A Spare Life (36 page)

He would often say, “Oh, love of mine, I know what loss is. You know my mother died when I was a child. At that moment, something was torn not only from my soul, but from my body as well—as if an organ was removed. And even though I got a new mother, one I picked myself—which is no small thing—that part of me has always remained empty.” I knew that I, too, would always feel an emptiness where Srebra had been. What could possibly fill such a void? Bogdan said, “Some fill it with drugs, some with alcohol, some with religion, some with politics, and in each instance, to the extreme. But it doesn't help.” He filled the emptiness with crosswords, prize coupons, quizzes, and various other games that were entertainment for other people but income for him. And what about me? How could I fill the emptiness Srebra's death left in me? When she was alive, both of us longed for privacy, for solitude, to be without the other. But now, when I had privacy, I didn't know what to do with it. In the bathroom, while I hunched on the toilet seat, I behaved as I had when Srebra was present: I tried not to make any sound except what was unavoidable, I peed quickly, in one stream, I shit just as quickly, my hands always on my knees, hiding me—from whom? I needed time to free myself from my self-imposed restraints and
feel the freedom that existed behind a closed bathroom door where no one could be if you didn't want them to be, and there's no excuse for someone to come in while you're in there, except if you allow it. Once I grasped the freedom of the bathroom, I slowly got used to it. I locked myself in, and showered for hours, sat on the toilet, changed pads, looked at myself in the mirror, combed my hair and studied how it grew, rubbed my body with all kinds of lotions, waxed my legs, polished my nails… What didn't I do locked in the bathroom, even when Bogdan wasn't home? The bathroom became my refuge, where I discovered my own identity, an individual identity, like everyone else's, no longer one part of a pair of Siamese twins. Surely Srebra would have discovered herself in the same way had she lived and I hadn't. Surely she would have wanted to get pregnant again. I still didn't want that. I wasn't ready for motherhood. Nor, I think, was Bogdan ready for fatherhood. Although we weren't young anymore, we felt unprepared to be parents. We didn't talk about marriage. We lived for ourselves together and for ourselves individually.

I plunged into my graduate studies, which turned out to be extremely interesting. Since the courses were connected with themes of migration and migrants, they required field research, attending conferences, participation in projects, and travel. My mentor at the university proposed I study émigré writers. I was in touch with literary institutes that had information on this topic, or which organized events with émigré writers. The University of London's reputation opened up many doors to me—to festivals, conferences, literary events. And housing and travel costs were always covered by the university. The university was clearly spending my 50,000 pounds. I also received a stipend of 500 pounds a month from an NGO that helped East European graduate students. That was enough for me to split costs for bills and food with Bogdan. He paid the rent and didn't want me to give him money for it. In that way, he maintained his independence and I mine: we lived like boyfriend and girlfriend, but not as man and wife. It was as if he were simply treating me to a roof over my head.

I began to delve more deeply into the politics of migration. Even as a child, I had read and had favorite writers, but I'd never attempted to write anything myself. Of all the authors I read, it was Marina Tsvetaeva, who, although for the briefest time, was the most present in my life, and I bought everything, in any language, I could get hold of. She was a typical example of an émigré poet—both in her own country and throughout the world. “We are interested in contemporary emigrants,” my mentor said, “not those of the past centuries.” From the theoretical works I read, I learned that a person is unaware that he is living at the same time as thousands of dispersed writers who had left their countries for political or personal reasons: writers who still wrote in their mother tongues; writers who had changed languages; bilingual writers; writers who stopped writing; writers who began to write after they emigrated. A huge topic opened up before me. I began to meet émigré writers. London was filled with émigré artists. With each conversation, I grasped again and again that we both are, and are not, born as citizens. It's not only the soil upon which we were born that defines us, but all the ground we've trod, all the air we've breathed, all the people we've met, all the languages in which we've tested our power of transmutation. The person who writes is half chameleon, half stone. Before he dies, a worm in his soul says in his mother tongue: “Who are you? Who were you?” He dies before answering the question. The émigré writer has no answer to that question.

One day, when I returned from school, Bogdan's friends from the Society of Young Pro-Western Immigrants from Eastern Europe were gathered. Pizza boxes, plastic plates, and cans of beer were strewn all over the place. Bogdan quickly began to straighten up. His friends even more quickly began to stuff some cards on the table into envelopes. I went into the bedroom, and while I was changing my clothes, they cleaned everything up, said goodbye to Bogdan, and left the apartment. “Did they leave because of me?” I asked him. Although they often came over, I still hadn't become friends with them. They always left quickly, as if avoiding my presence. I didn't know why, but I avoided theirs as well, even though they were immigrants, the same as us, and their narratives could, at the very least, have served me in my studies. But there wasn't a single writer among them. They either were, or were studying to be, economists and programmers. They worked a bit here and there, but didn't have steady work. None of them had an internship or employment, but supposedly, through the help of their society, they would obtain this from their employers. That's how Bogdan explained it to me. It was clearly difficult to succeed in London. It was more difficult to find work than to study. “Why don't you enroll in a program, too?” I once asked him, because it was surprising: here was someone who knew everything, who solved crossword puzzles in just a few minutes, who was the first to find answers in quizzes, but who hadn't finished college. “Auntie Stefka felt it wasn't necessary to have a university degree in the West in order to succeed. Under capitalism, it's not education that's important but resourcefulness. In socialist countries,” he explained, “so much revolves around one's studies, but here, it's important to make your own way, hustle, make a deal.” His adoptive mother's way of thinking was a bit odd to me—Balkan somehow—but I didn't say anything. We rarely saw her and Bogdan's stepfather, who had once been the partner of Auntie Stefka's sister. Stefka married him when her sister died. That didn't mean Bogdan didn't go to Brighton often to help her with this or that, as he said, but he never slept over. He always came home by train, bringing fresh fish that he bought at the main fish market. Perhaps I didn't see Auntie Stefka more often because she could no longer be characterized as
Macedonian, as the single woman who had been adopted by Bogdan and then one day left with him unexpectedly for London. She was no longer the beautiful woman with a bun who lost her parents in a fire and had, as a result, been left alone. She had been dignified and kind, the youngest single woman on our street. She was extremely annoyed when I greeted her in Macedonian and immediately said, in English, “We only speak English here.” I was stunned, but Bogdan reassuringly stroked my hand. Whenever I mentioned anything about Skopje, about the neighborhood, about the people whom she had also known, she looked through me, as through a glass door. She simply didn't react, either with her body or her voice. She said nothing about Srebra. She completely ignored my story, as if she didn't know it. In fact, in her home we only spoke of the present or the future, but not the past. Bogdan's stepfather, an older, kind-hearted Englishman whom Bogdan called “Uncle,” made us such strong Irish coffee that I would be dizzy the entire train ride back to London. Bogdan and I didn't talk about those visits to his adopted mother, whom he persisted in calling Auntie Stefka, and his stepfather. We never talked about them. In moments of sadness, he thought only of his real mother, whose photograph he kept in the bottom of a globe vase in which we never put flowers. There the small pale photograph of his mother sat, photographed with him in her arms, a smile on her face, and with such pride—as if saying to the world, “This is my son! Bogdan! The personification of his name—God given!” Occasionally, Bogdan would look at the photo through the glass, as one looks at fish in an aquarium, but he never took it out. And, though he never explicitly forbade me from taking it out to wash the vase, he would always prevent me from doing so, saying gently, “Don't. She will die again.” That sentence frightened me. I didn't want to be her killer, so I left her inside, and only wiped the outside of the vase. Inside, the dust was piling up, and one day a spider appeared, but the photograph was clean and remained there, at the bottom of the vase, at the bottom of Bogdan's heart.

Bogdan and I lived together happily, with no quarrels or complaints. His tenderness and passion knew no borders. He literally carried me in his arms, listened to me, comforted me, understood me. He was the love of my life, and he said I was the love of his. “I can hardly wait for you to finish graduate school so we can have a child,” he said. “But you do know it takes three years?” I laughed, and that night, as usual, I took a contraceptive pill. There were times when I, too, could barely wait to finish school so we could have a baby. A small beautiful child with a modern name: Maya, David, Dora, Sergei.

It had been two years since I had been to Skopje. From time to time I called my parents. My mother always picked up, so I never got to speak with my father. These were informational conversations—what I was doing, how university was going, what Bogdan was doing, what they were doing (nothing), what was new (what should be new?), if they went to the cemetery (well, your father's hands shake so much he can't drive the car anymore, and it takes two hours on the bus). They had been there on All Saints' Day, had brought things and cleaned the grave—a lot of grass had sprouted. Then I would change the subject and ask how Aunt Milka was doing (sick, hit with ten injections), how Aunt Ivanka was doing (she's upset at Lenče and Mirko and has gotten so thin you can hardly recognize her), Verče (who knows what she's doing, she only goes from work to home), Lenče (back and forth between the hospital and home—she beat her mother again, turned her black and blue; Mirko taught her all of that, mark my words), my uncle (he doesn't call; Snežana doesn't let him). “Does Darko call you?” “No,” she said, “he doesn't call anymore; your aunt Ivanka told me he's gone off to the monastery and become a monk; she saw his father at the bank, God preserve him… Oh and yes, I met Miki and his girlfriend; ugh, she's worse than you: dark, skinny, a nothing! A ponytail tied up with a rubber band!”

I listened, laughing with self-irony. She had always thought I was ugly, worthless, Srebra and I. Probably from the time we were babies. Worthless. Like bats, but with conjoined heads to boot. Perhaps that's why we never had our pictures taken as babies. Only beautiful people get photographed. These were the things my mother talked to me about on the phone—always distressing, always filled with negativity. Everyone was on the verge of death or at a critical moment in life. If it was summer, it was hellish, you couldn't breathe. If it was winter, it was cold, the radiators had frozen, and she just hung around at home with my father. They were sinking in their own misery.

Two full years after my move to London, I said to Bogdan, “I can't put it off anymore. I have to go to Skopje.” “Go,” he said. “But I'm not going. I'll wait for you here.” I bought a ticket and left on the first plane to Ljubljana. There were no direct tickets to Skopje, so I decided to go from Ljubljana to Skopje by train. It was the beginning of November 1999. I had bought a few presents in London and a lot of food for the trip. I had a long trip ahead of me, and I ate a lot while traveling. The evening before I left, I prepared a bag of food: some chocolate, juice, water, bread sticks, salty snacks, chocolate milk, a banana, a tangerine, and the next day, before I left, I also put into the bag a sandwich I packed in foil and a plastic bag, along with a folded napkin. I ate almost the entire trip. I ate and read. My stomach got full, but I simply had to empty the bag before I arrived, filling it again with the remains and wrappers. To lighten it. To lighten myself. On the train from Ljubljana, the young man sitting across from me took a loaf of bread and a small wheel of kashkaval from his backpack. Everything was neatly covered in plastic wrap. He took out a knife—a real one, long and sharp—from a black leather case, and on the little table by the window, he cut two pieces of bread and four pieces of kashkaval with precision. He made himself a sandwich, wrapped up the bread and cheese in the paper, returned the knife to its case, and bit into the sandwich. I thought: what precision, cleanliness, polish, order. The man was from Slovenia. My food was not as beautiful. I had a feeling that it didn't have an enticing aroma, but stank. How much can one manage to eat during a train trip from Ljubljana to Skopje? Nearly twenty hours of nibbling, chewing, sipping. I recalled there was a town in Slovenia called Litija. When I was young, instead of playing catch or volleyball on the schoolyard during gym class, we played “Partisans and Germans.” I was called Sister Lita, and Srebra was Sister Kerol; we were orderlies for the wounded Partisans. Lita was short for Litija. I had read that name somewhere, probably in an atlas, and had dreamed up the character Litija, but I don't know how. Beyond the schoolyard fence ran the Kumanovo–Belgrade highway. One day, our classmate Olivera said that she wanted to run away from home and that was the road she was going to take. She said she was going to run away from
the smallness of her home (her mother and father slept in one bed, and she and her sister—a younger sister who often wet the bed—slept in the other). Her grandmother slept on the narrow bed in the kitchen. The grandmother knew Russian so well she could translate an entire movie into Macedonian. She would turn her back to the television and translate aloud while Olivera followed the subtitles to see if she was correct. She was. We wanted to leave home along that road, too, and go somewhere far away, out into the wide world. Srebra had gone into the widest world, into the heavens, but I remained in London. And now I was traveling toward Skopje, toward the source of my entire life, which had clearly been running dry but was now reviving. I took out a book to read. Since I had moved to London I only read books in English, for the simple reason that I had no more books written in Macedonian. I had decided not to bring anything back from Skopje besides new books in Macedonian. I didn't know what awaited me at home. Yes, I thought,
home
. My home was still in Skopje, at my parents' apartment. I longed to go to Srebra's grave, to kiss it, caress it, and tell her everything. Although I often went to Blake's grave in Bunhill Fields, which had become my substitute grave for Srebra's, I was still aware that it wasn't there, but in Skopje, in the cemetery in Butel, where Srebra—her remains and her spirit—was buried.