A Spare Life (3 page)

She decided to teach us to ride a bicycle. That had always seemed impossible to us, to our father in particular, who kept, next to his black bike in the garage, an old red Pony bicycle that he had picked up somewhere; it had an old black saddle, a chain guard painted orange, and no rear bike rack. Whenever we went down to his garage to get chalk so we could draw, we always looked at the red Pony with a vague, questioning feeling of how we might possibly ride together—where Srebra would sit, where I'd sit. And he would call out right away, “Bikes aren't for you; if you fell off, we'd be stuck trying to sort everything out.” Roza disagreed. She urged us to go home, get the key to the garage, and take out the bike while she got hers from their garage, then we'd follow her instructions on how to ride. So, of course, that's exactly what we did. First, Roza adjusted the seats of both bikes so they were the same height. Then she told Srebra to sit on the Pony and me to sit on her bike, placing them precisely side by side. We had to cross our arms so my left hand was on Srebra's right handlebar, and her right hand was on my left handlebar. “Look in front of you, not down at the ground,” instructed Roza, and she pushed, holding onto both seats. We rode two meters, and then smacked into an old Lada parked at the curb. We held ourselves up against the windows, and fortunately, didn't hit our heads on anything. But a small dent was visible on the front door on the driver's side, and both bikes' handlebars were bent. When our fathers came home from work, we confessed what we had done. Other than shouts, threats to send us to an orphanage, and curses, Srebra and I weren't punished. We never asked Roza whether she was punished for doing something she shouldn't have. On the days Roza didn't come outside in the afternoon, Srebra and I, not knowing what to do with ourselves, usually went to Auntie Verka's. If we weren't with Roza, we rarely wanted to play together or go to the same place. It was a constant problem both for us and for our parents that we never wanted the same thing. If Srebra wanted to go to our cousin Verče's, I wanted to stay home and watch a movie. If I wanted to go to the library and take out a book, Srebra didn't want to budge. How many arguments, pleas, bites, pinches, and stomps on each other's feet came from any suggestion, any plan in our lives. If
only we could be separated for an hour or two so we could each do what we wanted. But that was impossible. The two of us did, however, like to go to Verka's. We were drawn to her—a single woman and heavy drinker who lived in one of the apartments in our entryway, directly opposite Roza's apartment on the second floor, an unusual woman who both loved us and hated us. But we didn't care. How old was Verka when we were children? When Srebra and I begged her for presents? When she brought us the cassette
Songs about Tito
from her trade union's trip to Belgrade, along with a combed-wool doll that collected dust for years? When she gave me books by Mir-Jam, and Srebra the Fisher books? When we went to her place, and she sat on the couch while Uncle Blaško massaged her back? Even though the sight embarrassed me and disgusted Srebra, we still didn't leave, sitting at the table and passing an empty container of cream back and forth, sliding it across the table. That's how we learned that the salesclerk in the neighborhood's only bookstore—where we bought all our books and notebooks for the first day of school—had cancer and that Auntie Verka was deathly afraid she would get sick too. She once showed us a photograph of the son who had repudiated her after helping her get an apartment designated for a single person in our building.

Auntie Verka would send us to get a bottle of rakija, or a jar of mayonnaise, or cigarettes. She divided the change down to the dinar, half for me, half for Srebra. For hours, she would sit on the balcony sipping rakija, smoking cigarettes, and occasionally cursing at someone on the street, hurling abuse at a tenant seated on their balcony, or just letting out the odd shout. Srebra and I were usually in her living room then, sitting by the window on the same wall as the balcony, watching her and quietly giggling, or counting the money she had given us. Then she either shooed us away for no particular reason, swearing at us or calling down curses on our heads, or we secretly slipped out of the apartment. We would leave the building through the glassless window at the back, stepping on each other's feet, and head straight to the store for lollipops or chocolate. At times like that, Srebra and I loved each other normally, like sisters, without any tenderness; we didn't hold hands or anything, but at least we didn't fight, didn't quarrel or tease each other.

Auntie Verka was one of the rare individuals in our joint life who brought us together. Perhaps that's why, for our twelfth birthday, the only people we invited to our party were Roza, Verče, and Auntie Verka. How many arguments there were over one stupid birthday party! Our father didn't make much of a fuss; he went to the garage, to his “atomic shelter” as I called it, after the band with that name. Our mother, on the other hand, passed through every phase of disapproval, bickering, and threatening; yet in the end, she threw up her hands, because with us, there could be no peace in the house. That was clear to her from the moment we were born—as worthless as conjoined bats. It wasn't clear to her why she hadn't given us to a children's home, but she had succumbed to our father's persuasion that if she brought us home, they'd find doctors who could separate us once we'd grown a bit and were strong enough for the operation. But he'd lied to her. Where could such doctors be found if there were any at all, and besides, there was no case like ours in the whole world. I don't know if it was just Srebra and I that were unable to feel her love or if it was because, paradoxically, a child can't feel motherly love until she's grown up, until later, when she starts to analyze it. As always, we got through this fight with insults, nasty words, and spite, but in the end, we got our way: for the first time in our lives we would celebrate our birthday, against all opposition. Mom thought birthday parties were for the rich, particularly since we were born in the summer, when there was no school, and no one expected there to be a party. “Who will come to your party, God?” she asked. But on the day of our party, Mom made steamed cookies and a cake with strawberry pudding filling, sprinkled with ground walnuts. We went to the store and bought snacks and mint liqueur, and at home we made juice from sour cherry syrup. We arranged everything nicely on top of the white freezer in the big room where our parents slept. Soon Roza, Verka, and our cousin Verče arrived; Roza brought gifts—notebooks with thick red covers. Verka brought money tucked in both pockets of her skirt, and Verče came with money wrapped in a piece of white paper, just as our aunt had given it to her. We put on some music, Đorđe BalaÅ¡ević, the only cassette that was mine, and Srebra's Zdravko Čolić tape. We nibbled on
breadsticks while Auntie Verka went straight for the liqueur. Then we cut the cake and ate it without candles or ceremony, humming along to the songs on the tapes. Our parents didn't sit in the room with us. Our father stayed in the garage the whole time, and Mom sat in the kitchen doing needlepoint, ears cocked to catch our voices intermingled with the music. Auntie Verka, who was drunk even in her dreams, could barely stand. She was sipping straight from the bottle, laughing, showing her yellow teeth among which two gold ones glittered. Roza was trying to make the atmosphere merrier by playing “one, two, three, you hit me” with Srebra and me. Verče's hands twisted a snake fashioned from small black-and-white beads which stood on the wardrobe as a decoration, but aside from the music, there was an emptiness in the room that makes me shudder even today; that birthday was so sad that we never again even mentioned celebrating one. Instead, we suppressed the shared day of our birth, even though the resulting tension lasted the whole day and was worst of all when our parents returned from work without the least acknowledgment that it was our birthday. But Verka remembered that our birthday was in summer, and for several summers in a row she gave us a present, some old thing she had in her apartment—a small porcelain horse, a chicken made of lace, small knitted shoes that had decorated the knobs of her cupboards, a book by Tito, Marx, or Engels that she bought through her workplace until she was allowed to take early retirement due to chronic alcoholism, or money to buy lollipops or chocolate.

Mom always swore about her in the same way: “May her heart devour her,” she said, although it was never clear to us why she disliked her so much, even though no one else in our building liked her. Everybody closed their doors in her face, avoided meeting her on the stairs or outside, pretended to be deaf if she asked them something. There were even those who insulted her openly, shouting, “Worthless drunk! You stink and your apartment stinks. You'll bring some disease in here! Idrizovo prison is the only place for you! Jesus, your son should never have found you an apartment; he should have just left you on the street! Why did you have to end up in our building?” All sorts of things like that. The men were particularly harsh, because it was to them that Verka most often turned for a cigarette or a sip of rakija or beer. It was only Uncle BlaÅ¡ko, who lived on the first floor, who didn't argue with her. He didn't smoke or drink; he just sat on the balcony, and whenever anyone walked by, he mumbled something resembling a greeting. At home, whenever we asked for something sweet, Mom always joked, “Something sweet like your sweet uncle BlaÅ¡ko.” As a matter of fact, I think Srebra and I asked for sweets just to hear that one kind sentence from our mother, to feel that she might love us. Uncle BlaÅ¡ko's wife died young of stomach cancer, and on the day of her funeral, Srebra and I stood on our balcony and watched the hearse approach. On the corner, BlaÅ¡ko's six-year-old son stood sadly in his blue suit and pale-blue shirt, his hair combed to the side. A small, lost child without his mother. No one held his hand; he stood alone and waited for the hearse to pull up in front of our building. His father was beating his chest and crying loudly. No one else was crying. All the grown-ups who lived in the apartment building climbed into their cars and set off behind the hearse carrying Milka's coffin. In all the years before her death, Srebra and I had seen her only once, the day we had a car accident. Our aunt Ivanka had come over that day. She, too, had her troubles, because our cousin was in the hospital to have one of her ovaries removed, even though she was only ten years old. Aunt Ivanka lay all day on the small couch in the kitchen and cried, crushed from pain, grieving over little Verče's fate, that she might never have even a single child with only one ovary. Our
mother said to her, “You think that my two will ever have children? Who will take them with their heads like that?” Srebra and I just stood there, mute, beside the couch. We couldn't figure out why Verče wouldn't be able to have a child. We couldn't remember what our biology teacher had said about how babies were conceived, and we said nothing—Srebra with her eyes downcast, I holding in my hands the little red toy telephone we had bought for when we visited our cousin in the hospital. In the stairwell, we met Roza, jumping up two stairs at a time as usual; she was returning from the store. “Hey, nice telephone,” she called to us. I don't know how we all fit into the Å koda, but we piled in—Dad, Mom, our aunt Ivanka, Srebra, and I, as well as Aunt Milka, who was already sick and going to the doctor's in the hospital where Verče was. We hadn't driven for five minutes, when, turning onto the main street, our father hit another car coming from the opposite direction. The crash wasn't a big one, but it was enough to frighten us more than we'd ever been frightened before. Our aunt and Milka got out of the car, still shaken, and ran to the bus stop to wait for a bus to the hospital. Although we could have simply gone home on foot, we had to stand and wait for the police. We didn't get home for another hour. Dad was upset. He couldn't believe something like this had happened to him. He kept looking at the car's dented bumper. Mom simply went mute. She did not utter a single word. She was pale, and I wondered whether she might have a fainting spell, because those spells had lasted for years, when she'd suddenly feel dizzy, go pale, and then lose consciousness, all accompanied by the words, “I'm going to die.” Srebra would usually cry—she couldn't keep her face puckered up in the frown she used to keep back tears—while I trembled, my body going cold as if it were thirty below. I trembled so much that I shook Srebra as well, and my hands became sweaty. But this time, she didn't lose consciousness, and when the three of us got home, she mechanically poured dried beans into the red pot and began to pick through them, sitting in the kitchen on the couch with her eyes fixed on the pot—picking and picking over the beans. Srebra and I sat down by the small table on the wide chair our father had made for us a long time ago from some boards he got somewhere,
with a cushioned seat. We just sat there, saying nothing, handing back and forth our only doll, its crying mechanism long since removed from its belly, naked, its head bald on top, with one arm that kept falling off. We passed it back and forth as if it were a real baby: slowly, gently, without a word. It was deathly quiet in the apartment. Suddenly, the front door opened, and our father came in with another man, a mechanic I supposed. They sat in the dining room, we didn't move a muscle; Mom didn't get up but continued picking at the beans. We heard our father ask the man whether he would like a glass of rakija. He must have nodded in agreement because we didn't hear a response. Then Dad went into the big room where the glasses and rakija were kept. When he came back, Srebra and I peeked from the kitchen table through the opening between the kitchen and dining room, as Dad said to the man, “Here you go, old pal.” That was the first time in my life that I heard the word
pal
, and it has remained in my memory, stitched in embroidered letters. I was thrilled with the word; it filled me with hope. They drank the rakija and went out again. We still hadn't spoken. Srebra had to go to the bathroom, so we went, and while I sat on the trashcan holding my nose so Srebra's excrement wouldn't stink so much, she began to giggle, shaking my head also with her giggles. “He said ‘old pal'—that's ridiculous! Dad doesn't have any old pals, since he doesn't even know anyone from where he came from. He's talking nonsense.” I knew Srebra was right, but didn't say anything. Our father hadn't been in touch with his family for years. When he and our mother got married, they lived with his parents in the house that, our mother said, he built when he was still a child, lugging the cement and mortar himself. Our aunt and uncle were little then and played hide-and-seek while he worked excruciatingly hard, but they're the ones living there now. Put simply, his mother and father treated the newlyweds very badly. They were unhappy that their son had married a village girl; while our father was at work, our pregnant mother stayed home, in rooms with small barred windows in the basement of the house. Grandpa would insult her, chase her outdoors, and then call her back inside. Several times, he even hit her with a broom. Grandma acted as if she didn't see anything. Our mother cried every day, and maybe that's why we
were born with conjoined heads, with this inoperable physical deformity. When our grandparents saw what kind of children their daughter-in-law had produced, they just threw us out onto the street. Dad managed to take his only coat along with a pink coatrack that had a mirror and a shelf for hats, which stands in our hallway to this day. With us—infants just a few days old—the coatrack, and their bags, they hopped on the first bus that came along and begged the driver to take them with all their baggage. The coatrack's mirror banged against the handrail throughout its journey on the bus, and cracked down the middle. Finally, we reached the last stop, at the other end of the city. We got off the bus, and the driver took pity on my parents and helped with the luggage. They asked the first woman they met whether she knew of a room for rent nearby. The woman, Stefka, lived in a small house at the edge of the neighborhood. She was a widow whose son had gone off to Germany, so she happened to have an empty room. Stefka picked up Srebra and me, thinking we were normal twins, and would have pulled our heads off had our mother not explained that we were born with joined heads, God save and preserve us. Granny Stefka gave us a small room in her house anyway; she found a woven basket for Srebra and me, and we stayed there for three whole years, until our parents were able to buy an apartment on credit two bus stops away. Our father never forgave his parents for what they did that day, and they literally forbade their other son and daughter, and all the other members of the extended family, to have any sort of ties with him. Our father was left with no family, no loving touch of a parent's hand. Our aunt and uncle felt no compassion for their older brother, erasing him from their lives. One day, though, when Srebra and I were six years old, a young woman came to our house. The darkest brunette we had ever seen sat in the big room on the couch where our mom and dad slept. She picked up the belly-shaped hot-water bottle that was lying on the bed. Srebra and I had won it in a school lottery and christened it Hermes; we played with it, rocking and hugging it before bed, when we filled it with hot water from the small green pot on the oil stove. But it was our parents who slept with it. The young woman turned the water bottle over, looking at it from all sides, then put it down and took
from her handbag two chocolate bars with crisped rice—the biggest ones we had ever seen—and gave them to Srebra and me. “This is your aunt,” our father said with a shaky voice, his hands trembling like slender branches. We just stared at this aunt of ours. She sat there awhile and cried a bit, without uttering a single word; then she stood and left. We ate the chocolate bars with crisped rice over the course of a whole month, square by square. Nobody ever mentioned the visit again. After that, our father's hands never stopped trembling, and he was so nervous that he shouted at every little thing. In fact, his moods changed every five minutes: He'd be polite and gentle with us, calling us his little chicks. He would buy us chocolate bars with pictures of animals on the wrappers, but then he would shout at us: “Get lost!”; “You voracious asses, you have devoured the world!”; or “Beasts, I'm going to take my belt to you!” One day, when we were in the dining room making models of traffic lights and signs for a school assignment, he got totally fed up and began reeling through his repertoire of insults. I tugged on Srebra with all my strength, because I couldn't stand the torrent of words dirtying his mouth. Srebra cried out in pain. We went out onto the balcony, and below, Lazarus Day singers were strolling by with a bear. The air was wintry and melancholic; the large room was cold. In the dining room, Dad glued the models together as he shouted, “You have devoured the world!” Saint Lazarus was nowhere to be seen, but the bear was walking on its hind legs. And on that day, Srebra and I once again ate sole, flour-dusted and fried—that whole winter we ate sole—I liked the shape of the fish, like an inflated heart. Srebra poked the body with her fork, making the form of a cross, and then ate it with her hands. Our mother and father ate boiled ham that came from the five-kilo tin fried with eggs, but the pieces of processed ham didn't stick, they just lay there beside the eggs in the pan. Our father had bought both the fish and the ham through his work, along with a large plastic container of plum jam. He would drink some of the red wine he kept in the basement and his anger would fade away. I could hardly wait for the electricity to go out, which usually happened in the afternoon, due to rationing. Then all four of us would squish together on the small couch in the kitchen, Srebra and I
would ask Mom and Dad common expressions in French, and they would dredge up something from their school days, or make something up and we'd all laugh, while around us there was total darkness, and it wasn't unpleasant to sit next to one another, huddled up, not only for me and Srebra, but for them, too, for our parents. It wasn't unpleasant to love one another and be happy. Those afternoons without electricity were beautiful in their illusion of family happiness. But when the lights flashed back on (I always imagined a man sitting in a large room filled with on/off switches who alone determined when the lights would go on) and we could see one another, we all got up right away. Srebra and I, as if on command, jumped to our feet. We'd busy ourselves with something we could do in the same place, or argued, or simply sat and watched television in absolute silence, each of us already closed into herself, already alienated, loathing one another again.