A Spare Life (44 page)

Verče once told me she had run into my uncle in Skopje. She said he was wearing a completely moth-eaten suit, with one button hanging by a thread and another one missing, his pants wet from snow. He was wearing thin-soled shoes, and hadn't shaved for days. He was waving around the yellow briefcase he had bought while living with us and studying. Srebra and I often played with that briefcase. Hundreds of times, we put it on the couch and opened and closed it, arranging his pens, papers, notebooks, and lecture notes inside, arguing over who got to carry it to the big room and back. My uncle continued to use that briefcase, the same one, for years. If my mother wasn't at home constantly, I would have called my uncle to tell him that Bogdan had died, although he didn't know him. I would have told him that I would soon give birth and that I had graduated but refused to accept my master's diploma. He would have thought that incomprehensible; he had tried to get his degree, even when he was older. No one understood what I had done. I overheard my mother say to my father, “They can't prove she was making passports, too, but even if they let her go, what will she do? How is she going to make any sense of her life? She doesn't have a job in London, and with just a Macedonian diploma, who will hire her? She squandered her prime years on her degree, and then she didn't get her diploma out of sheer stupidity and self-indulgence. There's nothing for her to do here, either; there are so many lawyers just sitting around. No one is waiting to hire her as a lawyer.” My mother embittered my soul, and in such moments, I even thought about pleading guilty so they would put me in jail to give clarity to my present and my future. But then I thought about what would happen to my babies, and I was afraid they would take them from me—I had a law degree, and I knew that, in Macedonia, in the women's section of Idrizovo prison, there was no place for babies. Then I would see, suddenly, how angry I was at myself. I wasn't guilty of anything. I'd had no idea Bogdan was actually working in some sort of counterfeiting passport factory. I cried for him and was angry at him; so many feelings were mixed up inside me. I was on the brink of a nervous breakdown, and the night my water broke I shouted as loudly as I could, “Mom!” I yelled again, and then my mother and father
woke up in the big room. They got up, sleepily, and I told them to call an ambulance. My father looked for his glasses behind the television. His hands were shaking more than mine. My mother said that ambulances don't come for women in labor, so it would be better to call a taxi. My father called a White Mercedes taxi—theirs was the only number he had written down on a piece of paper—and I quickly slipped on a robe and left the apartment. My father held me by the arm and lifted me into the taxi, telling the driver to take me to the maternity ward. “The state hospital or the one in Čair?” the taxi driver asked, and my father said, “The one in Čair,” but I said, “The state hospital.” My father asked me, “Do you have any money?” I just nodded. It was a good thing that I'd put my wallet in the bag I'd prepared for the hospital. When we arrived at the state hospital, I paid the driver and then told the first orderly I met in the hallway that my water had broken. He looked at me—he probably hadn't seen such a large belly in a long time—and asked, “Where's the orderly from the ambulance?” When I told him I had come by taxi, he clicked his tongue and yelled, “Alone? By taxi? At two o'clock in the morning? After your water broke?” He was shouting and looking at me in confusion, even as he helped me lie down on a gurney in the hallway.

I gave birth by Caesarian section. I gave birth to two girls. No parts of their bodies were conjoined. Two normal girls. One weighed six pounds, the other five pounds, nine ounces. “Twins,” said the midwife when I awoke from the anesthesia. “MaÅ¡allah! May they live long and healthy lives! What are you going to call them?” “Marta and Marija,” I said like a shot, even though those names hadn't occurred to me before. Soon, all the nurses came to see Marta and Marija. Especially after they learned there was no father, that their father had been the one in the incident on television—the man killed on the Sofia to Skopje bus, with whom I was returning to Skopje from abroad so we could get married. “But aren't you under house arrest? Something about passports you had with you?” asked one of the medical technicians boldly as he helped me swaddle the babies. “Yes,” I said, “but I'm not guilty. I haven't done anything.” Some felt sorry for me; others gossiped about me. The other mothers in the room avoided talking to me. On the second day, a nurse came flying into the room and shouted, “Hide the pacifiers! There's a delegation from UNICEF coming!” The delegation had to see that all the mothers were nursing their babies and weren't using formula or pacifiers. But a lot of us were having difficulty nursing and we all had supplementary bottles and pacifiers that we dipped in sugar water to soothe our crying babies a bit. When the delegation left—quite pleased with how we were bonding with our babies, pacifiers still under the pillows—several police officers came into the room, sent by the court of inquiry, and, immediately behind them, my lawyer. “I had no intention of escaping. I couldn't give birth at home. I had to break house arrest to get to the hospital.” Apparently, I was supposed to have notified the investigative judge immediately. At two in the morning? How, when the only number I had was for his office, which opened at eight? But if it had been during day, would it have occurred to me to call him? The police said they would wait for me in the hallway; I was supposed to leave the hospital that day with Marta and Marija. My lawyer sat down beside me, and, as if trying not to wake the babies sleeping in a small crib beside my bed, whispered as quietly as possible that he had some information. The London police had searched the apartment, but they found nothing in
particular, which demonstrated that the passports hadn't been counterfeited there. But where then? Where? I should try to remember all the people Bogdan hung out with, who he brought home, and most importantly, where he went by himself. “He hung out with SiniÅ¡a, Jan, Georgi, but I only saw them when they visited us. They were all members of the Society of Young Pro-Western Immigrants from Eastern Europe, and it's hard to believe they would be involved in such things.” “And you?” my lawyer asked, looking me in the eye. “You studied migration. Bogdan could have dragged you into the business. Tell me.” “No,” I said, looking him in the eye as well. “No, I really thought Bogdan was working on a show about nationality.” The lawyer rolled his eyes, as he had the first time we spoke. He looked at me as though I were an idiot, which I had been. Marta and Marija awoke, and both began to cry at the same instant. My mother and father came into the room. My mother immediately took some holy water from her handbag and spritzed Marta and Marija, who began to cry even more. “What are you doing?” I shouted at her. “It's okay. That's what you do with babies,” she said, as she lifted Marta and my father lifted Marija. The lawyer politely said goodbye and left. Then we also left the hospital, under police escort. My mother and father had come by bus. Now all of us, along with the babies, went home in a police van. There were journalists and cameras everywhere. That very evening, while Marta and Marija slept in their little bed made from two armchairs pushed together, with a pile of sheets and blankets over them and two sprigs of basil beneath them, I watched myself on the small television in my room getting in the police van with Marija in my arms, my mother carrying Marta, and my father carrying my bag.

“Look carefully at this young woman!” the newsman said. “Five years ago, she went to London with her Siamese twin to have an operation to separate their heads. Her sister died; Zlata Serafimovska survived. Today, five years later, she is charged with counterfeiting passports in England with her partner, who was killed as they returned to Macedonia. The husband-to-be and father of these two babies is dead, and only Zlata Serafimovska knows the whole truth. Will she reveal it?” The journalist shouted as the video showed me covering Marija's head and ducking into the van. But I was now in a secure place, under house arrest but in my own room with my two little daughters.

Everything that ensued could have been anticipated from a legal perspective, but I was nursing two small babies, and I had no more tears in my eyes. In my dreams, God and Bogdan were mixed up. It seemed like they were playing a joke on me. Bogdan sometimes laughed coarsely; sometimes he cried and shouted, “Mom! Mom!” In my dreams, I often watched as I flung myself from the roof of the building that had stood across from our apartment in London. Every dream was a nightmare, every night was long—long and broken by Marta and Marija's crying. I nursed them in a state of delirium. I stroked them as if they were plush toys, and not babies, not my children. During the day, my father walked them for me—first one, then the other—from the kitchen to the balcony and back, again and again, and my mother wandered around the apartment, cooking something or other. Marija and Marta, one after the other, pushed their cherubic faces into my mother's, which was both old and infantile at the same time. They slobbered one cheek and then the other. My mother laughed and said, “You little bitches.” In Macedonian, dirty words are, for some reason, pet names for children: s
hitbox
,
pisspants
,
bumhead
,
farter
,
little bitch
. My mother didn't take them outside even once, and, although I had given them the money and begged them to buy the double carriage, it just stood in the big room, and neither she nor my father wanted to push it. “You don't take children outside for forty days,” she told me, so we languished in the apartment all winter. I had two heaters going in my room, and covered Marta and Marija with a thick blanket, but my soul was colder than it had ever been. I still ate alone on
the sewing machine table in my room, watching Marija and Marta as they lay on the couch. Once, Marija made a terrible mess while being changed, like in a movie. It was surreal. First, she pooped all over my hand, because she was naked and hadn't yet been swaddled, and then on the changing mat on my bed. I shouted, surprised. My father came into the room, and Marija spattered us and the floor. We cheered her on, laughing. We were happy because she had finally managed to poop after five whole days—we had given her a small bottle of chamomile tea and sugar. We felt fortunate, happy, surprised. It was the first time in my life I'd heard my father laugh like that. I laughed all afternoon, adding fantastic elements as I reimagined the incident: Marija is pooping, the excrement flies in every direction, I crouch down, hiding, so she can't aim it at me. How much I missed Bogdan at times like that. The incident freed me, making me feel my awareness that I was a mother, and Marija and Marta deserved to have a mother, in the full sense of the word, and not an absent nurse who just vegetates beside them.

Sometime before New Year's, my house arrest finally ended, and I was free while the legal process played itself out. It was a full nine months before I was called to a hearing, and after several proceedings, I was found guilty of being an accomplice to a criminal activity—concealing travel documents—and sentenced to a year in prison. “A whole year!” my mother said, and then gave me one of her lectures: “Your children will forget you. A year is a long time. Who will look after them? Your father and I are old. We can't take care of young children. This is what happens when you carry on with a criminal. He was in your home and you didn't recognize him. You went all the way to London, and ended up with a Macedonian guy. You couldn't find some Englishman, someone local. Even as a child, it was obvious what sort Bogdan was, sitting in front of our building with those silly crossword puzzles and looking at everyone like he was out of his mind. Even then, you could tell what sort he'd be. But it wasn't her fault. The poor woman was taken away young. But the single woman he adopted wasn't stupid; she knew why she was going to England. She was interested in business, and she taught her child. Now you need to just take it and shut up. As for the children, God will have to look after them for you.” What my mother said wasn't what was important to me. What was important was that Marta and Marija were still babies, and my house detention had ended along with my nine months of freedom. I awaited my fate. My lawyer said he would do everything to prove I wasn't guilty on appeal. He convinced me to show him the letter from Bogdan's mother to help redirect the investigation. “See who has a bee in her bonnet,” he said, and he was convinced—as I was—that Bogdan's mother knew about the crime and had possibly participated in it herself. My lawyer pressured me to tell him everything connected with my case—I must know something, something I was hiding, he said. “It's obvious…I suspect you don't want to expose Bogdan's parents for the counterfeiting, or his friends from the society. Your children will be given to a children's home if your parents can't take them,” he said. “A whole year in prison awaits you.” He was essentially convinced there was no way to prove I wasn't guilty except by informing on Bogdan's mother. At the hearing, I defended myself
with silence. I didn't have the strength to speak. Bogdan's image inside me kept me from mentioning his mother's house as a possible factory for the counterfeiting. She never contacted me again. Why didn't I name her? The woman had never liked me, nor I her. Nothing else was found in our apartment in London, and the case was closed. Everyone now waited for the decision here in Macedonia. In the meantime, the owner of our apartment in London cleaned and rented it out to some other people. Who knows what happened to our things? Most likely, Bogdan's mother took them. I couldn't contact her to find out. Bogdan's laptop was the only piece of evidence the Macedonian authorities had, but it didn't contain a single name of a possible accomplice. All that was there were the data from real East European passports and false British ones. And the four passports inside the folder with the ultrasound pictures of Marta and Marija in my suitcase. I don't know. I promised myself I would inform on Bogdan's mother if it became clear to me that I couldn't live without Marta and Marija. Or not. To find the ability to denounce someone…you need to be born with that sort of character.