A Spare Life (21 page)

I gathered my courage and asked Sister Zlata, “Could we stay for Christmas as well?” Srebra recoiled, stunned by my suggestion. “Of course you can!” exclaimed Sister Zlata, happy as a child. Srebra didn't have the heart to protest. So we said goodbye to the others, thanking them for bringing us to this heaven on earth, and waved to them from the enclosed wooden balcony as they left. Darko turned around a few times to wave at us, and then they were lost to view down the path below the convent. Each of them had taken away a small leather pouch with a small wooden cross inside. We were told we'd also get one when we left. “Darko is kind of strange,” I whispered to Srebra, “wanting to hang around us the whole time, even drying the dishes while we washed.” Srebra only said, “I don't know why we didn't leave with them.” That whole day, we cleaned the monastery, read the psalms of David, and learned to sing hymns. For as long as I could remember, my favorite hymn had been the
Cherubic Hymn
. It now entered my dreams, in Sister Zlata's voice. Those days at the monastery were lovely. We had time for reading, for prayers, and for cooking, our first such experience, since at home, Mom never taught us how to make anything. Often, when she was making dinner rolls, or steamed cookies, or a cake, she would kick us out of the kitchen so we wouldn't get in her way and cause her to burn something or make a mistake in the recipe. Sister Zlata prepared food with ease, leaving part of the work for us, laughing, “Who has helpers as good as mine!” I added, “And two-headed ones at that,” and we laughed. Suddenly, Sister Zlata began to sing a new hymn aloud, and it echoed through the monastery, and our spirits were filled with beauty and happiness. Is this what is called
bliss
? I wondered. As though Sister Zlata had heard my thoughts, she said, “God is a blessing; there is no greater blessing than He.”

We laid down straw in a dark windowless spare cell, and in the middle of the room we placed a good-sized oak sapling decorated with bits of cotton in a flowerpot. A man from the village brought a small lamb that raced freely around in the straw, gamboling about as if it, too, rejoiced in the imminent birth of Christ. On Christmas Eve, early in the morning, children came to the monastery singing a different version of the traditional Christmas Eve song than we knew, and we gave them apples, pears, walnuts, and three candies inside little pouches made from curtain material and tied with interwoven white, blue, and red threads. “I make them gifts every year, and they seem delighted with them,” said Sister Zlata. When the last child left, we went into the church. We kissed the icons, read several prayers, and then withdrew to the convent—Srebra and I to the room with the chapel where we were sleeping, and Sister Zlata to her cell. On the wall in our room hung an icon of Saint Christopher. I dragged Srebra over several times to look at the saint with young Jesus Christ on his shoulder. We had learned of Saint Christopher in a volume about the lives of the saints, and I read his story aloud. A wonderful story about a man who wanted to serve God in a special way, and, unknowingly, carried Christ across the river. As Christ became heavier and heavier, Saint Christopher said to him, “Why are you so heavy, child? It feels as though I am carrying the whole world on my shoulders.” Christ told him who he was, blessed him, and baptized him. The story fascinated me. I hadn't heard it before, nor had I known that there was a saint with that name. When I finished reading, Srebra said she wanted to shower, since that evening was Christmas Eve. We went down the stairs to the washrooms, which were a bit like school, a bit like camp. We opened the door to the shower, and recoiled, frozen by the view: Sister Zlata drying herself with a towel. She was naked, having just showered. Her hair was down; it was wet, black with threads of gray, and long, almost to her waist. “Oh!” shouted Srebra as we slammed the door shut. Inside, Sister Zlata merely said quietly, “God grant forgiveness, God grant forgiveness.” We fled upstairs to our room. Both of us were quite rattled. Srebra began to laugh quietly, as if her nerves had given way, and I crossed myself repeatedly, not able to stop. I was embarrassed. It
made me feel ashamed, but also surprised. I had never considered the fact that monastic people also took their clothes off, washed themselves, that they, too, let the hair they never cut down. I don't know if they ever combed it. “Okay, quit it, now,” said Srebra. “You quit, too,” I told her, and we finally settled down.

When we went downstairs again, Sister Zlata was no longer there. We washed as quickly as we could, with our eyes closed. Because of our heads, we either had to bend down together or not at all, and in a standing position we were never able to see our legs or our vaginas, just the tops of our breasts and our nipples, which stiffened when the water was a bit cold. We hadn't been embarrassed in front of each other for a long time—we couldn't be, we simply had no choice. But now, we both closed our eyes, because we were taken by an unpleasant feeling of intimacy, as if we had broken some rule in looking at Sister Zlata naked, with her hair down, which had otherwise always been covered by her nun's felt cap and veil. Sister Zlata didn't say anything when we saw her in the kitchen. She was making a vegetable pie and Lenten beans; Srebra and I fried fish dusted with flour, the way we had seen our mother do it. We had Christmas Eve dinner in the cell scattered with straw and a fireplace in which the gold and orange fire danced along the five-century-old walls of the monastery. It was truly a feast. We didn't have a round loaf with a coin inside, though, because Sister Zlata considered it a relic from pagan ritual. Instead, we had dried fruit, apples, pears, leek pita, fish, beans, and homemade bread. Sister Zlata sang Christmas carols all evening, and the lamb scampered around the cell, licking our palms as if it, too, rejoiced in the birth of Jesus. It was the most wonderful Christmas Eve of our lives. On January 7, 1993, at the boundary between night and morning, Sister Zlata woke us to go to church. Since she was a nun, she couldn't celebrate the Christmas liturgy alone. In capes and boots, we went down the snowy path to the village church, where every single person sang, those who could and those who couldn't. That togetherness in God was beautiful and grotesque and primordial. When we returned to the monastery, it was mid-morning. As always, Sister Zlata lay on the floor, hands crossed over her breast, as if she were lying in a coffin, prepared for heaven. We lay down in our monastic cell, and were as gladdened by the birth of Christ as we would be by the birth of a child.

Before evening prayers, just as we were about to enter the church, someone in the courtyard called out, “Hey, Zlata, Srebra!” We turned—as we always did when someone called to us, not just with our heads, but with our whole bodies like wolves—and at first, we didn't know who was calling to us. Then we recognized our aunt, our uncle, and our cousin, who was now a young woman. We hadn't seen them since that one and only visit when our mother left us in front of the door of the house where our father had grown up. We hadn't gone there since. And now here they were, in the courtyard of the convent, and we hurried to greet them, but with no hugs or kisses. We were extremely reserved with our uncle, and unnaturally cordial with our aunt, who immediately asked us what we were doing, how we were, and why we happened to be there. “We came for New Year's and stayed for Christmas as well, but we're leaving tomorrow.” “That's really great. We came to see the convent, since we're here on a ski trip and decided to take a walk, but it's really cold, so we went inside to light candles and were just heading out,” our aunt continued. Our cousin stood bashfully off to the side, her cheeks burning. Did she like us; had she missed us? Was she aware that, just like us, she had, and simultaneously didn't have, cousins? “You know, your grandmother died,” our aunt said. We simply nodded. We knew she died because someone called to tell our father when the funeral was, but he had merely said, “God forgive her,” and didn't go. By the next day, I had forgotten that she died; I felt nothing toward the woman, except an ache that she had not been the grandmother to us she should have been. Srebra even said, “She croaked,” but we didn't laugh. Our father continued to watch television, spend time in the garage, get angry and swear, or call us by our nicknames. Nothing changed in our lives. And now here they were, standing in front of the church, our would-be aunt and uncle, and our cousin, with whom we shared no cousinly feeling. We said goodbye one more time, and went into the church as they climbed into their white Lada and vanished down the path below. The entire time I was in the church, I prayed for my father; for the first time in my life I didn't think of him just fleetingly in my inner prayers, but I prayed to God to help him find peace while he was alive, to make
peace with his brother, his sister, all of them, and to go at least once more to the house he built when he was still a child. When we left the church, Srebra said in a hushed voice, “I never want to see them again,” which was a bit shocking, since I thought Srebra was flooded by the church's blessing also and had only good thoughts for everyone.
Temptation
, I thought, but said aloud, “What about Dad? Do you think he doesn't want to?” Srebra pursed her lips. The next day, we had to leave. Sister Zlata said to us, “You can come whenever you wish. Also, you should know I've decided not to give you your small crosses and chains, but will save them for next time.” She was sad we were leaving, because it was clear we got along together well. We had formed a kind of family, even Srebra, who always resisted anything related to the Church, had felt relaxed there. Sister Zlata didn't say it, but we could almost hear the unspoken sentences:
And where else, but in a convent, will people like you be loved? You are beautiful to God, and it's God's brides alone that you can possibly be.
She asked me to show her my small icon one more time. She crossed herself and kissed it. I pulled Srebra over to the icon of Saint Christopher one last time, and I patted the heads of Saint Christopher and the baby Jesus he carried.

On the train, I said firmly to Srebra, “If we never manage to get separated, the best thing for us would be to go into the convent.” But she responded more firmly, “We will get separated!” Once we were on the train, I began to think about life outside the convent. All the days there, we had heard nothing about what was happening in the world; we hadn't even thought about the war in Bosnia, or anything else. Now, at the railroad station we saw women with children waiting for someone, for a train, for anyone who could help them, someone to take them to a refugee camp or other place of asylum. “I wonder what has happened?” said Srebra, and indeed, after we got home and quickly wished our mother and father a Happy New Year—fleeting kisses on the cheeks, which we only did at New Year's or when we were going to leave to stay more than two months in the village—we heard on the evening news about new horrors in Sarajevo and throughout Bosnia. I think we were less pained by what we were seeing on the screen than shocked, asking the question, “How is it possible that this is happening? How is it possible?” The January examination period began, and at some of the exams, we saw the friends with whom we had traveled to the convent. They told us they went to the church in Krivi Dol every Sunday. They said the most beautiful liturgy in the city was held there and one had to go early because there were so many people and the church was quite small. Sometimes not everyone could get inside, so some had to remain outside in front of the door to take part in the service. But that winter of 1993 was very cold, with black ice and heavy winds, and it was difficult to get up early on a Sunday morning and endure our mother's questions: “Where are you going? How can you be so foolish as to go to church in such a storm? The bus doesn't go there, and the snow isn't cleared; someone will grab you and take you off somewhere. Who goes to the church? If you need a church, there's one here…” and on and on. In fact, we didn't get to experience many Sunday services because the boiler hadn't been turned on on Saturday night. I longed for a real liturgy, for angelic singing, for my
Cherubic Hymn
, for communion in God with people who were spiritually close to me. For a while, I somehow forgot about the church in Krivi Dol. It was Easter
service when we went there for the first time. We climbed uphill a long way, past the skating rink in the fortress, past the closed disco, looking from the heights down on the Vardar River and the city stadium surrounded by the spreading greenery of the city park. We walked on and on while buses rolled past us. One even stopped, and the driver, a young man, asked, “Aren't you going the wrong way? This isn't the way to the nuthouse.” Then he and his co-driver had a good laugh; another kept honking his horn as if it were a wedding, but we finally made it to the church. As soon as we entered and heard the melodious voice of the priest and the small choir accompanying him, we forgot our exhaustion, our anger, and our shame, at least I did, because in the depths of my soul, I gave myself over to the liturgy, which pierced straight to my inner unrest. All the school friends with whom we had traveled to the convent were there—Boro, Kristina, her daughter, and Darko, who winked when he saw us and shifted his position several times in the crowd. The women stood to the left, the men to the right. Most of the women wore headscarves and long full skirts. Srebra and I had neither headscarves nor full skirts. We could only wear shallow hats in winter that reached down to where we were conjoined. Perhaps we could have tied a scarf over both our heads. But it wasn't important. We all floated in a kind of bliss. At the end, we received a wafer, and many of the others also took communion wine. We didn't, because we hadn't fasted, gone to confession, and repented for our sins of thought, word, or deed. The priest drew wine from the chalice with a spoon and placed it and bread in each person's mouth; we sang. Later, at home, Srebra said, “How can everyone use the same spoon? It must be a hotbed of bacteria,” immediately adding, “I know what you're going to say, sickness doesn't spread to those who believe in God.” “What do you know?” I retorted. After the service, everyone greeted one another in the churchyard with hugs, saying, “Christ is risen. Truly, He is risen.” It was lovely. Darko brought us back downtown in his car. He asked, “Will you come regularly?” “Yes,” I said. “No,” said Srebra. “No?” asked Darko. “But I thought I could see you here.” See
you
, he had said, thinking only of Srebra. “See
you
, he said; he was only thinking about you,” I said to Srebra at home. “He must have been
confused,” said Srebra. We didn't mention it again until the following Sunday. Darko drove us home again, but we didn't want him to drop us off in front of our building, because someone might see and then gossip about it, especially our parents, and then we'd have to explain who he was and why he was bringing us home. Men were
a priori
excluded from our lives, and it would be, of course, absurd for anyone to be interested in us, especially in one of us, as Darko now was in Srebra. Was he blind or weird? And how could he be interested in one of us, or even both of us for that matter, when we were predestined to be alone, or more precisely, because we were already a pair we could never be a couple with a man? Darko studied architecture, and, in addition to religion, he was also interested in politics. He told us he was a member of the opposition party. Srebra attentively followed all the political events in Macedonia and the former Yugoslavia. Although I was always forced to watch television with her, my thoughts were not on what was being shown on the screen, or I simply read a book, and events seemed to slip past my attention, so I didn't know that the new Macedonian parties had young members, and not just middle-aged men and the occasional woman. In our family, politics were talked about in the most reductive, and I would say, populist, manner. Our mother and father changed political views whichever way the wind was blowing: If they listened to Serbian news, they were convinced Serbs were dying in Bosnia, rather than Bosnian Muslims. If our president, Kiro Gligorov, said the acronym FYROM—Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia—that was fine as long as we were granted entry into the UN; then they agreed with him, but they also thought opposition members Ljubčo Georgievski and Branko Crvenkovski were young and bright. It was only about Albanians that they had a single point of view, which was negative and stereotyping, as it was in so many families, even those with educated parents. For years, nothing changed. The general politics of compromise, a remnant of the one-party system, ruled for a long time in our family, in which, except for our uncle who changed from a Communist to a liberal, there were no parties, nor even party sympathizers, but only commentators on the things that had a direct effect on our lives. The fact was,
Macedonia was becoming more and more of a country with its own national symbols, its own money and government structures. The fact was, the war in Bosnia wasn't ending, and we had all become accustomed to that; people were dying, but we lived more or less normally, carrying on with our own joys and sorrows. Srebra had found herself in the study of law, and I studied as much as I had to, but the rest of the time, while Srebra delved deeper into supplementary readings, I immersed myself in novels and poetry. Books were my best friends, and that was not just an empty slogan taught to school kids. When I thought of friendship, I grasped that we had rarely had friends in real life. As kids, we had Roza, but she died, and it was my fault—that was clearer to me now than ever before, and I had never, ever found the courage to admit it to her parents. Most likely they knew, because Roza hadn't had a chain of her own, so she must have borrowed it before going on that fateful trip to Greece. On the stairs, whenever we saw her mother, father, or sister—who now had her own little daughter who looked so much like Roza—we greeted each other warmly, with sadness in our voices, especially noticeable in her father, who was never again quite himself. He dragged himself around in black clothing, his face sallow; he spoke quietly, timidly. The loss of his daughter had caused his shoulders to sag, and seeing him so bent, so sad, made you sad, as though Roza had died yesterday. No one in the building ever mentioned Roza anymore; everyone had closed that chapter in their lives, or more precisely, from our everyday experience. The changing years swept everything before them. No one spoke of Auntie Verka either, whom we could have also counted among the friends from childhood. And everyone had forgotten Bogdan. New people lived in the apartment of his adopted mother, a young couple with no children. For a long time we didn't have friends, until our New Year's trip to the convent, when we became close with Sister Zlata and the colleagues from the university who had invited us. The loneliness of all those years had become a natural condition, and I have always felt that it was the books that kept us from going crazy, regardless of whether they were legal tomes or novels. When I read entrancing novels, I felt aroused almost every night, even though, in the novels, characters rarely made
love. I was particularly aroused while reading
The Kalevala
just before bed. It wasn't obvious why such an erotic charge came from such a spirited work. Given our age and the whole situation, I felt entitled to self-gratification. I poked my fingers inside or twisted the end of the blanket on my side of the bed and slowly, so as to not wake Srebra, rubbed it against my vagina, pressing it inside and feeling bliss spread throughout my body. I would fall asleep, but then would wake up several hours later feeling like a monster. I knew God saw everything, and I was ashamed before Him, so I'd recite the Lord's Prayer ten times to myself, until I fell asleep again. A new schism was growing in me, a division between my longing for God and my longing for a man. What would it be like to be with a man, to be under him, on top of him, to be one body joined from two, not by our heads but by our sexual organs? Some of the other students at the university were already pregnant, and I thought about the way in which they became pregnant. During exams, they frequently used pregnancy as an excuse for their lack of preparedness. Srebra and I never spoke of these things. I don't know how she controlled her sexual needs or whether she even felt such things at all. She usually slept peacefully through the night. And during the day, we heeded Sister Zlata's advice not to put our hands in our laps lest the devil lead us into temptation. Sister Zlata! Sneže and Ivan told us that they had heard she'd been thrown out of the convent and sent to a village near the Greek border, to some small abandoned convent, and that the convent we had gone to was now a monastery, with new monks. How difficult that was for me! But why did they throw her out? She took such great care of the convent. She was so good! Kristina said she'd heard that she had begun to go out, that's what the villagers said. She would go walking about, singing, crying, or laughing hysterically, and once, she threw herself on the ground in front of the convent doors, thrashing her legs. She was unable to stop until a priest from the village sprinkled her with basil, and he then managed to pull her back inside. She had gone mad, the villagers said. But, poor thing, she was just a holy fool, nothing else. A holy fool! How I loved that expression. I had read an entire book about holy fools in Russia, and after that I couldn't be apart from
God's Pauper
by
Kazantzakis or
Narcissus and Goldmund
by Hesse. Srebra seemed to want to say, “I knew it,” but if she had, I think I would have dug my fingers into her side. She kept her peace. We continued to go to services in Krivi Dol regularly, Srebra saying that she wasn't affected by the singing, that she only went out of a desire to see the other parishioners, to see how they reacted, whether they fell into a trance, whether it was a collective delusion, and to hear what the priest said in his sermon: Would he mention the war in Bosnia? Would he take sides? Many Macedonian priests were allying themselves with the Serbian Church that held the view that Serbs were the victims, not the torturers. The Serbian priests sent soldiers into battle, marking their foreheads with the sign of the cross more to symbolize the Serbian eagle than the Christian cross. Srebra approached services analytically and objectively; I went subjectively. I was the one who experienced the blessing in the prayers and hymns, the wafer and the candles. Once I even took communion. I dragged Srebra into the line and, with her walking beside me against her will with her arms drooping, I, with arms crossed, opened my mouth as far as I could to not spill a single drop of the communion wine. I had managed to eat no fats for a whole week, which irritated our mother and father terribly. I only ate boiled beans, not fried, bread and onions, peppers, tomatoes, and cabbage with a little red pepper and salt, but no oil. Still, I didn't go to confession, because we didn't have our own spiritual father, unlike most of those who went to Krivi Dol. “I don't have one yet, either,” said Darko, who always drove us back to our neighborhood, and, when it was cold, insisted on picking us up. More and more often after service, we went for coffee at Café Kula just the three of us, and we two would sit on chairs pushed together in the garden outside with him across from us, or in winter, we sat on the banquettes in a booth. We drank coffee or tea and talked about this and that. He wanted to build a church in his neighborhood someday, where, he said, there wasn't a single one: “I can't see why they wouldn't build one; there will be more and more churches now,” he said. “People are returning to the faith, and it's high time, now that we have our own country, and everything belongs to us.” He did not talk much about the party,
unless Srebra asked him specifically. We learned that his father was vice president of the party and was on television sometimes. It seemed to me that most of the time, in fact, we were silent, drinking our tea or coffee. Darko would occasionally take Srebra's spoon and hold it and, as if unobserved, lick it, before returning it to her plate. He would help us put on our coats, always brushing Srebra's hair from her collar.