A Spare Life (19 page)

We stood there a while, then wandered around; we were growing annoyed that we didn't know exactly where he meant when he wrote, “In front of the shopping center,” but then we saw him. We recognized him immediately, because the Marjan in the photograph had the face of an old man: wrinkled, a worried face, not like a child's, and now, as a young man, his face still carried the same wizened look, the same concern. The person walking toward us also had the gate of an old man; he seemed barely able to drag himself along. He was dressed in blue jeans and a black leather jacket. In his right hand, he carried two rabbit-eared cardboard boxes of popcorn that he had probably bought in the square. He carried them carefully, so none would tumble out. Srebra and I were dressed in black duffle coats, red berets on our heads that, from a distance, probably looked like one big hat. We wore corduroy pants and black boots. The winter was cold and had seemed to last an eternity. Before we left the house that morning, I had thought we looked like Little Red Riding Hoods, two in one, and the image had brought a smile to my face. We stood woodenly, motionless, on the stairs by the entrance to the shopping center; we knew he recognized us, though he had never seen us in real life or in photographs. He came closer, looking at us, and the smile on his face turned to surprise. We waved to him. He was now standing before us, with the two green rabbit-eared boxes filled with white and yellow popcorn puffs. “Zlata? Srebra?” and we smiled at the same time and answered, “Marjan?” He couldn't get out another word. He stared right at our heads, gaping at the spot where they were joined, where our red berets touched, and his gaze cut through our shared vein like a knife. “Are those for us?” Srebra asked, breaking the silence. She took the popcorn from his hands, passed one of the boxes to me, stuffed some in her mouth, and then began to cough. I only held the cardboard rabbit-box; I couldn't eat. Finally, I said, “As you can see, this is how we are. I'm sorry we never wrote to you; we were children then and were embarrassed.” “Yes, yes,” he stammered, “yes, of course.” “Come on, let's go somewhere,” Srebra proposed, and we set off toward the square and the stone bridge. He strode along beside us, confused, lost, concerned. “Let's go to Café Arabia,” I suggested, because Srebra and I went
there once when we were finishing our first semester after seeing an announcement pasted on the front door of the Law Department inviting everyone to gather in Café Arabia and drink tea to protest the war in the Persian Gulf. We had really enjoyed ourselves; we drank black tea and ate falafel, while Ali, the owner of the restaurant, spoke, in beautiful Macedonian, against the war. Srebra and I almost never went anywhere, and the outing to the café filled with young people rumored to be comparative literature students, was an incredible experience for me. That night, I had strange dreams: a large pyre in the square, and in the fire—a chair. All the children in the world had been gathered there, and one by one they were put onto the chair in the fire. And they burned. All that remained was the charred body of the last boy in the world, but it was intact, pinkish gold, the color of light meat. And then the torturers broke his arm, his leg, his skull. It was a terrible dream. Still, I wanted to take Marjan there; at that time of day it was empty with only Ali inside, straightening the tables. He remembered us, because no one forgot us once they'd seen us, and he was happy that we'd come. He put us at a table by the window, and brought us tea and a plate of falafel, then went off to the kitchen. Srebra began, “Why did you send the telegram for us to meet?” Marjan hesitated, not knowing whether he still wanted to talk, but then told his story. “I didn't know you were this kind of twins, but you and my mother saved my life. You were my guardian angels.” We couldn't figure out how we could have saved his life and just looked at him quizzically. “You remember how I once wrote and called you from Belgrade when I was at the military school? You didn't write back, so I decided not to write to you again. But I thought of you, and dreamed that one day we would see each other, and I might fall in love with one of you. In February of ‘91, my entire class was sent to Croatia, to Zagreb, and then on to Split. We were told to be on alert and that we had to fight the Croatians. They made me a sergeant, even though I hadn't finished the military high school. They gave me an apartment in Split and a big salary. I was living well, and nothing happened until May. On May 6, SaÅ¡o GeÅ¡kovski was killed. You probably saw it on television. That night, I called you, but you couldn't hear me. I called several
times, but you just said, ‘Hello, hello,' and you couldn't hear me.” Yes, we remembered that night when someone called several times, but the telephone only crackled, and whoever was calling gave up. “That was me. I was calling you, because I didn't know who to call. There is no telephone in my village. I was so frightened and wanted someone to be thinking of me. I know my mother didn't sleep at night and protected me from death, but you were also my guardian angels, because my future was connected with yours, and I stayed alive so I could come back and fall in love with one of you.” “And then what happened?” Srebra asked, moving quickly past that last sentence, “How did you save yourself?” Marjan drew close and said extremely quietly, “I fled. I deserted. I left the apartment and everything I had inside: money, furniture, clothing, I left everything. I put on an old pair of pants and a jacket I still had from home. I hid day and night until I crossed all the roadblocks. I arrived on foot from Split. For two months I hid in bushes and behind rocks. And now here I am.” “You're crazy!” Srebra shouted, and I thought the same. “Yes, I am crazy, but alive. When I got home, my mother almost had a heart attack. She hid me in the basement. Meanwhile, the postman found out, delivering several orders demanding that I return to the Yugoslav Army, and if I didn't, I would have to answer to the military court in Belgrade. I couldn't stand it any longer. I got dressed and went to see the mayor of Tetovo. I told him what had happened and that, if necessary, I would condemn myself, but I would not return to that army. He replied, ‘Bravo, young man. There's no reason for our children to die for foreign interests. Don't worry a bit. Macedonia is putting together its own army. We'll give you a job, and you will get an apartment and a salary.' So I'm a free man now, and I came to tell you.” “Yes, to tell us,” Srebra repeated. We looked at him across the café table, and there was something childish and naive in his wizened face cut through with wrinkles, deeply lined, and pale. His eyes were dark brown, almost black; his eyebrows were thick; his hair was oily and black. He was about twenty, the same age as us, but his body—though built up from his military training—trembled, slack and sick, under his V-neck sweater. This man opposite us was so fragile; his hands shook as he slowly drank his tea; his lips
were narrow and pale in a fixed sweet smile. He looked at us with childlike trust, open to our gaze, our judgment, to us. This was the first male, the first young man, with whom we sat and spoke as young women. We fell silent and looked at one another. “Evidently, you don't like me,” he said with an accusatory tone. “Maybe I don't look so great now because I'm tired and run down from everything, but everything is going to get sorted out. I'll get an apartment and a job in Skopje; I am going to be able to support a family.” “Support a family?” I said, surprised. “But you're only twenty years old. What do you need to support a family for? What family? Your mother and father?” “I want to have my own family,” he said. “A wife, children—I want to live a normal life and not hide from anyone, to live here in Macedonia.” “And how can we help with that?” asked Srebra. “Yes, what are you expecting from us?” I asked. He was clearly uncomfortable; he blushed, his lips began to tremble, he could barely speak. “I had never imagined that you had a problem. I thought one of you would like me and you could be my girlfriend, my wife.” “And now?” Srebra curtly put in. “What now?” “Now…now…” Marjan stammered, but Srebra added, “Now, nothing. Now nothing, right?” Marjan fell silent; he didn't know what to say. He got up, went and paid Ali, quickly put on his jacket, swaying back and forth several times behind his chair, and said, “Okay, well, goodbye. Just know I'm always here for you if you need anything.” He turned and went down the stairs, but Srebra yelled after him, “Goodbye, goodbye to you, too,” and then quietly added, “We'll certainly never need anything from you.” Now that we were alone, I could sense how angry she was, while I was just confused and inexplicably sad. “Cretin,” she said, “cretinous soldier,” and she poured the popcorn on the table, and pulled me so hard it hurt as we stood up. Ali waved as we went down the stairs. I couldn't get my thoughts together. I did not know what that had all been about; what that strange situation resembled; whether Marjan was guilty of anything, and if so, of what. For the image he'd made up of two young twins, his guardian angels in the Yugoslav battles? For his illusion of a future filled with love and happiness? For his desire to have a family, because he was mature, nearly grown old, though only twenty? I felt sorry for
him, and I silently prayed to Saint Zlata Meglenska, touching her with my fingers, to pray for Marjan, so he could find happiness.

We could not find happiness as long as we were the way we were. But even if we had been normal, I wouldn't have loved Marjan. He wasn't my type. He was too timid, too submissive; his aged child's face posed no challenge. I knew exactly how life would be if I were a normal girl and married him: He would work on the military base; I would be a homemaker and the wife of a soldier; we would live in an average apartment; I would give birth to at least two children, probably not have a job outside the home, because military men were committed to the idea that their wives should not work. On Sundays, we would go to his parents' in the village for dinner, and during the week, he would be tired from work and would watch television all evening or play with the children (sons if possible). That is what our lives would be reduced to, because it was rare to find men with military educations who were interested in the arts. He would find excuses for why he would not go to the theater, why he could sit through a movie with Sharon Stone but not a Dutch film, why he yawned through poetry readings, why he didn't read literary books, but only crime novels and things like that. Perhaps I wasn't being fair, but that is exactly how I imagined life with Marjan—monotonous and provincial. I wanted to ask Srebra how she imagined life with him, but she was too upset, and we never spoke another word about him.

In the examination session of June 1992, Srebra passed all her exams, but I passed only one, and that by sheer will. All the other students had written exams, but ours were oral, to prevent us copying from each other—that is, so I couldn't copy from Srebra. After the professor entered the marks on our report cards, he told me: “You, unlike your sister, do not like law. It's obvious you're forced to study it on account of your sister. That's a serious problem: both for you and for us. You should withdraw. Either study seriously or withdraw and just come along to the lectures. Read something that interests you. Enroll in some other department as a part-time student.” It was good advice, even though I had become indifferent to what I studied, or whether I studied at all, given the overall outlook from the news and other reports about the war: the horrible pictures of a young girl marrying her fiancé who had been killed in the marketplace in Sarajevo; the images of the swollen eyes of refugees; the viewpoints and attitudes of those around us sympathetic to the Serbian position; the atmosphere at home, where our father and mother understood nothing but commented on everything about the former Yugoslavia in their own idiosyncratic way. Srebra and I were already mature young women with big breasts and hips, though our conjoined heads were viewed as grotesque, perhaps even revolting. There was no indication anywhere that it was possible to realize our dream of an operation. It was a luxury to think about something like that and egotistical to want a solution for our personal problem under such conditions, with the barriers, new borders, death, death, and death. I knew my parents would be furious if I withdrew and switched to the Philology Department and studied literature part-time, because I would have spent a whole year of my life supported by them with nothing to show for it. No, from that moment on, I decided to force myself to truly study law. For the fall exam session, I registered for three exams. I studied all summer, even when Srebra and I went to the village to our grandmother and grandfather's. There, we shut ourselves in the room with the blue table, blue chairs, and a blue vase with plastic flowers. We settled comfortably on the couch and crammed. We studied together for the exams Srebra hadn't passed yet, reading aloud from our thick textbooks. There was no
TV in the village, but the old radio picked up things we couldn't get in Skopje. Every station spoke of the war. On August 26, 1992, a barely audible station announced that the Serbs had set fire to the library in Sarajevo. Everything was burned. Grandma and Grandpa only said one thing about the war: “Ordinary people die, but the big shots sit around and devour everything.”

On September 1, 1992, we returned on the Proletar bus to Skopje, and a man of about forty, with bright red cheeks, wearing a light brown suit and holding an old map of Yugoslavia in his hands, was seated across from us. He kept his eye on us, but he watched us less with surprise than curiosity. We were accustomed to being looked at with much ruder and more impertinent glances. He would look out the window, then at the map, then at us. Srebra and I looked straight ahead. I usually felt nauseous when we rode the bus. After a while, the man got up the courage and spoke to us in English. He asked how to get to Belgrade from Skopje—whether there would be an evening bus. Srebra and I didn't know. Then he asked where he could spend the night in Skopje, where it would be least expensive. Srebra and I didn't know that either. He laughed, unperturbed, as if still expecting we would help him somehow, give him some sort of advice. But in fact, we really didn't know where he could sleep cheaply. Even though he was asking about Skopje, we had never slept in a hotel, and we'd heard that both the Continental and the Grand were expensive—hotels for foreigners. He was foreign, but judging from his worn shirt, he wasn't wealthy enough to stay in an expensive hotel. We didn't say anything; we just giggled, looking straight ahead all the way to Skopje, our heads swaying left or right in response to the curves in the road. At the bus station in Skopje, something inexplicable rose forcefully in my breast, and just as we got up from our seats, I said, “Come with us.” Srebra heard me and started, but he only asked, “Really?” I merely replied, “Yes.” “My name is Gary,” he said, and it was only then that we introduced ourselves. We got our bags and started off across the stone bridge. “
Slebla
,
Zhlata
,” he repeated several times with a wide grin. Srebra didn't say anything the whole time, and she pulled me left and right out of spite, causing us to walk as if drunk. There was hardly anyone on the bridge except for a few people who were actually drunk, staggering along submerged in themselves—meditative drunks turned inward, not outward.