The guy called her the next day and asked her out. There was no trace of the frenzy and freedom of the previous evening and when he tried to draw her to him and kiss her after a long walk that made her calves ache, she herself was amazed at how easily she managed to slip away, explaining that while it had been fun and she didn’t regret it, she preferred to remain just friends; perhaps she would have liked him to act more disappointed, but it was fine this way, too: she had gotten smashed, she had hooked up, and she had dumped him, the three beats naturally followed one another, and now Sirma could tell her welcome to the club, if she dared.
Incidentally, over the summer Sirma and Spartacus’s relationship melted away in the same vague way as it had begun. Maya once again spent a whole month nursing suspicions that they were no longer together, until they finally told her that they really weren’t. Shortly before that, Sirma had gone to the seaside with her parents and she seemed to have met some guy there. As far as Maya could tell, Spartacus didn’t seem to be suffering particularly, he was the same as ever, crafting clay monsters and constantly discovering new bands, the three of them would go out in the heat, stop in front of the knocked-out window of some cellar-cum-convenience-store, buy beer from the clerks, who were scowling yet eager for business, and sit sweltering by the monument to the Scythian Army, as if deliberately daring the sun to suck the moisture from their bodies, the beer turned to bland broth before they managed to finish it, but they would sit there on the marble edge of the enormous monument, and in the later hours, more people would arrive along with the mercifully cool evening air, amorphous, noisy groups would form and they would join them, hanging out at the monument, drinking a beer or two and talking until their evening curfew approached, that’s how more and more days passed and Maya’s parents grumbled that she was wasting her time instead of taking a German class, but they weren’t very insistent, because she had finished the school year with straight As, and also because, as she found out later, they were already planning their divorce.
Spartacus also took off, first for the sea, after which he was supposed to go straight to his grandparents’ village, apparently it was somewhere close to the Sea of Marmara, and spend two whole weeks there. The first day after he left, it was a Saturday, Maya’s brand new cell phone, whose primary purpose was to allow her mother to find her at all times, remained mute. She had nothing to do, so she went to her father and asked him for a book. He scratched his head and pulled a soft, tattered little book with the strange title The Catcher in the Rye off his bookshelf. Maya chased her brother out to play soccer with the neighborhood kids, closed herself up in their bedroom and read the book from cover to cover in one day, already halfway through she decided that she wanted to go with Holden Caulfield, at one point she wasn’t so sure anymore that he even liked girls, at the very least his disgust at the ass-wagging Sally’s short skirt was highly suspicious. She decided to call Sirma the next day and tell her about Holden, except that in the morning, while she was still eating breakfast, Sirma beat her to it and merely said three o’clock at the monument, right. It turned out that Sirma had read The Catcher in the Rye and Maya was slightly indignant that her friend had not felt the same frantic desire to share her experience, but it turned out that Sirma had something far more substantial to share. She really had met another guy at the seaside. And not only had they met, they had slept together — Sirma said we fucked, and now Maya suddenly and sharply recalled the shock that word had evoked in her, not the word itself, but its place in the whole situation, Sirma’s ability, her desire to impart so much aggression and contempt on the intimacy of her own body, she turned away slightly, glanced at her furtively and smiled, Sirma really was a bitch then, most of all to herself. That afternoon at the monument Maya couldn’t think of anything more intelligent to ask other than how was it and Sirma with the same biting irony described the act as if it were a scene from a silent comedy, filled with slips, pratfalls and stumbles, and Maya, despite her disbelief, started laughing, albeit nervously, Sirma also started laughing and without that air of superiority, no less, which usually tinged her laugh, how strange that it was devoid of that superiority right then, at the moment when Maya most keenly felt how much her friend had outstripped her, she kept telling herself what a baby she was. She lost hers quite a bit later and now it seemed normal to her, but then, during that summer of the monument they had been only fourteen and she, with all of her feelings of inferiority, had wondered at Sirma, why was she in such a rush, especially when she found out it had all happened in one night, the guy was actually from Philippopolis and they surely wouldn’t see each other again, which, Sirma said, was for the best. Maya didn’t think she would sleep with a man just like that, for one night, especially not for the first time, but decided to keep quiet, instead she asked about the details, since Sirma clearly relished telling them: where had they done it, so did he have an apartment, he had rented a room, they had met on the beach, in the evening she had convinced her parents to let her go out with Eugenia, the daughter of the friends they were at the seaside with, and that’s how it had happened, Eugenia was also fooling around with another dude, but she was eighteen, just like Sirma’s guy had been, in fact. Maya now felt somehow jealous, but not of the nameless stud from Philippopolis, but of this Eugenia, who had surely given her friend advice, who had taken her and shoved her into the hands of that wanker. Sirma didn’t mention anything more about her. Maya asked her whether Spartacus knew. Yeah, Sirma said, I told him before he left, so is that why you broke up, actually, no, Sirma said, anyway, what does breaking up mean, what does leaving mean, you, me, and Spartacus are much closer than we could ever be with anyone else, and a single fuck isn’t going to change that. Maya felt a warm wave engulf her, she surely blushed, her stomach clenched, she wanted to say something fitting, but she couldn’t, Sirma had articulated what she had been thinking the whole time, what she had wanted to be, and now here it was alive and real, the truth itself; just then her phone buzzed, it was a text from Spartacus, it’s really lame here, the sea is choppy and you can’t swim, Chris Cornell has a new band, the album’s coming out this fall.
[3]
They stopped again: Krustev wanted another coffee. It was a swanky place — a newly constructed white building in pseudo old-fashioned style, with decorative black half-timbering, red roof tiles, and a concrete wall with stones stuck into it, and if you went inside, it turned out that the whole back wall was glassed-in, overlooking a private breeding pool. They sat down at one of the characterless tables draped with white tablecloths. They were practically the only customers: three fat, swarthy men in warm-up suits sat at a table near the bar, silently smoking and slurping hot tripe soup, which filled the hall with the life-affirming scent of garlic and vinegar. If the ancients had created a sculptural group representing the hangover, that is most likely what it would’ve looked like. Although back then the men definitely wouldn’t have been in warm-up suits, but naked. Spartacus puffed his cheeks out, trying not to laugh. These bodies surely wouldn’t have pleased Praxiteles. Over the past few months he had gotten interested in ancient art, at first despite himself, since after he’d taken the year off he had started working at a tourist agency, they called him every week or two to lead groups or to help with the writing and translation of various brochures and info packets, that was perfect for him, unwittingly, however, the subject had hooked him and he had crossed some boundary beyond which he had begun thinking about aesthetics in ancient terms, understanding the codes and messages, and he was now capable of sincerely delighting in all those armless torsos and arrogant faces with wounded noses.