A Spare Life (8 page)

The next day, before lunch, Srebra and I were working on our math homework at our table in the kitchen, while Mom, who had come home from work, was cooking some ham for our dinner, when suddenly, loud cries came from the stairwell. “That drunk again,” Mom said, and we, too, thought Verka and Riki were fighting. But these cries weren't angry, but cries of pain, screams the likes of which we had up until then only heard in films. We heard doors open, then someone knocked sharply on our door, and Srebra and I jumped up, tripping over each other's legs as we ran to open it. In the hallway we saw the crazed faces of Auntie Dobrila and Auntie Mira, and from the floor below came loud groans. Our neighbors looked at us with ashen faces, and we, in shock, went to the railing that overlooked the floor below, and Auntie Magda, voice worn out from pain, moaned, “Aaaah, Roza.” The moment we heard that, Srebra and I literally couldn't move. It was as if we had been turned to stone where we stood. Then our hearts began beating as hard as they could. I could hear the rapid beat of Srebra's, and she could hear mine, and at the spot where our heads were joined it was like the roar of an ocean, a pain so entirely unexpected, a pain such that one could not imagine that such pain existed. But what roared most of all were the words we heard. We stood pressed against the railing, horrified, mute, and it was only due to our conjoined heads that one of us didn't fall, keeling over the edge in madness, in the sharp sensation that sliced our bodies. Mom came and pulled us from the railing, then pushed us into the apartment, whispering as quietly as she could, “Come on, come on.” Then she stepped out alone. Srebra and I stood in the hall, right where our mother left us, glued to the wall, opposite the small cabinet with the mirror, petrified, speechless, without making the slightest sound, only our hearts beating loudly, uneven as the lines of an erratic EKG. We caught sight of our faces in the mirror: eyes wide, ears alert, foreheads creased, lips partially open. Our faces were not children's faces, but the faces of old women. A person in pain is either the most beautiful or the ugliest on the planet. We were the ugliest. We heard a cacophony of voices. We recognized the voice of Uncle Kole, who was crying like a baby. Nearly everyone was crying and Srebra also began to cry, crying like she
never had before. But I couldn't cry. The eyes behind my glasses were dry, drier than they had ever been in my life. Srebra was shaking me with her crying, but I held myself against the wall and stared in the mirror at myself, at Srebra, and again at myself, unconscious of what or whom I was looking at and whether I was looking at anything at all or whether everything was merely an illusion, a nightmare that would pass. But it did not pass. After a while, our parents came in, our uncle right behind them. No one said anything. “God forgive her…no, there's no need for forgiveness. She was a young girl,” Mom said at last. “But how could she have died from lightning?” asked our uncle. And that's how we heard how Roza had died. We had been so frozen by the very thought that she had died, that she no longer existed, that we hadn't thought about the cause. “She was wearing a small chain. Her grandmother and grandfather were at the spot where their house once stood. Roza and Mara were running around in the fields when it suddenly began to pour, and the children ducked under a tree to hide. But then the lightning came and a bolt struck the cross, killing her on the spot. Mara just fell down, disoriented but not hurt, though she's in terrible shock.” I think my mother said all this in one breath while taking the roasted ham hock from the oven. The scent of cooked meat emerged from the oven and wafted through the kitchen and dining room. Our uncle stood between the two rooms, our father behind him in the dining room, Srebra and I supporting ourselves by holding onto the kitchen sink. Our legs had been cut from beneath us. My head spun. I felt our common vein pulsating in my temple, but only into me, as if it had shifted from its channel and coursed into my head alone; with her right hand, Srebra kept me from falling and pulling her down on the couch along with me. “Give them some sugar water,” our father said, and the next moment, we were sitting on the couch drinking sugar water from the same glass. “I gave the chain to Roza; I lent it to her; it was my cross, the one the priest gave me,” I managed to get out. Mom said, “Fine, so you will carry that on your soul your entire life,” quickly adding, “Come on, get up and eat, the ham will get cold.” I didn't know if those who are suffering could eat, whether the body can even take in food when the soul is undergoing great torments. Can you reach
for food when your conscience bores into your spirit? Can you eat lunch when you've lost someone you love, and the guilt is within you and no one else? Srebra and I dragged ourselves mechanically to our chair. On the table, the ham hock, almost blackened, stood in the small circular baking dish of gray aluminum. On the bottom, the fat had congealed into small black crumbs. We ate meat and bread on the day Roza died. I mechanically pulled off a small piece of meat. When I put it in my mouth with a bit of bread, I felt as if I were committing a sin—something inside me resisted. But the sin had already been committed; the meat was already traveling down my throat toward my stomach. Roza was dead, and we were eating meat. As if we were eating her flesh. That is the sensation I had, along with the memory of my grandmother once saying one shouldn't eat meat when someone dies. Srebra also put bits of food mechanically into her mouth. The meal lasted two or three minutes, but it seemed like the longest of my life. Srebra and I felt as one that we had to go see Auntie Verka. We went quietly up the stairs. Though there was no longer anyone in the hallway, we heard sobbing from Roza's apartment, interrupted by despairing cries of pain. We couldn't bring ourselves to go in, even though we had made a tentative motion toward the door. I felt that I had to go in and tell Roza's parents that I had killed her with my cross and chain, that had I not given it to her, she would be alive. But I lacked the strength, lacked the courage, and the tremendous pain in my chest suffocated me. We stood in front of the door for several seconds. Srebra seemed to be waiting for me to go in, but I suddenly turned and dragged her, stumbling, without knocking, into Auntie Verka's apartment. She was sitting by the table in the living room. Alone, she stared at a point on the wooden table. Riki wasn't home, but we didn't even notice. Auntie Verka raised her head. The bags under her eyes were dark and more sunken. We sat on one chair, each with a hip on the seat. She said, “Children, you know, Roza can come back. It happens sometimes with people who have died. The first and second days they're dead, but on the third they come back to life. The day after tomorrow, Roza will surely be alive. I'm not lying to you. There have been cases like that.” I will never forget the
feeling her words provoked in me. Never. I grasped at her words as if at a straw, a real, actual straw with which I would save Roza. Roza was always so decisive, so brave. If she did not appear now among the living, when she had to, then when? My soul was filled with hope I would never feel again. It made perfect sense that Roza would come back to life on the third day. Just like Jesus. Better for Roza to be resurrected like Jesus than to marry at the age he was resurrected, I thought. And while Srebra looked at Auntie Verka as if at a ghost, I looked at her in that moment with all the hope that existed in the world. We went back upstairs to our apartment. All night, Srebra and I lay on our backs looking at the ceiling. We fell asleep at dawn. When we awoke, our first class at school had already begun. But we didn't go to school. We went out on the balcony. There was hardly anyone outside. The warm April morning was unaware of the tragedy that shrouded our lives. Srebra and my conjoined heads seemed like only a minor misfortune. We were alive. But Roza was not and it was my fault. Suddenly, Srebra whispered, “Roza went by.” I hadn't seen anything. Srebra whispered again: “She just went inside. I saw her. She came around the building, in red pants and a green tee shirt. Didn't you see her?” It didn't occur to me that she might be lying, making it up. But I was infinitely sad that I didn't see her, and kept looking. Auntie Verka had said Roza would come back to life on the third day, but it was now only the second day. Anything seemed both probable and improbable. I dragged Srebra down to the front of the building. We went to the slope in front of our garage, where we had played the fortune-telling game last summer. Roza was supposed to get married to Panait at twenty-one or thirty-three; they'd live in Salonika and have one child. Oh, the irony! The irony! Roza died at fourteen, in a village near Salonika, a child herself. We set off from in front of the garage to a spot under Roza's balcony. The balcony door was closed; everything was quiet. We stood on the slope, and children from the street slowly gathered. Bogdan came. He hadn't gone to school either. His eyes were red, puffy from crying. He stopped next to me. It was as if he wanted to reach out and touch my shoulder, but he stopped. We were standing on the drive when Nena said in a muffled voice, “According to the almanac, people
born in August die at four, fourteen, or forty-four.” I felt Srebra and I would also die at fourteen, in a year, because we, too, were born in August. But the small hope that Roza would come back to life smoldered within me. The residents of the apartments would go out onto their balconies, look around without saying a word, and then go back inside. Only Auntie Verka sat on her balcony, head resting on her hand, looking around absently, or perhaps at us, without calling out, as was her habit, without waving her hand. We children stood on the sloping drive, also without saying a word. We weren't silent for just a few minutes, but for a long time, until the arrival of the police car, which parked on the street corner. Two police officers emerged, one younger, thinner, tall, the other older, stouter, with white hair. They walked past us down the street, and before going into our building, they both took off their caps. At that moment, I knew Roza was dead, and that she wouldn't be coming back. I knew people took off their hats when someone died; my grandfather had told me. That's how one pays respect to the dead. The policemen vanished up the stairs. We stood on the sloped drive in front of the building all day. From time to time, the door to Roza's balcony opened, and some unknown people dressed in black stepped out. Toward evening, a black car pulled up. Two men took a white coffin out and carried it quickly inside. In the evening, our mother said that we were going to Roza's parents' apartment to convey our condolences. “I can't,” said our uncle. He was packing. The next day, we were taking him back home to the village, because he no longer wished to study a foreign language, but wanted to go home and prepare to marry his girlfriend. Srebra and I wore pleated skirts of brown viscose and brown blouses. We didn't have black clothes, so brown ones were the most appropriate. We went to Roza's apartment. Her aunt and uncle stood in the dining room greeting everyone. First, we went into the small room. Roza's father and sister, Mara, sat on the bed crying, heads on their knees. “We've lost Roza, Daddy, we've lost Roza,” Mara repeated. Her father cried uncontrollably, hunched over like a child, his face yellow as a lemon. Mara wept in fits. I wanted to stroke her head, but didn't have the strength. Srebra gently pulled me into the other room. It was packed with people, everyone
weeping aloud. At the end of the room, nearly flush against the wall where the balcony was, on a table, stood Roza's white coffin. Inside, in a white wedding dress, lay Roza. Her face was covered with a veil. Her black curls poked out from under the veil. On her feet were white shoes with low heels. Her hands were lying on her chest—pale, limp, soft. She looked like a sleeping doll dressed in bridal clothes. Her toes pointed upward, and her white shoes cleaved the air with their luster. There are images that a person never forgets: if they were photographed, they wouldn't be as real, as true, as they are embedded in our consciousness. Roza, dead, in a wedding gown, in a midsized white coffin—neither for children nor for grown-ups—in the big room with two foldout couches and furnished with a wall shelf unit similar to ours. Motionless, Srebra and I stood in front of her body. Why didn't we bend down to kiss her? Why didn't our mother push us toward the edge of the coffin to stroke her veil? In that moment of such intense sorrow, did our conjoined heads shatter the moment with their grotesqueness? Did they lessen the pain? I don't know, but we said our farewells to Roza without a kiss. But my longing to kiss her, or at least touch her, broke my heart forever. We pushed our way out to the balcony, and stood looking down at the sloping drive. We reentered the room. We went up to Roza's mother, who was held by two women to keep her from collapsing onto Roza's body. I don't know if she recognized us. I wanted to tell her that the chain was mine, that I had killed Roza. I wanted to beg her forgiveness, to offer her my life, to let her kill me, beat me, spit on me. But I had no voice. Nothing came out of my mouth, not a sound. Srebra said nothing. We left and stood for a long time outside in the night, looking up to Roza's balcony. Early the next morning, at four o'clock, our mother shook us awake, whispering, “Get up, get up, come on, we're going.” We left the apartment silently. Our steps were as quiet as if we were tiptoeing barefoot down the stairs. Our uncle carried the bags; our mother closed the door, and crossed herself. We got in the car and set off for the village. We were fleeing Roza's funeral. For the three days we spent in the village, Srebra and I hung out in a room with iron beds, reciting from memory “Eyes,” Aco Å opov's poem about the death of a female partisan,
our homework assignment for Macedonian class. “Three days we carried you huddled up…” The blood in our temples pounded, and I couldn't imagine the poet's partisan. Instead, I saw Roza lying on a stretcher, my chain around her neck hanging over her right shoulder. The small cross swung back and forth, striking the stretcher with a barely audible thud. “Auntie Verka lied to us,” said Srebra. When we returned to Skopje, our mother brought us the evening newspaper. Inside was an obituary for Roza signed by her mother, father, and sister, alongside a small pale photograph. Our entryway was quiet. The residents moved almost silently. Not a sound came from Roza's apartment. When Srebra and I came home from school, we hesitated on the stairs, but we didn't have the courage to knock on her door. Every night I struggled with my conscience. I was certain that the next day, I would tell Roza's parents I was guilty. But during the day, Srebra would unravel my nighttime resolve. “I don't know how wise it is to tell them,” she said. She didn't know, however, why it would be unwise to tell them. We didn't go to Auntie Verka's anymore, although she once called to us from her balcony, “Come, let me give you charms to protect you from evil.” We didn't go. Deep inside, we were angry that she had lied to us about Roza coming back to life. One day after school, I made Srebra turn toward the church. A powerful force dragged me there; I had to go in to find the priest who had given me the cross. We didn't have enough money for a single candle. The priest was walking through the courtyard. He stopped when he saw us. He remembered us immediately. No one who had seen us once in their lives failed to remember us, and perhaps we even appeared to many of them in their dreams, in nightmares along with other strange beings that only vaguely resembled people. The priest stopped, blessed us, and asked, “Why are you dropping by church now, after school, where they teach you that God doesn't exist?” He laughed, pleased with his joke, then added, “Bravo, bravo! This is how it should be; you should come to church.” “Father,” I said with the last of my strength while Srebra shook her head, shaking mine along with it, “that chain with the cross you gave me—I lent it to Roza, the girl that was with us, and she was struck by lightning that hit the chain. She died.” The priest was alarmed. He had