A Spare Life (40 page)

The festival organizers did not allow us to leave our hotel at night. They guarded the hallways until they thought we were asleep. However, along with the guests from Germany, New Zealand, the United States, and France, we agreed to go out after ten o'clock, by which time the organizers had dragged themselves off to their rooms. We would gather at the corner of the hotel, and then, snickering quietly and walking quickly, set off toward the outskirts rather than the city center. After walking for a long time, we would catch sight of the small ragged huts and barracks in which poor people lived with a well in the yard and no electricity. All the settlements we saw were the same: garages turned into small shops or cafés with a television hung from the ceiling and karaoke for the locals, a few products spread out on two or three shelves. There were sunken faces, the smell of burnt food, young boys and girls dressed in a youthful, though kitschy, fashion, a scattering of small houses with leaning roofs, always whitewashed, with bricks that crumbled at the touch, the sound of screams, and babies crying from inside the huts—rooms without kitchens, without anything. In front of the houses by the water pumps, there would be a burner here and there, a few pots, banged up from years of use. Poverty…poverty away from the gleaming skyscrapers of the massive corporations nestled in the city center, each one full of working men and women, but children almost nowhere to be seen, except standing in a row behind a schoolteacher or on a school bus.

Whenever I passed a younger woman alone or with a child, I thought about how it was likely she had been sterilized, having the right to give birth only once in her life but never again, even if she were to become pregnant. Her womb would be punctured with a needle and everything inside would be pulled out. Her life would be destroyed. Communism with the hands of capitalism; capitalism with the face of Communism. There's no greater perversion of the world order. Bogdan and I were stunned by the spirit of China, which destroyed everything in its wake to build a new China, but preserved, through artificial means, its tradition for the eyes of the world: eleventh-century Buddhist temples and pagodas were destroyed and new ones built with cheaper materials and then presented to tourists as authentic. It was only when we were taken to a huge film studio—a movie city where more than half of the films in China were made, though not only Chinese ones—that I saw what China had been like before. It had everything: color, pagodas, and temples, while outside the studio those things were gone. The state destroyed and then the state built, through imitation, the monuments of culture. A perversion of artistic impulse. We ate on golden plates, with silver chopsticks. We drank from golden goblets and drowned in crab, lobster, shellfish, and the tastiest meat dumplings, but around the corner, an old man—prematurely old at fifty—squatted silently, like all the Chinese whom the golden hand of state structures hadn't touched, and splashed himself with water from a bucket. It was absurd for me to seek émigré writers in China. The writers there who had written candidly and critically were already emigrants, either out into the world, or in their own country—condemned to eternal exile inside themselves.

I was shaken by our trip to China. While Bogdan wasn't indifferent to what we saw and experienced there, for him, it was a lovely trip because we were together day and night. He bought me presents, kissed me in front of everyone, making the woman who interpreted for us call out on the bus, “Look how in love they are!”

The first night after our return from China, I dreamed about Aunt Ivanka all night. In the dream, it seems she is crossing somewhere. Like she's crossing from one side of a cube, something like a cardboard box, to the other. Then I dream about the room with the iron beds in the village, where Aunt Ivanka and Mirko usually sleep. It's Aunt Ivanka's room, and it's the same as it was in real life, except filled with flowers in flower boxes. They are like a garden from when she was alive, but now it is my uncle who waters and tends them. In my dream I see the mirror above the bed. In the past, Srebra and I had peeked through the window, and I do that now, alone, but instead of the street, I see only a strip of asphalt, like a small path. The room is bright, happy somehow. It occurs to me that I can take photographs of the house, from all angles, to have as a keepsake. I could even videotape it, but I don't have a video camera with me. Then I see Bogdan. He has bought himself a suit, from Greece I think, but inside, there's only a corpse whose heart seems to burst while it lies on a table. Nearby sits Aunt Ivanka; all that's visible is her head: big, healthy, beautiful, with the lovely hairdo she had in her best years. She says she'll wash the corpse, she'll move it. I say that I'll wash it, but Aunt Ivanka stubbornly tells me to leave it to her and she will put everything in order. I awoke in a sweat. A fever was eating at my heart. In the afternoon, just as I was thinking I should call my mother, the phone rang. It was her. She had never called me herself before. It was as if there was an unwritten rule that I would be the one to call, because I had money. And yet here she was. I knew something big had happened. Something bad. She wouldn't have wasted money on a call for good news. “Your aunt Ivanka is gone,” she said. “Yesterday, at the hospital.” I was silent, shocked by the news. My mother hung up the phone. I felt lost and alone. Bogdan had gone to Brighton. I left the apartment. I pressed the icon in my
pocket until it almost drew blood. I took the bus to Soho, and on Manette Street, I found the chapel of St. Barnabas. The chapel was closed. There was no notice, no announcement about when there would be a service. I could have rung the bell at the house where the homeless center was—it was an integral part of the chapel. I didn't ring. I stood awhile and then left. I called Aunt Milka from the first phone booth. She had been crying before she lifted the receiver. I started to cry as well. Only then was the pain within me freed, and through my tears, it found a path. How much I missed Aunt Ivanka all of a sudden. In her summer dress—her only dress, an orange-brown one—coming breathless into our room. Ours, mine and Srebra's. Aunt Milka told me, between her tears, that Aunt Ivanka told her a few months ago she was going to die, and they wouldn't see each other again. She said the same thing to me the last time I was in Skopje. She had been preparing herself for a long time for the grave: clothes, comb, everything. She had prepared herself to go. She told Aunt Milka that she had hidden the money she got when her company went into receivership; it was for Lenče to finish her studies and have money to feed herself. She had thought of everything. Perhaps she knew her diagnosis and had hidden it. Who knows? She held her fate in her own hands and simply waited for her day of departure. She bought a new jacket for “Then.” I wondered where she bought it. What was in her mind as she carried it home and hung it in the closet, new, with its label still on, waiting for her? When exactly had she gone to buy it? I felt terrible, absolutely lost. I went into Saint Paul's Cathedral. I found a seat in the corner, sat down, and wept, stroking the icon of Saint Zlata Meglenska in my pocket. Ah, if there were a single Macedonian church in London, would I have gone more often, perhaps feeling the bliss, the blessing of God's presence in my life again? Women with their heads covered, kneeling on the marble tiles; mellifluous voices, the strong scent of icon lamps; young women kissing the priest's robe. Warmth. Home. I could have gone to Essex, but I always put off going there because it was there, in the monastery, that I had overcome the pangs of conscience that gnawed at me after Srebra's death. Saint Christopher with the baby Jesus on his shoulder had somehow freed me of that sin of conscience, and
when I left, I no longer felt guilty about Srebra's death, only the guilt that I survived. If I went there I would feel a new pang, because I no longer felt the one caused by Srebra's death. I could not confront once again my feeling of guilt that I had survived and not her, even though the doctor told me several times it couldn't have been otherwise. The vein had been on my side since birth, not on Srebra's. Bogdan was in Brighton to get money from Auntie Stefka, and I was in London, alone, with Aunt Ivanka's death thousands of miles away from me. I couldn't have gone to her funeral. She was to have been buried the day my mother called me. Everything about her stayed with me. Memories, warm and beautiful. Srebra and I pounding out poems for homework on her typewriter, which had almost never been used. How she gave us money before we left for London, fifty pounds to help us get settled. The time we were outside in a green field with Verče when we were little…maybe Lenče had also already been born. We were making wreaths out of chamomile flowers. I think Aunt Ivanka was happy then. The time she lay on our small bed in the kitchen and cried and cried because one of Verče's ovaries had been removed. How she would sometimes come alone. She'd sit on our chair in the kitchen and cry, complaining about Mirko, Verče, and Lenče, saying she would leave them, that she could no longer reason with them. The time Srebra and I went with her past the Gypsy quarter and we saw two girls wearing one skirt. Srebra and I and the girls exchanging stunned glances: we had conjoined heads, they were conjoined bodies in one skirt. The last time, before I left Skopje and she had dragged herself over to our place to bring me a bottle of rosé for Bogdan, and some coffee, Napolitanke cookies, and an orange towel “to remember me by over there in London,” she'd said. The time she bought Srebra and me the most beautiful blue cardigan sweaters with shoulder pads, which we wore for years. How she took over the task of buying Srebra and me the dresses Grandma had promised us when we were young but hadn't managed to buy before the end of her life. What a weight on her mind! Couldn't our mother have secretly given Grandma the money, or bought the dresses herself for Grandma to give to us and thus ease her soul, free herself from her promise? Why did everyone,
seemingly with intent and a dose of derision, fail to lift a finger, letting Grandma torment herself with a promise she couldn't fulfill, even though she wanted to? Every time we saw her, she mentioned it to Srebra and me, and we felt a twinge of awkwardness in our hearts. Those little dresses grew bigger than we were, bigger than love itself, becoming a symbol of our fate—all that we couldn't have. Our grandmother never made enough money to buy them for us. As we tended the tobacco, diligently threading the leaves in the root cellar, propped against the ice-cold earthen wall with pillows, our hands yellowed and gummy—which we'd later wash with pinkish cream from a round box as the strings of tobacco dried beside the quince below the house—Grandma would say she'd buy us the dresses with the money from the tobacco, but tobacco was always a source of Macedonian pain, unprofitable blackness under the poor's fingernails. After we stopped planting tobacco, Grandma still didn't give up on her promise. She never gave up until she died; she simply had no means to fulfill her promise. And the dresses didn't give up on Grandma. Nor did Srebra and I give up, because we always felt as if we were wearing those dresses and they were the most beautiful clothing, in which we enwrapped our souls. It was Aunt Ivanka who finally bought us real dresses—blue-violet mixed with other colors, and big flowers. They were simulacra of Grandma's dresses, but to us, Grandma's two little potential dresses were never equaled. Today, it would be so easy to buy the promised dresses. The stores overflow with dresses. Perhaps it was the same then, but for our grandma it was as impossible, as if God were somehow personally opposed to the fulfillment of her promise. So the dresses turned into fate. The agony of poverty was cultural, social, and political self-sacrifice from which all that survived was love. Srebra did not survive, Aunt Ivanka died. Love became another name for the dresses and vice versa. Like fate. Like when she made beer cookies, piroshki, pizza, cake; like when she offered them to us with all her heart and soul. How many things I didn't get to ask her, how many things I didn't give her. I called Verče. She was heavy with grief. She said, “Mama was seriously ill, and she didn't recover. It's obvious that she had decided to die. She didn't have anything left to live for.” Verče
said Aunt Ivanka died because she couldn't change anything. “My father, most of all,” she said. My uncle Mirko, who destroyed her life, turning it into garbage, bringing junk home from all over the city, stockpiling it in each room, under the beds, in the empty freezer, and in the drawers, not allowing any of it to be thrown away or cleaned up. He gathered old plastic bottles on his black bicycle from around the television station and university, plastic bags, cans and jars, yogurt containers, Tetra Paks of milk. All of it was in their apartment, where no one went anymore, even though my aunt wanted so much to have company. She wanted everything to be clean. She was a homemaker who couldn't perform her job, because whenever she attempted to tidy up and throw out at least some of the garbage, Mirko slapped her, and then Lenče, in the panic and insanity of a manic state, beat her like crazy, punching Aunt Ivanka until she was exhausted. That's why she decided to die. To save herself. My uncle had looked for a burial plot for Aunt Ivanka while she was still living: somewhere in one of the villages, anywhere, as long as he could bury her as cheaply as possible.

On the day of her funeral, my younger uncle came to see my mother in Skopje. He ate breakfast there. It had been such a long time. It was Aunt Ivanka on her deathbed that resolved their quarrels. She had always been the balm for our wounds. I heard the burial was brief. No one came except the closest family members and a neighbor from the building. My mother gave her a towel and some stockings. Aunt Milka made such a scene and cried so hard that people visiting other graves looked at her in disbelief. She was shouting, “Where will we be welcome now? Lenče is ruined, Verče is ruined.” My mother said to me, “Maybe it's really hard for her; it is her sister, after all…but such is life.” I didn't ask whether it was hard for her. She said, “Maybe that's what they do in the village, but this is Skopje. Nobody carries on like that.” It cost fifteen hundred denari for the priest who performed the service at the burial. They barely scraped it together. That's approximately twenty pounds. Enough for a short list of items I'd buy at the Tesco. That's all. Verče wore a black scarf around her neck. My aunt, our youngest uncle's wife, called her husband, four times. Lenče had lost so much weight that my mother was convinced she would also die soon. I dreamed about Lenče a few days after Aunt Ivanka's funeral. In the dream, she had committed suicide. The dream book interpreted that as a life change—the beginning of a new life. Perhaps that is why Aunt Ivanka died. So Lenče could start a new life.