Angel Igov - A Short Tale of Shame

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.