He woke up once and for all from the heat. The sun had clearly climbed high enough to warm the tent and it was gradually becoming a greenhouse inside. But he didn’t feel like getting out. If the sun was already high in the sky, then he’d slept a long time. He could still remember most of the strange dreams he’d had, it must’ve been really stuffy, and a fat black fly was crawling over the netting of the tent. But the zipper of the tent was sitting there, quietly closed. Sirma’s sister. He felt his cock apathetically harden in the usual morning erection, that tiresome caprice of the hormones. He suddenly realized who the girl from his dream had been, hidden behind the inexplicable idea that Sirma had a sister. She was a girl from high school, younger than they were, whose birthday party they had ended up at more or less accidentally a year ago, they were already in college, but they still had friends in high school and the latter had dragged them to some party. Spartacus snorted, that was surely his last true high school stunt. He knew the girl in passing, who, in fact, did not particularly resemble Sirma, but she was attractive, still he had gone to the party without any plans, but gradually and imperceptibly he had had way too much to drink, so much so that he blacked out and whatever he knew about that evening had come from Sirma and Maya’s giggling stories. He wondered how much to believe them, because he had a hard time believing that in his drunkenness he had been so hyperactive so as to do everything they had attributed to him. According to them, he was racing around everywhere, he had chased a solitary and sullen skinhead, insisting that he explain exactly what his problem with blacks was, he was the life of the party until at one point he definitively homed in on the birthday girl, dancing a slow dance with her, the song ended, but they kept spinning around, staggering in the middle of the room, Spartacus perhaps remembered that vaguely when they told him, a soft, dazed spinning around the girl’s warm breath, and the realization that he couldn’t see anything, who knows what kind of alcohol they had foisted on him, but the next part he really didn’t remember: according to Sirma and Maya everyone in the room was laughing loudly, shouting at them that the song was over and it was time to finally untangle themselves, but they kept spinning, so finally one girl said well, let’s not let a good dance go to waste and sat down at the piano, that sounded believable, because there really had been a piano in the room, and so the girl had started playing another ballad on the piano and they kept spinning for a while longer, and when it finished, Spartacus and the girl as if on command tumbled under the piano and started vigorously making out. Here Spartacus had tossed back his head and started laughing in disbelief, indignant and satisfied, now you’re making stuff up, he kept saying, even though that could’ve been true, too, he had some memory of the warm taste of the girl’s mouth, of her busy tongue, while Sirma and Maya swore they weren’t embellishing a single detail, well, if that’s how it was, he shrugged, that makes it even funnier, it’s just too bad that I clearly had no idea what was going on, so you were having fun without me. In any case, it was true that in the morning or some time around then, he woke up in a huge bed in which five people were sleeping or pretending to sleep, the birthday girl was snuggled up to him and looked extremely out of it, he tried to kiss her, so that thing about the piano must’ve been true, otherwise why would he have done that, but she couldn’t even move, she merely looked at him numbly, they really must have drunk some very sketchy alcohol, lift your head a little, he said jokingly, but she replied I can’t, I’ll throw up in your mouth, and shortly thereafter she cleared out, maybe she really was going to throw up, however, there were two other girls in the bed, they looked pretty young, but he played dumb, putting his arms around one of them and lying down comfortably, she gave in to his embrace, without saying anything, but also without moving closer, and at one point he woke up or sobered up or enough of both to ask himself what the hell am I doing here, he removed his hand from the random body he had come across, got up and went to splash cold water on his face, but in the kitchen Sirma and Maya, who were drinking coffee, met him with a round of applause, and shortly thereafter dragged him outside to go home, the first buses were already lazily humming in the darkness.
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.