[10]
Since they had come to this island, everything had been somehow strange and unreal, as if the dreams she had dreamed recently had gradually escaped their designated boundaries and were at first hesitantly, then ever more freely and confidently having their way with reality. And perhaps it was also due to the approaching mysteries, they were supposed to be tomorrow, they would have to look for a secluded place tomorrow night and play out the ritual of their intimacy, theatrics which she had made up without much hope that the others would go along with it, but now look, it had been two years and they had done it every month since Elena had left them, up until this week, when they had come across her father and he simply set off with them, he was an odd person, strange like his daughter and Sirma wasn’t surprised when, hemming and hawing, he had begun explaining that he had to go somewhere on his own, besides it also immediately crossed her mind that tomorrow they would have to tell him the same thing, and now look, this was a golden opportunity that freed them from the need for unnecessary explanations or to sneak out during the night. The tree was digging into her back, but she stubbornly leaned against the twisted trunk, all around dusk was brushing the ground like a light blanket and in the warm twilight things took on an unreal appearance, the fortress wall, the bridge a little further on, and the bushes along the path, an empty bottle was lying slightly off to one side and in the falling dusk Sirma jumped in surprise upon seeing that it was a bottle of Thracian vodka, Terres, and she spent a long time staring foolishly at the bottle, Terres, that was the same vodka she had brought to Elena back then, she had taken a bottle of it to the office her father didn’t use, she had slipped Spartacus’s phone out of his pocket unnoticed the previous evening, while he, with his usual enthusiasm, had been talking about Radiohead’s latest album and whining that they still hadn’t come to Thrace, and by the way, now there’s a good idea for Krustev and his promotional agency, but she hadn’t gone to talk about that with his daughter: when she had called her on the phone, she wasn’t even surprised, could she possibly have been expecting such an invitation to meet, that decisive clash, and she took advantage of her right to hold it on her own territory, you know, just to talk, Sirma had told her, and had gone over there with vodka, she didn’t even know why she’d taken it, she wasn’t hoping to get her drunk, she wasn’t hoping to get drunk herself, but in fact, maybe they really had gotten drunk, she remembered that she left the bottle there half-empty, but a lot of time had passed, half-empty, just like Elena’s story. You’ve come to get rid of me, Elena said directly, after she had poured them each a drink and they had sat down on the floor, facing each other, blue eyes against green, Elena in a tight green shirt and no bra, her round breasts clearly outlined, wearing close-fitting jeans, and she’d tossed her leather jacket onto the couch, and Sirma thought to herself that maybe she actually remembered her, that she had remembered her the whole time and had been playing with her, just as she played with Maya and Spartacus, and with all the others, you’ve come to get rid of me, Elena said, and Sirma replied yes, and the blood rushed into her ears when she repeated yes.
Until then she had never had a conversation like this with anyone. Elena told her everything, about her family, about the money and the house, the beautifully painted façade of their affluent life, about her school and how she had met Chloë, things that Sirma didn’t want to know, didn’t want to hear, but clearly that was the price she had to pay, so it was necessary to hear her out, was that it, would the witch finally shove off once she had blurted out everything, all the trash she had collected inside of her, or perhaps she expected Sirma to start feeling sorry for her, to hug her in consolation, to take her tear upon her cheek in an act of self-sacrifice and then patiently to offer up her other cheek, but the more she listened, the more she was unable to pity her, and the more she learned about her, the more difficult it was to understand her. It was so simple at first: there was this obnoxious tagalong, this schemer, who was trying to muscle her way into their triple life, but then she could also connect her with that green-eyed witch from years ago, the girl who squeezed money out of other girls with her fists and kisses and gave it to her friends to buy drugs, a girl who was simply evil and who loved watching others suffer; but now she was forced to find out more and more things about her life, to look at her face-to-face, a human being like all others, and to understand less and less her passion for meddling in the lives of others, for experimenting with them and watching them fall, as if projecting onto others some part of herself that she wanted to calmly examine and analyze from the outside. Elena’s story jumped back and forth in time and in the end she stopped somewhere in her distant, half-forgotten childhood, when I got lost, Elena said, I only remember sitting on some gray street and watching some boys fight, it was amazing. An hour ago, two hours ago, before however much time had passed, Sirma would have been able to mock her, to make her look ridiculous, to tell her you’re scum and stay the hell away from my friends, you’re trapped, I’ll simply tell them what I know, Spartacus isn’t in love with you, it’s just teenage hormones and you know it, and Maya is pissed at you, because she’s jealous, plus for her the story of what happened that night would be more than enough, I’ll tell them your story and there’s nothing you can do about it. But now that story had swelled, it had become so bloated and heavy that it could no longer be told, not by someone else, and suddenly Sirma felt duped. It had become impossible to treat her like the scum that she was after those hours on the floor, blue eyes against green, she had walked right into her trap. What do you want, she asked, and Elena replied: Nothing. She fell silent and then repeated, I don’t want anything, that’s the problem. Well, Sirma said, despite the fact that she’d lost her nerve and was afraid that this was terribly obvious, well, I want you to leave us alone. Lucky you, Elena said, you know what you want, and she started laughing, she started laughing so resoundingly that Sirma felt humiliated, took a sip of her vodka, and said, well if you ask me, I think you want me to give you a nice big black eye. But Elena kept laughing and Sirma didn’t hit her in any case, should she have hit her or not, that was the question, which even now she hadn’t found an answer to, would she have defeated her if she’d hit her, or would she have been defeated, she didn’t know, because, even though Elena really had left them alone, to this day she wasn’t sure which of the two of them had won back then and this uncertainty was even more sickening than defeat; Elena, even from far off in time and space, possessed the ability to make everyone feel like a fool. You don’t mind, do you, she said and reached for Sirma’s glass, she had finished her own, and took a sip right from the place where Sirma’s mouth had been, and gave her the glass back, she stared at the bright lipstick stain Elena had left, her lips on the glass, and suddenly she went back to that evening on the street, and once again she was jumping between the two bodies, that of the helpless girl up against the wall, and Elena’s compact, aggressive body, and she was clearly drunk because even to this day she wasn’t completely sure whether that moment had really happened or if it was just her imagination, had Elena really darted forward and kissed her on the lips, the same kiss which she had wrongfully and secretly felt that night, since it hadn’t been meant for her, or perhaps it had, perhaps it had been meant precisely for her, for her alone, now she felt it again, but she didn’t know whether it had happened in reality, in that which she could at least from time to time with a certain approximation call reality, because in the next instant Elena had returned to her place and was sitting there calm as can be, and all of that remained in a moment which had leapt into her time from some other, parallel time of passed-over opportunities, a time in which they all lived other stories, again fully possible stories which they had no inkling of and which they could only come into contact with accidentally in such a momentary intersection of times, like the spontaneous twitching of a nameless nerve which you don’t expect to twitch since your brain hasn’t sent it a command, and in such cases had she not really jumped from one time into another? But the kiss, real or not, seemed to put an end to everything.