A Spare Life

That June afternoon on the outskirts of Skopje, in front of our apartment building, Srebra, Roza, and I were playing a new game: fortune-telling. On the steaming cement of the lane that sloped down to the residents' garages, we drew squares with white chalk and wrote the age at which we hoped to get married inside them. We would attract the attention of every passerby and, sitting on their balconies or standing by the apartment building's open windows, even the neighbors who knew us well would stare at us, because my sister and I were twins—conjoined twins—our heads fused at the temple right above my left ear and her right ear. We were born like that, to our misfortune and our parents' great shame. We both had long thick chestnut-brown hair that concealed the place where we were joined, or at least we thought so. At first glance, it appeared as if we were squatting and leaning our heads together, our bodies free the full length down. We were dressed in light strapless summer tube dresses. I was in a green dress with little yellow flowers, and my sister was in a red one with blue and white dots.

At the age of twelve, the only thing my sister Srebra and I, Zlata, were ashamed of was our names. Why would any parents name their children Srebra and Zlata—
silver
and
gold
—let alone children already marked by conjoined heads as freaks of nature in their community? These were the names of old women, cleaning ladies, or women who sold potatoes in front of the bakery. Whenever we complained to her about our names, our mother silenced us with the justification: “That's what your godfather wanted: Zlata after Saint Zlata Meglenska, and Srebra after a woman named Srebra Apostolova who killed two Turkish
beys
in Lerin.”

“That's stupid,” is what we always said; it was one of the few things we agreed on. Our godfather never once set foot in our house after the christening; it was as if the earth had swallowed him up. In fact, he took off for Australia to earn a living and erased us from his consciousness forever.

“Zlata's a birdbrain and Srebra's a turd brain!” children called after us, taunting us in the street; with the exception of Roza and occasionally Bogdan, no one ever played with us. Some parents, to shield their kids from nightmares, forbade them to associate with us freaks, but other kids fled from us of their own free will and threw rocks at us from a distance, shouting, “retards!”

Roza was the only one who didn't have a problem with our physical deformity. She lived on the second floor of our building; she was a year older than us, and had thick, curly black hair and dark skin; she was a little on the short side, but was sturdy. There are children so delicate, with skinny legs, pale faces, and small hazel eyes, like us, that you'd think the wind would blow them away, and then there are those that look muscular, healthy, like they'd be heavy in one's arms, with strong hands, like Roza. She was so strong-willed and adamant that we always agreed to her proposals.

That day was no different from any other; she suggested that we draw squares, inscribe in them the age at which we wished to get married, then, above the squares, the initials of three boys we liked (potential husbands), and below the squares, the numbers one to three (how many children we might have); on the left, letters to designate how much money our husbands would have:
P
for poor,
R
for rich, and
M
for multimillionaire, and then on the right, the first letters of three cities in which we would like to live. My square and Srebra's were close to each other; Roza drew hers a little way off. Then each of us counted the characters around the edge as many times as indicated by the number in the middle of the square, circling the letter or number we landed on, and then continuing around (skipping any circled characters) until we had calculated out our circles. Here is a sketch of what the lives we imagined for ourselves looked like:

Roza was to get married in eight years, which seemed a long way off, when she turned twenty-one, as her mother had been, and she'd marry a boy whose name began with
P
. Yes, it was nice that she would end up with Panait from the Greek village of Katerini, where she went on vacation every summer with her family to stay in an old house near the cathedral that had apartments for rent. Panait lived in the house next door with a garden; he was a nice boy who had learned a few Macedonian words on account of his love for Roza, enough for shy communication in addition to glances, hide-and-seek, and swimming together in the sea.

“Sure, we'll be poor!” she exclaimed, because that was what her counting had given her: Panait would be poor, they'd have one child, and would live in Salonika, the city Panait loved more than any other in the world because he'd been born there. He had been premature, but his life had been saved, so once a year, he and his parents went on a pilgrimage to the Church of Saint Demetrius to give thanks to the saint. “Only one child,” Roza said sadly, because she had imagined one day, when she was grown and happily married to Panait, she would have a house full of children, or at least two, like her and her sister, who was three years older.

For Srebra, who wished to get married at twenty-three, it worked out that she would marry a boy whose name began with
D
(she had had no particular name in mind; she had just scribbled it off the top of her head just to have three boys' names); D would be rich, and they were to have two children (“Good for you!” Roza exclaimed), and live in a city whose name began with
L
.

“London!” I cried, and in my surprise, tugged on her head as I jerked my own. “Why London? You don't even know what it looks like! And it's really far away! I don't want to live in London! How will you live there if I don't live there, too? You only think about yourself!”

Even from my earliest childhood I had felt Srebra was always thinking only of herself and couldn't care less that we were joined at the head and couldn't possibly lead separate lives, but only a single one, shared, as if we were one person in two half-fused bodies. We had to do everything together: eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, go to school, go out, go in, everything. Even when we were little, if she needed to pee during the night, she threw off the comforter and jumped out of bed, which meant she, with no consideration at all, tugged at me, jolting me awake and forcing me to my feet even though I was still in a haze between the dreamworld and reality. The pain was so intense in the spot where we were conjoined that I'd scream in horror, while Srebra, teeth clenched, was already running to the bathroom, dragging me with her. Once there, while one of us sat on the toilet, the other had to sit too, which meant plopping down on the blue plastic trashcan that we moved to the left or right of the toilet depending on which of us was on the seat. Into that trashcan we threw away the paper—which was not scented toilet paper, but typewriter paper my mother would sneak from her office and then tear into quarters so we could wipe ourselves after doing our business—and also kitchen waste, leftovers, all manner of garbage.