Angel Igov - A Short Tale of Shame

Spartacus stepped out of his tent and the day sprawled before him, plentiful and yellow, and the seconds, milliseconds and the other finer beats of time stuck to his legs, as he waded through the day with Maya and Sirma, and with that strange, sad person who had suddenly hit the road, only to wake up the husband of a dead wife and the father of an ex-lover, ex-friend, ex-threat. All four of them lazily watched the sand from the glass upper globe slip into the lower one, Spartacus continued running various memories through his head, as he had done for most of the previous day while they were in the car, and at one point he wondered if he hadn’t changed places with Elena’s father, who certainly had more right than he did to dig through his memories and pay so much attention to them, and perhaps to sit here on this island beach and to look out at the sea with the feeling that everything that was going to happen had already happened. But Sirma and Maya had also gone silent, sunk into themselves, mulling various things over, as if they, too, inhabited some previous stories, perhaps at the end of the day everything was due to Elena, to her invisible yet tangible presence ever since they had gotten into her father’s car, had she ridden in it recently, had she seeped into the seats like a scent, like an infection, she really had a knack for being present, for hovering nearby, even when she was thousands of miles away, maybe she had also captured their minds in some way, forcing them to race down the steep slope of memory, but perhaps in the end there really wasn’t much of anything that could happen here, on this island, on this sandy beach, in front of the greedy maw of the sea, which fawned in the surf and licked at their toes.

His romance with Elena had lasted less than a month. Their bodies had raged in a staggering frenzy, they had kissed furiously in the middle of the street, she had bitten his lips as he pressed her to the façade of public buildings downtown, sometimes the doormen would come out and chase them away, not so much angry as amused, they would take off and Elena would whisper in his ear, did you see that, the doorman had a hard-on , and he would go crazy again, seized by the thought of the hard, grinning doorman in his blue uniform, they would sink into the park somewhere, into its wooded part, throwing themselves on the ground and unbuttoning their clothes with trembling fingers. Afterwards, tamed for a few hours, they would find Sirma and Maya, who eyed them mockingly, timidly or with outright hostility, so are you screwing them, too, Elena had asked him at the very beginning and he laughed, it wasn’t the first time he’d heard that question, others usually asked which of the two he was sleeping with, and he would put that topic to bed once and for all by saying both, and even though it wasn’t true in the literal sense of the word, it was nevertheless the truth in its own, uh, metaphysical way. But when Elena had asked him so are you screwing them, too, he had hesitated as to what to answer and his hesitation had lasted long enough for her to decide that that, his hesitation, was the answer and that in that case she could choose to believe whatever she wanted, and she had chosen to believe that yes, the three of them indulged in wild orgies, and she had started telling him what nice breasts Maya had, how much she liked Sirma’s green eyes, he had thrown her onto the couch in the sleeping office, which her father had given her the key to, stripped her and rushed into her, to make her shut up, but once, when they were doing it, she had again begun fantasizing out loud about the girls, how nice it would be if they were here, too, she had said it like that, kneeling on the couch, he had covered her mouth with his hand and pulled her towards him, her body twisted and trembled, she bellowed, but he pressed her mouth tightly with his hand and didn’t let go until he had come as well, at which point he groaned you’re crazy, but she just smiled exultantly and said: Aren’t I, though? They didn’t see each other for the next three days because her parents had made her go with them somewhere on a long weekend. Without meaning to, Spartacus glanced at her father, rather ridiculous in his black swim trunks, just as all older men looked ridiculous in their swim trunks for some inexplicable reason, even though he was still in good shape, he didn’t have a gut, yet the first premonition of old age hovered around his body, it wasn’t a mark on the skin, it wasn’t a wrinkle or something visible, but Krustev seemed to exude his own uneasiness, his reduced sense of comfort in his own body, or at least that’s how it seemed to him, the girls surely were of another mind entirely, he had long since realized that they saw older men in a different light, he thought about him driving the red car which had brought them here or maybe some other car, a previous one, and next to him was his wife, who was now dead, and in the backseat was Elena and she was replaying dirty scenes in her mind and she smelled of sex, of him, of the couch in the office and the cool dirt under the spruces in the park, he couldn’t imagine those people together, he didn’t see anything in common between that fury in the body of the half-Slavic girl and the anxious man who looked as if he had been cold for a long time and was now gradually beginning to feel the rays of sunlight on his skin, and he felt a deep thankfulness that Krustev didn’t know what he had done with his daughter, although on the other hand he had surely been wondering about it the whole time, surely all fathers were like that and he would become that way, too, if he had a daughter, sometimes he thought abstractly about some other time and place in which he would have a family and children, but in these visions, too, he could not solve the problem of who, in fact, would be the mother of his children, couldn’t the kids somehow be born without a mother, while he would stay with Sirma and Maya, or else perhaps he would have one child with each of them, that was now possible, and all thanks to Elena, wasn’t that right. While she had been on that long weekend with her parents, the three of them had gone out alone and he had thought that everything would be as usual, since they had learned to leave their hook-ups and relationships, insofar as they existed, aside and not to let them into their triangle, he didn’t feel like he had let Elena inside and hadn’t even thought about it, but Maya and Sirma, it seemed, had another opinion on the matter, they were mad at him, they sipped their beer and let fly snide comments meant to insult him, what the hell is your problem, he asked angrily, we don’t have a problem, Sirma declared, you’re the one with a problem in your head, and not your big one, but your little one. He got up and stalked across the lawn with long strides, but behind his back he could hear Sirma yelling after him, now there, don’t you see, he felt offended by their unfairness, especially by Maya, who had spun 180 degrees, hadn’t she been the one who had brought her friend and had wanted them to buddy up to her, and in the beginning Sirma had been angry with her, while he had defended her, he didn’t understand what the two of them wanted from him, yes, maybe things between Elena and him were more serious than with his previous girlfriends, than with Sirma and Maya’s guys, but he hadn’t expected such jealousy and it all seemed incredibly irrational, absurd and childish, which, he thought to himself now, perhaps it really had been.

When they again hopped over to the bar, because in the end there wasn’t much else to do between the sea and the campground fence, on the coarse sand that unexpectedly flowed into the dry soil beneath tall, straight pines, so strange and uncharacteristic of the seaside, Krustev again insisted on treating them and they took him up on it, each time they put up less of a fight, the man obviously enjoyed doing it, while for them every free round was a breath of fresh air. In the car, Maya had told him that they’d taken the year off to think about whether they really wanted to study what they were studying, and that was true, but only almost. In fact, it was Maya who had taken a year off not just because of that, but because she needed money, after the divorce both her mother and her father’s finances were not exactly rosy, while her brother was growing and eating a lot, at least that’s what Maya said, half-joking, half-serious, but on the other hand, she could translate and teach French without taking a year off her major, so the idea of taking a step back and reflecting on things really was important, in any case she had suggested it and he and Sirma had taken her up on it, because it had seemed wise to them, they wouldn’t lose anything by doing something else for a year, and in any case Spartacus was growing ever more skeptical where law was concerned, while Sirma, who had gone to fantastic lengths to get into her dream major of architecture, was simply furious about the way the teachers blocked their students’ progress so they couldn’t become competition. The year would soon come full circle and they had to decide what to do from then on, but for now they could still travel, think, and earn some money with which to think and travel. Spartacus calculated that if things went on like this, even if they extended their vacation, he might still have some money left over when they got back. He had set aside the payment from the last brochure, and now, of course, tourist season was starting and there would be work, new groups of German grannies and Mesozoic Americans. His own grandmother, from the village near the Sea of Marmara, always loved to say that easy money was the most fun to spend. Now, having earned a little something and despite the fact that he still lived with his parents, he no longer asked for an allowance, Spartacus was convinced that his grandmother was dead wrong: it was the most fun to spend money you earned yourself and which you knew you’d put time and energy into, which you were now free to squander in one fell swoop, getting your revenge on the tourists by turning them into beer and fried fish, draining them and gnawing them down to the bone, or better yet, transforming a glossy brochure into a concert ticket, watching for an hour and a half as the smoke of your burning cash envelops the musicians on stage, watching with delight as the time-turned-to-sound breaks loose and flies off. He didn’t like carrying cash, no matter how little, he hurried to turn it into other things, and sometimes he wondered what in the world he would do if some day he made a lot of money, say what Krustev made, it seemed logical, maybe he, too, would take a shine to some kids who reminded him of his own youth and would pick up their tab, but Krustev, with his promoter’s agency, at whose concerts Spartacus had turned his cash to smoke and time to sound, and with his stores for home entertainment systems, that Krustev was probably too rich to be able to squander his money, he didn’t have enough time. No matter how egotistical it was, there was something deeply pointless, some insult to being itself, in dying without having relieved yourself of that burden. Once, only once, had Spartacus ended up without a single cent, he had been maybe seventeen, he was going to meet Sirma and Maya on the bridge over the Tonzos, they were late and for lack of anything better to do, Spartacus dug into his pocket and found only a small coin, it wasn’t even enough for ice cream, so he raised his arm and chucked it far into the river; cars whizzed past on both sides of the bridge, it was noisy and he didn’t hear it splash into the river, but he told himself, okay, now I don’t have a single cent in my pocket, and he felt an incredible rush of freedom. He spent three days like that, until the next installment from his parents, of course, that was easy at seventeen, what do you really need to buy, when it comes to beer in the park, there was always someone willing to cough up cash for it instead of you, and if nobody does, then you go without beer, but despite that for those three days he completely consciously lived the joy of the penniless, looking to spend most of his time out and about, wandering through the streets, looking in the shop windows and feeling pride and relief that he could not buy himself anything whatsoever, not even a bottle of water. He knew, with that knowledge which stands in the corner like a heavy block of stone that you can’t budge, that those three days would never repeat themselves. The older he got, the more doomed he was to earn money and spend it, spinning his toothy gears in the machine of exchange, grinding coins in his molars.