Angel Igov - A Short Tale of Shame

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.