A Spare Life (41 page)

Bogdan was completely loving and supportive. Once I got over Aunt Ivanka's death—if one can get over a loved one's death at all—I turned once again to my studies. I read and read, analyzed, interpreted, and delved deeper into the works of Eastern European émigré writers. I discovered the works of Albahari, Škvorecký, Hemon, Ugrešić, Drakulić, Kadare, Herta Müller, Miłosz, Goma. I reread the plays of Goran Stefanovski and many, many others. Most of them left their native countries in the early 1990s, largely because of the war and political conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. I compared them with younger émigré authors. My master's thesis seemed to write itself, employing my hand as its amanuensis. For months, that's all I did: write and write and write, preparing meals for Bogdan and myself in between. He usually wasn't home, but when he was, we ate, lay down together, made love, then went to the market or the movie theater, or just for a walk around the neighborhood. We still fell asleep in each other's embrace as we had on the first day. I was so calm with him, not jealous of anyone. I loved him, and he loved me, but we were both free to carry on our own lives—I with my studies, he with his quizzes, crosswords, and games. He won money often, but also other prizes: a knit sweater, a leather belt, a box of groceries from Tesco, and a shaving kit. His mother, his adopted one, continued to give him money, and we lived well, modestly but pleasantly.

Bogdan began to dream of having a house. A house with a garden in which our child could play. “In West London, with English grass and a privacy fence.” Although I thought he was joking, he assured me that he really did want to buy a house and would soon have enough money to do so. “I've been saving this whole time,” he said. “And I almost have enough.” Had he been saving from the money he got from Auntie Stefka? “That,” he said, “and everything else.” When he left, he always took his computer with him. “What's happening with that quiz show of yours?” it occurred to me to ask him one day. “We're still waiting for a license,” he said. “It's not so simple.” Whenever his friends from the Society of Pro-Western Immigrants from Eastern Europe came over—who, incidentally, still didn't have regular work though they had been looking for years—I often wanted to ask them about the show, too: how it was going, what was happening, but they were always laughing so loud, drinking beer, and smoking while talking about their home countries, always bringing up negative things and mocking them with cruel irony, so there was simply no space for me to join the conversation. I went on writing my thesis in the bedroom.

In December 2000, I received my master's degree. My defense generated considerable interest in the department. Lots of professors who weren't directly involved in migration studies but were interested in the topic came to watch. At the end of the millennium, Great Britain didn't know how to treat its immigrants, let alone Eastern European émigré writers. The crisis in the former Yugoslavia was essentially over. The country no longer existed, nor were there any dictators left in the Balkans. From time to time, though, writers from that area would still turn up at the Foreign Office, alongside the many immigrants from Asia and Africa, and the ones from India, who came as if they were coming home and, because they wrote in English, quickly became British writers. The writers on whom I had based my thesis were scattered across Europe and the United States and, almost without exception, continued to write in their mother tongues. But those who did switch to the language of their new country gained visibility more quickly. I tried to prove in my thesis—using studies of writers who had emigrated from Eastern Europe to the West—that language was still an ideological determinant of national literatures, and integration of these authors was most often understood as assimilation. If they changed their language, they got the attention of publishers and readers more easily, but the authors whose works were translated—or even worse, untranslated—remained outsiders in their new cultures forever. These authors were divided between two homes. They lived in a new country while maintaining ties to the old one, but the literary public was more interested in single-country authors, and looked at authors who hadn't changed languages with contempt. People who are native-born are frightened by otherness, while immigrant authors are also a bit frightened of the otherness of the native-born. There were two parallel worlds in which the national and transnational writers saw eye-to-eye and joked around politely, but an important criterion for their meeting was a degree of dissidence and political exile from “those raging primitive Balkans or the lands beyond the Carpathians.”

My frank, and, I might add, sharp defense of my thesis provoked a long discussion. From his seat in the amphitheater, Bogdan made a time-out signal. My mentor finally concluded the discussion, and praised me for what I had accomplished over the previous three years. He congratulated me on my degree, handed me my diploma, and joked that from now on, they would no longer take money from my account. He then revealed my secret, which, at the very beginning of our studies three years before, I begged him not to reveal. I had told him where the money for my education came from, about Srebra, about our operation, about everything, and he had promised that he would keep silent, but he hadn't said until when. And now, with the degree in my hand, he felt it would be a glowing conclusion to the ceremony, and revealed my secret to all the gathered colleagues and students. Hundreds of eyes stared at me, shocked, with disbelief, fascination, and rapacious curiosity, like the eyes of the journalists when Srebra and Darko got married, or the ones outside our hospital room whom the doctor personally locked out to protect me, or the ones in Skopje when the politicians speculated on television about the money for our operation. I recognized that rapacious curiosity, that feverish frenzy to hear more, to learn something else, something perhaps more piquant than what they had already heard. My mentor didn't stop there; he told them everything. He had remembered every single detail: about the operation, about Srebra's death, about the affair with the money, and about my return to London—how I had come into his office with my short-cropped hair and the scar from the operation still visible… He told them everything. He was blabbing like a granny at the village well. I watched him and couldn't believe it. Inside, I felt Srebra's rage—not so much mine as hers—and I took the microphone and said I didn't wish to accept my degree from the University of London and they could take the diploma and shove it. I took it and tore it up—though that was hard to do because it was thick and wound with a gold thread. “I don't need your diploma, since you don't understand dignity and respect, since you don't know what privacy means,” I said, and then stormed out of the amphitheater. Bogdan immediately left the room, calling after me, “Are you crazy? Do
you know what you've done? You just trampled on three years of study. You trampled on everything you accomplished. Are you nuts? Maybe that's okay in Macedonia, you can be proud, but here in England, do you think they give a damn? That they'll respect you more? No, they'll forget all about you, like you never existed!” He said all kinds of things to me, but I just laughed. I laughed out of some supernatural joy. I took the icon from my pocket and danced in the hallway, kissing it, then Bogdan. He was angry, but he eventually softened. He seemed to understand that what I had done wasn't so bad. That in some way, I had defended Srebra's honor, and we were dancing in the hallway of the University of London, and Saint Zlata Meglenska, who usually frowned, seemed to be smiling at me. I kissed her darkened face. Bogdan kissed me, and we went home together. I didn't take a birth control pill that night, or any of the nights that followed.

In February 2001, as we watched the morning news on the BBC, listening in shock and disbelief to the report that soldiers in the Macedonian Army and four members of the Albanian National Liberation Army had actually exchanged shots in the village of TanuÅ¡evci and staring at the unbelievable headline on the screen, “Crisis in Macedonia,” I felt nauseated. I ran to the bathroom and vomited. When I came back, Bogdan was still watching, engrossed. It was clear—there was armed conflict in Macedonia. “They're going to kill each other. Albanians and Macedonians just can't live together,” he said. That's what all the film coverage and commentaries demonstrated in the days that followed, and for several months thereafter. One particular event circled the globe: An interpreter was killed, along with representatives of the United Nations Protection Force, while traveling in an armored vehicle through Skopje streets. The interpreter's husband cried as he spoke. She had left behind a two-month-old baby. She hadn't needed to work, but a colleague had other obligations and begged Mimosa to take her place that day. Both women were daughters of a Macedonian mother and an Albanian father. Because I was upset by these events, I hadn't noticed how often I felt sick to my stomach. I bought a pregnancy test. I was pregnant. Bogdan was elated. “Just a little bit longer and we'll buy a house,” he said. He wanted us to tell Auntie Stefka together that she would be a grandmother. We went. Bogdan reminded me they only spoke English at their place. I told her in English. She smiled. “I won't have much time to look after my little grandson, but I heard you refused your degree, and so you will be a housewife and will take care of your child. That's not so bad, you know.” I don't know why she talked to me like that. She didn't like me; nor I, her. We acted like strangers. I wished Bogdan's real mother were alive, the dear woman who, in my childhood, cleaned the entryway to our building and only talked about Bogdan: how much she wished for Bogdan to study hard in school, to make something of himself. But Bogdan didn't finish college. His adopted mother considered it a waste of time for such an intelligent young man like him; he could make a living from the knowledge he already possessed. Bogdan did earn a bit from his knowledge, but she didn't hesitate to give him money, regularly, every week. She
gave him some more money now, and we went out. We walked by the sea. It was yellowish, clean, sharp, and gentle. A feminine sea. I rolled up the cuffs of my pants and raced beside it. Freedom, love, challenge. I got wet. Cleansed. The smell of history is the smell of caught cod. Some motorcycles were parked beside the ramparts and the buildings from a bygone era, and sandy-haired young men in tee shirts emblazoned with various statements of rebellion shouted at each other as if digitally amplified. Then, sudden movement, hard turn of the bikes. You'd think they were driving through a desert and not through narrow cobblestoned lanes that were older than their ancestors. I dreamed of Grandma that night. After such a long time, she finally appeared in my dream. I told her I was pregnant. She didn't believe me at first. I told her I was just at the beginning of the pregnancy. She put her hand on my stomach, and a warm, kind smile of love spread across her face. In the same room, Aunt Ivanka lay seriously ill. Verče, apparently, hadn't had children, nor, it appeared, had Aunt Milka. The dream was bizarre; I couldn't figure out what it meant, even with the help of the dream book.

I carried my pregnancy in the nicest way possible. I liked to lie in bed and read books. Not just by émigré writers, but more broadly—I read classics, Victorians, a return to Marcel Proust. I discovered contemporary British authors. And I kept returning to Marina Tsvetaeva, whose books formed an ever-increasing pile, in a variety of languages, as I bought whatever I could find connected with her, ordering books from bookstores. I kissed her photograph in its glass frame, and whenever I was sad, I took her in my hands, pressed her to my breast, hugging her. I held her in my embrace, and was comforted by her face, with its eyes wide open, and her sad, barely visible smile. The glass covering the picture was warm, almost like a human touch. My stomach grew, and during an exam at the hospital, the gynecologist asked me if we wanted to know the gender. Bogdan did, but I didn't. “That's fine, but I do have to tell you that you are carrying twins. We'll keep the gender secret, since that's what you want.” Knowing my medical history, the gynecologist followed my pregnancy carefully, and at each appointment reassured me that the twins weren't joined anywhere, only to my umbilical cord. The babies began to move in my womb, back and forth, left then right. I felt their heads under my fingers, restless and playful, as they stretched my belly to their will. My stomach had a different rumble than it had before, with a distant sound, as if it were their guts rumbling. Sometimes, I heard strange voices, as if they were crying or cooing inside me. We were three in one. One day, I colored my hair with henna. I lay on the bed with a shower cap on my head and one of Bogdan's winter scarves tied over it. I looked grotesque with my stomach protruding from my sweat suit and the turban on my head. It was a good thing Bogdan wasn't home. What would have happened had my water burst then? What if I had to call for emergency help? I could hardly wait the sixty minutes so I could shower and be ready once again for anything.

My moods shifted, and I noticed that I was thinking more and more about Macedonia, perhaps because of the still-raging conflict, or because I was thinking of motherhood, the language my children would speak, and the past behind me. I longed intensely for Skopje, though not just Skopje. In my dreams, I saw the convent and Sister Zlata, my friends from the monastery. Sometimes, I thought of Darko, and how I didn't know which monastery he had gone to. I missed my relatives, Srebra most of all—Srebra in her grave. Whenever I touched the icon of Saint Zlata Meglenska, she seemed to be telling me that she wanted me to come home to Skopje. I even thought that, now that I was pregnant, my parents might accept me. I thought I might bring gladness into our home, and something would change in our relationship—at last, they would love me. It was as if I had forgotten that my mother continued to talk mainly to herself, as my father remained silent, only cursing at my mother from time to time, while watching television. The food would be bad, even if we ordered in, because everything would end up in the freezer, whether intended for the freezer or not, to be thawed bit by bit to get as many meals out of it as possible. It was as though I had forgotten that I would still have to wash my face in the kitchen sink, where, in normal homes, people washed dishes, vegetables, and fruit, and that the boiler in the bathroom would be a battleground, because the number of baths my parents took had been set by the pattern of their parents. When Srebra and I lived there, we suffered so much under those abnormal living conditions. Those conditions always made us sad and ashamed, and we always thought we could change something. And now, as I pressured Bogdan to travel to Skopje, I thought we would be able to start over again at the beginning, love each other more, understand each other, and be a family. I thought we would rebuild our relationship on a better foundation and reset our unlove. In the end, we were all marked by Srebra's tragedy, a tragedy that bound us more than blood, but we would also be marked by the birth of my babies, who would cleanse that blood forever, down to the smallest drop. To be at home at least until I gave birth and perhaps until the babies had grown a little, enough to breathe Macedonian air and have the Macedonian sun shine on
them. Surely, I had fallen into some sort of pregnant mania, but it was stronger than I was. I thought about Skopje for hours on end as I lay in the bedroom, where, between bouts of reading, I'd set aside my book and daydream, imagining with open eyes how lovely it would be to marry Bogdan in Macedonia, at Saint Petka, and then give birth in Macedonia so I could write “Skopje” in the children's passports under “Place of Birth,” and to have them christened at Saint Petka. Then, after we finished life's most significant rituals—marriage, christening—only then would we return to London.