A Spare Life (39 page)

New York amazed me. It was so open, bright, cosmopolitan. I walked and walked along the endless avenues. I met many interesting émigré intellectuals in the city. One of the writers gave me his Croatian novel, in which he had described his craziest experience—becoming the operator of a security gate in front of a medical center. As he stood in front of the ramp, waiting for a taxi following his prostate exam, drivers asked him to raise the bar because it wasn't opening automatically, even though it was supposed to. There was no taxi. Nearly every minute, a driver approached and wanted to enter the hospital grounds. Everyone thought he was the security gate operator, and they asked him, some politely, some angrily, to lift it. He had set his briefcase with his laptop by the wall beside the gate, and there he stood: a short man, dressed in a suit, raising the gate with both hands, jumping a bit to lift it higher, so the cars could pass through. He stayed for the whole day. In the evening, the real operator arrived. That day, he had gotten a call that his wife had gone into labor and he'd run lickety-split to the maternity ward, where he stayed all day. He had taken part in the delivery, a medical technician had helped him give the baby a bath, and then he brought the baby to his wife, who nursed it. They were happy, they loved one another, and the man forgot that he was supposed to have been at work. No one thought about the fact that he was the operator of the security gate, or that the remote control was still in his pocket. So this Croatian intellectual had served in his place for the whole day. His taxi never arrived. That evening, when the new father returned, he couldn't help laughing when he heard what had happened, but the Croatian intellectual had already gone home on the bus. At the end of his book he wrote:
I felt like Saint Peter opening the Heavenly Gates
. New York's major bookstores didn't carry the book, but he was convinced that he had achieved great success with it. “I'll write the next one in English,” he said.

In the States, students were like peas in a pod: with sparkling eyes, quivering voices, sweet smiles—they looked like future monks who have been touched by a deep sense of God's blessing. It was the same for students from abroad who came to study. However, immigrant students who moved to the United States with their parents, for economic or political reasons, were different. They always looked worried, with circles under their eyes and a weary gait. They often held down jobs in addition to studying. There were several poets among them who sought their identity and roots in their verse. They questioned who they were and where they were from. One female poet, who had been born in New York, said while eating a sandwich, “They have to be careful in determining who should get citizenship.” When I looked at her quizzically, she added, “I have nothing against immigrants. My brother has immigrant friends from school, but he doesn't bring them home, because you have to know where people's loyalties lie, who they belong with.”

New York was the promised land of the
Snack
. “I love snacks!” my NYU professor of migration said, passing me a small dish, from which I took some chips and dipped them into a green sauce with garlic and a tasty mix of spinach, kashkaval, tomatoes, and eggs.
Snack
was like a life philosophy. Without
Snack
it probably wasn't possible to survive in America. There's no household in New York where people don't snack at least once a day. In the homes of immigrants, you eat as well as you do in the Balkans. Several families of the émigré writers I was assigned to visit welcomed me, treated me to their hospitality, and sent me on my way as if I were a member of the family. The families of a Bosnian writer, a Ukrainian biographer, and a Slovenian travel writer. One day, I got hit with terrible diarrhea, which devoured my body for several days. I called a Romanian poet, who was also a doctor, and he told me not only exactly what to get from the drugstore and how to drink the solutions and medicines, but also that when I was better, I should come visit him—it would be a treat for him, his wife, and their son. When I was better, I went to visit them. They lived in a beautiful house in Queens, near a Russian Orthodox church. His private clinic was in the back of the house. I thought it was just the sort of house I
imagined when I was a child and had trouble falling asleep. Now, though I hadn't thought about it for years, I was seeing a real-life version. The poet's wife, a blonde, who, though no doubt a beauty in her youth, had aged prematurely. She had prepared a wonderful dinner. She laid out the most beautiful tomatoes and the best sheep's cheese, with no trace of the sweetness that marked all New York food. We ate as if we were in the Balkans. But the doctor and his wife no longer loved each other. He called her names like “dumbo,” or said, “The meat isn't cooked enough,” and whenever she said something back, he added, “Yeah right, whatever.” Their son didn't come near the table, loaded with roast pork, potato salad, tomato salad, and a wide variety of white cheeses and kashkaval. At the kitchen island he took a frozen hamburger from the freezer, put it in the microwave, then went to the living room where, sitting on the couch, he wolfed it down with a can of Coca-Cola. The poet gave me two of his books in English, self-published. They weren't bad poems. Once again the same themes, just like those of all the other émigré writers: identity, roots, native land, questions about language, language-fatherland, nostalgia. I had enough material. I could return to London. The night before I left, my mother called me in a dream and said, “Zlata, I'm ready. I am going. I will die. I ordered grilled meat, ate my fill, and now I'm going.” Then the receiver went silent. In my dream, I asked myself if she really had left. Then she repeated that she was going. I woke up early to catch my plane. When I arrived in London, the first thing I did when I got to the apartment was snatch up the dream book from the third bookshelf, above the row of novels by Victorian writers that Bogdan brought me as a surprise from Brighton. In the dream book, it was written that, when you dream of your mother's death, you really want to free yourself of her, spiritually. The telephone represented communication that was blocked or discontinuous. That was all true. I still called Skopje every three weeks, but each conversation was just like all the others: They were sitting around, watching television. Was anything new? Nothing. They hadn't been to the cemetery for a long time—they would go, they would—Aunt Ivanka was quite sick, she was in bed, wasn't eating or drinking, things were hard, very hard…and on like that.
Not a single bit of good news, not a single optimistic occurrence. The next time I called, my mother told me my grandfather had died. He died the day after I called the previous time. He had already been dead twenty days, but I was just finding out. I said nothing. That day, I walked from East London to Kensington and back, but my soul was not lightened. Srebra, Grandma, Grandpa. My family was getting smaller and smaller. I had more and more dead in heaven.

Bogdan began to buy me expensive presents: necklaces with Swarovski crystals, a Gucci watch, lingerie from Palmers. Brand names had never meant anything to me. My clothes were from the Old Market in Skopje or from discount stores in London. He said his auntie Stefka had finally received the inheritance from her sister, so she could live even better with his stepfather, and so would we, he added. It was all the same to me. I saw Bogdan's adopted mother so rarely, and when we did, her insistence that we speak in English added to my feeling that it was better if I didn't see her. Bogdan continued to go to Brighton nearly every week, returning in the afternoon. It seemed to me like something they had agreed on: he would visit once a week, and she would give him pocket money until the following week. But now he said Auntie Stefka had given him so much money that he wanted to arrange a surprise for me and—
ta-da
! He pulled airline tickets from the drawer and said we were going to China. He had always wanted to see China, and now we were finally going. Not only that, he had signed me up for an interesting festival of writers and journalists, saying he wanted that to be a surprise as well. When they had heard I was from Macedonia, they accepted me immediately, and invited him too, arranging everything except the travel costs. “So,” he said, “everything came together nicely.” “We're going to China!” I was very surprised, and although I had never dreamed of going to China, I was still delighted. It was lovely to think that Bogdan and I would be abroad, together, for ten whole days.

I went to the bank to withdraw some money. I still had money in my account, although the university withdrew a set amount each semester. At the bank, my attention was drawn to a thin older man with a tipped-back hat above his eyebrows. He was trying to convince the teller to move money from his wife's account into his, because his wife was in the hospital. He wanted to know if, were his wife to die, he could take the money out of her account. He would not have that right. The bank employee was telling him to bring in his wife's bankbook so they could transfer her funds (140,000 pounds!) to his account, and then, if his wife came home from the hospital (the employee said, “God forbid she should die!”), they would move the funds back into her account. But if she didn't come home, the money would remain in his. The teller said to the man loudly, as if he were deaf, “Go home, get her bankbook, and come back before one o'clock.” The old man, nimbly, happily, flew through the door shouting, “Right away! I'll be right back!” He was already back and standing in line before I was done getting my account in order. Everyone looked at him. Evidently, he lived near the bank, or perhaps he had his wife's bankbook with him before, but acted as though he had gone home to get it. My God! Was this the greed that sickens the heart? Why was the man so happy? Will he be reborn with his wife's 140,000 pounds? Will he be young again, in love, alive? What could a man, his wife on the brink of death, do with her 140,000 pounds? Who knows? I took my 500 pounds and left. I thought even that might be too much for China. I stroked Saint Zlata Meglenska in my pocket. At home, I called Aunt Ivanka at the clinic in Skopje. I just managed to get her on the line. She said, “Don't you go wasting money; your mother will say you call too much.”

In China: A Buddha draped with a red cloth. Surrounding him are drawings—portraits of some poet or other. A man observes the statue, cigarette in hand. “Where is your husband? Where is your husband?” the interpreter's voice shook. I ran up the stairs to the room arranged with wooden conference tables. I snapped a picture of Bogdan through the window. “Here he is,” I said, showing the camera screen to the interpreter. The young, baby-faced policemen watched me. When the time came and the
Buddha revealed himself, they would be blinded by his power and flee in panic, but later these human pawns would be transformed into secret police. That's what I thought. For five days The Festival for Journalists and Writers was ceremoniously opened and then for five days, ceremoniously closed. The bed of Mao Zedong is wide enough and long enough to accommodate all his descendants. They gave us cigarettes, and in China, when a cigarette is offered, you have to take it!

The only pagodas now were cake molds. Since we were guests, we didn't pay an entrance fee for the People's Park. The people paid. They spat on the ground; we spat into trashcans. The golden rice wine no longer brought to mind the color of the field in which it grew, but rather the five-story building grown beside it. The vice president of the Association of Chinese Writers presented us with silk pajamas: pink for the women, brown for the men. They seemed to symbolize him saying, “Sleep!” Sleep and dream about freedom of literary expression, human rights, Chinese writers freed from political jails, the return of the dissidents—not as prodigal sons but as victors. Sleep, and don't look around and don't write about what's happening. Only write about beautiful things; write lyrical dreams.

At night, in Bogdan's embrace, I thought that the States smelled like Amai body lotion, and China like jasmine tea and toasted sesame oil. America wastes, China stockpiles. The villages were without villagers and the villagers without villages. A village with one percent agriculture and sixty percent industry was declared an eco-village. A rabbit made of rice huddled amid the pigeons in a village center. Naïve art? Handouts or hands out? As we traveled by bus along the highways through southeastern Chinese cities with silvery metallic centers and rusted yellowed outskirts, memories of Skopje and the village welled up in me. I had never seen a bonsai in Skopje or the village, but I learned that in China, forty years ago, a bonsai had been as valuable as a television. The mother of a Communist leader whom everyone called a “loser” had been a Buddhist, so the Comintern built her a personal temple in her garden. The former mayor of the village, now eighty years old, had been offered a rich pension and a house, but refused them. Our interpreters greeted him with respect. A small girl sang while she peed. Then she filled a dirty sink with water, stopped the drain, and washed her hands. Bogdan said that's what the English did, too. I had never seen anyone do that. That's how the English wash their dishes, too. I had once seen Bogdan's stepfather set the coffee cups in the sink. He washed them, took them out to dry, and only then did he drain the water. There were still tiny bubbles from the detergent on the cups. In our hotel room in Shanghai, the bathroom was made
completely of glass. Bogdan and I were embarrassed in front of each other. When I went, I saw that my toilet paper had turned red like the Chinese flag.

Bogdan told me his back hurt and asked me to massage it. Whenever I gave him a massage, he pointed to where it hurt most, so I could apply more force exactly in that spot: always under his right shoulder blade. I thought I should mark the spot with a brand or tattoo, a pen mark at least. Then I could get the aching spot into a small circle to collect all the tenseness of the day, all his—our—stress, fear, worry, and memories, and then, with no preliminaries or false starts, I could direct all the energy of my fingers directly at that small atom of resistance and knead it, squeeze it, press it, and poke it, like dough for a round Christmas loaf, until he cried out in pain and didn't want any more. I laughed as I told him what I was thinking about. He said, “You're absolutely crazy!” Then we watched TV, but all we could find were stations in Chinese—we couldn't even find the BBC or CNN in English. During one of our walks, our interpreter Cristine acknowledged that the Chinese don't get foreign channels for political reasons. The further God is tossed aside externally, the more He is missed internally. Cristine zealously prayed at the temple for Buddha to save her from herself.