A Short Tale of Shame. Angel Igov

she sat down in front of the mirror with a cup of coffee and started asking herself questions out loud. The goal of the interrogation was to find out what was bothering her. Did she like Spartacus? If she didn’t like him, what did she have against Sirma going with him? She couldn’t really expect all of their relations to develop in a triangle, in which no corner was ever left out. Well yes, she told herself, in fact, that was exactly what she expected. And to be frank, from a certain moment on things really did begin to happen that way, they did everything as a trio and Maya didn’t find it strange, she had never found it strange, but that really had begun later. A whole month passed before Spartacus and Sirma announced they were a couple. Maya kept hanging out with them and they didn’t seem to have anything against it. What’s more: Sirma started acting warmer, trusting her with more things, her eyes seemed less and less like mocking blue beads when she talked to her. Maya admitted that Sirma was very pretty, but she also thought that she herself was nothing to be scoffed at, either. Maya got used to Sirma and Spartacus being together and no longer shuddered when they kissed, but, in fact, this happened only rarely. Besides, at that same party where she had gone slathered with foundation and with eye-shadow ringing her eyes, looking as if her father had beaten her, she drank vodka for the first time, as an experiment, since at the previous party another girl had gotten drunk on vodka and hooked up with the host’s neighbor; and the experiment suggested that perhaps vodka has an automatic effect because after she got drunk at one point she suddenly found herself in the parents’ bedroom with the birthday boy pawing her, which was actually quite pleasant, Maya let him dig his huge, hot tongue into her mouth and sensed a warmth creeping along her spine when he unclasped her bra with astonishing dexterity, but she had already sobered up enough not to allow him to undress her. When they reappeared in the living room, Sirma looked at her with respect, while Spartacus went out on the balcony and tried to smoke with some unfamiliar boys. Maya never figured out how that unsuccessful attempt at smoking had led them to the brink of a fistfight, but she and Sirma quickly dragged Spartacus away, who also turned out to be quite drunk, they dragged him into the bathroom, and Sirma started pouring cold water over him, while he alternately snorted, laughed, yelled and shook his fists, his whole T-shirt was soaking and Maya, still mellow from her adventure with the birthday boy, suddenly said he was very sexy all wet like that, and Sirma burst out laughing, come on, girl, isn’t one a night enough for you, but Spartacus was not in good shape at all and they slipped out with him, walking on either side and holding him up, while he howled ’70s songs at the top of his lungs and when he couldn’t remember how the lyrics went, he would simply repeat the same verse ad nauseum; Maya and Sirma were enjoying themselves thoroughly, ecstatic when some elderly passerby looked after them and clucked his tongue indignantly. But Spartacus sobered up quite quickly, growing gloomy and shame-faced. They argued for some time over how to see one another home without anyone coming to harm, since they found themselves more or less equidistant from their respective apartments. In the end, Spartacus and Sirma walked Maya home. It turned out to be barely nine, her mother and father were watching television in the dark living room and praised her for coming home on time, horrified, she expected them to bust her for drinking, but they were too engrossed in the film, only her brother met her in the hallway and said, whoa, Maya, just take a look at yourself; scram, twerp, she replied, but she went into the bathroom and was horrified to discover a degenerate whore with smeared make-up looking back at her from the mirror. If that’s how you look after a hook-up, thanks, but I’ll pass.

      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