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.