A Spare Life (12 page)

dirty whore
, all the while shaking me left and right. I was silent the whole time, but finally, a moment came when I couldn't contain myself, and I screamed, “You know, it feels really good! There's nothing more pleasurable than that!” Srebra dragged me into our room, grabbed the clown, twisted his head with all the strength she could muster, and ripped it off. Scraps of cloth and bits of foam fell from his neck. The clown's head emptied and it flattened, but the cap was still hard and full. With her teeth Srebra ripped the seam connecting the head to the body. From the split seam spurted bits of rag and small balls of foam, like pearls. “Now let's see how you screw yourself!” Srebra said to me as she kicked the clown. I cried; tears poured silently down my cheeks, large and fast. I cried, but not only about the clown. I cried about everything, about myself, about Srebra, about everything. A flood of emptiness drenched my heart; pain spread through my entire body. I cried that I no longer had the clown, I cried that I no
longer had Roza, I cried that I no longer had Bogdan, I cried that Grandma and Grandpa were so far from us. I cried that our uncle had married an unsuitable woman, I cried that I no longer had little Igor. I cried for all the losses that occurred to me; I remembered all the sorrows that I'd hidden in my heart. I cried that Srebra was my sister, I cried that I, Zlata, was Srebra's sister, and I cried because our godfather had given us those names. I cried because our mother and father had daughters like us, and because we had parents like them; I cried because I was alive. Srebra had likely expected I would get angry, that I would argue and shout, but now she was completely bewildered. She fell silent and didn't know what to say; she did not know whether it was better to say something or remain silent and wait for me to calm down. I cried for a long time, sobbing, until my lips were dry and purple, and I shook and shook Srebra's head with my sobs, but she remained silent, and we somehow dragged ourselves to school, late for the second class of the day. Along the way, I kept repeating silently, “Our neighborhood is in Gazi Baba, Gazi Baba is in Skopje, Skopje is in Macedonia, Macedonia is in Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia is in Europe, Europe is in the world, the world is the planet Earth.” I repeated the sentence over and over while pressing the small icon of Zlata Meglenska in the pocket of my light jacket. Was that my mantra, my strange prayer? I know that I always repeated it when I was at the nadir, when I saw no escape. I repeated that sentence the morning when we left for the village on the day of Roza's burial. As I'd looked at our mother's back and the windshield in front of her as we passed through forests that had turned green, I repeated my geographic mantra, only changing the starting point—in place of our neighborhood, sometimes it was Grandma and Grandpa's village, or Pretor, or Lukin Vir.

That day we grew distant, but also the most connected we had ever been. Nothing was said in words. I felt we would be closer if we could separate, but now, trapped by the fusion of our heads, we remained strangers, almost enemies. I felt as if a channel had closed within me, as if I had become as distant as possible from Srebra and our connection had become merely a physical defect, not a spiritual one. Inside, I felt freer than ever, thinking I could fly away if there weren't that senseless physical impediment. I felt Srebra close into herself as well; at moments it resembled contempt. We went out less and less. We sat at home, on our chair in the dining room. I read a book; Srebra watched television. That is how we spent our free time.

On February 15, 1987, Uncle Kole brought us an invitation to Mara's wedding, which was to take place on March 1, at the Olympia restaurant. Our parents went, but they didn't take us, just as they usually didn't take us to the weddings of more distant relations so people wouldn't look at us and talk. “It was lovely, just lovely,” Mom said when they got back, “but there were a lot of tears; everyone cried; everyone cried themselves out, and Mara, poor thing, was such a beautiful bride, but sad and pale; it isn't easy for her without Roza.” For two nights, I dreamed of Roza in her wedding gown, her white shoes with the toes pointing up. Srebra softened a little. She suggested we go to the theater. On March 3, 1987, we went to the theater for the first time, to see
Sarah Bernhardt
. Srebra made me promise that if we went to see
Sarah Bernhardt
, we would also go see Jordan Plevneš's play
R
. I promised. I loved
Sarah Bernhardt
. The story tore me apart; her life seemed unique. The woman sitting behind us asked us not to sit with our heads together; “I can't see anything,” she said. And we turned toward her the way a wolf turns with its whole body; with our two bodies and our two heads, and we stared at her. “And what's more, you're impudent,” she whispered as we swallowed the saliva in our throats so we could answer her. “Our heads are conjoined,” Srebra whispered as quietly as possible, but several people turned toward us nonetheless. No doubt, several of those people remember that they saw the play
Sarah Bernhardt
only because they remember two girls with conjoined heads sitting there. Whether we wanted to or not, we became a
memento in the albums of unknown people.
R
was scary; at one point, I was restless and wanted to stand, but Srebra was engrossed in the performance; her eyes devoured the stage set and everything happening on it. I closed my eyes and just listened to the dialogue; it seemed different from anything I had ever heard spoken aloud, different from anything on television, as if it were a language that first had to be learned. I recognized the words from books, but not from sentences spoken aloud. We did not go to any other theatrical productions for the rest of 1987, but at home, we alternated reading
Sarah Bernhardt
and
R
several times. On March 21, our father brought the
Vujaklija
dictionary home from the city for us. Milan Vujaklija's dictionary of foreign words and expressions was 1,050 pages long, with explanations of more than 260,000 words. Srebra and I set it on the bed, then lay on our stomachs to read the words, each of us reading a page at a time. That was also how we learned English, by reading dictionaries. When we returned from school on March 26, another surprise awaited us—our father had bought a dual-cassette deck. It cost twelve million old dinars, he told our mother, and was made by the Italian company Lancio. “You only buy nonsense,” Mom said. “As if they need books and a cassette player.” Father just replied, “Well, don't you know everything,” and nothing made him mad that day. But in the days that followed, his mood changed three hundred times an hour. Once again, there were times I wanted to address him using the formal
vie
form for “you”; the thought overtaking me whenever I was angry or hated him. For years, our father had bought us Animal Kingdom brand chocolates, and he called us “beasts.” He collected the little stickers that came with the chocolates in a blue envelope he kept in the cupboard beside their bed. Sometimes when they were at work, Srebra and I secretly climbed up on a chair to get the envelope from among the other things hidden in the cupboard. We never bought the album you were supposed to stick them in. We never even sorted the stickers on the table; our father just collected them in the blue envelope our mother had brought from work. When we wanted to see the pictures, he would shout: “Great, now it occurs to you; I'll have to go rummage around.” And I would really want to address him formally, to show him
that I despised him, that we were not father and daughter, but strangers. Srebra, it seemed, didn't have that desire. I used that formal pronoun to punish the people I despised (some of them, like our father, whom I also loved). I wanted to pull away, to distance myself from their viciousness, and in so doing, protect myself. I was also formal with Uncle Boro, our neighbor who hadn't spoken to our mother in years on account of some minor quarrel the year we moved into our apartment, and because he would yell to Srebra and me, “Where are you, two-heads?” When he died, Mom went to his funeral with the rest of the neighbors. I was overtaken by uncontrollable crying that entire afternoon while all the people from our building were at the funeral and Srebra and I were left sitting in the big room—Srebra putting cards in order on the table and minding her own business, while I put my elbows on the table and wept, accidentally knocking her cards all over the place. I don't know whether I was crying specifically for Uncle Boro, who died just a few months after returning from an engineering job in Kuwait, or because I imagined the deaths of all the people I knew: those I loved, those I didn't, and even those whom I addressed with the formal pronoun
vie
. “Don't be a hypocrite,” Srebra said. “You didn't even say good morning to him on the stairs, and now you're crying because he died.” I cried the same way when Desanka Maksimović's “A Bloody Fairy Tale” was broadcast on television. It was a morning program bringing back memories of the National Liberation War. The murder of schoolchildren in the Serbian town of Kragujevac during the Second World War was described in detail. One of our aunts, who lived in Kragujevac, had given us a small statue of the V-shaped monument commemorating that event—white, uneven, on a black base. I ran my hands along the small statue and waited for Srebra to touch it as well, but she only said, “How can you cry for people you don't know, when you barely shed a tear for Roza?” She was right; I found it easier to cry for people I didn't know, like peeling an onion; the tear ducts just opened and the tears poured down my face, but for those close to me, it is more difficult. You think there's something stuck in your throat, something throbbing in your head, your heart beats in your temples, but your eyes are
dry, dry, too dry, like an iron dam holding back a reservoir. So tight not a single tear can pass through the cracks in your soul. But once it does, there's no end—your whole body weeps, your entire being, not just your eyes. I even wept when Indira Gandhi was killed by Sikhs, although I knew her only from television. Since then, something has bound me tightly to India; I feel an attraction to that country. Years later, I dreamed of marrying Rahul Gandhi, the extremely handsome grandson of Indira. But neither the letter
R
nor New Delhi had occurred to me when Srebra, Roza, and I were playing the fortune-telling game. “That game doesn't mean anything,” said Srebra. “Roza's fate didn't come true, did it? If it had, Roza would still be alive.” True, I thought, the game didn't mean anything; perhaps I should try a different game. Better to play the game of waiting for the hands of the clock to align and then thinking of a three-digit number, then adding up the digits to see what letter of the alphabet it corresponded to, and someone with that initial would think of me. It wasn't
A
, or
B
, or
C
. Emptiness took hold of me, body and soul; after Srebra ripped the clown apart I felt an emptiness between my legs at night, and I had to poke my fingers into that space that longed to be filled. I didn't know whether to pity myself or Srebra, who didn't know the secret of corporal bliss. When I read books about love, I could imagine what the main characters were doing, how they felt. But Srebra could not.

Who knows what was going on with our father then, but he was more generous than he had ever been. Once, we heard him tell Mom that he had become president of his union. Maybe that's why he had a bit more money, and in addition to
Vujaklija
and the cassette player, he bought us each a digital watch and a midsized red accordion that looked like a toy, but was a real accordion. “It's for sharing, so take turns,” he said. First Srebra took a turn. She let out a couple of sounds, stretched it several times, turned it all around, counted the keys and buttons, played a few more notes, then shoved it into my hands. I was holding an accordion for the first time in my life. I dragged Srebra to the kitchen table. I set the accordion down on it, and took a sheet of the typing paper our mother brought home from work from the pile that stood on the chair on which no one ever sat. The paper, cut in quarters, was what we used in the bathroom for toilet paper; I put the sheet in a slit in the accordion, and began to pound on the keys as if it were a typewriter. I never did play the accordion, but I used it as a pretend typewriter. Srebra would play a few random notes, but I would immediately lay it down horizontally on the table and type on it, banging as if I were writing something very important. “Do you at least know what you're writing?” Srebra asked me scornfully, breathing rapidly. “Do you think you are Agatha Christie or Mir-Jam?” “No, I want to be like Zola, or Dostoevsky, or Lawrence.” “You can't; they're men.” “Then I'll be like, like…” I wanted to reel off the names of several female writers, but the only name that came to mind was the Macedonian writer Olivera Nikolova. “I want to be like Olivera Nikolova,” I said, but Srebra shot back, “Dream on!” One day, our mother brought home a real typewriter in a cloth bag. “It's from work. It was just sitting there and no one was using it,” she said. I immediately christened it Ljubinka. We set it on top of the sewing table in the middle of our room. We shifted the vase to the left side and put the typewriter on the right, next to the sewing machine. Srebra and I couldn't sit in chairs to type, but had to stand. We stuck in a sheet of the paper from our mother's office and typed, me with my right hand, Srebra with her left. She had become left-handed when she was little and saw that it would be difficult to draw and write with her right without bumping into
me. The typewriter completely pushed the accordion into oblivion or, more precisely, into the corner between the shelves, the wall, and the bed in our room. The typewriter became as important to us as the cassette player and the dictionary. What a salvation that typewriter was when unexpected guests arrived. They'd show up on Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon—our mother's cousins with their spouses and children, all dressed up, with a box of little cakes or wafer cookies in their hands—determined to spend part of the day visiting, while the hosts—us, that is—were unprepared, either not yet washed or just preparing to bathe. We'd all be sitting in front of the television dressed in old clothes or tattered pajamas, staring at some film or other, when all of a sudden the bell would ring, once, twice. Dad would turn down the television as the bell rang a third time, assuring him it wasn't some beggar or Gypsy selling something, but rather someone we knew. Mom would stand up, shouting, “Go see who it is.” Dad would get up, flick on the light in the dining room, clear his throat, turn on the light in the hallway, turn the locks—one, two—open the door, and there before him would be the guests, simultaneously joking and looking a bit uncomfortable (“You weren't lying down were you? Oh dear; it's not too late for guests, is it?”) but also full of self-assuredness (“Even if you were lying down, get up—we didn't come just to stand in the doorway. It's Saturday, it's Sunday, it's a day for a visit”) and in they'd come. They'd shake hands with our parents in the hallway, then take off their shoes and coats, while our mother quickly changed out of her robe, but didn't manage to slip her bra on before the guests entered the dining room. She'd say warmly to them, “Oh, it's been so long since you've been here; how nice that you thought to come,” but at the same time she'd be angrily thinking,
Really, why didn't you call first? Is this how one comes for a visit?
She'd take the box with the cakes or wafers, toss it on the couch in the kitchen, and get busy taking out cups while the guests in the dining room would greet us, kissing us three times on the face, first me, then Srebra, then me again, looking us over as if something had changed in us. We'd giggle; Dad would head to the basement for some cornelian cherry juice and wine; Mom would take out salami and cheese, chop it, and place it on the table, fretting that
there wasn't anything else. Srebra and I would already be on the way to our own room; we'd quickly push the door shut; meanwhile, the guests would sit by themselves in the dining room and watch the movie we had been watching; finally, everyone would be seated. They'd nibble the cheese and salami, chattering on about this and that—about how expensive everything is, about politics. Srebra and I would type away on our typewriter standing in front of the sewing table; we typed unconnected words, both of us too embarrassed to write anything concrete in front of each other, a sentence with a beginning and an end. Years later, I'd understand why I couldn't write, even though I carried the urge within me: I was never alone. People can't write when they are not alone. It's impossible to write with your head connected to another head. Writing is a private act, but Srebra and I did not have privacy for a single moment in our lives. As a result, I forcibly turned away from writing, but inside, I wrote and made note of everything that happened to us, everything I noticed, and everything I felt. Just like Bogdan, who solved crossword puzzles in his head because he had no pencil, I wrote internally because I had no space. In any event, when we were typing mindlessly on the typewriter, none of us—not the guests, not us—felt particularly at ease. The guests would finally leave, we would lie down, and as Srebra and I listened to our mother and father gossiping about the guests through the wall, I would be overcome with a feeling of emptiness before falling into a dream; our blood was diluted with cornelian cherry juice, our father's with wine, but our mother's blood was water. In truth, sometimes we went visiting, although much less often and to fewer places than those who came to visit us. Srebra and I were happiest when we went to visit Viki and Dragan, our second cousins on our father's side. The only relative who kept at all in contact with our father was his cousin, a lieutenant in the Yugoslav National Army who had lived in Belgrade and married Snežana there, and then, through high-up connections (and machinations, most likely, as our mother said), they moved to Skopje, where they were given a large military apartment in the Gradski Dzid, the central apartment block, right downtown, where they had two children, Viki and Dragan. From time to time, our mother would say,
“We're going to Vančo's this evening,” and Srebra and I would get dressed up as nicely as we could, and then, slumped in the back seat of the Å koda, we would turn our heads in unison, first to look out the left window, then to the right. Outside in the dark, the street lamps shone, flickering like lanterns all around us; the atmosphere of the city center, which we so rarely saw, opened before us like a magical arena; the cars honked and rumbled; the red buses puffed at the stops. We wanted the trip to last as long as possible, and then when we entered our hosts' apartment, the children went straight to the kids' room, which had its own balcony, just for our cousins. We stood on their balcony and peeked onto the one opposite, where, according to Viki and Dragan, a “pervert” lived. We stifled laughter while staring into the pale light of the pervert's balcony door, waiting for him to appear, so we could see what he was like. Up till then, neither Srebra nor I had seen such a person, but Viki and Dragan had seen him; they said that he sometimes smoked out on the balcony, and there was another man, another pervert, who leaned up against the railing with him. “It's not just one pervert there,” said Viki, who was five years younger than us, and Dragan, “There are two—they stand outside when our parents aren't home.” “Do you even know what a pervert is?” Dragan taunted her, though I didn't know whether he knew himself. “Doesn't it mean
homosexual
?” I asked with some embarrassment, because I knew what a homosexual was, but the word
pervert
could refer to many things. “No,” said Dragan, “these perverts aren't the same.” Srebra seemed like she wanted to add something, but remained silent. I think she was thinking of the time, one day when we were still little, when we were waiting on our balcony for our young uncle to take us to the village on the bus. We could see as far as the house on the corner of the street that led to our school, and in the other direction as far as the iron crossbar that was used for hanging carpets when they needed to be beaten or for chin-ups, with the dumpster next to it, and a linden tree beside them, and Srebra asked me whether I knew what a “pervert” was because once she had heard Riki the Gypsy, Auntie Verka's lover, shout to Bogdan, “Where are you, you little pervert?” I hadn't known what a pervert was. I thought it was a child without
parents, and so I told Srebra that that was probably what it was, and then, on the bus to the village, I thought about “the little perverts,” and was happy that all the children without parents who now had adopted the singles in our neighborhood were no longer perverts. But today we were laughing with Dragan and Viki because their neighbor was a pervert, though it still wasn't entirely clear to us what a pervert was if not a homosexual. Plus, he had a mother and a father. The next time we saw Dragan and Viki, at our house, we played “I spy with my little eye,” and when it was time to go, Uncle Vančo stood up, gave my father his hand, and told him quite loudly, curtly, almost militarily, “It's no big deal, cousin, but I have to tell you that we won't be coming to your place again, and don't you come to ours, because after last time your father called me and told me that everyone had turned against you. He asked me what the hell I was doing seeing you, and told me to tell you that we wouldn't see each other again. So, don't show up again, even though you're my only cousin on my father's side.” Then our aunt Snežana, who had never properly learned Macedonian, added, in a mixture of Serbian and Macedonian, “What can you do? That's how people are.” Our father blanched, his lips trembling, and only managed to say, “If that's the way it is, Cousin, I won't force you; you know best.” And we all said goodbye, shaking hands, without hugs or kisses, even us children, and we never saw them again. “Pervert,” whispered Srebra; I knew she was thinking of Uncle Vančo, and I pictured our grandfather's face. I never wanted to see either of them ever again.