A Spare Life (25 page)

Darko's mother and father came up to us, smiled, and said, “Everything you need is in the apartment,” handing the key to Darko. “Children, may you be happy,” they said, including me along with the bride and groom. We got into Darko's car and set off. The apartment was absolutely beautiful—clean, bright, with beautiful furniture, all of which Srebra had chosen, with me offering advice. But I still hadn't grasped the seriousness of my role in their marriage, in their lives. Darko had selected the bed, the largest I had ever seen, and had it placed in the largest room. It had three pillows and two blankets, one larger, one smaller, all in a gold color that shone like sunlight on the bed. The wardrobe was big, running from one end of the wall to the other, and opposite it was a large vanity with a velvet-covered bench for two. Darko and Srebra were distracted that evening. We sat in the living room and stared absently at the television. All of a sudden we saw ourselves at the registry office when Srebra and Darko said “yes” and I bent down with Srebra so she could sign. The camera's zoom lens zeroed in, seeking the spot that connected us, and the reporter said, “Scandalous, but amazing. Love indeed knows no boundaries. Today this young man and the woman in the white dress entered into marriage, along with her Siamese twin with whom she is connected by this link between their heads.” The picture was grotesque, a mirror in which we saw ourselves: the groom in his fashionable suit, the bride with a veil on her head entangled in the hair of her Siamese twin sister dressed in a black satin dress. Their heads joined, fused forever. Then they showed Darko's father swinging at the camera, and the reporter commented, “Unfortunately, the vice president of the opposition party tussled with our cameraman. Is this the democracy he stands for?” That night, Darko slept on his back, holding Srebra's hand. There was no other touching, no movement; he was dressed in his pajamas, just like we were dressed in nightgowns we had slipped over our legs in just a few seconds, and in total darkness. I didn't take off my bra as I always did before bed. From then on, I always slept with it on, even though it pressed and dug into me. We couldn't fall asleep for a long time that night; from time to time, we swallowed the lumps in our throats, clearing them with broken coughs or an inhale,
trying not to be heard. We fell asleep at last. That was the first night of Darko and Srebra's marriage. And my first night in their double bed.

The front page of Monday's newspapers carried only two stories, accompanied by large photos: one was of the taking of Srebrenica by the Republika Srpska Army; the other was the wedding of the “threesome.” And once again there were attacks on the vice president of the opposition, Darko's father. Srebra wanted to throw the newspapers away, but I managed to save one. I threw it into the wardrobe in the bedroom and never looked at it again. For several nights we slept as we had that first night, but then one night, I heard Srebra ask Darko, “Do you love me?” Darko whispered, “I love you more than the whole world.” “Then be mine,” Srebra whispered back. Darko gulped. He didn't know what to say. I thought it was my turn to do something. I told Srebra, “I need to go to the bathroom,” and we got up. In the bathroom—beautifully appointed with a small comfortable chair with velvet covering next to the toilet—I said, “I am going to take diazepam.” “Are you sure about what you're doing?” she asked. “Yes,” I said, “What about you?” “I don't know,” said Srebra. I took three diazepam from the small bottle in the cupboard and gulped them down with water. Then Srebra and I took care of our other business. By the time we returned to the bedroom, I already felt dazed. I fell into a deep sleep as soon as we lay on the bed. In my dream, I felt the mattress shaking below me. It felt as if I were on a boat, but I slept and didn't know where I was or with whom. When I awoke, Darko was already gone, but Srebra was waking with sweet sighs; her nightgown up above her thighs; she wasn't wearing panties. When we lifted ourselves to sit up in bed, she immediately pulled her nightgown over her knees. We stood up, and there, where she had been sleeping, were several drops of blood. “So, it happened,” I said calmly. “It was so lovely,” she said, laughing, “it was so lovely.” It was good that Darko wasn't home, because otherwise, I think she would have wanted to do it again right away, whether I took three diazepam or not. She was excited all day. She could not sit in one place, but got me up, then sat me down, then pulled me around the apartment, until finally, she took a cookbook out from one of our bags, and we began preparing things. She wanted to greet Darko with a nice meal, and when he got home he pressed a hand between her thighs and his lips to her throat, on the side opposite our conjoined spot.

Every day, the television carried news of the massacre in Srebrenica. Darko tuned in to the BBC, which had more information. We watched and couldn't believe what we saw. Since Auschwitz—according to the history textbooks, anyway—there had been no event as monstrous in Europe. Srebrenica weighed on our lives like a heavy fog. Those nights, all three of us slept as if dazed. I don't know what Srebra and Darko felt, but I was afraid. I was frightened, disturbed, thinking of that most accurate description: man is wolf to his fellow man.

But life continued, and I don't know whether that's the fortune or the misfortune of the living. Collective tragedies, no matter how intense, cannot surpass individual tragedy. Or comedy. Now every night Srebra spilled three diazepam into her hand for me, and every night I felt a force rocking me in my sleep, as if I had fallen into a hole and was listening to breaths of pleasure and shouts from a distance, but they were right here in our shared bed. Darko wasn't home during the day. He went to work in a planning office. His father had found work for him immediately and could have found work for us as well, he said, but only if we wanted it. I did not want to work in an office, and Srebra and I agreed that she would prepare for the judicial exam and no longer torment me about exams or law books; that was over and done with for me, as was, in fact, my life as an individual. During the day, when I wasn't cooking with Srebra or we weren't out buying something, we sat on the couch in the living room. She would have some big legal book, and I'd read an entrancing novel. Those moments were lovely. The apartment was gorgeous, comfortable; the balcony looked out over the city center. Life in this multistory building carried on in a completely different way from life in our building on the periphery of Skopje: the neighbors barely greeted one another; each person hurried up the stairs; and in the elevator, if people exchanged remarks, it was only about the weather. At first, everyone looked at us strangely, thunderstruck, but eventually, they either got used to us or pretended that they had. If someone asked us anything a bit intimate, we answered without shame that we were born this way, Darko and Srebra had fallen in love and had wanted to get married, and I had agreed in order to bring happiness to my sister. But we said nothing about our nights, letting everyone think whatever they wished.

We rarely went to our mother and father's—only to pick up something. Our room gaped empty, bare, and our mother kept their things in our cupboards. What was surprising was that Dad began coming to our place more often. If he was somewhere in the city, or at the market or the doctor's, he would drop by, sit awhile, drink a beer, nibble on something sweet or savory if we had anything. He would offer to vacuum for us, or take out the garbage. He leafed through the photo album from Srebra's wedding, looking at each picture for a long time, transfixed, especially at those taken at the party at Café Kula, with his brother and sister. He borrowed the videotapes of the wedding to watch them at home with our mother, returned them, borrowed them again. We felt uncomfortable talking to him about anything other than the most ordinary things, like who was doing what. We spoke with our father about our neighbors, and with our mother about our relatives and Grandma and Grandpa. Those were our common topics. We had no others. From time to time, we would give our father the garbage to take out on his way home, or have him pick up some document for us if he was going to town. And we began to pack him a bag of things to take home, fresh vegetables or fruit, a piece of kashkaval, salami. It became the custom whenever he came; he came only in the morning, before lunch, when we were alone. He sat for half an hour, and then we would fill up the bag with food. We would give him money for the bus and he would leave, without exchanging a single word of importance with us in that half hour. Once, he handed us a small scrap of paper, and with a trembling voice he said, “Your mother has jotted down here what she needs.” It was a grocery list, written in our mother's rapid handwriting: bananas, coffee, shampoo, two bars of soap, kashkaval, feta, salami. Srebra and I went into the bedroom. “Is she crazy? Is she crazy, or what?” Srebra whispered, but I elbowed her, saying we had to go buy the food. Our father was reading the newspaper in the living room. We went outside, and Srebra pulled me along, repeating in a loud voice, faster and faster, “Is she crazy, is she crazy?” Yes, she was, but we still bought her everything she asked for, and from then on, our father regularly came with a list, and we bought the things. We'd put everything in a bag for him, and he would leave.
Mom never thanked us, not on the phone, and not when we went to visit, but sometimes, she would make comments like, “Those plums were not fit to eat,” “I don't drink that kind of coffee, I only drink Rio,” “That hair dye you bought me—I had to recolor it; white, white as if I were an old lady—where did you find that brand?” And other comments like that. I would snatch the phone when I saw the number, because I would just stay silent and listen, but Srebra would get angry. Our father was always embarrassed when he handed over the list from our mother, and sometimes said, “Your mother, well, it is becoming intolerable.” These meetings of ours were strange, as if we were trying to get close, but it eluded us. His hands shook more than before, and his voice trembled when he spoke. Srebra and I were depressed when he left, but both of us kept silent. Srebra rarely told Darko that our father had been there.

After all those nights of diazepam and the bed shaking, it was obvious that Srebra would get pregnant, because I never saw any condoms, and there were no pills. We'd had only one gynecological exam in our lives, when we were fifteen years old and our vaginas had itched terribly. We scratched ourselves discretely and headed to the bathroom, and, ashamed or not, we washed ourselves with cold water. For a short time, the redness and itching had seemed to go away, but just for a little while. Then we itched even more, and had no choice but to go to the gynecologist, whom we told, even though she was still in a bit of a state because of the sight of us, that both of our vaginas itched. She said, “I don't have a table on which to examine both of you. Take these instructions, and go have a swab sample taken.” We went to the laboratory, located near the mortuary. There, the nurse placed us crosswise on a bed, took swabs from us, and then we walked past the mortuary again to get the results. We both had yeast infections. The nurse told us the best medicine was to clean ourselves with vinegar and water, but the doctor prescribed tablets that were placed into the vagina, suppositories, and said we should shower regularly, ideally using baby shampoo. None of this was feasible in our house, not even washing with vinegar and water, because one bottle of vinegar had to last at minimum a half a year—we only used it for salad—and hot water was heated only once a week in the boiler, so we couldn't shower regularly. We used the vaginal suppositories, and for a while, the itching disappeared. But when the itching began again, we simply didn't go back to the gynecologist. So we itched, scratched ourselves, and washed ourselves with cold water. Now, when Srebra began to feel nauseous and dragged me to the bathroom to throw up—her head bent over the toilet bowl and my head bent over the stool with the velvet seat—she said she was probably pregnant, but was still not sure, and had to go see the gynecologist. Darko brought home a pregnancy test and gave the kit to her to place under the stream of urine while I sat beside the toilet on the chair bought especially for me, with its soft seat covered in red velvet, just like Srebra's on the other side of the toilet, where she waited when I was doing my business. The small indicator window displayed a white cross. The test was positive. Srebra was
pregnant. All three of us looked at that cross in awe as if in church, and Darko, in his excitement, even crossed himself as he began to cry. He cried like a small child. He hugged her and kissed her; he hugged me and kissed me as well, but I boiled in anger, seeing myself on that small white cross on the pregnancy test, seeing myself crucified on that cross, on the cross of their love. And now this? “Each child is a child of God, Zlata. Ours most of all,” he said to me. “Still,” I said, “one never knows—she should see a gynecologist.”

We went to a male doctor at a private clinic, where, in a comfortable, bright office, the nurse had already pushed two hospital beds together, and on the bed, there was equipment for conducting the exam. Both the gynecologist and the nurse were extremely discreet; they asked no questions, as if it were an everyday occurrence to have patients with conjoined heads. “Yes, you're pregnant,” the doctor told Srebra. In the hallway, there was more emotion, ecstasy, sentiment. It wasn't clear to me how they could be so unaware, so clueless. Was it such a small thing that I had agreed (without anyone asking me or begging me) for them to get married and for us to live together? And now they wanted to have a child. Srebra couldn't contain her happiness. She wanted to dance with Darko but couldn't without me, so I had to hug him awkwardly, with my arms around both him and Srebra. We danced like a kind of sandwich, stepping on each other's toes, which made Srebra and Darko giggle with that seductive joy of lovers that particularly annoys those who aren't in love. Srebra was happy, but frightened. “Can I count on you?” she asked me a few days later, pulling me in front of the bathroom mirror to look me right in the eye. Her question confused me. We had never asked each other questions like out of a movie. We rarely said “thank you”; we didn't say “please”; we didn't wish each other “good night” before going to sleep in our shared bed; we didn't say “excuse me” or “pardon me” if we bumped each other unintentionally or stepped on each other's feet or jerked each other's heads, which happened often and always hurt. We simply did not use such phrases, the ones found in the Serbian handbook
The Book for Every Woman
, although we knew them and used them with other people. Indeed, it was only with strangers that we acted politely, but not with our parents, who themselves didn't behave that way. Not with our aunts or our uncle or with our grandma and grandpa. No one in our family used the words and phrases of good manners, and in fact, the first person close to us who used such words was the person closest to Srebra: Darko, who had been raised with good manners and who not only knew how to use silverware as if he had been born to it, but also never said “give me” without adding “please,” said “thank you” for every small act, and excused himself for each
clumsy thing that he might do to anyone. I don't know about Srebra, but at first, it really bothered me. It seemed to me out of a movie, and a sign that we were strangers, even Srebra and Darko, because we had always thought people who were close never had to use such phrases. It was normal to say to a close family member “gimme” and not say “thanks,” let alone “thank you,” because it was understood and didn't need to be stated. But Darko used such words, and it was strange to him that we didn't talk to him in the same way. Srebra had already begun to talk in that way with him. And now Srebra was asking me whether she could count on me, and her manners, that cinematic question, confused me. I was silent for several seconds before I finally said, “You can.”