A Spare Life (6 page)

provincials
, as she called them. That's why she picked a Rom as her lover, a guy named Riki—“The Gypsy,” we all called him—who moved in with her, with his big belly and huge behind. They sang and drank together in the apartment. They fought or cried out in pleasure. It was never as loud in our building as those two years when Riki lived with Verka. During that period, Srebra and I did not dare go to her place, and she no longer sent us on little errands to the store. After the radiation treatment for Srebra's sinuses, we discovered when we got home that there was no power in any of the apartments, because Riki had cut it off. He was angry that no one ever said “Good morning” to him. Curses, howls, everyone shouting—he, Auntie Verka, all the apartment residents. Someone called the police. Two older policemen came into the building and grabbed him, and at the bottom steps they kicked him, beat him with their truncheons, and swore at him. Along with our dad, we barely got past them. Roza was sitting on the railing of the upper stairs, eyes wide. “This is a madhouse,” she said as we went by her. “C'mon, let's go somewhere,” she whispered, and we needed to get out of there so badly that, without saying anything to Dad, we sneaked past the gathered residents and ran outside. We headed automatically toward the
store. Roza said she wanted to buy some snacks. As we left the store, we ran into Bogdan, who was going home to his small shed attached to the back of the store. “Hey, Bogdan, what are you up to?” Roza said, “You're never around; you don't hang out with us anymore.” We stopped. Bogdan turned red, then got up his courage and said, “Well, I'm going home to pack.” “Where are you going?” she asked. “I'm moving in with Auntie Stefka,” he said. “How did that happen?” Roza asked. Srebra and I just stood there silently. Bogdan shrugged his shoulders, mumbled something, and then went into his house. We returned home, wondering about what he'd said. Bogdan was moving in with Auntie Stefka! Stefka was a single woman, like Auntie Verka, a decent person, quite young, our parents would say—though she seemed old to us, if still pretty, with long black hair that she wore in a bun—who lived in our building. There were also single women living in the building next door—twin sisters on one floor, and an older woman on another. It wasn't clear to us why each entryway had an apartment for an unmarried woman, sometimes even two women,
singles
, as we called them, because that's what we heard our parents call them. “My sister says Prime Minister Milka Planinc has decided that each entryway should have a single woman, and she gave them apartments so they, too, could have a life,” Roza explained on the way home. “A woman who doesn't have a husband or doesn't want to get married can send an application to Planinc, and she gives her an apartment, and that's how she becomes a single,” and that seemed logical because we'd heard that Auntie Verka's son had arranged for her to get the single-woman apartment in our entryway. “But why was Bogdan going to live with one of these single women?” That was not clear to Srebra. “You know, my parents said something about how children can now adopt a mother for themselves,” Roza recalled, adding, “older children, like Bogdan, whom no one wants to adopt.” It seemed pretty weird to me that a child, even an older one, could pick out a mother for himself. Somewhere deep inside me a thought crept in—which mother would we select if we did not have a mother? “Grandma,” was my internal reply, but Grandma was not a
single
woman, and among the singles we knew, we were only close to Auntie Verka,
but she was a drunk, and thus not allowed to be adopted, and Riki was living with her. I knew there was a special home for children without parents, which is exactly what it was called: Home for Children without Parents. From time to time, our parents threatened to send Srebra and me there. They'd take us there and then we'd see, Lord only knows what, that that was a place for the likes of us. But no one ever mentioned that Bogdan should live in such a home, even though it was logical that a ten-year-old child, which was how old Bogdan was when he was left motherless, shouldn't live alone. But Bogdan had been living alone for three whole years since his mother died. He ate in the school cafeteria, wore clothes the store clerk gave him, and when he had to go to the doctor or some other official place, our classroom teacher went with him. It had seemed to all of us that Bogdan didn't want to leave his place. He spent hours there, solving crossword puzzles in
Brain Twisters
, to which he'd subscribed with the money that we had raised for him by collecting old paper. And now, suddenly, Bogdan was to move in with Stefka, the most entrancing, but also the saddest, single woman on the street, always in high heels with her hair in a bun that revealed a white face with large dark eyes. At home, we told our father straightaway. He didn't say anything. He went down to the garage to kill the day he had taken off work to take us to the doctor, but when Mom got home, we also told her, and she turned to our father and said, “I told you. Didn't they say on television that it had been decided? Each child whose mother and father died simply has to select a new mother and adopt her. Good Lord, save and protect us, instead of grown-ups adopting children, now children adopt parents. A new law in Belgrade, that's what they said, because there were many single women, and since the state pays for their apartments, they can at least look after a child.” That afternoon, Auntie Dobrila came for coffee. She always came when she needed tweezers to pluck the three hairs that grew near her mouth; she had no tweezers at home, so she used ours, which had been bought at a fair. All us females sat in the kitchen, Srebra and me on our chair, Auntie Dobrila perpendicular to us, and our mother across the table, where no one ever sat when we were alone. That chair was for the dishcloth that Srebra and I used to
wash our faces in the evening before we went to bed, using the last of the warm water from the kitchen boiler. On the table stood a yogurt container we used as a bucket for scraps; Srebra and I spun it around to read the label for the hundredth time while our mother shot us a look telling us not to. That used to happen sometimes when Auntie Zorica came to visit, too. One evening, we were looking for our mother to give her our key, and she was visiting Auntie Zorica who was seriously ill and who died a few days later from cancer. I wanted to go into the bedroom to see Auntie Zorica one more time, but Srebra was against it. The death of a neighbor was announced from the balcony of the deceased in the form of a loud cry and weeping, and soon the entryway bell would ring. And that's how we found out about Auntie Zorica. But now, sitting with Auntie Dobrila, the only conversation was about the singles in the neighborhood. Auntie Dobrila also confirmed that it was true; children without parents could adopt a mother—any single woman—and move in with her. “Now, how did that child come up with Stefka?” wondered my mother. But Auntie Dobrila wasn't surprised. “She's the youngest, the prettiest, the healthiest; she earns a good salary. The child will live better and better!” “Well, you never know, maybe she likes young children for…well…for those things…” commented our mother. “Anyway, that's who Bogdan chose; Mara from the Slavija market took him to the town hall, where all the singles from our neighborhood had been summoned, all except Verka, because she's a drunk and couldn't be selected, and Bogdan saw them all and liked Stefka the most, so he chose her. People were waiting all day; there were so many children and singles.” Bogdan was lucky to have gotten a mother from our neighborhood. When they heard he was an excellent student, they took pity on him and said, “This child has a future,” so Bogdan will move in with Auntie Stefka. “What won't they think of,” said Mom. “Children adopting their own mothers. That didn't exist in our time; how could a child know how to adopt a mother?” “No, seriously, believe me, it's better for a child to adopt his mother, rather than have some pervert—excuse me—adopt him and turn him into an addict,” Dobrila assured her. There was nothing bad to say about Stefka. A single woman, she had some education,
having completed a commercial high-school course. She did not have parents. Their house, in a village in eastern Macedonia, had burned to the ground, and when she heard about it while living in the student dorm, something severed within her; she was beautiful, young, but sad, very sad, just work then home again. She didn't have friends, or a boyfriend, or anything. When her sister was still young, she had gone off to England, and that sister was all Stefka had left. Now at least Bogdan might heal her wounds a little. She would have someone to converse with. And she had money; she could take care of him. That's what Auntie Dobrila thought, and Srebra and I agreed with her. But we were still curious which other children would adopt which other singles: Who would adopt the sister-singles, twins but not Siamese like us? Who would adopt the single woman who lived in the yellow building, or the one in the prefab house on the road to school? “She's not that sort of single,” said Auntie Dobrila. “No one is going to adopt her. She was left alone because her husband died a few years ago. The woman went out of her mind, and people say that on the bedroom wall there is a big splotch of blood. Who knows where it came from? Maybe she killed him and then went crazy when he appeared to her in a dream, but the police didn't pursue her; they just left her there like that, and now she barely walks, dragging herself along, not wearing underwear under her dress, and if you don't believe me, lift it up sometime, and you'll see.” Really? Was that possible? I wondered, but Srebra started laughing hysterically, and her laughter shook my head. She laughed so hard she had to pee, and we ran to the bathroom. Auntie Dobrila went home, and our mother scolded us all evening, telling us we were crazy and that we didn't know how to appreciate what we had.

A couple of days later, Bogdan moved in with Auntie Stefka. Now we lived in the same building, almost neighbors. In the building next door, the twin single ladies were adopted by two Rom girls. They never went outside, and we never hung around with them—following the wishes of their “mothers,” they still went to their old school. Every morning, all four of them took a bus to a different neighborhood where the school the girls attended was located. Then their mothers continued on to work, and in the afternoon, they all came home together. At the time, we had such an intolerant attitude toward Roms that we simply didn't want to be around them, not at school or outside in front of the building. “Gypsified” was the word grown-ups used when something was ugly, unclean, not how it should be, and we once heard our mother say on the phone to our aunt, “To tell you the truth, it would have been better if I had given birth to Gypsies rather than these two.” When she heard her say that, Srebra began to sob, shaking me, but I scolded her, even though I couldn't look her in the eye: “What are you crying about? You know they don't love us.” With something approaching envy we looked at the happy face of the single woman who lived in the building next to ours who had been adopted by a stout girl with mild developmental disorders. The girl wore glasses with thick black frames and walked with her feet pointing outward, limping with both legs. Her hands were fleshy, white like snow, and she always held her adopted mother's arm, and the single woman, with a smile in her eyes and on her lips, supported her new daughter. There was something heavy, solemn, almost tragic in her gait; her whole being displayed a sense of concern. And that is how it was for years, until the most tragic moment in her life and in the life of her new and only daughter.

Most important, however, is that in March of 1985 we went on a three-day excursion to Ohrid. On the bus, Bogdan sat behind us, solving crosswords. There were ten of us to a room at the children's resort. Srebra and I always had to share a bed, and the beds there were particularly narrow. On the first night, I dreamed that our mother was falling from the eighth floor of a building. The girls were sleeping. Srebra did not move when I opened my eyes in the horror of the night and the loneliness in my soul. At the moment in the dream that my mother fell, I felt I was also falling into an ever-greater emptiness, that I had broken something that could not be fixed; that my soul was broken. When I told Srebra the next day, she screamed at me in our reflection in the cupboard mirror: “Really, it seems like you want Mom to fall in real life. And then we'd have to figure out what to do.” I could barely wait for the three days to pass to go home so I could tell Roza what I'd dreamed. Roza always understood other people's dreams: “That's odd,” she said. “I also dreamed I fell from the eighth floor. But how can that be, when our building only has three floors? Forget it; it's all nonsense.” I don't know why I've never been able to forget that dream. Not so much the dream, in fact, as the emptiness into which our mother fell, and I along with her (and, whether she wanted to or not, Srebra). It haunts me in my sweaty hands, in the beating of my heart, in the pain in my head. “My head hurts, too, because of you,” Srebra would say angrily, because a reaction in one of us gave rise to the same in the other. If one of us laughed, the other laughed; if I was upset, so was Srebra; and when Srebra was hungry, I felt hungry as well. We did not know how to explain it any other way than the way our grandma put it: “Your blood mixes. That's why.”

Roza suggested that we go to the movies, to a Bruce Lee film. We had never been to the movie theater before. We dressed nicely, begged our parents for money, and set off to the neighborhood theater, which was in an old building from before the earthquake that also housed the district registry department. There was nobody else there. The cashier covertly spit into her blouse to ward off the evil eye when she saw us, then called through the window, “They won't show the film. You're the only ones here!” We were terribly disappointed. I begged Srebra and Roza to at least go to the church, a two-minute walk from the theater. Srebra wanted nothing to do with it, but Roza agreed. “Why not?” she asked. “Maybe they'll give us a communion wafer.” I hoped that as soon as I went in, all the anguish that had taken root after my dream about our mother's fall might disappear, that everything in my soul would be as it had been before, and all memory of the fall would vanish and never return. Whether the priest caught something in my look behind my glasses, I cannot say. It was clear that he recognized us from the few times we came to church with our mother and aunt. I smiled at him. He gave me a thin chain with a cross. He only had one, he said, and Srebra and I should take turns. Srebra immediately said she didn't need a cross, but Roza asked, “When will you have more? I'd like one, too.” The priest smiled and said he'd surely have them by Ascension Day. On the way home, while Roza walked in front of us deep in her own thoughts, Srebra whispered, “You think God created us and that's why you want the cross. I don't need one. I'm certain we're descended from monkeys.” Roza turned and shouted, “C'mon! Don't you two know how to do anything but fight all the time?” I wore that chain around my neck day and night. I didn't take it off even when I bathed, huddled with Srebra in the beat-up old bathtub, or during radiation treatments for Srebra's sinuses. I wore it to school, even though we weren't supposed to wear religious symbols there. Even when we began wearing lighter clothing, I still wore my white turtleneck blouse that had ten buttons up the back so I could pull it up over my legs, and beneath the blouse, stuck to my skin, were my chain and cross. It was like a rope to save me from falling. I rescued myself with it when I felt something pulling me
down toward an unclear abyss that I sensed almost physically—deep, dark, black.