A Short Tale of Shame

[8]

Sirma was lying on the bunk of the ferryboat from Thessaloniki to Rhodes, bored. The others were bored up in the fresh air, looking out at the sea, but she was already sick of that. The sea didn’t change much. From time to time they would see some larger island, or else just naked rock, carelessly tossed in the middle of the watery desert, but the islands, too, looked so much alike that after the first few, gawking at them wasn’t particularly interesting. At first, Sirma had imagined that the twenty-four-hour voyage at sea would be exciting. Maybe it would be exciting at the end: the gradual approach towards their goal, maneuvers for entering the harbor, the shrill siren; but until then there wasn’t much to do. But then again, there hadn’t been much to do on Thasos either, despite the beautiful sand, which so unexpectedly flowed into the dry soil beneath the pines, their asses had started itching from the sand and they had wanted to hit the road again, Krustev in any case had suggested they go to Rhodes, and with their already weakened resistance, they had let him buy the tickets and explain that he wasn’t doing it to flaunt how much money he had, but simply because he felt like traveling and he liked the company, which still didn’t sound so great, because it turned out that he was buying himself fellow travelers, but how could you get mad at the guy, he was too sad to get mad at and besides, he was cool, in his own way. Maya ducked into the cabin, raised her eyebrows when she saw Sirma lying there and asked her if she felt seasick. She wasn’t seasick, the ferry was big and steady. I was just lying here thinking, she said, and at one point I realized: I’m just lying here. Maya had come back to get her camera to take pictures from the deck, Sirma admired her enthusiasm. She went out, leaving Sirma alone again. Always the three of them, just the three of them, but a person still needs to be alone from time to time. And perhaps there wouldn’t even be that three of them, if she hadn’t insisted on it back then, if she hadn’t stubbornly and purposefully woven their shared garment out of myriad opportunities and occasions, because it could also be otherwise, because they could have each set out on their own path, which, at the end of the day, is the custom among people, and they could have started living like everyone else. Yes, all three of them wanted to be a threesome, but someone had to make the effort so it would happen, and she was that someone. Two incidents had convinced her that that was the best variant, that they would do well in creating such solid ties that no one could come between them, first that stupid incident at the seaside, when she’d lost her virginity, she laughed out loud remembering Maya’s bewildered look when she’d said we fucked, the truth was she had gotten almost no pleasure out of the sex itself, the satisfaction came from what she was inflicting on her body, from grabbing it and offering it like a piece of meat to that idiot to poke and jab, she liked that supremacy over the body, the pain, the greasy stream of blood that trickled between her legs and she was even sorry that she would not be able to inflict the same thing in all its glory on herself a second time. Maybe she didn’t actually like sex. And maybe, not maybe but surely she was frightened by her masochistic pleasure, which had nothing to do with the nerve endings in the clitoris that she had read about in books with titles like I’m Becoming a Woman, and, in fact, she had run away to Maya and Spartacus, set them up around herself for protection, so as to be part of something bigger and thus to be less herself, because the truth was she didn’t like herself, didn’t know herself and didn’t know what she was capable of inflicting on herself.

At the end of her second year in high school she had experienced something similar and that categorically confirmed her decision. Her parents suddenly got after her to see her cousin, it was really strange, the two families were in vague contact at best, they got together a few times a year and she had no opinion about her cousin whatsoever. She let them convince her and called her on the phone. Chloë, that was her cousin’s name, didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic, this was clearly some idiotic parental conspiracy to bring their daughters together, but in the end why shouldn’t they see each other, so they set up a time and Chloë brought her to a darkened café with a pool table that reeked of cigarette smoke. She offered her a cigarette, Sirma lit up, she had started smoking in elementary school, trying to be cool, but actually didn’t like it at all and waited impatiently for her clique at the time to fall apart so she could quit smoking, but she’d mastered the mannerisms — with a cigarette in her hand she could pass for a dyed-in-the-wool smoker and that sometimes came in handy, she was more adaptable than Spartacus or Maya who had never smoked a cigarette in their lives and often earned themselves funny looks because of this. As it was the afternoon, the café was half-empty, they were all friends of Chloë and they looked as if they lived there. In the greenish light two boys were expertly playing pool and she was staring at the table, she liked the rhythmic clicking of the balls, her cousin was smoking silently and anxiously chewing the cigarette between her lips, Sirma looked her over carefully, she was heavily made up, her hair was bleached platinum and for the moment, despite her anxiousness, she seemed relieved not to have to walk, because she was wearing shoes with monstrously high heels that were clearly wrenching her ankles. Sirma had presciently left her army-surplus backpack and worn-out jean jacket at home, but she still sensed that she looked out of place there, her cousin had wrenched her feet from her shoes, they were clearly digging into her, her toenails were painted purple. Sirma had never gotten a pedicure. She and Spartacus and Maya made fun of the girls at school decked-out like poodles, who made fun of them in turn. She felt ridiculous. She had no reason for being there. The drinks were expensive, there was no one she could talk about music with, she was used to sitting on the grass in the park and though she still liked the rhythmic clicking of the billiard balls and the boys with their skillful, confident movements, she started feeling smothered. At the other end of the café, beyond the pool table, there was something like a raised upper level with a single solitary table, from which several older boys were contemplating them lazily. They were good-looking guys, and with their absent-minded expressions, with the apathetic superiority that radiated from their table, they seemed to lift it even higher, into some cloud-filled dimension from which they watched the mortals’ games with the distant, languid interest of Olympians, or perhaps it only seemed that they were watching, when in fact their divine minds had wandered off somewhere else entirely, into the unseen and the unfathomable. The glass door of the café opened and another girl came in, with tight jeans and a leather jacket, she was pretty, with blonde hair and soft features, everybody livened up at her entrance, her cousin straightened up and puffed on her cigarette more energetically, one of the boys lazily slapped the newcomer on the ass as she walked by the pool table, and she made as if to kick him. The girl came over to them, Chloë pointed at Sirma, this is my cousin, but she didn’t say her name or the name of her friend, the girl sized her up with a smile, but didn’t say anything, she sat down by Chloë and they started a conversation that Sirma couldn’t understand at all, they were talking about some guys with funny nicknames, about scag and A-bombs, about Nero and how an eighth kept him floating for three days, you know, and about some other guy who was probably a narc, so if Chloë saw him she should keep her distance. Then they started murmuring quietly and Sirma guessed they were talking about her, her cousin frowned when the new girl turned to her and asked her if she wanted a jay. Sirma gaped at her. A joint, man, you know. Aaah, why didn’t you just say so, girl, she tried to get into their style. She had only smoked a joint once, Spartacus had scrounged it up somewhere, dug it up from the bottom of his backpack, hidden among the little plastic figurines and dead pens; and since unlike her friends, she had experience with cigarettes, she had managed to not cough while they smoked it, but nothing happened to her at all, nor to them, either. The girl in the leather jacket took out a joint and handed it to her cousin. You guys can have it, she said, my throat is killing me, I can’t smoke right now. The others saw the joint and started milling around them. Are we gonna smoke it here, Sirma asked incredulously. Of course, her cousin replied, the bartender is down, so don’t freak. She lit the joint and took a drag, the sweetish scent of weed wafted heavily in the air, they passed it around twice and it was gone. Sirma waited for that mellowing she’d heard about, but after a long time she still didn’t feel anything and decided that she must not have smoked it right again. Her cousin, however, had mellowed out, it was as if the shared weed had lowered her guard a bit. Looks like Chopper’s gone horse-riding, the girl in the leather jacket said and nodded towards the raised table at the other end of the café. Yeah, looks that way to me, too, her cousin replied, seeming impressed. They fell silent for a while. C’mon, let’s go hunting, said the girl with the leather jacket. Her cousin took a deep drag off her cigarette. But now I’m feeling all peaceful and shit, she said, from the weed. Don’t give me that, the other girl said. You need the money. True, Chloë said, but still, you know. She had her back to Sirma so she couldn’t see what kind of gestures she was making to the other girl, but she figured that again they had to do with her. But her friend just kept smiling, completely calm. Chloë turned to her and looked at her carefully. Sirma, I can count on you, right? How about making some money, huh? Whatever you say, Sirma shrugged. Whatever you say, she mimicked her, and Sirma suddenly realized that her cousin was drunk, she had obviously been drinking before she met up with her, she was slurring her words and looking through her towards something, so much so that she herself was tempted to turn around to see just what was so interesting behind her back. C’mon, said the other girl, come with us and we’ll show you how it’s done.

They went outside and started walking quickly. It was already getting dark. Sirma hurried after them, annoyed, and wondered whether the weed hadn’t gotten to her at least a little this time. They stopped two blocks later and turned down a side street, there was a school a bit farther up and the kids were walking home in little groups. One lone chubby girl with a big backpack passed by them, the girl with the leather jacket shot out and grabbed her by the shoulder. Hey, she said softly, gimme your money. What money, the girl with the backpack mumbled. Sirma was stunned. She, too, had gotten jumped on the street, they’d demanded her money, and she, too, had instinctively answered with the same stupid and pointless answer: What money? This kind, the girl with the leather jacket said and shoved her prey up against the wall. She brought her face close to the girl’s and for an instant Sirma felt like she herself was up against the wall, she felt the other girl’s aggressive breath scalding her lips, then suddenly things turned around and now she was the girl with the leather jacket pressing her victim’s shoulders hard, she could do whatever she wanted to her, and in the next instant she came back to her real place, standing and watching, hypnotized by the sight, by the power and the aggression streaming from the girl in the leather jacket, she suddenly raised her knee and hit the fat girl in the stomach, she let out a little moan, then mumbled, c’mon, let me go, she was on the verge of tears, and Sirma suddenly hated her for that powerless sniveling, then her cousin went up to them and said softly, come on, give us the money and nothing will happen to you, come on, don’t beat her up, she’s a good girl and she’ll give us some cash, isn’t that right, and the girl finally reached into her pocket and thrust some rumpled bills in her hand, yeah, she really is a good girl, said her cousin’s friend, the other girl looked on helplessly as Chloë went through her pockets looking for more money, but there clearly wasn’t any more, look in her backpack, her friend ordered, Chloë rifled through the backpack nervously and hurriedly, there’s no wallet, she reported, I don’t have any more, that’s it, groaned the fat girl, but the blonde girl with the leather jacket kept holding her and repeating “oh, what a good girl” and suddenly she kissed her on the lips and laughed loudly, then she roughly spun her around and launched her up the street with a slap on the ass, come on already, what are you waiting for, her cousin hissed and pulled her into the street, her hand was warm and wet, the girl with the leather jacket appeared calmly from around the corner, she was still laughing, three fivers, said Chloë and hesitated for a moment, before adding, exactly even, she turned towards Sirma and handed her one of the bills, Sirma stared at the dirty, rumpled piece of paper, come on, take it, Chloë insisted, you’re in on it, too, right? her hand was shaking, whether from adrenaline or from fear that she had shown too much without knowing whether she could trust her, and Sirma realized that she had no choice, she reached out and took the bill, it was old, greasy from the hundreds, perhaps even thousands of fingers that had passed it around. Her cousin sighed. Keep mine, the girl with the leather jacket said, you need it more than I do. Are you sure, Chloë said, yeah, of course I’m sure. They went back to the café with the pool table and her cousin ordered three vodkas at the bar. Sirma drank hers in one gulp and earned a round of applause. She felt keyed-up, her skin was prickling. Do you do that a lot, she asked her cousin. Oh yeah, she said. You ought to see us at a club. You won’t believe how that chick can fight, she nodded towards her friend. She really is a witch or something, lemme tell you. She ripped out half of some girl’s hair. See, she pulled down the collar of her shirt and showed her red scratch marks. That’s from the last time we went clubbing, we got in a fight. But if anybody asks, I tell people some dude scratched me. The only problem is that weed is counterproductive for fighting, it makes you all mellow and stuff. Just look how nice we were tonight. Sirma started scraping her nails on the table her empty vodka glass was sitting on. One of the guys from the pool table, the better-looking one, sat down at their table and started making out with the third girl, whose name they still hadn’t bothered to tell her. All of a sudden she was sick of it all. I’ve got to go, she told her cousin. Really? Too bad, she replied. Call me some other time. Yeah, okay. Hey, Chloë was suddenly serious, what happened tonight stays between us, okay, we’re on the same team now, right? Absolutely, what, do you think I’m a squealer? No, no, of course now, it’s just that… Okay whatever, you get me, right? No worries. She got up and went towards the door. Even if she was a squealer, that greasy bill guaranteed her silence. She turned around and saw the other girl licking the guy’s ear, their eyes met and she winked at her. Sirma didn’t react. The boys at the raised table kept watching them indifferently, as if they didn’t exist at all for them. She opened up the glass door and stepped out into the dark, she quickly set out for home, but no matter how fast she walked, it still seemed too slow, as if her legs were sinking in some sticky swamp of disgust and euphoria, and she again entered the scene with the girl backed up against the wall, sometimes she was in her skin, sometimes she turned into the other girl, the attacker, and afterwards she melted down into nothing more than the touching of lips, into that unfathomable yet enchanting kiss of violence, she tried to blame her dazedness on the weed or the vodka, but she knew that wasn’t it at all, that physically she was totally sober, and that she was spellbound by what she had seen alone, now she was imagining her cousin and the girl with the leather jacket tearing out other girls’ hair, raking their faces with their nails, and then flying at each other, swinging their fists like boys, falling on the ground and, as they were fighting, they would suddenly start kissing in the noisy half-darkness, checkered by multi-colored lights, then again and again she would go back to the scene near the school, sometimes playing one role, sometimes the other, and that kept going until she finally fell into a pitch-dark, dreamless sleep. The next morning she woke up early for school, went to the kitchen, got herself a bowl of cereal, poured milk over it, and while she was waiting for it to soak in, she went over to the window and looked outside, down below there was a run-down playground with a few surrealistic jungle gyms and a dilapidated horse-shaped spring rider, all of a sudden she heard the blonde girl’s voice in her head saying clearly Looks like Chopper’s gone horse-riding and she suddenly realized what it meant, her stomach clenched and her diaphragm jumped, she heaved over the table, over the bowl of cereal, but she didn’t have anything to throw up, only a stream of bitter stomach acid trickled into her mouth, she spit it into the sink and turned on the water.

Her uncle and aunt had clearly realized, they had figured out what was going on far too late and had come up with the completely stupid idea of finding new friends for their daughter, all of a sudden they had remembered that, hey, she has a cousin, well, of course, why not have her hang out with her cousin, who goes to a good school? Bent over the kitchen sink, Sirma felt rage, she had no desire to save her cousin, now she needed to save herself, to dissolve herself in water like a tablet and to drink herself down, she now hated her cousin for cracking open that door, which should have stayed shut, she had shown her vileness, which she had in fact liked, as if someone were teaching her to eat her own shit. On the bunk of the ferryboat to Rhodes, Sirma was suddenly paralyzed by a deeply forgotten memory, from when she was a kid and had been playing with a little boy in the neighborhood park, their grandmas were sitting on the benches and not keeping much of an eye on them as they played and chased each other, Sirma suddenly caught a strong whiff of shit, she grabbed the little boy by the hand and told him he’d stepped in poo, he lifted his foot and looked at the sole of his shoe, it was smeared with a reeking yellow mess, now watch this, he said, sat down on the ground and with the natural flexibility of small children lifted his leg, brought the shoe towards his face and licked it. In the bunk, Sirma again sprang up in wave of nausea, just like that morning over the cereal, and just like then, she had nothing to throw up, only a stream of stomach acid stung her tongue. Back then, that morning over the kitchen sink, she had decided to reduce her world to Spartacus and Maya. Before going out, she quietly went back to her room, pulled the dirty, rumpled bill out of her pocket and stuffed it in the bottom of the cupboard where she had kept various important things ever since she was a kid, the fiver stayed there up until she moved away from home. When she was gathering up her stuff she found it, she had almost forgotten about it, and since a lot of time had passed since then, she gathered the strength to reach towards the cinnamon-scented candle she liked to light in the evenings and to burn it up.

But her cousin sank and miraculously surfaced again, and Sirma was thankful to her for the latter, because, even though the two families had never really been close, they surely would never have forgiven her desertion if Chloë had died of an overdose, as seemed to be the case with many of her friends. She simply got lucky. Her father, Sirma’s uncle, found a job in Austria and they left; once cut off from the café with the pool table, where the barman was down, Chloë became a perfectly normal girl, she had already learned German and was studying some sort of economics. Sirma never did figure out how seriously her cousin had gotten hooked on heroin, but since the people around her were dying off, it clearly was no joke, and if that were the case, then she really had needed money, and that shakedown by the school was surely no isolated incident, she had done it regularly with the girl with the leather jacket, whose face Sirma could not recall for some reason, but she would remember her from time to time and would also remember that on that evening, she hadn’t smoked the joint, she hadn’t taken the money they had snatched from the scared girl on the street, she hadn’t even sipped the vodka Chloë had bought with the money. After her uncle’s family left for Austria, some long-forgotten kinship ties had suddenly reawakened, the fathers started writing emails and talking on the phone (Skype hadn’t yet become a mass phenomenon) and one day, right around the time Elena had appeared in their midst and Sirma had met her with instinctive hostility, because she threatened the inviolability of their trinity, her father triumphantly announced that they were going to visit Vienna. Sirma had nothing against setting aside a week of her vacation for Vienna. But when the day came for them to leave, Elena had already launched her attack dizzyingly fast, she had jumped from Maya to Spartacus, she was drowning him in sex and in doing so seemed to have lost Maya, who understandably was sincerely jealous now, but she had driven a wedge between the two of them and Spartacus, and Sirma left for Vienna with the bad feeling that in her absence things would get even worse. Dance a Viennese waltz for us, Spartacus joked before she left, and at that moment everything was just as before, but she knew that in the evening he would meet Elena and she imagined his hands unzipping her jeans, his fingers sinking into the yielding pink flesh. Her cousin really had become a perfectly normal girl and Sirma was happy for her, she realized that until now she had always been ashamed of that evening and of the fact that she had never called Chloë again, despite her parents’ urging. The two families strolled the streets and took photos of themselves in front of the extravagant, cream-pie buildings, Sirma had bought herself a new digital camera and one evening it occurred to her that she could show Chloë pictures of her friends, they hooked the camera up to the computer and she tried to explain to her, insofar as it was possible, her relationship with Spartacus and Maya, and Elena was in one of the pictures, too, Sirma groaned and explained that she was just some annoying chick who was trying to glom onto them, but her cousin abruptly fell silent, Sirma looked at her, she sat frozen, staring at the screen with unblinking eyes, hey, said Sirma, what’s the matter, she did not take her eyes off the picture, that’s Elena, she said finally. Yeah, Sirma said in surprise, her name is Elena, do you know her, of course I know her, Chloë said at last, don’t you remember her? Some powerful wave hit her on the head and sent her back to that bizarre and repulsive evening, she heard Elena’s voice, oh, what a good girl and felt her strange kiss on her own lips and only now could she reconstruct the image that had buried itself somewhere deep in the corners of her memory, the face of the girl with the leather jacket.

As she could conclude from that evening, Elena had never gotten hooked on drugs, nor had she needed the money she squeezed out of those frightened girls, sometimes with a kiss, and sometimes by bloodying their noses, she had more than enough money, she had done it for fun and when she had gone to the café with the pool table and all the other places people went to hang out and get high, that was also for fun, she knew everybody: Chopper, who had gone horse-riding; Nero, who had floated for three days on an eighth; and the guy who was probably a narc, now all three of them were dead, as well as lots of others, such as the two guys Sirma had seen playing pool so well. Chloë spoke softly and swallowed, her eyes dry, if she had ever felt the urge to cry for those people, she had clearly already cried everything out. Elena was like some apparition, a witch, she said, and Sirma remembered that she had used that word even then, but as a compliment, she had always been hanging around them but never with them, she had watched, laughed and enjoyed seeing them writhe in the sticky semi-darkness, sometimes she told them what scum they were, while the next time she’d tell them how much she loved them, and she often gave them money to buy junk, and then at one point she simply disappeared, vanished into thin air, she just got sick of it, Sirma thought, and changed groups, now she knew what had repulsed her about that girl from the first day Maya brought her around, she knew why she had felt uneasy in her presence, as if lightened and naked, and she knew that immediately upon her return that she had to chase her far away from Spartacus.

She suddenly wanted to see Spartacus leaning over the railing with a map in his hand, struggling to figure out exactly which island they were passing, but refusing to ask a crew member, Maya, too, with her camera, and Krustev, proud to be in the company of nice young people. Sirma wriggled out of the bunk, left the cabin and set off into the labyrinth of corridors and narrow, steep staircases. She wandered for quite a while before finding the others amid the multi-colored, multi-lingual crowds on the deck, it was five in the afternoon and they were already far south, the sun was noticeably sinking towards the sea, but as it sank, it grew ever larger and continued beating down, right on the nape of the neck. Hey, Spartacus turned to her when she finally found them, we’re already getting close, you missed some amazing views, but soon we should be able to see Rhodes, aren’t you excited to see your great-grandfather’s island? When they had decided to go to Rhodes, Sirma had called home and asked for precise information about the family’s mythical Lydian roots, her father had explained to her that the story really was downright mythical, his grandfather had been a Lydian from Rhodes and family legend had it that he had run away from home as a boy after his drunk father threatened to kill him and boil him up for stew. Her great-grandfather became a cabin boy on a ship and since, of course, this was back in Macedonian times, he had sailed the empire’s five seas, until he finally decided to settle down somewhere whence he’d have to travel three days on a donkey to catch the scent of the sea, and thus he arrived in the sleepy Thracian village, where, as a result of this strange great-grandfatherly whim, Sirma’s grandfather had been born. Unlike her father, Sirma had never been interested in their family history. She remembered a yellowed photograph of her great-grandfather — who in the world had travelled three days by donkey in order to photograph him in that mountain village? — but in any case, the picture had captured an angry old man with a huge white mustache and something like a turban, she was really surprised by the turban and suspected that her great-grandfather had been a Muslim, but her father explained that at that time Christians had also worn turbans on Rhodes and the nearby islands. There were yet more mysteries surrounding the great-grandfather from Rhodes: participation in an uprising, a wound to the shoulder, some hazy irregularities in how he came by a wife. But now thanks to chance they were going to the very island where her great-grandfather was almost boiled into stew by his own father and Sirma couldn’t deny that her curiosity was growing; what do you know about Rhodes and about Lydia, she asked Spartacus, thanks to his job at the tourist agency he had become a reliable source of easily digestible information about the region, well, the Colossus, Spartacus said. Even I know about the Colossus, Sirma said, it stood at the entrance to the harbor and ships would pass between its legs, a huge statue, one of the seven wonders of the world, right, can you list all of them? I can, replied Spartacus, but only one other one was located in present-day Lydia, namely the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and he looked at her triumphantly, besides, he added, it isn’t true at all that the Colossus was straddling the harbor and that ships passed between its legs, that’s more legend than anything else, too bad it only stood for sixty years or so, an earthquake destroyed it. That is too bad, Sirma said, surely the wrath of the gods caused the earthquake, they didn’t like people building such a huge statue, like the Tower of Babylon, the gods don’t like hubris, Spartacus agreed. What don’t they like? According to Spartacus, hubris was when you are really haughty and arrogant, and in order to act like a big shot you transgress against the divine order of things, but to her it sounded like the name of a rare herb that was part of the recipe for chai. The Lydian king Croesus is also an example of hubris, Spartacus noted. Wasn’t Croesus the one who was really rich? In Spartacus’s story, Croesus, besides being filthy rich and possibly being the first to hit upon the idea of minting money, went to war against the Persians, but not before asking the Oracle of Delphi for advice and the oracle predicted that if he went to war, he would destroy a great empire, Croesus was overjoyed and rushed into battle, and only when he had suffered utter defeat did he realize that he truly had destroyed a great empire, namely his own, but while he was fretting and fuming, the Persians caught him and their King Cyrus, whom the Jews otherwise considered very cool and tolerant, since he had allowed them to return to their homeland from Babylonian exile, ordered that he be burned at the stake. So they tied Croesus to the stake, lit it and everything was going as planned, Cyrus was looking on and enjoying himself, however right when the flames were about to reach him, Croesus cried out despairingly: “Solon! Solon! Solon!” Cyrus was intrigued as to the meaning of this cry and since his translators could only tell him that Solon was a famous Athenian wise man, he ordered them to put out the fire and bring Croesus to him. It turned out that some time earlier, Croesus and the wise man Solon had argued about human happiness and Croesus had claimed that he was the happiest person in the world, since he had everything: a strong empire, enormous wealth, a beautiful wife, wonderful children; but Solon told him that there were at least two men who had been happier than Croesus and they were twin brothers who had died in their sleep because their mother had begged the goddess Hera to give them the greatest possible happiness. So it turns out that happiness is a peaceful death, Maya broke in, who, along with Krustev, had been listening to the lecture carefully. That’s how it turns out, Spartacus agreed, but Sirma bit her lips, because it probably wasn’t a very good idea to philosophize about death in front of Krustev, who had obviously lost his wife recently and didn’t want to talk about it; in any case, Spartacus continued, Croesus had already lost his son, who had been killed accidentally by a friend of his, his wife had committed suicide out of grief and now there he was, the former ruler of a collapsed empire, about to be roasted at the stake by foreigners, however, Cyrus was put to shame by the story, just as Croesus had been right before the flames engulfed him, and since the two of them were so ashamed, Cyrus decided he would do well to spare Croesus’s life and hired him as an advisor. So, Spartacus concluded, Croesus showed hubris by claiming to be the happiest man on earth; and fate, with its innate love of irony, decided to show him that this wasn’t quite the case; but, in fact, hubris is indivisibly coupled with shame, because with pride and arrogance you not only demean others, but in the end you shame yourself, while on the other hand it was precisely shame that saved Croesus, right, there aren’t many people like him, who could say that they saved their own lives thanks to the fact that they suddenly and at exactly the right time were ashamed of what stupid bastards they had been up to that point. What’s more, at least according to Ancient Greek mythology, it turns out that Lydia is definitely the land of hubris and hence of shame, for example, the story of Niobe, who boasted that she was better than Artemis’s mother because she had more children and was more beautiful, is quite similar, Artemis and Apollo went and slaughtered all of her children as punishment; except that the story about Croesus could easily be true, I think it comes from Herodotus. You are Herodotus, Sirma said, but she didn’t tell them about her great-grandfather, who had sailed the five seas and afterwards settled in a remote mountain village three days’ journey by donkey from the scent of the sea, the angry great-grandfather with the moustache twisted up like hubris.