A Spare Life (5 page)

But that January in 1985, I just wanted the days to pass until winter break when we'd travel alone with our cousin Verče on one of the Proletariat bus company buses to the village and directly into the embrace of our grandmother. The fire blazed in the only warm room in the house; while Srebra and I sat in our grandma's lap, Verče had already found something to amuse herself—she had pulled a lead pellet from her pocket and was sticking it into the woodstove with tongs to see if it would melt. “Tomorrow we will go into town,” our grandmother said. “We'll see the girl your uncle wants to marry. But don't tell your mother, she'd yell at me, asking why I took you along and brought shame to us in front of the in-laws.” “We won't tell her,” said Srebra, but I had a gigantic lump in my throat. We could hardly wait. Grandma, Verče, Srebra, and I went to the house of the girl our uncle, our mother's brother, was in love with so we could have a look at her. She and her sister were standing at the window—the chosen one was a brunette, her sister a blond—like a picture of angels and divine brides in heaven, although the only thing that our prospective aunt-to-be had of that image was the plump body of a woman in a baroque painting of paradise. At first, when her parents saw Srebra and me, they could not help their open mouths uttering “Oh!” Then they scowled, but, finally, her father smiled as broadly as possible. He stood behind Srebra and me and hugged the two of us, placing his hands on our breasts. He ran his hands across them, as if by accident, while we stood, stunned, looking at the tapestry hanging on the wall. His wife went out to bring some juice; Verče sat in front of the television set; our grandmother settled down next to her and looked around. When our prospective aunt appeared, her father let his hands drop from our breasts. Our cheeks burned with shame. “Were they born like this, or did it happen to them afterward?” the mother asked our grandma, pointing to us as she served the juice. “That's how they were born; it's fate,” our grandma said. “What's your sign?” asked our potential aunt. “Your uncle and I have compatible horoscopes, both our signs and rising signs.” “You have beautiful, beautiful granddaughters, even if they are like that,” her father laughed again. He had a leering expression, white teeth with a few gold ones interspersed. Later, as we were waiting for our
grandmother to put on her shoes, he passed Verče in the hallway and grabbed hold of her by the breasts, too, as if by accident, while helping her put on her coat. Verče was twelve years old and as flat as a board, but we were a year older and almost unnaturally mature, our nipples obvious under our blouses. And in all our future meetings, at the engagement party, at the wedding, at every family event connected with our uncle and aunt, her father always greeted us warmly with his firm grip, immediately throwing his arms around our necks and literally taking hold of our breasts. Srebra and I would freeze, red with embarrassment. We hated him and we hated ourselves, while his wife, smile in place, chatted on about nothing. They were the owners of a fabric store called Makedonka. On occasion, our aunt gave us a meter or two of some material or other—I remember one that was a dirty white color, with a brown and orange palm tree in the middle, or maybe two palms: our aunt sewed us skirts with elastic waistbands and a flounce. They didn't look great on us because of the elastic waistbands. We usually wore them with light brown tank tops that stretched enough so, like all our tops, we could pull them up from our feet.

From the very beginning, our grandmother did not like our uncle's choice. For a daughter-in-law she had wanted a nurse, someone hardworking and as cute as pie, with long hair, a fair complexion, smiling, beautiful, and blond. The woman our uncle had selected was the diametric opposite of Grandma's ideal. Our uncle cried behind the house when our grandmother told him she was not the girl for him, then took off somewhere. Our aunt cried sorrowfully, “My poor little brother. He's the only one with any education, and now look…” she sobbed, then set off after him. Srebra thought it was funny, but I cut off her laughter with a sharp pinch to the hip. Verče suggested we take a walk through the village. No sooner had we set out than we met Vida, our grandma and grandpa's neighbor. Granny Vida was most interested in whether our father had settled things with his family. She always asked when we saw her, and Srebra and I always said we didn't know anything about it, that the topic was not mentioned in front of us. “So what about you? Are you looking for a cure, or do you plan to stay like this?” Granny Vida asked. Srebra and I did not know anything about that either, because Srebra and I didn't know where to find a cure, and it always seemed to us that our mother and father weren't looking, and that we'd continue on with conjoined heads to the end of our lives, old maids, scorned by everyone. Perhaps we'd end up like our neighbor Verka. Deep down, our grandma also seemed to think we'd be old maids, because she frequently told us about an old maid in the village. “She gets her paycheck, eats, and drinks; she's like a buffalo. What does she need a husband for? A wife with a husband doesn't eat or drink; she just slogs along looking after children, who then bring home lazy, unwashed daughters-in-law.” Another old maid in the village was Slavica, the agent who interrogated our grandfather that winter, though about what no one told us. Thin, tall, bony, with dark skin and hair, a gold tooth, and eyes that blazed with malice and power, she was the queen of Yugoslav Communism in the village, a member of UDBA—the secret police—dressed in a long leather coat. Who made those leather coats the UDBA agents wore? For years, even after the breakup of Yugoslavia, they wore them over their business suits. Every time Slavica showed up at the house,
Grandpa, as if on command, threw a heavy wool jacket over his shoulders, and with peasant
opanci
on his feet, grimy from working in the animal stalls, went off somewhere with the agent. When he returned, he didn't want to eat dinner or sit with us in the room with the woodstove, but lay down in his room, where he pulled the quilt and heavy woolen blankets over his head and trembled like a branch. Several years later, they found him, beaten, not far from the vineyard. He spent several days in the hospital and then came to Skopje. Srebra and I were alone. We had just returned from a book fair we had gone to with our school and were at Auntie Dobrila's; she made leather slippers at home on an industrial sewing machine. We sat on the couch and watched her. She was not bothered by our appearance nor was she ashamed of us. She jokingly referred to us as the “ass and underpants” as if we chose to be together all the time rather than being forced to. Our grandfather arrived at our apartment and rang the bell over and over until it finally occurred to him to ask Auntie Dobrila where we were. We unlocked the door to our place and let him in. He came in and sat on the couch in the kitchen. He was confused, anxious, his head bandaged. This was not our grandfather from the village; he was like some other person. We didn't know what to talk about. We left him there and went back to Auntie Dobrila's. We returned after our mother and father came home from work. We read the court decision aloud several times, but still didn't understand whether our grandfather had been charged, or had brought charges against someone else. The next day, he left on the first bus, and we went to the Prohor Pčinski Monastery with Roza's class—her teacher taught history—for Roza had begged for us to be taken along to see the monastery where the Antifascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia had met. Srebra and I sat in the front seats of the bus, across from Roza, and all three of us looked straight ahead, through the bus's windshield, while the radio played the Serbian pop song “Those Green Eyes Were Mine.” Our grandfather never came to Skopje again, and we never went to Prohor Pčinski again. Nor did he allow our grandmother to come to Skopje more than once every two or three years. It made him angry that she sat on the balcony where everyone could see
her. Was he jealous? Or did he think that it wasn't her place, a villager, to be out on the balcony? Or was he afraid that, in his absence, our grandmother would seek out her first love, a man named Kole, whom she had loved for seven years before she married our grandfather? She hadn't known how to write, so her sister, Mirka, had written letters for her, which she sent to him baked in loaves of bread. He appeared to her in a dream just before he died, and now that he was dead, she was more sorry than ever before that she hadn't married him and sat in a city garden in Skopje enjoying herself, rather than being tormented by village chores. Unrealized love, a life of pain. Her stomach ached until the end of her life. Every evening she licked sugar in place of morphine.

That winter vacation, after we met our prospective aunt, our Aunt Milka told us that our father had telephoned from work to tell her that our mother was in the hospital. “She was feeling sick to her stomach,” our aunt said. “It's a good thing it's vacation and you're here, or who would have taken care of you?” That evening, while Srebra and I were sleeping with Verče in the bed in the room with the woodstove, our grandma lying at our feet like a dog, I began to run a fever. When she noticed that I was sick, Srebra got really angry. We hated each other most when one of us was ill, because the other one also had to lie there as if she, too, were sick, and, more often than not, would get sick herself. And now, of all times, while white snowflakes blew outside and Verče had already asked Grandfather where the sled was, I got sick. I was burning with fever and almost delirious as I drank yogurt our uncle brought from town especially for me. Srebra covered her nose and mouth with a handkerchief so she would not get sick too. Verče kicked about the room, turning the cassette player on and off. Finally, she put on a Riblja Čorba tape and left the room, and all day, between dreaming and waking, I listened to songs from their album
Buvlja pijaca
. Srebra looked at the ceiling with her mouth and nose covered, fists clenched. At such moments, she hated me more than anything in the world. I hated her too, because I felt her hatred. Our mother was far away; we didn't even know which hospital she was in. Most of all, we were afraid she would die. I quickly recovered, and before the end of vacation, Grandma took us to the village center. We stood on the path near the village school and looked downhill toward the small river, where, when she was younger, our grandmother had washed clothes with the other women from the village. The village priest threw a wooden cross into the shallow, partially frozen river, and several men and boys dressed only in leggings, naked from the waist up, jumped into the water at the same time and poked around until one of the younger boys pulled the cross from the water. The priest called out, “Blessings upon you, Jovan! God bless you!” He patted the boy's shoulder, which was turning blue, sprinkled him with basil, and presented him with a small grayish-black radio-cassette player. “Grandma, how come Grandpa didn't come to jump in after the cross? Or Uncle?” I
asked, but, walking along behind us, she said, “Oh, they're not keen on such things.” Grandpa only went to church on Saint Nicholas Day, and our uncle was a young Communist. It was Epiphany, and the Blessing of Water, a celebration of Saint John the Baptist's baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River, when God presented his beloved Son to the people while the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, flew above their heads. For years I asked myself, and once I asked Srebra: “Why in the form of a dove, and not some other bird?” Srebra said that monkeys loved to catch doves, and that is why the Holy Spirit appeared to them in the form of a dove. I didn't believe her. But really, why in the form of a dove? And was it because of the Holy Spirit that Uncle Boro, who lived on our street in Skopje, kept a dovecote filled with such beautiful white doves? The only dove we ever had, which our uncle in Montenegro gave us, suffocated in our Å koda just as we pulled up in front of our building. That was an emptiness nothing could fill, a dove that was impossible to replace, not even by one from Uncle Boro's dovecote. Was it the loss of my personal, private Holy Spirit? Two days before we were to go back to Skopje, our grandma said, “Your uncle is going with you. He'll stay in Skopje till the summer; he's taking a language course. Look after him. He's the only uncle you've got. Let him eat whatever you're eating. Give him whatever he wants, so his weenie doesn't fall off. He's a grown man, after all.” Our grandfather yelled, “Come on, stop it, don't go prattling on, he's not a child.” Our uncle spent so long in town saying goodbye to the girlfriend who was to become his wife that summer that he barely caught the bus we were on. Perhaps Grandma thought that if he weren't with her for half a year, he would forget her. Did they really sell a cow so our uncle could study a language that he was never going to need, or was it to distance him from this girlfriend, whom they did not want as their daughter-in-law? We arrived in Skopje. Our father was waiting for us with the car at the station. First we dropped Verče off; then we went to our apartment. Our uncle asked whether our mother had returned from the hospital. “No,” answered our father. “They're letting her go Friday.” Srebra and I said nothing. What awaited us at home was the little woodstove, its fire burned down, and a pot of beans
our father had boiled. First Srebra and I ate with our uncle sitting perpendicular to us; then Dad ate by himself. Our uncle had to sleep in the big room, on the foldout couch by the door, in the room where our parents slept. Together, we somehow made up the bed. We'd have to wait for Mom to return from the hospital so she could empty a few things from the cupboard and give him space for his clothes. The next day, our uncle went to visit her. We did not. Dad said we shouldn't go to the hospital; a hospital is no place for children. When our mother got back two days later, she brought dolls made from felt: one pale yellow, the other orange. The dolls were long and attached to wooden sticks. Someone had been selling them in the hospital. They were not for Srebra and me; they were just to have around the apartment. We put one in our room on the shelf; the other sat in the big room on top of the old television. After our mother put on her blue robe, she lay down on the couch and silently looked at us seated in our chair. What concerned us most was whether she would laugh as she had before. Her laugh was the only thing that eased our anxieties about being unloved children. When our mother laughed, it gave Srebra and me confidence; we grew more sure of ourselves. In those moments we heard her laugh—and she laughed loudly, almost hysterically—Srebra and I felt close to each other, and carried our misfortune more easily. Our father almost never laughed; he only let out a sound that was supposed to resemble laughter, a sort-of laugh released as an exhale, as if he were clearing his throat, a laugh he had second thoughts about. As it turned out, for a whole month after her return from the hospital, where they had removed a cyst from her ovary, Mom didn't laugh in her usual fashion. It was not until she went to work again and was once again able to tell us who said what and who did what, in particular about “Comrade Director,” that she was able to laugh as she had before. One evening, before going to bed, our uncle, wrapped in a heavy wool blanket and shivering, accidentally broke one of the globes on the lamp that hung in the big room. Afraid of what our father would say, he opened his drawer (the top one was his our mother had decided), took out his pants, and got himself ready in case our father should happen to kick him out of the house. My heart was beating like crazy
because I loved him and was worried and afraid for him. Srebra loved him too, but she argued with him, calling him an idiot whenever we played a pinching game and he pinched us too hard. Our father did get very angry, but he controlled himself and didn't kick Uncle out, but that evening in front of the television, he muttered the same thing for hours: “As if people like that should study languages, the bastard; because of people like that the country will fall apart…” Our mother sobbed silently on the couch; Srebra and I watched the quiz show
Kviskoteka
, but both our minds fled to the big room, where, scrunched down under a quilt and thick wool blanket, our uncle's body trembled. What we loved most was when mother vacuumed and shooed Srebra, me, and our uncle into the hallway, where we sat until she was done. In the hallway, we played hopscotch on the brown carpet with its brightly colored lines. Srebra and I held each other tight under the arms and hopped each on one foot, while our uncle hopped on two. We laughed until our uncle turned completely red in the face, including all of his forehead, and then Srebra would toss at him: “You look like a monkey's ass.” Something oppressed my spirit, though, something indefinite, but our uncle said, “And you look like a witch.” In the evening, Mom boiled some noodles, and we grated the cheese that was brought from the village. When our uncle wasn't lying in bed, he sat in the dining room and watched television, silently, trying to be invisible. Mom always asked him if he wanted to eat, as if it were not quite clear, since, during the day, he ate in the student cafeteria, and for some reason all of us expected that he would never be hungry at home. I think we all secretly prayed that he would say no so there would be more for us. Also, Dad often yelled at him, like he did at us. Our uncle was nearly full grown, the only one in our family to finish university, and was now enrolled in a foreign-language course. He was a man on the verge of marriage, but our father treated him like a child. When our father insulted him because of some minor thing even Srebra felt sorry for him; I could hear her swallow the lump in her throat. I wished we had a caged lion on our balcony, so every time Dad screamed the cage would open and the lion would charge, frightening him. Those six months with our uncle in our home hardened Srebra and me. We became more decisive, more
contrary. And our hope grew that one day our heads might be separated, because our uncle told us he had read in an English textbook that in London there were many talented doctors, who, many years ago, had separated two babies whose heads were joined. “I told you,” Srebra threw at me. “I knew it.” In Skopje, we didn't know any doctors like that, although every doctor and nurse we met in the clinic hallways—eye clinics for me, and ear, nose, and throat for Srebra—stopped and approached us. They asked our father what had happened, how we had been born with conjoined heads, whether it hindered our development, whether we had one brain or were our brains conjoined. Always the same sophomoric questions. Srebra and I, first one then the other, would silently twirl our father's car keys, while he answered the curious doctors and nurses: “Their brains are separate, but they share a vein; I don't know, I don't really understand it, but that's what they told us. This one has sinus problems, and that one doesn't see well. There is no one who can perform the operation. It is a very difficult operation.” And then we would go into the office of either an eye doctor or an ear, nose, and throat specialist. Sometimes at home, Srebra and I played patient and ophthalmologist. We would stand a ways back from the wall calendar. I couldn't see the numbers and letters on the calendar, but Srebra could. We hadn't known how to tell our mother and father that I didn't see well, so we didn't—it was discovered during the first routine school checkup. Srebra often called me, “blind idiot,” and in those moments, I was grateful to her. I thought Mom and Dad would ask why she was calling me blind, but they never asked, because all the ugly words spoken during a quarrel were understood merely as symbols, part of the war of words, not as expressions of reality. Later on, over the years, we would go to the eye doctor, and I would sit in the special chair for my examinations, and Srebra, attached, would sit in a normal chair, while the doctor with questionable personal hygiene would breathe in my face and fit glasses, often missing the opening for glasses between our joined spot and my ear, poking us with the glasses right where it hurt the most. Srebra, keeping her lips firmly pressed so as not to inhale the doctor's bad breath, covered first one eye with her palm then the other, silently guessing the
letters and numbers on the chart. Then she would whisper them to me when I couldn't get them. The doctor appeared not to notice her whispering, or, perhaps because of it, he prescribed thicker and thicker lenses, which stuck out of the black frames, the cheapest ones possible, which my father selected. Every trip to the doctor was followed by complaints: “This is becoming intolerable. All we do is go to doctors' offices. Screw the two of you. You voracious beasts! You just know everything. You think you're just smarter than everyone. You've devoured me.” Srebra wouldn't put up with it for long, saying, “Who else is there to take us to the doctor? You're our father.” That would make him even angrier, and he would swear all over again. I felt terrible that we exhausted him with our ailments. I was embarrassed that he had to take us to the doctor's, take vacation days from work, get up at night to make tea when we were sick, rub skin cream on our behinds when Srebra and I, in a gust of cold wind, backed into the gas stove, and when he had to give Srebra nose drops every eight hours, which he usually gave to me as well, just in case. It was as if we were someone else's children hanging around the house, not knowing what to do in their world, with insufficient light for my eyes and insufficient heat on winter nights for Srebra's sinuses. Her nose ran in torrents. To wipe it, she needed two or three handkerchiefs a day, which our mother hand-washed and dried on the top of the gas stove before returning them to her. Only radiation of the sinuses would help—a ten-day treatment in the clinic by the Bit Pazar. But when they saw us, the clinic staff did not know what to do. They would have to cover my eyes with the red cloth, too. They bound our heads with one long cloth, wrapping it around twice, over my glasses. They pointed a red-hot lamp at Srebra's face. We had to close our eyes and stay like that for twenty minutes. But I peeked stealthily at the red lamp with one eye. My glasses were pressing on my nose and I quickly got bored with the red of the lamp, so I lifted the cloth a bit more, and, through the other eye, a view through the window unfolded. Outside, I saw the red city buses raising dust, and on the grass by the side of the road sat Albanian men with white felt caps on their heads and Albanian women wearing raincoats and headscarves, while children ran everywhere. Where does their
desire come from to sit wherever there is grass on the slope by the road with its constant flow of traffic and spewing gas fumes? Did they feel like Americans or tourists in Central Park sprawled out under the trees with a sandwich or can of soda in their hands? The veiled women and old men with felt caps spread along the road breaking bread and nibbling onions. There was freedom in their sprawled figures that didn't apply to us. We sat on chairs without backs, side by side in a clinic by the Bit Pazar, in front of a red lamp, eye to eye with the glow. It would be lovely if we, too, could lie on the grass by the road, look at the sky, and eat sunflower seeds. I thought how pleasant it would be to sit on the grass with Roza, who would surely dream up all kinds of new games and funny sayings, or with Auntie Verka—how many interesting things would happen between her and the Albanians on the grass, how many arguments, but then again, maybe not, because Auntie Verka, unlike us Macedonians, liked Albanians and Roms and drunks and whores. She didn't like ordinary people,