Читать книгу A Short Tale of Shame - Angel Igov - Страница 5

[1]

The girl next to him fell silent and it took Krustev a while to realize that she had fallen asleep. He looked in the rear-view mirror: the other two kids were also dozing in the back seat. He himself had hardly slept the last few nights and longed to feel drowsy. Since the middle of April he had been suffering from insomnia more and more frequently. He refused to take pills; he put on his jacket, went out into the garden, and stared at the patterns on the birch trees for hours. They were perfect in their spontaneity.

The noonday sun made people sleepy and insects crazy. Krustev was driving quickly and from time to time a black fly would hit the windshield with a dull thud. There was a fly, now there’s not. Period. I’m surrounded by sleepers, Krustev said to himself. Instead of envy, he felt claustrophobia: the teenagers’ triune sleep pulsated in rhythm with their deep breathing, each breath filling the car to its utmost limits and pressing Krustev to the wheel—a fluffy, shapeless white mass, receding and swelling again, a sea of sleep, a white sea, the Aegean, they were traveling towards it, yet it had already slipped into their car.

The phone of the girl next to him buzzed like a fly: Hello, I love you, won’t you tell me your name, so they listen to ’60s music. Krustev felt flattered, as if he had written the song. He hadn’t written it, but he had played it in one of his wilder bands back in the day, which was called Stinkweed—archeologists had just discovered the ancient sanctuary near the village of Stinkweed, shades of pagan priests and memory-weary stones. The singer, for his part, chewed stinkweed and spent whole days in the kingdom of the shades. The band didn’t last long.

The girl stirred, dug her phone out of her cargo pants and rasped: Hello? She explained that she couldn’t go wherever they were inviting her because she was on her way to the Aegean Sea. The other end of the line was apparently envious. The date was put off for some other awakening. Krustev didn’t start a conversation with her. He could sense her clumsily cleaning off the sleep that had clung to her so strongly precisely because it had been so short. The girl sighed and rubbed her eyes.

I know you, she said suddenly. Me? You. You’re Elena’s dad. Krustev let out a laugh, only later would he realize how long it had been since that had happened. I can’t deny it, he said, and who are you? Maya. I’ve known Elena since we were kids. Do you remember me?

Maya. A fleeting memory of a studious little blonde girl who perhaps sat next to his daughter in elementary school carelessly flitted through Krustev’s mind. The young woman now sitting on the other side of the stick shift was also blonde, but she didn’t look too studious. Maya. I think I do remember you, Krustev said. We went to the same grade school, Maya continued, then we lost touch, but then we found each other again. It was really funny, because both of us had changed so much that it was like we were meeting again for the first time. But we liked each other again. She’s in America now, Krustev said. I know, said Maya, we used to see each other pretty often before she left, once she had a party at your place and I saw your picture there, otherwise I wouldn’t have recognized you. Krustev mentally noted the compliment. The family picture which hung in a frame in the living room was taken five years ago. He had been only twenty-five when his daughter was born. She was now twenty, so that meant that’s how old the girl next to him was. Sometimes it occurred to him that he was getting old, just as it occurs to you that you’ve forgotten to call an old acquaintance whom you ran into on the street and promised to call. He rubbed his stubbly face with his palm. Have you kept in touch since she’s been there? Actually, no, Maya said, she’s somehow dropped off the radar. Or maybe I have. Krustev could smell some kind of intrigue, but he left it for later, he had fired off his questions solely to find out whether the girl knew something of the events in his family, that’s how various concerned relatives and business partners, whose repulsively soft and sweaty hands reached out to squeeze him in insipid sympathy, put it, but since she hadn’t been in touch with Elena, most likely she didn’t know. He was tired of everyone knowing. That’s why he’d taken off in his car. The trees along the roadside didn’t know.

It hadn’t even crossed his mind to pick up hitchhikers along the way, in fact, he had hardly seen any hitchhikers in recent years; the person who until recently had hitchhiked either now had a car or had left for somewhere much further away, like his daughter. She had hitched a lot in high school, that is, her official stories always said otherwise, but Krustev and her mother could tell, they worried, but kept quiet, after all, they were young enough to remember the stunts they had pulled at her age. Only Elena seemed not to know that they knew she hitchhiked, and for quite some time Krustev wondered what the point of this secrecy was, but afterwards decided that his daughter simply needed to keep secrets from her parents and while it had seemed laughable to him at first, later he accepted it as normal. Over the past few years, however, hitchhikers had become few and far between, most often foreign couples with huge backpacks, with skin tanned and hair bleached by the sun, sometimes he stopped for them, just for some company, but their stories inevitably turned out to be identical, the stories of young, curious Europeans wading into the weed patch of Balkan exoticism, and he had almost stopped picking people up, he only did it when some completely sudden impulse whispered to him and in those cases he never regretted it. Now that same impulse had stopped him in that place, the first straight stretch since he had entered the mountains, and he was surprised that such a place even existed, a long sigh in the road before the next bend. There were three of them. The other girl and the young man were still dozing in the back seat and Krustev suspected they had also seen his picture in the living room. He felt a slightly unpleasant tickle: he was driving strangers who had been in his house and had probably even properly trashed it, as usually happened at Elena’s parties. But perhaps they were his stroke of luck, they had a destination, they wanted to reach Thasos. He envied them. He had simply gathered up some luggage, checked his credit cards, and taken off in the car just like that, to wherever he felt like. And when he had stopped for them, and they had asked where he was headed, he had frankly admitted that he didn’t know, it hadn’t crossed his mind the whole morning that he didn’t know where he was going. Now this is what I call hitching, the black-haired girl declared, as she settled into the back seat. He jammed their backpacks into the trunk and said since they were going to Thasos, he would drive them to the port at Datum, but he didn’t think—it only fleetingly occurred to him—why shouldn’t he, too, continue on to the island by ferryboat, maybe even along with them, he didn’t so much need the company—he needed to know where he was going. Did this make him a tagalong, but hey, they were the ones who had gotten into his car.

So, Maya piped up, why did you just take off in your car? Krustev was silent for a moment, then replied why not? That’s great, if you can get away with it, the girl murmured, Krustev grunted. I guess I didn’t have a choice, he said, but I’ll explain it to you later. She kept quiet. She was surely looking at him in confusion, but he avoided her gaze and stared at the road. What should he say now? Fortunately, the backseat came to life, hey, we actually fell asleep, the young man yawned. You know who’s driving us, Maya turned to him. Elena’s dad. Boril Krustev.

Krustev almost never heard his full name these days. When he was young, he had liked stating it in a defiant tone, it uncompromisingly drove home his Slavic descent, and in the ’80s that could stir up trouble for you in the capital, but Krustev had learned to wield it like a sword, a cold weapon which drew blood. Afterwards, of course, things had settled down, at the moment being a Slav in Thrace was no worse than being an Illyrian or Paeonian, and it was definitely much better than being a Dacian. Since the accepted wisdom back then was that Slavs could either work the fields or sing mournful songs, Krustev left the fields to his grandfather and started playing, his music grew ever less mournful and they even became stars of sorts, and later it was no longer so important whether you were a Slav and after he left his last and most successful group, everything had worked out amazingly easily for him, the promotion agency, the big concerts, and the stores for audio-visual equipment alongside that, he had become comfortably wealthy and it was as if this made him less of a Slav, or people just didn’t care so much about that now, and he didn’t care, either.

The young man was worked up about something else, however, since he was Boril Krustev, was he playing anywhere these days? No, only for fun, and even then rarely, Krustev said, skipping over the fact that that, too, had not happened to him in a long time, he hadn’t played in public for ten years now, since Euphoria had broken up. Then everyone from the group had set out on their own paths and all those paths led equally far from music, towards the world of private business, which had opened up with liberal aplomb, from the very beginning Krustev had decided that he would bring foreign bands to play in Thrace and wouldn’t you know, it had worked out; sometimes, going back over his memories, it positively spooked him to think how badly he had wanted to break into that business without any cash, with only his love of music and the connections he had made abroad, and how quickly everything had taken off, those were crazy times, he would tell himself, crazy times. The young man really liked Euphoria, however, especially the first album, and hinted that they could get back together at some point, isn’t that what usually happens, the dinosaurs of rock suddenly get back together and go on tour. Krustev chuckled despite himself. So they already counted him as a dinosaur. This was getting more fun by the minute, he had done right in picking them up. The young man kept chattering on about Euphoria and Krustev was thankful that he didn’t mention his daughter at all, even though he knew that it would come up at some point, but didn’t he miss the rock-and-roll lifestyle sometimes? Krustev started to explain that when he had been his age (he mentally smacked himself for the expression) he was just getting into those things and they had seemed so romantic to him, music, freedom, being on the road, people loving you, getting into you, and playing like crazy; but there’s also the flipside of the coin, all the slogging, exhaustion, alcohol, drugs and fights of every kind, because you’ve teamed up with people who all think that they’re the shit, believe me, Krustev said, if I could turn back time, I’d spare myself at least half of all that. He inhaled more noisily than he meant to. He hadn’t strung so many sentences together for months and he wasn’t even sure it was sincere, actually he was sure that it wasn’t sincere, but he badly needed to reject his entire past, especially now, to transform himself merely into the person behind the wheel, with no history, no life and no death, a function of the highway, the mileage. So, he’s a pureblooded Thracian, probably of communist stock at that. You’re not a musician, are you, Spartacus? Well, no, actually, it doesn’t really go with his name, the black-haired girl suddenly chimed in, I mean, if he’d been Orpheus… Since Sirma’s also awake, our little clique is now at full strength, Maya said next to him. I’ve been awake for a long time, if you really want to know, I was listening to you and thinking about various things; Sirma, nice to meet you, she moved so that Krustev could see her in the mirror, curly black hair and blue eyes, and waved at him. So you’re Elena’s dad. Talk about crazy. Now that’s what I call a coincidence. It’s not fair, Krustev tried to joke, you all know my daughter, you also know me vicariously, but I don’t know anything about you. There’s time, Sirma yawned, didn’t you say you don’t know where you’re going?

Krustev really didn’t know where he was going and Sirma suggested point-blank that he come with them. It makes sense, he thought, that way they have a sure ride, they don’t seem the type to lounge around frying on the beaches of Thasos for more than a day or two. However, they hadn’t decided where to go after that. Maya laughed nervously, she had also thought of asking him to come along, but you know how she is, while she was sitting there wondering how to put it, Sirma had beat her to it. Sirma was clearly the boss and Krustev asked her if they wouldn’t get annoyed with an old fart like him. Again he told himself that he shouldn’t talk about what was coming up, don’t act with them like everybody your age acts with them, drop the Elena’s dad act. But he wasn’t sure he could put on any other act. Maya and Spartacus burst into energetic protest, talking over each other. Sirma waited for their buzzing to die down and simply said, come on now, in a businesslike tone.

And with that, things likely should have been considered decided.

In the house, the windows are sleeping, the furniture is sleeping, the refrigerator is sleeping, a plug dangling from its shoulder. The doors are sleeping: beautiful, solid, heavy doors. Krustev is sleeping, hung on the wall, his wife is sleeping on one side of him, his daughter on the other, they are sleeping with open eyes, smiling amid the garden outside. The empty bottles jammed into the black bag in the hallway are sleeping. The air conditioner. The lawnmower. The dirty dishes piled in the dishwasher. The slippers, collapsed from exhaustion, are sleeping in indecent poses. Sssssleep… The only ones standing guard are the tiny lights of the alarm system and a few inexperienced spiders, who have stretched their webs in various corners of various rooms, stalking their puny prey, without an inkling of one another’s existence.

As if to make up for this, the whole garden is awake: the birch trees are whispering, the willow is murmuring incomprehensibly, in the furrows the multifarious plants with Latin names are trying out their new flowers and buzzing excitedly in exotic languages, the rock garden is juggling miniature stones and there, next to it, on the lawn, is the place where their family picture was taken five years ago, the places where the three of them have set foot can be clearly seen, where they carved the moment in gently and unrelentingly, there the grass is flattened and will not straighten up again.

Actually, it suddenly popped into Krustev’s mind, aren’t these three in college? It’s the middle of May, shouldn’t they be going to lectures right now? He received a full-on lecture in reply. All three of us are taking time off, Maya explained. At the end of sophomore year, lots of people begin doubting whether their major is really for them, they had, too. The three of them had gotten together at the end of last summer and decided that they would give themselves a year to clear things up, then they would decide whether to keep the same majors or to change, interesting, Krustev said, do the three of you always decide what to do as a group? Pretty often, the girl again gave her nervous laugh. It’s been like that since the beginning of high school, always the three of us together. In the beginning everybody thought it was weird, Spartacus cut in, then little by little they got used to it, at the end of the day there are people with much stranger relationships. Krustev couldn’t disagree with that, he himself handled strange relationships well, significantly more successfully than normal ones, take me, for example, Spartacus continued, I’m in law school. Sirma jokes that that’s why I’m such a chatterbox. Right now, I can’t say that I don’t want to study law anymore. It’s just that I need a year off to think things over and figure out whether I really want to go into law or if I’d rather do something else, and now’s the time, because afterwards it will be too late… Sirma wanted to know what Krustev’s major had been. Me? He had studied management. Only it was different then, he shrugged, I never really had the college experience, because of music I started my BA a lot later, after the Euphoria guys and I had ditched our instruments and decided to go into business. And I was in a hurry to graduate, even though I’m sure it would’ve been the same, even without a diploma. While they were teaching me how to run a company, I was already running three. He suddenly thought this sounded too arrogant and added that in those years, that happened a lot, it still does now, too, Maya said.

The road rushed on ahead and took the curves fast, narrow, but nice, repaved recently with the Union’s money, traffic was light, few drivers chose to pass through the heart of the Rhodopes on their way to the sea, and Krustev felt a fleeting, hesitant delight in the freedom to drive freely, without getting furious over the trucks and junkers blocking traffic. Below them, to the left, was the river, high since all the snow had already melted, running its course with a cold and no-nonsense determination; beyond it rippled the newly greened hills. They passed through several villages, long and narrow, built along the river, with two-story houses, their black wooden timbers sternly crossed over whitewashed walls. Since few cars passed, people were walking along the highway here and there, sinewy grandfathers and ancient grandmothers, some even leading goats and from the backseat Sirma for no rhyme or reason announced that she had dreamed of being a goat her whole life, but didn’t manage to expand on her argument, seemingly having dozed off again. Krustev put on some music, Maya and Spartacus, perhaps to make him happy, or perhaps completely spontaneously, sang along quietly and swayed in rhythm such that in their interpretation, the careless rock, designed for Saturday night and chicks in leather jackets, sounded and looked like some mystical Indian mantra. Krustev kept silent, he drove slowly through the villages and looked at the people. They spontaneously reminded him of his grandfather, a strange, scowling person, who always looked angry before you started talking to him, then it turned out that he gladly gave himself over to shooting the breeze and telling stories, mostly amusing tales, one, however, the most recent story, was swollen with darkness and violence, and Krustev thought of it from time to time. His grandfather’s village lay on the border of the Ludogorie region, the only Slavic village around, and his house was on the very edge of the village, near the river, a quiet village, pleasant, albeit a lost cause, the communists had forgotten it in their general industrialization, occupied as they were with the more densely Slavic regions, after the fall of communism the state had left the Slavs in peace once and for all, but back then it was the Dacians’ turn, they had moved into erstwhile Thracian towns, and, of course, in the end they fought, the Thracians called it “The Three Months of Unrest,” while everyone else called it the Civil War of ’73. Before the war, everyone from my grandfather’s village figured that the quarrels between the Thracians and the Dacians weren’t their business, they even joked about how the names of the two peoples rhymed, people for whom they felt equally little love lost, the civil war in the Ludogorie, however, made the hostility their business, too. The battles began, the Dacian militias defended their cities street by street and building by building against the army, who rolled in with tanks, but the tanks didn’t do much good in a war in which you couldn’t see your enemy. Everything really had lasted only three months and Krustev, no matter how young he had been then, could confirm that beyond the region and even in the capital, people were hardly aware of the unrest in practice, his father and mother said the same thing, his grandfather’s village, however, was a whole different story. For three days they heard machine gun fire from the direction of the city, all the radios were turned on in hopes of picking up some news, but they only played cheerful Thracian music around the clock. On the third day, the shooting ceased. A rumor spread that the army had taken the city and that the Dacian fighters had scattered, every man trying to save his own skin however he could. The village mayor warned them not to take any Dacians into their homes, should they arrive. Only five years had passed since the Slavic events in Moesia and everyone was afraid of what might happen if Thracian soldiers came to search the village and found hidden enemy fighters. That evening, my grandfather went out to feed his animals and when he opened the door of the barn, he saw two human eyes. It was a young man, no older than twenty, with dirty, matted hair, a gashed forehead and blood stains on his ragged striped shirt, like the shirts the Dacian militias had worn, he hadn’t even managed to take it off. He was severely wounded and feverish, wheezing, rolling his eyes from the cow to the mule and back again, he didn’t say anything. What could Krustev’s grandfather do? All alone in the very last house, just as his village was all alone between the hammer and the anvil of this war, which was not its own. Perhaps the boy would die before the soldiers came, but perhaps not. He left the barn, grabbed his hoe, went back in and brought it down on the boy’s head with all the geezerly strength left in him. He loaded him on the mule somehow or other and threw him into the river. The neighbors kept quiet. The next day a Thracian regiment really did arrive in the village, searched a few houses, sniffed around suspiciously, doled out slaps to a few young men whose looks they didn’t like, and went on their way. The river carried the corpse away and no one in the village mentioned it, his grandfather, however, for some unclear reason was sure that the neighbors had seen everything, he crossed himself surreptitiously, like under communism, and kept repeating, a terrible sin, a terrible sin, a terrible sin, but what else could I do? He lived a long life. He had told Krustev this story the same year that Elena was born and several months before he died. Much time had already passed, he had taken a second wife, a widow from the village, and he had continued living in the last house by the river. Senility was already getting the best of him and Krustev had even wondered whether he hadn’t made the whole story up, because who, really, who could imagine his grandfather killing someone in cold blood with a hoe? Yes, indeed, he had lived in a different time, he had fought in two wars and had won medals for bravery, so that means he surely had killed people, but not with a hoe and not in his very own barn, although do the place and the method really change anything, Krustev grunted and tried to keep his mind on the road.

Sirma announced her latest awakening with a powerful yawn and a quick commentary on her friends’ mantra-like chanting, and for the next half hour they all talked over one another, including Krustev. The asphalt was much better than on the last road. Maya, for her part, had never come this way. They argued for some time about whether she really hadn’t. Krustev asked them whether they hitchhiked often. Not very often, they had done it more in high school. Surely his daughter had tagged along with them as well, but in any case, his observations about the decline of hitchhiking were confirmed. The three of them generally tried to hitch together, sometimes they tried other combinations, but it never went as well. Spartacus had once hitched with three other guys and only a Gypsy horse cart had deigned to drive them between two villages, after which they split up, otherwise it was never going to work. Sirma, for her part, had hitched alone a couple times. Didn’t you ever run into any trouble? No, only once, when a woman had picked her up. Everyone laughed at that, even Krustev. He was feeling better and better, he was tempted to say more normal, but he was no longer sure whether this was normal or whether, on the contrary, the scowling pre-dawn, semi-twilight he had inhabited for such a long time was. There had been flashes during the winter, too, but then Elena had left and he had collapsed again, only he didn’t turn on the television, but read instead, first he read the books he had been given on various occasions in recent years, then the ones Elena had left in her room, after that he went to an online bookstore and ordered a whole series of contemporary titles in translation, they were delivered by van, an astonished young man unloaded two full cardboard boxes in his hallway and left, shaking his head pensively, Krustev read them, some were good, others not so good, but once he had closed the last one—a novel by a Dutch writer about a malicious, blind cellist—he decided that he wouldn’t read anymore and that he had to get out of the house. Maya said that she thought she had forgotten her bathing suit. As if we haven’t seen you without your bathing suit on, Spartacus replied, then realized that they weren’t alone and fell silent, embarrassed. The three of them seemed to spend so much time together that when they found themselves with other people, they quickly forgot about the others’ presence. With the involuntary habit of the male imagination, Krustev envisioned the girl sitting next to him without her bathing suit for an instant and felt uncomfortable about it, as if he had made her an indecent proposal. She was his daughter’s age. Sirma preferred Samothrace to Thasos. Samo-thrace, only Thracians, Krustev joked, without knowing whether they spoke Slavic, but at least Sirma seemed to get it and repeated in delight: Only Thracians, how cool is that! Thasos and Samothrace, the two islands the new state had managed to save when the Macedonian legacy was divvied up. Like many other Slavs, Krustev, with a nostalgia instilled by foreign books, sometimes dreamed of Macedonian times, when the Slavs were merely one of the dozens of people who had inhabited the empire and were in no case so special that they should be subjected to attempts at assimilation, but still, things were clearly changing. Twenty years ago, Thracian kids wouldn’t have taken a ride from a Slav. Twenty years ago, there weren’t many Slavs with their own cars and even fewer of them would have dared to drive straight through the Rhodopes. Had they been to any other Aegean islands? Last year the three of them had made it to Lemnos, while Maya had gone to Santorini with her father. We also want to go to Lesbos, Sirma announced. You two go right on ahead to Lesbos, Spartacus said, that island doesn’t interest me a bit, they all burst out laughing. Krustev was impressed, however. So now that’s possible, he said. We’re all part of the Union and the borders are open. Do you know how hard it was to get a Phrygian visa back in the day? Especially for me, Sirma suddenly blurted out, seeing as how my grandfather is Lydian. But she had never set foot in Lydia. Spartacus and Maya looked extremely surprised, apparently not so much at her parentage, rather at the fact that there was something about her that they didn’t know. The mood crashed for a whole five minutes, at which point Spartacus started talking about Euphoria’s first album again, asking Krustev whether he had it with him in the car and insisting on putting it on. Later, Krustev replied, because in disbelieving gratitude for this kind-hearted twist of fate, he felt himself wanting to sleep, the curves ahead were giving off warm sleep, and when on the outskirts of the next village he saw a shabby roadside dive, he stopped immediately to drink a coffee.

[2]

What crazy good luck—to get picked up by someone who can drive them wherever they want to go, and he’s not just some jerk, but Elena’s dad! If she hadn’t been sitting, Maya would’ve jumped for joy. When I get home, I’m gonna sit down and write her an email. Now here’s a good reason, it was stupid of them not to write, to avoid each other because of some childish stunts from two whole years ago. Elena’s dad looked like her—with ash-blond hair and a round Slavic face, whose features were perhaps too soft for a man, but which for that reason lent it a pleasant warmth, dignifying the otherwise severe nose and habitually pursed lips. It was strange, of course, to take off in your car just like that, aimlessly, on a long drive, that’s what he told them, and a couple times he seemed to hint at some problems, indeed, he didn’t look at all like a happy person, maybe it has something to do with Elena, she often created problems, why lie, although it could also have something to do with his wife, his health, his business. Maya wondered how rich he was. The car—she couldn’t see the make, and she didn’t know anything about cars anyway—was big, nice, comfortable, it drove smoothly but did not look luxurious by any stretch of the imagination. Elena, at least back then, hadn’t had a lot of money. But their house was positively mind-blowing: spacious, light, opening out onto a huge garden, where she had met Dobrin at one of Elena’s parties, lots of Elena’s friends were Slavs and that surely made sense at the end of the day, and Dobrin in particular was really a good guy, fully in keeping with his name, which meant “good” in Slavic, but, of course, nothing lasts forever. And Boril Krustev was surely rich, but he didn’t like showing it off with luxury and that definitely spoke well of him. How old was he? He looked young, definitely younger than her own father, with an almost athletic build, in fact, with a clean conscience you could say he was a good-looking man, yes, Elena was also pretty, a little too pretty, and she had been ever since she was a kid. Maya stared at the man’s hands on the wheel, despite the fact that he was relatively husky, his fingers were rather delicate, a musician’s fingers, after all, she told herself, even though B.B. King played divinely with his fat little sausages.

So Sirma was of Lydian descent. Maya couldn’t have been more surprised if Sirma had suddenly mentioned casually that Sirma wasn’t her real name, but instead something entirely different. Because her Lydian descent wasn’t what mattered here, but the absurd fact that Sirma hadn’t talked about it during all the years they had known one another, not only known one another, but had become a common organism, the three of them with Spartacus. It’s like your right leg blurting out to your left hand something it had never suspected, hmm, maybe that isn’t the best comparison, but given that it was something that wasn’t important in the least, why hadn’t she mentioned it until now? Was this some sort of secret, which had broken the skin that had concealed it suddenly and without resistance? In that case, Maya likely would have taken it better, she would’ve acknowledged her friend’s right to have secrets, things she didn’t want to talk about; but to keep quiet about something that didn’t matter, that wasn’t OK, because it puts you in a privileged position and Maya was taken aback by the whole pointlessness of the miscarried secret.

Elena’s dad picked exactly that moment in her thoughts to ask how the three of them had met. They had met on the first day of high school, so it had been almost seven years now, which wasn’t such a short time at all. Maya remembered very well how, curious, flustered and slightly scared, she had gone into the yard of her new school, a wide paved space swarming with unfamiliar faces, buzzing with unfamiliar voices—nobody here knew what they were in for, nobody knew what their class would be like, whether they’d make friends quickly, nobody knew who they’d end up sharing a desk with, who would be peeking into their notebook and whether that desk-mate would reek like garlic, here there were no longstanding desk-mates, everyone—OK, fine, with a few minor exceptions, but that only confirmed the rule—everyone was a stranger, everything was new for everyone, and everything had to start from the beginning, the first day of school was the first day of the world. Maya was convinced that she would screw something up and later it turned out that she really had screwed something up: she had gone to the wrong line, right next to the one her future class was forming, the faces in both lines were equally unfamiliar and there was no way to recognize her mistake, she timidly started talking to the girl next to her, who looked extremely bored with the welcoming ceremony, she wasn’t carrying a backpack, but a canvas army-surplus bag like soldiers used, and actually she looked quite sketchy to Maya, but still she had to shoot the breeze with someone, and it turns out that was Sirma. Maya realized her mistake only when the classes started off towards their respective homerooms, so that the rabbits could introduce themselves to one another in peace, then she saw that 8-IV was written above the door her line was going into, and not 8-III, this was an additional muddle on top of everything else; this year the Ministry was instituting some reform which nobody understood, but in any case, the preparatory classes at the language high schools would now be called “eighth grade,” and in contrast to the already-existing eighth grade classes, which had been preparatory the previous year, they would be divided up not by letters, but by Roman numerals, such that the chaos was total: if they asked you what grade you were in, you could no longer just say “eighth,” you had to explain whether you were from the letter ones or the numeral ones, the latter, of course, were younger, and in the end the upper grades thought up their own way of differentiating the two grades: the established eighth graders were just eighth graders, while the new eighth graders, who really should have been preparatory… Sirma had told her one day some time at the end of the fall. You know what the older kids call us? Fakes. Why fakes, Maya didn’t get it. Because those guys are the real eighth-graders, while we’re pretending to be eighth-graders, we’re trying to fake them out, get it, when in fact we’re nothing but a prep class—fakes. I’m not trying to fake anybody out, Maya said, and I don’t get it at all, it’s not like we decided what they’d call our classes. We didn’t, said Sirma, but that’s how it is, just go try to talk to one of the upperclassmen and when you tell him you’re in eighth grade, he’ll ask you: Are you an eighth or a fake? Maya didn’t know any of the upperclassmen and had nothing to say to any of them, but she was indignant nonetheless. Why the hell fakes? They stayed fakes, however, right up until the class ahead of them graduated: eighth-fakes, ninth-fakes, tenth-fakes, eleventh-fakes, and only then did they suddenly become the one and only twelfth grade, liberated from that shameful suffix, a change which surely could have offered some kind of gratification, if they had cared in the least. Back then, however, on the first day of the new world, Maya stopped, groaned and almost burst out crying, not because it was so fatal that she had missed out on talking to some girl from her own class instead of the neighboring one, but because she really, and I mean really, had known that something would get screwed up, and look, that’s exactly what happened. She pulled away from the line and set out against the human stream to get to the previous room. She took a deep breath and felt relief when she saw that the students there looked just as random and nondescript as the others, empty blackboards for acquaintance, just waiting for friendships, bad blood, crushes, and inanity to be written on them. Since was the last to come in, all the seats were taken, except one—in the back row, next to a tall and gangly boy with black hair and a dorky prepubescent moustache on his upper lip. Maya hesitated, because she preferred not to sit next to a boy, but she didn’t have a choice and everyone, including the teacher, was starting to look at her. She went all the way to the other end of the room, smiled and sat down. With a breaking voice like the buzzing of a fly hitting glass, the boy introduced himself: Spartacus.

On the road, Spartacus was digging around in his backpack for water, his backpack had stayed in the back seat, Krustev couldn’t fit them all in the trunk, and Spartacus had to untie his mat and loosen the straps to get the bottle out, while Sirma made fun of him for not putting his water in a side pocket. From that first day when Maya had met Spartacus, he was constantly digging around in all sorts of backpacks, bags, satchels, plastic bags, and pulling the most bizarre things out of them: rare CDs and even cassettes, wax figures, which he crafted himself at home, pieces of candy that looked suspiciously like pills, flying sheets of paper, which he wrote funny sayings on, used bus tickets, ketchup-stained cash. When she had sat down next to him in the back row, she was convinced he would annoy her. Lord only knows what he’d come up with to show off, to impress her, most likely he’d draw on the desk. The desk, however, had already been covered by Spartacus’s predecessor (someone from the real eighth grade), and the boy did nothing more notable than chewing on his pen. The introductions had begun. Each person got up, turned towards the class and said a few words about himself: usually only his name, what school he was coming from and how many years he had been studying English, now and then somebody would brag that he was on the basketball team or played guitar. Maya diligently tried to remember the connections between the faces and names, but when the introductions were finally over, she discovered that most of the desks remained blank spaces and only here and there did she manage to connect the two most visible constituent parts of her new classmates. Spartacus turned to her for the first time: Do you remember anybody? No one said anything that might help me remember their name. His or her name, Maya corrected him and he fell silent, flustered. What’s my name, she asked him. Uhh… Joanna? No, no I’m just kidding, I remember you for sure, you’re Diana. He chuckled in satisfaction at his own joke. Very funny, Maya said.

There were two reasons to stay at the same desk with Spartacus. First, she felt awkward moving, it would have seemed rude. Second, there was nowhere for her to move to: did everyone really like their new desk-mates so much or did everyone feel the same awkwardness or perhaps they were just lazy, but no pair from the first day changed places until much later. Quite soon the others began whispering, look, the first romance in the class had already sprung up. Maya could not imagine falling in love with Spartacus, nor did he show any particular interest in her. They cautiously felt out some shared terrain: he was into soccer and rock, Maya had nothing to say about the first topic, but they more or less saw eye-to-eye where rock was concerned. Maya smiled, how had their conversations gone in those first days, maximally reduced to the catechistic formula. Have you heard so-and-so? Yeah. And have you heard so-and-so? Nope. Oh man, you gotta hear ’em. Okay. And have you heard so-and-so? They went on like that for fifteen minutes and felt immense satisfaction upon grasping even the most superficial signals marking them as kindred souls. At thirteen, Maya thought to herself, you really can become friends with someone merely because you both listen to Zeppelin. Which might sound unfair towards someone you have grown so close to, but after all, there had been some beginning when you were strangers and it had to start from somewhere. It had taken quite some time, however. For the first few months, Maya mainly hung out with a couple girls who walked home in the same direction, they got on the bus together, only to scatter at different stops, yes, that was the other automatic system for establishing initial relationships when you were a rabbit-fake: one became friends with the people one walked home from school with, and not the other way around.

Is it too windy back there, Elena’s father asked. He had opened his window and Maya watched him thirstily drinking in the mountain air, heavy with the scent of pine sap. Spartacus and Sirma said it wasn’t. They discussed the Rhodope mountain chalets. Or rather, they recalled shared stories, because, of course, they had made the rounds of the Rhodope chalets in question together, the three of them. Maya struggled to think of when exactly she had met them: strange, she remembered everything so clearly, but precisely this, such a key moment, escaped her. Had she and Spartacus gone to the snack bar and there, in front of them in line, was that girl from the neighboring class with the army-surplus bag and the ironic smile? Even though back then, in that first month, the math teacher was on extended leave and the gym teacher had agreed to combined their classes, so neither group would have big holes in their schedules, so they had had gym together, forming huge mobs on the soccer field or basketball court, and in general everything had turned into one big goof-off fest, she might have met them then, or perhaps as late as the green school in December, although that was unlikely, it had to have been earlier, because by the time of the green school the three of them were already hanging out together. On the other hand, Maya remembered very well when and how things had abruptly gotten complicated and how she, to her own most sincere astonishment, had felt helpless and biting jealousy.

She and her mother had gone out to buy her some jeans. They had already been making the rounds of the stores on the main shopping street for more than an hour in the March slush and they couldn’t find anything that fit both her and her budget, as well as fulfilling Maya’s light-beige color requirement. They were just coming out of yet another store and Maya was about to tell her mother that she couldn’t take it anymore and was ready to acquiesce to the most pedestrian blue denim just to get it over with, when Sirma and Spartacus appeared on the sidewalk in front of her. They were absorbed in conversation, Spartacus jutted up a whole head above her and was nodding so vigorously that his poofy hair, which he was trying to grow out, bobbed rhythmically and made him look a bit like a poodle. Sirma was explaining something excitedly and looked unusually pleased with herself. Maya stared. She would’ve pretended not to see them, she would’ve let them pass and given them the third degree on Monday, but from his height Spartacus noticed her, at first he jumped, but then he started waving ecstatically. Talk about theatrics! Sirma’s black curls were positively glowing. Hey, what are you doing here, Maya? I’d ask the same of you; Mom, these are my schoolmates; ohhh, it’s so nice to meet you, so you’re Sirma and Spartacus, I’ve heard a lot about you, why don’t you come over some time, in a matter of seconds her mother’s sharp eye had managed to look them over carefully, pausing on Sirma’s scrawl-covered army-surplus bag and the pins on Spartacus’s jacket, while they giggled idiotically and explained that a new music store had opened up further down the street. Maya was livid. She wished them a pleasant afternoon, went into the next store with her mom and—oh, parody of wonders!—finally discovered the yearned-for light-beige jeans, which according to her mother fit her perfectly, really, said Maya, well, Okay then.

And on Monday she headed for school in her light-beige jeans, while under her coat, unbeknownst to her mother, who would have been shocked at such recklessness, it was still winter, after all, she wore only a tight pink shirt, which had shrunk sufficiently to accentuate her breasts and show her navel, she put on lipstick, she would’ve put on more make-up if her mother had already left for work, but there was no way to do so now, she made herself up for the first time a whole three months later for a party and the results were catastrophic, so she went to school like that, purposely dawdling on the way so she would arrive a minute or two after the teacher, she took off her jacket and was left in her pink shirt, she burst into the classroom triumphantly and… Spartacus wasn’t there. She sat at the desk alone. Ways for expressing repeated past action: past continuous tense, used to, would. I used to go out often with my friends. During the break, Sirma herself popped into their room, hugged her and informed her that the music store was great and that Spartacus was sick with the flu.

When Spartacus returned to school, however, everything seemed to continue as before, the three of them went out together and Maya didn’t see any signs of a greater intimacy between Sirma and him, which annoyed her all the more, because the awful anticipation of seeing them kissing at any moment ate away at her. One afternoon, when she was home alone, 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 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.

I’m not hungry, Krustev said, but it’s already past noon, so eat something if you want and don’t worry, it’s on me. Let’s get a trout a piece, Sirma said. Maya started protesting Krustev’s plan to treat them, but he just shrugged. If you want trout, I’ll go check out the breeding pool. They didn’t get it. To see what kind of shape it’s in, Krustev explained. You do know, right, that trout live in clear, running water. The breeding pool is a compromise of sorts, because, of course, it’s hard to build a pub right on the banks of a rushing river where trout spawn and to catch them straight from there; however, most breeding pools are full of mud, the water is stagnant, the fish don’t budge, and that, of course, affects their quality. Well, we’re not that fussy, Spartacus said, but in any case, I, for one, am not hungry yet. I dunno, this place doesn’t really whet my appetite. A sandwich and a thermos out on the grass, now that’s something else entirely, Maya agreed. So they remained in the dark as to the living standard of the local trout and drank another round of coffee. Spartacus sensed his body’s resistance to the artificially inspired liveliness. He had gotten up at six. He had eaten a roll, packed his bag and left, while his mother, as usual, had gotten up to see him off at the door with admonitions to be careful. They were meeting at Sirma’s studio and while riding there on the somnolent bus, he wondered at his own stupidity—why hadn’t he done like Maya, who had packed her bag the previous day, brought it over to Sirma’s and slept there. The two of them had overslept, of course: he rang the doorbell at length, Sirma finally answered with a yawn and waved him in. You couldn’t talk to her until she’d had her coffee. Then they had to eat breakfast. It was past eight when they left, and it took them another half-hour to get outside the city on the rickety, reeking bus and to set up their ambush. They got picked up quickly, as they always did when the three of them hitched together. The man was sleepy and noncommunicative, but he clearly felt better in their company, he was going to Philippopolis, but he circled the city and left them on the outskirts so they could more easily continue south, he smiled at them and told them to have a nice trip. They waited for the next car. It wasn’t a highway, mostly locals took this road and the few cars that appeared going their direction usually turned out to be packed to bursting with cabbage, empty crates, and mysterious black sacks. Finally some ancient Scythian junker stopped for them, a true relic from the times of the Eurasian Alliance, out of which leapt a jolly middle-aged windbag who cheerfully announced: Step into the Caucasian Ford! Loaded with four people and heavy backpacks, the Caucasian Ford sputtered down the road, while the windbag showered them with information about his personage. He was a writer (a member of the Association of Independent Thracian Writers), he had five published books—two novels and three collections of poetry—and now was writing his third novel, to balance things out, heh heh. What are you studying, kids? Llllllaw? Frrrrrrench? What about you, my girl? Arrrrrrchitecture?! Aha, a kindred soul! art is a magnificent thing, yes indeedy, but you gotta think about earning your daily bread, buuut! as it says in the Gospel, man does not live by bread alone, no sirree, he does not live by bread alone! he needs wine, too, heh heh heh. I, for my part, am a writer. Two novels and thrrrree! collections of poetry! Where are you heading, kids? To the Aegean? Well, isn’t that nice, but why’d you come this way, why not take the highway, here you better be ready to ssssslosh! around the curves, and besides, there’s not much traffic, goll dang it, not much traffic at all, this region has gone to the dogs, I’m from here, from the Rhodopes, from a vvvillage, Katuntsi’s the name of it, but I’ve long since moved to the city, but now! I’m off to see what’s going on in the vvvillage! to see the old house, well now my brother’s living there, the man retired with a capital R and up and went back to the vvvillage, and he was right about that, do y’all live in Sevtopolis then? Yes, Maya said patiently. Good God damn, the windbag said, but that Sevtopolis is one big mmmadhouse. The vvvvillage is nice, you can write there. Maybe there! is where I’ll go this summer to finish my novel. Spartacus politely inquired as to what the novel was about. I write about people, I do, the windbag warmed up, about ordinary folks with a capital F! But I think up some plots for ’em! All kinds of stories, this ’n that, all intricate-like, so there’s a thrrrill to it!—and just guess how I’ve twisted around this story with a capital S now! it’s a love story with a capital L, buuut! at one point the woman accidentally stumbles across her husband’s test results—HIVeeee! positive. And she just loses it, right, ’cause she is preggers with a capital P! And that’s just the first twist of many… Buuut! I won’t give away the ending so y’all will buy the book when it comes out! They promised to do so. Fortunately, the turn-off for Katuntsi came up quickly and the windbag left them by the exit. Well now, he said, what’d I tell ya? that Caucasian Ford did the job with a capital J, as did I right along with it! Well, happy trails! Buuut! tell your friends that a real live writer with a capital W drove you! If you ask me, Spartacus said as the Caucasian Ford puttered away down the dirt road towards Katuntsi, before becoming a writer, that guy was army with a capital A. The girls giggled. That was entertaining, said Sirma, buuut! we’re gonna be stuck here on this bumblefuck road for a good long time. However, they hadn’t been waiting more than two minutes when a shiny red car appeared on the road, they immediately stuck out their thumbs and the car stopped. A middle-aged man poked his head out the window and Sirma yelled: Where are you going? I don’t know, the man said. It doesn’t matter to me. Get in.