A Spare Life (29 page)

We had to go to the hospital for our first physical exam. It was Sunday morning, and the doctor was coming to the hospital just to see us. We had to be on time. We could not eat breakfast; both of us felt our stomachs turn at the very thought of food. Darko waited for us in the hallway, his face radiant, a secret expression in his eyes. He said nothing specific as we hurried to the underground station. We changed trains twice, reached the East Acton station, and then walked a short way to the hospital. The main building was an old structure, dating from the beginning of the twentieth century, with new wings added on. It was no accident that we were going to this particular hospital—it was the largest university clinic in Europe. Soon after it was built, conjoined babies had been successfully separated, though they hadn't been conjoined at the head, but at the shoulder. In the letter that Darko received from the hospital giving the date of our appointment—August 18, 1996—it said there was no guarantee they would actually perform the operation. The doctor wrote that he would determine whether to do the operation following an exam. With mixed emotions, we were now on our way to meet that person, our legs intertwining as we nearly ran. Srebra was laughing, almost hysterical. Darko followed us, calling out, “Hold on, calm down.” I kept sneezing, from excitement I think. Srebra covered her mouth; we were anxious, frightened, and happy. Our nerves were nearly shot. Darko was pale; our cheeks were flushed. Were our parents talking about us? We had sent them a postcard with the short message: “Greetings from London,” and now we were running to see our doctor, our savior, our executioner. “Hey, what about Bogdan?” Srebra suddenly cried out, right at the clinic door, but Darko merely said, “Please, really, just calm down. Let's go find the doctor.” At the reception desk, a black woman greeted us kindly. She skimmed through the letter we handed her, then called our doctor. He came in, tall, middle-aged, straight-backed, with an athletic build. He looked like a film star from the 1960s. His hair was black, slicked down. His complexion was a mix of European and African. When he saw us, he smiled broadly and said, “Are all the women in the Balkans so beautiful?” He then immediately added, turning professional, “You don't even notice that your heads are
conjoined.” Srebra and I pulled our hair back so he could see where our heads joined, then he led us to his office on the third floor of the left wing, jumping up two stairs at a time ahead of us. In his office, he had us sit on a leather couch and offered Darko an armchair, while he settled in the other armchair, and, with a remote control, lowered the blinds. Then, with a different remote, he turned on the television—a DVD player connected to a monitor, to be precise—and before us was a video of two sisters from an Arab country, around our age, with their conjoined heads wound in a scarf as they happily entered the operating room. On the video the doctor gave a brief account, and when this matter-of-fact narration was finished, the camera showed the doctor, an old man from South Korea, saying, “I decided to separate them when I considered that they had slept on their backs for thirty years, unable to turn over to get comfortable.” Then a voiceover added, “The day after their operation and death, this doctor cried in his wife's lap like a child. But the twins' dream had still been fulfilled—they returned home in two separate caskets.” They showed the caskets of yellow wood being lowered into the ground, one beside the other. Then our doctor turned off the film, raised the blinds, and looked at us. We were shocked by what we had seen. We had not expected such a beginning, such an introduction to our operation, which was our undertaking for salvation. It was far too raw, too painful and frightening, a slap in our faces, or, more precisely, a blow to the shared vein where we were conjoined. We sat speechless, lost, crushed, and exhausted. Darko cleared his throat while the doctor played with a pen, turning it over in the air. Finally, he said, “This could happen to you. This is, in fact, the most likely outcome of such an operation.” Then he fell silent. We were also silent, shifting around on the couch. We had expected a different approach—encouragement, endorsement, agreement with our decision as we had explained to him on three large sheets of paper sent from Skopje—we had anticipated support. He said, “The worst thing is that I don't have a wife, so I don't know whose lap I would cry in.” He laughed, loudly, ironically, almost cynically, and then stood up, walked behind our couch, took both of our heads in his hands, and said, “Be here tomorrow morning at eight.
You'll be given a hospital room. We'll do a complete examination, and after that, I will perform the operation. There is no other solution. You can't live like this any longer. Still, you have to decide whose life we should save if forced to choose. And you both must give signed consent.” He patted our heads, adding, “When we wish to change the fate we have been given, we must do it through our own accountability alone.” We were confused, our faces flushed. Darko watched all three of us strangely, not knowing what to say. We stood, extended our hands to the doctor, and left. We had never seen a doctor like that before. He didn't fit our conception of the most successful neurosurgeon in Europe, one who could separate our heads successfully, as we had always thought. The worm of doubt gnawed our flesh, but we looked at it triumphantly, because our skin had thickened from the moment we decided to separate at any cost so now it was impenetrable, like armor, and didn't allow the doubt to penetrate beneath our skin, into our souls. We had no other choice—we had to believe in the good. We had to free ourselves from this evil in our life, in our fate. Surgically. What God had joined together, let the knife put asunder. That was Srebra's raw logic. She said: “If God made us like this—though I personally think the two of us are descended from monkeys—then this operation will correct his mistake.” I squeezed the icon of Zlata Meglenska in my pocket. I stroked it and held it. I didn't take my hand from my pocket even in the doctor's office. All my strength, all my soul, all my hopes were gathered in the feel of the icon's soft, yet coarse, wood. God, how many years had I been inseparable from it. It was worn and faded from all my touching and squeezing and from the shapes of all the pockets into which I had shoved it every morning after spending the night beneath my head. My life was unimaginable without the icon, without this saint to whom I prayed automatically, though all my energy was concentrated in that automaticity. It was no empty prayer but a prayer-concentrate, a Hesychastic soothing of the soul. A human being was going to touch what God had ordained—our physical deformity. Orthodoxy didn't forbid operations, because a person needed his body to be resurrected, which is the reason that the holy fathers looked negatively at cremation. The body must be
buried, the body must be healed, the body must give birth, and the body must be resurrected.

“He'll separate you,” Darko said with conviction when we were outside. “He will separate you!” He was euphoric. He was shouting through the street that led to the underground—the aboveground, actually, because here at East Acton, the trains stopped above ground, and only later, at the third station, did they go deep into the earth, down into the depths of our thoughts. “Dead or alive,” I said, although I didn't want to be cynical. “Alive, alive,” said Srebra, “Oh, I'm so hungry!” But the choice we had to make cut between us like a living wall: Who would live if a choice had to be made? We didn't say a word about it. After a long ride, we got off near Hyde Park and went into a small, nondescript restaurant with a sign over the door, reading “We serve English breakfast all day.” We were hungry, not from hunger, but from excitement, anxiety, fear, and joy. We ordered three English breakfasts: we each got a fried egg, sunny-side up, bacon, roasted sausage, broiled tomato slices, a pile of boiled beans with hot red peppers, bread spread with butter, and coffee. Breakfast at eleven o'clock. We ate everything. Then we headed to the park. We came face-to-face with an enormous black marble Achilles. Bicyclists and people running in different directions swirled past it. “Look!” Darko pointed out a family to us. The mother was running, and the father ran while pushing a carriage in which a three-year-old boy was loudly laughing, excited by the race. I asked why they ran even on a Sunday, when so much time was spent every other day hurrying about from here to there. But they were a family, and for them, that was something far more important than the running. At that moment, I made my choice: Srebra must live. We approached the Speakers' Corner. A man standing on a bricklayer's ladder was speaking loudly, shouting actually, screaming in defense of Jesus Christ. A typical, populist herald of God, so sure of both himself and God. Standing right beside him, though not on the ladder, was a Muslim man who contradicted the Christian in a quiet voice. He kept repeating, “You know, you know,” which was the only thing that could be heard amid all the roar and commotion. An absurd scene, cinematic. Behind them, a young black girl in a pink dress was running around with her father, a large, imposing man. On the other side, a man sat on a chair singing meditative songs, then
reading psalms from the Bible. While we were there, not a single person spoke about politics. I thought Macedonia should have something like a speakers' corner in the park in Skopje for politicians—though not just for them—so they could say whatever came into their minds, talking as much as they pleased. People could say whatever they wanted and lighten their souls. A speakers' corner for radicals, in every sense of the word. Perhaps Srebra and I should climb on a chair in Hyde Park and speak about our torment. Had anyone ever spoken in Macedonian from the Speakers' Corner in London? I said none of this aloud; after all, Darko was the son of the vice president of the opposition party in Macedonia—Srebra's father-in-law, who had found enough money for our medical treatment in London, although it wasn't clear to us how. Officially, the money had been given to us from the Health Insurance Fund, and had gone directly into the account of the London hospital.

We continued on to the British Museum. The Parthenon, Greek Gods, Egyptian mummies, Indian deities, terracotta from Taranto, the Rosetta Stone, and, at the end—Macedonian folk costumes from Galičnik. Everything was in the British Museum, the whole world, everything that had existed prior to us, artifacts from every civilization were preserved there. Everything was there, and everything not there was coming. Including us. “Look, they could put us here,” said Srebra, “with the inscription ‘Two-headed Macedonians, embalmed,' you in black, me in white, like on our wedding day.” “It would be one of the most popular exhibits,” said Darko, and he laughed. All the museumgoers looked first at us, as if we were an exhibit that had stepped out of a display case, and only then did they turn discreetly toward the real exhibits, still affected by the sight, unsure in what era they found themselves. We were not invalids. We were not blind, not autistic; we didn't have Down syndrome. We “only” had conjoined heads that didn't immediately strike the eye. It was only after the fifth second they saw it, when our heads moved in unison in the same direction, and our bodies, always leaning to one side or the other, were pulled by gravity, gravity which, in our case, was always off-balance. But we were here in London, seeking an escape from the circumstances of our life. Just one more night, and we would be in the confident and capable hands of our surgeon.

That evening, we returned a bit early to the hotel. Along the way, we each had a Cornish pasty. As we entered the hotel, the woman at reception handed Srebra and me the key to our room with an expression on her face different from the one she wore as she gave Darko his. She looked at us with a smile playing at the corners of her lips and a secret in her gaze. We weren't sure why. We took the elevator to our floor. Darko said he would go to his room and then come to ours in half an hour. We went into our room, undressed—pulling our clothes down our legs—then popped into the shower. We dried off quickly, and, seated at the small vanity in our room, dried our hair with the hairdryer. I dried mine a bit and hers, then Srebra dried hers a bit and mine. We knew that this was the last time we would dry our hair in this fashion. We looked silently into the mirror, and in our gaze, everything was condensed, everything we had been silent about all our lives, everything we wanted to tell each other but didn't for whatever reason, everything was in our eyes, because other than in a mirror, we couldn't see each other. We loved each other, we hated each other, we were ashamed of each other, we felt contempt for each other, we were afraid of each other, we were close and we were distant. Everything was mixed up in our hearts, our heads; yet, surprisingly, it had all become unimportant, nearly meaningless in the face of our desire to be separated once and for all! Period. End of sentence. While the hair dryer blew on our hair, mixing the strands together, we were aware that, right in that moment, in the loneliness of a hotel room in London, we were separating, and it made us both happy and downcast, more out of fear than pain. Someone knocked on the door. “OK!” Srebra called out. “Come in!” she added even louder. A moment later the door opened, but it wasn't Darko on the other side, but a young man in strange attire, as if he were from outer space—from head to toe in a shiny silver woolen jumpsuit, with a soft hat that covered him from forehead to chin. Srebra and I gasped at the same time. Srebra said roughly, “Excuse me?” and the young man said in English, “You ordered a bed-warming?” At once I recognized Bogdan, not from our childhood in Skopje, but from the television show we had seen the night before, when he was sobbing and striking his head with
his fists, yelling, “Shit, shit” after he lost. It was Bogdan, it really was. “Bogdan!” I cried, but he couldn't believe his eyes. Evidently, he had not known we were there. Darko had ordered the bed-warming as a surprise. Bogdan stood, holding onto the door, and said, “Zlata? Srebra?” Then he took his hat off and began to pull his arms out of the suit. “You're not going to warm our bed?” Srebra asked with a smirk, while I stared with mouth agape. He nearly jumped, saying, “If you want me to,” but I waved him off with my hand. My heart nearly flew from my chest, and our hearts and temples pounded in a shared rhythm, which I thought might echo through the whole room. I don't know how we calmed down. I think it was when Darko came into the room, and, laughing, introduced himself to Bogdan. Bogdan, the childhood friend who had disappeared one day from our lives, was now here, with us, in a hotel room in London, as a professional warmer of hotel beds. It was a new profession—human bed warmers who lay down in specialized attire before the hotel guest got in. It was warm outside, but in the room the climate control had cooled it to sixty-two degrees, and the bed was cold. Some guests really did want a warm bed to climb into, so the hotel came up with this new job. Guests could order a bed warmer, who, hoping for a good tip, would warm it then discreetly withdraw. Bogdan was the only one in the hotel, and, apparently, in all of London, because it was rare for someone to want the service, and the manager had told him he would probably have to let him go because it was simply not worth keeping him on for those few occasions when a guest requested him. Many associations, organizations, and individuals considered the service controversial, but guests seeing the ad for the service hanging in the display case at the reception desk either reacted by laughing uncontrollably (which made the watchman in the hotel, a black man named John, also laugh), or with shock—arguing with the receptionist, defending human rights, intimacy, hygiene, human worth. One guest even said he would order the warmer to warm his bed, but would also fuck him, certain that the service was sexual, because otherwise, what normal person would warm a stranger's bed with his body, even if wrapped up in protective clothing from head to toe. Stories in
the newspapers said that the hotel had crossed all boundaries of good behavior and was offering a service that encroached on an individual's bodily integrity. It was a scandal. “As for me, this isn't my first job and it won't be my last. I finished a technical school program, and since then I've done all sorts of things, working in pubs, restaurants, offices, laundries, now here. But I mainly work here just so I can say I have a job. Most of the time I solve prize crosswords (he looked at us knowingly, but also a bit shame-faced, saying, ‘You know how much I liked
Brain Twisters
'). I play the lotto. I mail in prize coupons, postcards. I answer questions. England has tons of these things, and there are constantly new games. I go on quiz shows; yesterday, for example, I almost won the grand prize, but didn't. I'd be rich, and wouldn't have to warm hotel beds anymore. But then I wouldn't have seen you.” “What about your mother? What's she doing?” I asked tentatively. “My mother? Are you thinking of Auntie Stefka? That's what I call her. I couldn't get used to calling her Mom. She's alive and well, and when her sister died, she married her sister's husband, her brother-in-law. He's an Englishman, a good guy, but I still call him Uncle. I couldn't get used to calling him Dad. They live in Brighton, and we see each other from time-to-time. I live here, in an area called Shoreditch. I rent a place and usually sleep there, except when I know a client wants me to warm the bed. Then I get an employee's room in the hotel.” We spoke that night till dawn. About London, Skopje, the operation that awaited us. We all talked, but mainly Bogdan. That night, he was more talkative than he had been all the years of our childhood together, when he silently solved crossword puzzles and we played together and watched one another, at times timidly, at times aggressively, embarrassment and courage mixing like water and oil, depending on whether Roza was around. Srebra had barely any relationship with him when we were children. His presence annoyed her. But since Roza had accepted him as a friend, Bogdan was often in our circle. How had I felt about Bogdan when I was a kid? I had been embarrassed and sorry for him, but I didn't ignore him. At school, I listened closely when he spoke in class. I was shaken by his essay “When You Hit Rock Bottom.” I had never forgotten him,
and whenever we met in the neighborhood, I was confused and couldn't talk. But it had always passed quickly, because Srebra would pull me away. We talked about Roza. Bogdan remembered every detail of their friendship and at one point said, “Roza was like a sister to me.” We all fell silent. The memories came back and struck each of us like waves hitting a rocky shore, breaking our hearts with pent-up feeling, truths unspoken, thoughts unsaid. Until dawn, we combed through our lives as we never had before. We talked, laughed, kept silent, but we did not cry. Darko attentively pulled the threads of our conversation. He knew when to prompt us, when to stop us, and when to get us to open up a bit more. That night, Srebra and I passed through a ritual confession, a cleansing of our souls, a farewell to our joint heads, and looked toward a new future that would undoubtedly be bright. We went to bed, each of us calmed by her own collection of memories, her own personal history. Srebra and Darko kissed on the lips. Bogdan seemed taken aback when he saw them kiss right beside my face, next to my cheek. He said good night and left, with the promise that he would visit us in the hospital, where, he said, he would see each of us with her own head.