face suddenly evened out and became as normal as can be, but for a long time Maya was convinced that in those instants when she could not see her, the left half of her friend’s face was different from the right, that it was Slavic, whatever that might mean; later she came to understand what this meant, and also that this halving of Elena was not visible to the naked eye, and surely then she had buried her silly childhood fantasy so deeply that now she was suddenly shaken by the memory, at once happy and frightened, like a prospector who has glimpsed a shiny gold flake amid the pebbles in his sieve; but now her father was living with a Slav and Maya mused that if they were to have a child, which was not completely out of the question after all, it, too, would be a half-Slav and what’s more, it would also be her half-brother or sister, and for an instant she was stunned by this play of halves, after which she felt ashamed, as always happened when she caught herself thinking stupid things, and besides, she was mature enough, and the times had changed enough as well, to not pay so much attention to who in Thrace had Slavic, Illyrian, or Macedonian roots; the Dacians, of course, were another question entirely.

The sun was already clearly setting and all at once it grew cold; Sirma went over to the tent and finally threw on a T-shirt. They sat for a while longer on the beach and Krustev, suddenly chipper, told them about his first trip to Thasos, he had been seventeen and was playing in a band called Stinkweed, his first more-or-less serious band, he, of course, was the youngest, they set off hitching en masse and made it to Thasos, back then things were completely different, this campground didn’t exist at all, there was another one, totally primitive, but that was all they needed, back then they were living in a different world and didn’t even notice the sand beneath their feet, one evening they ended up as part of a big gang gathered at the port, somebody shoved a guitar in his hands and he started playing; as he told the story, clearly his pride was struggling with his desire to play it down; the guitar belonged to an elderly fisherman from Thasos, who finally went over to him, grasped him firmly by the shoulder, looked sharply into his eyes and snapped: The guitar is yours, my boy. He tried to object, after all, he already had an electric guitar at home, but the fisherman would hear none of it, he just kept repeating she’s yours, but you had better play her only when you’re near the sea, and the seventeen-year-old Krustev gave in. Over the next few years, whenever he set out for the seaside, he always took the fisherman’s guitar with him, then brought it back home and didn’t dare play it so far inland, but once he said to himself come on, what’s the big deal, he was at his place with friends, he grabbed the guitar, but she wouldn’t obey, she resisted, he tried to force her, Maya liked the eroticism in the way he put it, and in the end he broke a string, then he got scared, set her aside and didn’t change the string; and so for twenty years now he’d been keeping that guitar with the broken string. Maya imagined how at the instant when the string snapped, far from the guitar, perhaps out on the open sea, the fisherman suddenly collapsed onto the deck of his boat and died. It all sounded like something from a novel, there was a Macedonian author who wrote stuff like that and Maya suspected that Krustev was making it up, but even if that were the case, it was still a good story. Sirma and Spartacus also looked impressed. You and I have got a lot of talking to do about music, Spartacus remarked and satisfaction visibly washed over Krustev’s face. Sirma got up, stood on her tiptoes and stretched her arms up, raising her t-shirt and revealing her ass in her tight-fitting bikini bottoms. I say we go get a drink, she suggested. A mojito would do me some good right about now. Ouzo, Krustev countered with a smile. Ouzo, mojito, pick your poison, Sirma said.

Only a disheveled foreign couple was sitting at the wooden bar, drinking beer. The guy had a shaved head, was shirtless and had a little dragon tattooed on his shoulder, while dark-blonde, very well-done dreads stuck out of the girl’s head, on her ankle, perched on a rung of the high stool, she wore a big blue clay anklet. Maya decided they were Germans, but soon she heard the buzz-cut desperately repeating pommes frites, pommes frites to the girl behind the bar, the brunette was looking at him with a patient smile, Maya went over and explained French fries, ohhh, the bartender said, thanks, the guy and the girl turned their heads towards her at the same time, staring, you speak French, uh yeah, Maya said, we’re sitting over there, Spartacus, who didn’t like chatting with random tourists beyond his professional duties, nudged her side, I’ll be there in a second, Maya told him, but the French couple were so excited by their find that they drowned her in a stream of words. Nobody speaks French here, the girl complained, and our English isn’t that great, Maya agreed, you’re right, French people don’t come here too often so the locals don’t usually speak French, however, the guy started explaining that they had been traveling around the region for two weeks now, they had arrived in Thasos only last night, and everywhere it had been really hard to get by with French. He was already a little drunk, he was talking loudly and quickly, they’d started their trip in Ephesus in Lydia, all the stone shit there was really cool, the girl with the dreads chipped in, yeah, the guy agreed, we had a great time in Lydia and after just a week we even started picking up some of the language, you know, a word here and a word there and it works out and you say to yourself cool, now in Phrygia it’s gonna be even easier to get around — yeah, right! — fucking Phrygian is completely different, even the fucking alphabet is different, so I tell them, you use the Macedonian alphabet, and they get all offended, oh come on, it’s not Macedonian, it’s from Chios, right, ’cause it was supposedly thought up by some St. Whoever-the-hell from the island of Chios, I can’t even fucking pronounce it — he imitated the velar “ch” as if choking — and so the Macedonians, right, they supposedly got it from the Phrygians: totally fucked up! Well, that’s what I’ve heard, too, Maya smiled. Well, we’ll go to Macedonia, too, the girl shrugged, to see what they’ll tell us there. So here we are now in Thasos, in this Thrace of yours, the Frenchman with the dragon on his shoulder continued heatedly, and your language doesn’t have a damn thing in common with Lydian, nor with Phrygian, for fuck’s sake, I can’t understand you people, why the hell do you need all these different languages? Maya started getting annoyed, well, then why is French so different from German, she asked, but they just stared at her in confusion, well, ’cause we’re different nations, the guy said, well, okay then, so we and the Phrygians and the Lydians are different nations, too, Maya laughed, but the guy kept stubbornly insisting, what’s so different about you, he kept protesting, I can’t see any difference at all, you’ve divided yourselves up into a pile of countries and on top of everything, every county has this or that minority, Slavs in Thrace, Thracians in Illyria, I don’t know what they have in Phrygia, Patagonians, maybe, and everybody speaks a different fucking language, but at least here you all use a normal alphabet, he added as a compliment, sensing, perhaps, that he was starting to get carried away.

Maya mentally noted how lucky it was that none of the others spoke French, the bald guy really was pretty drunk and quite sincerely indignant over the fact that in the different countries nearby there were different peoples who spoke different languages, we’re just getting totally confused, said the girl with the dreads in a diplomatic attempt to put an end to the topic and fortunately the black-haired bartender reappeared with their French fries. Maya went back to the others, who were already drinking: Krustev — ouzo, Spartacus — beer, Sirma — a mojito; she ordered a mojito as well from the black-haired bartender and settled onto the stool, what were you talking about, Sirma baited her, I was arguing with the bald guy, Maya said, about whether his basic problem was being drunk or being stupid. Still I wonder, she thought to herself, how things were during the Macedonian Empire, everybody was part of the same country, yet they were still different peoples, back then that poor French guy would’ve been even more confused, since he wouldn’t even have had the basic signpost of national borders, incidentally, European travelers had come back then as well to map the different ethnic groups, Spartacus had told her — he was interested in history — how all of their maps were completely different, in the center of Seuthopolis there was a street named after an Austrian ethnographer, whose map showed the Thracians occupying nearly the whole Balkan Peninsula with the exception of old Hellas, while according to Spartacus in Illyrian cities they named their streets after another ethnographer, an Italian, whose map had spread the ink-blotch of their ethnicity all the way to the delta of the Danube. Maya imagined the Austrian and the Italian yanking each other’s beards and furiously tearing up the painstakingly painted maps. Afterwards, after the Macedonian inheritance had been divided up, every nation had waved the corresponding map, drawn by some European sympathizer, and thanks to those maps they had waged far too many wars, but hey, the Frenchman with the little dragon was right that there were still minorities of the neighboring peoples left in every country. The mojito smelled cool and crisp, and Maya gazed at the freshly cut mint in satisfaction. They make a mean cocktail here, believe you me, Sirma noted, and that’s not all, yeah, Spartacus chimed in, they have sex on the beach and triple orgasm, Krustev started laughing, sex on the beach, Sirma said, I could do that by myself, and immediately corrected herself, well, not exactly by myself, but I sure wouldn’t need a bartender. Yeah, but Spartacus likes the bartender chick, Maya teased him, and he went along with it, man, I was so nervous, he said, I knew I should ask for something way more chichi, but what do I end up ordering — one pathetic little beer. Elena’s father was sitting at the end, listening to them kidding around and smiling. This is where it’s at, Maya said to herself.

She again stared at the little mint leaves and asked herself how their trio must look in the older man’s eyes. While driving through the Rhodopes, he had asked them, so do you do everything together, after which he seemed to have decided not to wonder and to calmly accept every side of their unusual relationship that they decided to show him. Maya mentally noted the fact that their relationship could still (or perhaps now?) be called unusual. She wasn’t even totally sure how much outsiders considered it unusual, because practically speaking no one knew enough, of course, no one else had experienced the things the three of them had experienced together, and since no one knew them to the degree to which they knew one another, no one could say whether all that was unusual or not. Not counting the Elena fiasco, she had avoided bringing her other more or less random friends to hang out with Spartacus and Sirma, the two of them also didn’t bring other people in; way back when, Sirma had warned them other people wouldn’t understand in any case and would just ask annoying questions, so they were better off not creating such headaches for themselves in the first place. As far as guys were concerned, Maya liked hanging out with big mixed groups from time to time, she liked detaching herself from Spartacus and Sirma and sitting around drinking beer with guys who were so different from her, who so rarely thought about their own bodies, who acted so simply and effectively, like some eager and well-oiled machines. She liked flirting, and when the guys had a knack for it, too, sometimes she would hook up with them, and sometimes these hook-ups resulted in near-relationships, she would suddenly start to feel light, ethereal, as if about to take flight if she didn’t hold the guy’s hand, for example, with that Dobrin, whom she had, in fact, gone with for a dozen days after Elena’s party, he was husky, yet his muscles were devoid of aggression, somehow staid and calmly confident of their strength, and that, combined with his shaggy hair and chestnut beard, really made him look like a good-natured bear. He was slow and passive like a swollen river, he didn’t expect anything and was ready to accept whatever life offered him. Maya saw him around on the streets and in cafes after they had officially decided that they weren’t together. He would give her a friendly smile and she was sure that his ursine river was flowing as calmly and gently as ever through thick Slavic forests filled with wooly elms and raspberries twinkling amid the greenery. For example, Maya didn’t know whether it was unusual that she felt no desire to tie herself down to some man, to live with him and to start a family, whether the feeling of family she got from Sirma and Spartacus was unusual, a family with the strict ritual of the mysteries, in which it was possible, as it surely was in all families, to bicker and be jealous, to kick up a fight sometimes, and in the end to have that not lead to anything that might destroy the balance between the three corners of the triangle. But now she was looking at Elena’s father, the thick, wiry stubble jabbing into his cheeks, the bags under his eyes, a forty-something man, next to him Spartacus was still a boy, and she wondered whether all of that would be possible when they were forty-something, too, or whether it would remain as some odd-romantic memory of youth, like his story about the guitar that he should play only by the sea. She couldn’t imagine it, however, which likely meant that it wouldn’t happen.

She stirred the green coolness in her glass distractedly and rejoined the others’ conversation, Spartacus had kept his promise to grill Krustev about music and the two of them radiated infantile satisfaction while discussing the solo in “Stargazer”; in all of her musical conversations with Spartacus, with which their friendship had, in fact, begun, Maya had never managed to talk like that and she began to suspect that there was something typically male going on here which was foreign to her and which seemed slightly pointless, the ability to listen to the instruments separately, to articulate and compare them, she simply liked certain songs and never felt any need to analyze them, still it was good that Spartacus couldn’t actually play an instrument, because then his conversations with Krustev surely would have turned into complete musician-speak, she had once found herself in the middle of a drummers’ rap session and her ears rang with downbeats and off-beats, double-bass, high-hats and asymmetrical meters, and she had decided that playing music was far more boring than listening to it. Krustev had suddenly become confident and calm, with the satisfaction of a dedicated teacher who has found himself an alert and responsive student. Maya liked such teachers, even if they weren’t artistic like Krustev, but most of all she liked the old-fashioned, balding professors who wore suits, spoke slowly and clearly, and carefully wiped their fragile glasses with a little cloth from time to time; she also liked the smell of dust and wood in the lecture halls, the turbid yellowish light in the high, vaulted corridors and all the rituality of the university; yet it lacked something which even the crappiest high school possessed: life together, the aggregate of all the students, divided into class periods and breaks, that reassuringly shared gossip mill, where everyone knew everyone else and there was no need to make plans by phone, since they would meet thanks to a necessity that had fused with habit to such an extent that it looked like the natural state of things. And, of course, when they went to college, they all already had their established friendships, their networks of people and places, and they weren’t particularly interested in forming new ones, and even when that nevertheless happened, it never happened in that spontaneous, imperceptible way devoid of purpose and intention in whcih relationships in high school had sprouted up. If she hadn’t met Spartacus and Sirma in high school, back in the days when she was a fake, it would never have been possible to meet them later and in some other place. She slurped the last drops of the mojito noisily through the straw and her nostrils took in the next scent wafting from the dive at the edge of the campgrounds, the smell of fish, the salty and sizzling scent of simple wooden tables with paper tablecloths and of a noisy twilight in which silverware and laughter jangled. She looked at Sirma, who bared her teeth in a smile, I know what you’re thinking, she said, I’m hungry, too.