A Spare Life (17 page)

Lenče's father was even sicker from various psychological points of view. He went around on his black bicycle collecting old bottles, which he stored on their balcony. He loved to shove politics and healthy living in your face, constantly gathering herbs and spending his solitary afternoons in the shadows of the village of Katlanovo. He was a man who would destroy the kitchen water heater on purpose simply to conserve the maximum amount of energy, water, and money. A man from whom cousins and brothers borrowed money, but was never paid back, a man who even had money stolen from his coat that was hanging in the hallway when he went to visit his youngest brother. A man who bought the first computer model, but kept it unopened on the shelf for better times. A man who boxed up the television set when Verče started school because she was to study and not watch television, but would then come to our place and sit for hours in front of our television while our father boiled with rage. Once, Uncle Mirko was at our house when my toes were itching, and he heard me scratching and complaining, while Srebra shouted: “Stop it! That's enough!” He got up, took a handful of herbs and grass from his pocket, went into our bathroom with the green pot, and filled it with hot water from the kitchen boiler. He put the plants in it and barked at me: “Go on, sit here, put your feet in.” I don't know how, but my feet were already in the pot, with Srebra's beside it. We sat on the couch in the kitchen, while Mirko sat in our chair by the little table, Mom moving around, Dad watching television. The water was pleasant and aromatic, and I recalled how Aunt Milka once scalded our father's feet with hot water in this same pot when we were little and she had come to visit for a few days. Srebra and I had been quite frightened, and I think that was the exact moment when both of us understood that, despite all the aversion we felt toward our father, we did, in fact, also love him. And once, Milanka, our uncle Milan's wife from Berovo, when they came to sleep at our place, filled this same green pot with hot water from the kitchen and went to the bathroom, most likely to wash up. She and our uncle Milan had slept in the big room with our mother and father. They were all unusual in their own way, but no one surpassed the extremes of our uncle Mirko. He was a man who, when in the village, loved to
sit on his old wooden bed and drink milk from sheep, cows, or goats but would not help with a speck of village work, not even carrying a stick of wood. A man about whom our mother said it would be best if someone “just whacked on the head with an ax” and maybe that someone should be our father, though it would be a shame for him to be stuck in prison. Mirko was a man to be sneered at, quoted, and joked about in our family. This was the same uncle who didn't even feed the fish in our aquarium when we were on vacation and let them all die. A man who, according to our mother, stole the rings from the shelves in the big room when he watered the plants while we were on vacation. He was a human parasite. “May his heart be devoured,” our mother cursed him. But the curse didn't strike him. He was as healthy as an ox. While we strung tobacco, he was out with the other men in the field, but he just lay in the shade and enjoyed the scent of the hay. That's what our father said, and he cursed him with every phrase that came to mind. Grandfather had called to him, “Come on, Mirko, it's getting dark.” But who knew exactly what went on in the fields while we women were at home. One evening, when they returned from the fields, our grandfather said, “From now on, you will kiss my hand.” This intrigued the grandchildren, and whenever we saw him, we ran and kissed his hand, Srebra and I at the same time, bowing our heads to touch his coarse hand with our lips. His hand was rough, wrinkled, and withered, but firm—a villager's hand. Our grandfather had a nickname in the village—
Blood
. He had really tough blood, they said, especially when he was harassed by the secret police from UDBA; he was a tough guy. So we were called Blood's grandchildren, although some village women secretly called us “the ones with the heads.” Blood's hayloft at the edge of the village was well known; behind the barn was where the extramarital lives of the villagers took place, and our grandfather's barn had been critical for many types of love affairs: affairs between young women and men from the village; between men from the village and young women who came to visit from far away, especially during holidays and summer vacations; and between villagers and those from the nearest town. And it wasn't rare for adulterers from neighboring villages or the city to make love behind our grandfather's barn.
Sometimes, we went with Verče to see if anybody was behind the barn, but in the blackness, you couldn't see a thing; you could just hear muffled voices—sighs, moans—and the crunching of soil and small pebbles on the ground. All those sounds in the dark seemed frightening, like in a film, and although we knew what the people were doing behind the barn, we didn't laugh, but ran away as quickly as possible, dragging Verče along, each of us thinking about what we had heard but hadn't seen, longing for something unknown, yet known. I asked myself whether Srebra knew what sexual desire was at all, if maybe while I slept, she, too, poked the corner of the blanket up between her legs, or perhaps her own fingers, and if maybe she, too, was no longer innocent. Or perhaps neither of us had been innocent since that afternoon in childhood when, right here at our grandmother's, Srebra and I lay beneath the grape arbor on a small rug while Grandma was baking bread in the oven. To keep the sun from burning us, we opened Grandma's little golden umbrella, which was probably a child's, but that she still carried when it rained, and, lying with our backs on the narrow rug under the little umbrella, pressed against each other, rubbing my left thigh and her right, my left breast and her right, until a faint arousal and trembling spread through our bodies. I had long forgotten that event from early childhood, and who knew whether Srebra remembered it. I never mentioned it to her, but having recalled it, whenever I thought of that scene under Grandma's umbrella, I felt shame in my soul. We would find scattered bits of paper and condoms behind the barn some days—how disgusting it was to see the remains of passion left by unknown people who had chosen this bare patch of ground behind our barn, or against its wall, as their oasis and who, before leaving, never gathered up the garbage, but got their asses out of there as fast as they could before anyone saw them or a car coming down the road beside the barn shined a light on them. Verče, Srebra, and I had to sweep behind the barn to keep our grandfather from getting angry and lying in wait the next night for some impassioned couple to appear. He'd wave his ax or pitchfork at them, and our grandmother would say, “He's going to end up in jail.” So every afternoon, we went to the barn and swept with the straw-bristled
broom; nobody thought about a clean environment or about ecology, so we just swept the garbage down the hillside behind the barn that was no longer our property but didn't belong to anyone else either. It was sort of a village dumping ground in the midst of the harvested fields. Srebra, Verče, and I remained in the village all summer. Grandmother saved the cotton balls we used every morning and evening to clean our faces. “Just in case,” she said as she gathered them up in a plastic bag that sat by the pitcher set on the sill of the closed window in an unfinished room. The cotton balls smelled of acne medicine, face-cleansing lotions, and cucumbers dirtied by Revlon powder; there was a whole bag of them, because Srebra, Verče, and I cleaned our faces in the village more often than at home, but we were always covered in acne because there was simply never enough hot water in the yogurt container filled from the pot on the woodstove for us to wash. From time to time, we would go into town to sleep at our aunt Milka's, and on those days, we would stroll through town, and regularly go to our uncle's for coffee, because our aunt, despite her faults, knew how to read coffee grounds and horoscopes, interpret omens of the afterlife, create spells for seducing men, and do lots of other newage things. She spent hours interpreting astrological charts, but there was nowhere in the room to sit; clothes and socks were strewn everywhere—on the couch, on the chairs, on the table. There were puddles of honey or dried milk; cupboard doors were on the verge of falling off; there were burn holes in the carpet; the curtains were moth-eaten and dusty. To the critical eye, the pinnacle was to go to the bathroom to do one's business, which was not done sitting on a toilet bowl or even squatting over a Turkish toilet, but on top of a big empty paint or varnish can with the bottom removed and placed over the privy hole. Neither our aunt nor uncle was shocked by it—they lived day to day—but all of us, their relatives, worried about our university-educated uncle. He had completed the foreign-language course—our grandparents' only son, in whose honor our grandfather had sold a cow when he was born and feasted the villagers in the village restaurant for three days and three nights—our much-beloved uncle, the one who, to Grandpa's great sorrow, hadn't been able to find a wife up to his
standards, but had selected the biggest lazybones in the village, the worst wife in the world. When our aunt read Srebra's and my fortunes and saw a knife, a surgical knife, in the grounds of both our cups and saw that our heads would soon be separated and everything would be as it should, those were the moments we loved her and were somehow convinced this really could happen after all the years of our shared misfortune. “If countries can be separated, surely people can,” said our aunt, and we felt something like love for her, because her words seemed to carry truth. When two whole republics could be separated from Yugoslavia, something that had been, up to that moment, the equivalent of science fiction, why couldn't two heads be separated by a surgeon's knife? How could our heads not be separated?

Macedonia separated from what remained of Yugoslavia. That week, on the eighth of September, I was angry with myself, Srebra, and my mother. The previous Saturday evening, when I had taken off my wide, deep-pocketed Bermuda shorts to put on my pajamas, I had left my small icon in the pocket. This had never happened before; it was just automatic that I took it from my pocket or its special little purse and placed it in another pocket or under my pillow before I went to bed. But as soon as I got undressed, Srebra pulled me toward the door of our room to listen to something she heard on television. As she opened the door, I yanked her sharply back, embarrassed that my father might see me in my underwear. Srebra pressed us against the door so she could hear more clearly the announcement on the television that there would be a referendum the next day on Macedonian independence and that everyone over eighteen should go vote yes. “So what? They've already said that a hundred times today,” I muttered. Srebra had heard it, too, but she wanted to hear it again. Once the announcement ended, we moved away from the door, put on our pajamas, and got into bed. As soon as we had pulled up the covers, our mother came in, and although she didn't turn on the light, light filtered in from the dining room. She snatched something from the armchair and went out. The next day, I noticed that I was missing both my shorts and my icon. Mom had hand-washed them with Srebra's shorts, along with the icon, which she had pulled out when she felt something hard under her fingers. Saint Zlata Maglenska had been soaked, drenched down to the smallest splinter of wood and darkened by the water. It was drying on the sheet metal on the balcony, where my Bermudas and Srebra's already bone-dry shorts were hanging on the line. I was angry and hurt. I wiped the little icon, which was dry on the outside, but still heavy with moisture inside. Srebra and I put on our shorts and walked to the school to vote. People were pouring in, in groups of two, three, or more. Our mother and father said they would go vote after lunch, which is why we went after breakfast. Unless it was unavoidable, we did not go anywhere with them. That day, our aunt Ivanka invited us to lunch. We could hardly wait to see Verče and Lenče. Our aunt was considered the best homemaker in the entire family even
though she lived under the worst conditions because of Uncle Mirko—he was the biggest cheapskate in the world—but she did wonders with what little she had. At our aunt's you would eat the best piroshki, the tastiest fried pastries, the sweetest beer cookies. At our aunt's, there was sliced wholesome black bread and the salad had lettuce, though our father called it “rabbit food” and refused to eat it, so our aunt always made him a tomato and onion salad. She knew how to make the best moussaka, the tastiest chicken and rice. For this lunch, she greeted us with her specialty: the honey semolina cake she usually made for Easter. “Today is a holiday,” she said. “This is the first time we'll have our own country.” “What are you talking about?” our uncle said. “We had a country before, one as big as you could hope for.” Mom chimed in, “You just listen to me—we'll be wishing for Yugoslavia. Mark my words.” But Dad, as usual, said, “Oh come, now, like you know everything.” “Please, I'm begging you. Can we not talk about politics?” Verče protested. She had been traumatized by politics, because of what happened to her best childhood friend, Dzvezdana, who had just returned from Sweden, where she had lived with her parents up until Tito's death. She hadn't really known who Tito was, and while watching his funeral at their neighbors' house, she had said, “So what if he died? There are other people.” The neighbor went out and was gone just a short time before coming back with two policemen, and they said to Dzvezdana, “So you don't care that Comrade Tito died?” and while Dzvezdana tried to compose herself in all the commotion, they grabbed her under the arms and carted her off in their van to the police station, where they held her until night, after she'd apologized a hundred times for what she had said. Her eyes were swollen from crying when she got out, but her parents were waiting for her. At home, her father gave her a beating, and her mother sat her down and lectured to her all night about Tito—where he was born and everything he had done—thereby etching forever in her daughter's brain everything she should have told her in Malmö, Sweden, while Tito was alive rather than now in Skopje, a day after his death. Soon after, they sold their apartment in Skopje, went to Sweden, and never came back, although Verče waited in vain for them every summer vacation
for an entire decade. When they announced the success of the referendum and showed Kiro Gligorov congratulating everyone gathered in the square celebrating the news of a sovereign and independent Macedonia, we were not among them, because it was Sunday evening, when we heated the boiler and took a bath. Srebra and I both felt our spirits filled with happiness mixed with pride, and Srebra kept repeating, “I knew it, I knew it.”