A Spare Life (9 page)

heard about the accident, but didn't know that the chain that killed Roza was from here, from his church. He stared at me and Srebra so rudely, his mouth wide open, his belly big beneath his frock, gasping deeply. “God keep and protect her,” he whispered, frozen, powerless, flushed. After a while, he collected himself, and with a quick gait, he nearly leaped up the church's stairs. He disappeared inside while we stood in the courtyard and waited for him; he soon reappeared, and from under his frock he took out a miniature wooden icon, handed it to me, and said, “Here. This is an icon of Zlata Meglenska, so she can pray for you, so you do not carry your friend on your soul. What you are given in church is not to be passed on to someone else. The Devil drove you to lend her the chain. But this icon, don't give it to anyone, not for your life. Through it alone will you be delivered from the sin that lies on your soul.” I grasped from what he said that I really was guilty of Roza's death. I took the icon, and Srebra and I looked at it, seeing for the first time what Saint Zlata Meglenska, for whom our godfather had named me, looked like. A strange-looking saint, with a long kerchief on her head, neither tied under her chin the way our grandmother wore it, nor wound and tied at the forehead, the way other women in the village did. A kerchief-veil as if from a folk costume. She also wore traditional clothes, with embroidery on the sleeves, around the collar, and on the blouse under her dress. Her right hand held a cross, nearly identical to the one I'd had. I tucked her in my pocket, and with rapid steps, Srebra and I set off. “At least she's pretty,” said Srebra. “Who knows what Srebra Apostolova, whom our godfather apparently liked so much, looked like?”

From that day on, I kept the icon with me always. I only wore clothes with pockets, leaving all the rest to Srebra. At night, I put it under my pillow, and was disappointed that I couldn't sleep on my side at least once to press my cheek to it and be merged with my protectress. I felt it would bring me closer to Roza. I still could not believe that Roza was truly dead. Unable to accept the truth, and therefore unable truly to mourn for her, I couldn't shed tears. One morning, Srebra woke with a cry—I opened my eyes at the instant her head jerked mine upward and then downward toward our toes. Her two big toes were swollen, yellowish green, with pus oozing from under the nails. I immediately looked at my own, but there was nothing amiss. Srebra shouted while wiping at the pus, which flowed like blood, with the sheet. I had never seen anything like it. It was dreadful and Srebra's pain unbearable. Mom and Dad were already up, getting ready for work. They came into the room and saw Srebra's toes. Our mother said to our father, “Go and tell Goran that you're not going to work. Tell them you have to go to the doctor.” Dad left and returned ten minutes later. He was boiling with anger. “This is unendurable. We go from one doctor to another.” Mom put on her shoes and left. Dad rubbed Srebra's feet with rakija and tied them with a bandage, and after we got dressed, only I put shoes on, then we went down the stairs, Srebra walking barefoot on her heels. Dad brought the car right up to the door and somehow stuffed Srebra inside, while I, dragged along, plopped onto the seat beside her. When we got to the hospital, I gripped Srebra around the waist while Dad supported her on the other side until we got inside. The patients looked at us with mouths agape. People stood up from the benches in the corridor so Srebra and I could sit down. One woman said, without thinking, “Just when you thought you had seen everything…” Our father returned a short time later with an orderly, a gurney, and the doctor, who gaped in surprise when he saw us. The cot was too narrow for both of us to lie on, so we sat while the orderly pushed us to the operating room. There, they pulled over a small cabinet that was the same height as the bed, stretched Srebra's legs onto it, gave her a local anesthetic, and pulled out her toenails, which evidently had abscessed cuticles. Srebra
automatically turned her head to the wall, and the two of us saw a poster that read, “Tito gives blood. Give blood, too.” Below which was written the date: January 3, 1980. We stared at that poster, which apparently had hung on the wall of the operating room a full five years. Srebra moaned the whole time, even though the doctor told her to quit faking—it couldn't hurt with such a powerful anesthetic. After a while, he said, “All done. You can go.” Dad supported Srebra, grasping her around the waist as firmly as he could, nearly carrying her while I attempted to keep up and prevent our heads from hurting at the spot where we were joined. An older woman opened the door for us. Somehow, we got ourselves into the car, and off we went. We went to the brewery so Dad could buy himself a crate of beer. Then we picked Mom up from work and drove home. She hurried ahead to unlock the door of the apartment, and our father, breathless and worn out, supported Srebra while I bobbed up and down next to her; several times our legs nearly tangled, and we would have fallen had I not been holding firmly to the banister Roza had slid down so many times. Dad cursed, “Screw you all.” Waiting for us at home was the first postcard we ever received, addressed to Srebra and me from our uncle, who was on a trip to Ohrid. For days on end we lay on the couch in the big room where our uncle had slept. Our mother was sick again, and she lay on the other couch, dressed in her robe, moaning. Srebra moaned as well. We barely said a word for hours. I read Lawrence's
Sons and Lovers
. Then
Nana
by Zola. And
American Tragedy
by Dreiser. It seemed to me that I understood everything, but nothing was clear. Srebra read
Das Kapital
. My novels and her
Kapital
knocked against each other. Occasionally, our pages overlapped. We slipped pages we didn't want to read under the pages of whatever the other was reading, then glanced at sections of each other's books. Mom stopped moaning, took a thick book with a red cover from a drawer in the side cupboard, and gave it to us. “Read this,” she said. It was a book written in Serbian,
A Book for Every Woman
—a housewife's handbook. The book was full of all sorts of information. Srebra and I read it silently together; she read one page while I read the other. I thought about how, when I was grown and had a family, I, too, would divide the family budget
into several blue envelopes as the author suggested, and on each would write what the funds were for, and that's how I would take care of the money in my family. When our father returned from work, we'd all get up and go into the kitchen. Our mother would quickly fry something—liver with eggs, tomatoes with eggs, or spicy red sausages with eggs. Srebra walked by rocking back on her heels, as I walked slowly beside her. We ate at our table in the kitchen then returned to bed before our parents ate. In the evening, our father turned on the television, which was draped with a lace doily and sat in an opening of the wall unit. We watched the news, short advertisements developed by the Economic Propaganda Program, the cartoon
Teddy Floppy Ear
, boxing matches with Mate Parlov or Ace Rusevski, or soccer games, and then it was time for bed. Srebra and I would go to our room, to our shared bed, Srebra on her heels while I walked quietly beside her. I wanted my footsteps to be as silent as possible, so they couldn't be heard and I could hear how a person's steps echo when she walks alone. But Srebra walked on her heels, so her footsteps thudded dully on the floor.

Soon we were on school break, and Srebra had new nails, wavy and curved like talons. We wandered through the neighborhood for days. Without Roza, everything was empty and pointless. The shed where Bogdan used to live before he adopted Auntie Stefka had been knocked down, and a merry-go-round had been brought in from Luna Park and put on the empty lot. Two large speakers at the base of the merry-go-round blasted music until midnight. Over and over again the music of the Bosnian folk singer Å emsa Suljaković played. Srebra and I couldn't ride the merry-go-round; there was no place wide enough for the two of us to sit. Watching the others spin, the voice of the singer penetrated our bodies with longing, a vague desire, but there was nothing for us to desire. Bogdan came over. He stood with us and silently watched the merry-go-round, which he, too, never rode, and from time to time he said, “Now Roza's gone.” Srebra couldn't stand it. She felt he was making himself important, as if he had been Roza's best friend and wanted to tell us that we had forgotten her while he hadn't. I wanted to talk about Roza, but the words always came up against an unbreachable dam in my throat. Whenever anyone mentioned her, I stuck my hand in my pocket and squeezed the small icon, my hand sweating and oily from the wood. If we saw Roza's sister, we hid so she wouldn't see us, and when we left the building, we first listened through our front door to determine whether anyone was on the stairs, perhaps Roza's mother or father—to whom we had no idea what to say if we were to run into them. At the time, it seemed like Srebra felt the way I did, but perhaps I alone fled from confronting Roza's family, and Srebra wasn't thinking about it at all. We no longer walked along the main road that summer, writing down license plate numbers. We were already getting big, but if Roza had been alive, we still would have done it, because when we were with her, we felt young enough for that sort of silliness. We puttered around the apartment or outside, around the buildings, and one day, we nearly ran into a young guy on the stairs carrying over his shoulder a big bag filled with shoes. We realized right away that the shoes belonged to the people who lived in the apartments in our entryway who always left them in front of their doors day and night. We blocked his way and shouted, “Thief! Thief! Help!”
Mičo immediately ran out of his apartment, and when he saw us holding the stranger, biting him, scratching him, he grabbed the bag and threw it to the floor. Soon everybody came running out of their apartments, except for Roza's parents. “I need to pay for my girlfriend's abortion,” the thief defended himself, crying like a small child. “Let me go, please, I don't know where to find the abortion money.” I knew what the word meant, but I didn't know that boyfriends paid for their girlfriends' abortions. After a while, the residents let him go. Everyone took their shoes and went home, but the young man, tearful and frightened, slunk up to us and hissed, “That's why your heads are stuck together.” I had no idea why he would say that, but that night, I slept badly again. Instead of putting the icon of Zlata Meglenska under my pillow, I pressed it with my hands to my belly. “At least now he'll have a child,” a voice whispered to me, but it was my own voice, no one else's. Srebra was snoring in her sleep while I squeezed the icon, exhausted. The next Saturday, our father took us to a village near Skopje so he could fix some woman's window. We hung around in a yard that bordered a muddy stream. Butterflies flitted about; the scent of the flowers was intoxicating; one could sense a happiness in the atmosphere. We were too big to play, but too small to sit and make conversation. That's what we thought, anyway. When it was time for lunch, the woman came out onto the balcony and called for us to come up. She brought out a baked bean casserole and fried fish. We ate lunch with our father and the woman, who had a sunken face. She said that the window was working properly and our father was a real master. The beans were the tastiest in the world. And what a wonderful combination: beans with the fried fish, which we only ate at home with fried potatoes, never with bean casserole. Our father smiled somewhat charmingly, almost with embarrassment. That was the first time we ate with him at the same table, with the unknown woman who was no relation of ours but had prepared a family-style meal for us.

That summer, a very lovely family moved into our building: two three-year-old blond boys, Zoki and SaÅ¡o, and their blond, long-legged mother, who stood at the ground-floor window for days on end, most likely not waiting for their father—a young, smiling, somewhat shy man, a policeman by profession, who had a mirror on the inside door of his garage—but for Nenad, a hefty young man with a full dark red moustache, black eyes, and curly hair, who wore baggy sweatpants, was younger than she was, and lived in the neighboring building, and had immediately set his eye on her…and she on him. That lovely family soon fell apart dreadfully: she took the children one night and ran away with them and Nenad to some unknown destination. Her husband killed himself with his service pistol. I was stunned by the events, but Srebra just kept repeating, “I knew it.” I couldn't figure out the world of grown-ups; I couldn't figure out the world of our parents or other families. The single women who adopted Bogdan, the girl with delayed development, the two Rom girls, seemed happy, and their new children even more so. Bogdan always smelled of baby soap, and we envied him that smell, because we always smelled unwashed, a smell whose meaning we discovered years later, by chance, on a walk over the Stone Bridge, where homeless people gathered. They never bathed, except in the Vardar River in the summer. Srebra and I had to wash our faces in the kitchen if there was warm water left in the small boiler after our mother had washed the dishes. We bathed only on Saturday or Sunday evening. After the water heater was turned on, our mother carefully monitored it, checking the water several times while barking at us, “OK, go get your clothes.” Our father would shout, “Hold on, wait a sec, it's not hot yet,” but she'd just go on saying, “It is so. It's full of hot water!” Srebra and I, huddled in the tub, washed ourselves with a barely flowing stream of water, always surprised anew by our naked bodies, the ampleness of our breasts, which had grown to dimensions we would never have dreamed of when we were younger. Each of us rinsed herself, passing the shower hose back and forth every ten seconds. Soon there'd be a knock at the door: “Come on! What are you doing? Have you drowned?” Mom would shout. If we wanted to wash during the week, we turned on the small boiler in
the kitchen to heat the water, then placed the water in the white five-liter tub and carried it to the bathroom, where we let it cool in an old beat-up green pot. We hopped into the tub and took turns pouring water over ourselves with the small yogurt container. Then we'd shiver in small frayed towels, because we didn't have bathrobes. Our mother had an orange bathrobe she never wore from her trousseau; she kept it in a bag with a bathing suit that Srebra and I secretly tried on when our parents were at work. We'd dress quickly, as quickly as we could, pulling our clothes up over our legs, and then, soothed by the smell of some generic soap or other, we'd go out on the balcony to dry our hair. In front of the building, residents from the apartments would be washing or drying their carpets. The heat was typical in Skopje. That year, for our vacation, we went to the town of Pretor, on Lake Prespa. The day before we left, Mom sent us to the store to buy peanuts and sunflower seeds for the road. In the store, we could only find peanuts, so we bought a small bag of salted peanuts and went to another store to look for sunflower seeds. We left the peanuts at the entrance, by the window, so as not to go in with something we had bought elsewhere. While we were paying for the sunflower seeds, we saw a neighborhood drunk take the bag, quickly open it, and start shaking the peanuts into his mouth. We were so flustered that we couldn't say a word. Trembling with anger, we started after him, but he just chomped the last peanuts in his mouth. If Roza were with us, I thought, she surely would have yelled at him, and we would've found the courage to confront him. We saw Bogdan across the street. He waved at us. I waved back. The next day, we left for Pretor. One day, a group of brigadiers in blue uniforms, gold scarves around their necks, came into the camp where we were staying, and a blond boy, Ismet, three or four years older than us, appeared in front of our beach bungalow. He said he was from Kagne in Bosnia. Anyway, that's what we thought he said, and for years, we looked for a place called Kagne on the map of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the back of our
Geographic Atlas
where there were maps of the former Yugoslav republics, with Montenegro last. We became obsessed with the town Kagne, especially later, during the war in Bosnia, when we were constantly upset by the thought that Ismet
might have been killed. He was our joint crush; we didn't let him kiss us, but he was the first boy who'd ever wanted to touch us, the boy in front of whom, even with our conjoined heads, Srebra and I wanted to be beautiful, though we didn't know whether we were, dressed in brown tank tops under which our prematurely developed breasts were evident, and skirts with elastic waistbands and two palm trees and flounces that our mom had sewn from the bits of fabric our future aunt gave us from her parents' store. Ismet said he liked both of us and wanted to come into our bungalow, but we got scared and didn't let him. We waved to each other a lot. Srebra and I waved from the beach, where we lay on a military tent fly that our father had attached to a beach chair (which shone in the scorching heat with what seemed to be glistening beads of oil), and Ismet from the bus that was taking him home. The children of our family friends, who were also our friends, drank chocolate milk from Tetra Pak containers, but we were poorer than they were. We teased them, saying they were spoiled little mama's boys. Even though we understood chocolate milk was a luxury we couldn't allow ourselves, we envied them anyway and were certain that their parents Viki and Jovan loved Jovče and Drakče more than our parents loved us. But all those small displeasures were nothing compared with the event that marked our summer vacation in Pretor: bumping by chance into our uncle, our father's brother. They hadn't seen each other since the day our mother and father left his family's home with us infants, driven out by the grandma and grandpa we had never seen. When our uncle saw his brother, he grew pale and green, and didn't utter a word. Our father also said nothing. Our uncle and his wife disappeared into their camper, pulling a young girl who was evidently their daughter. The next day, there was no sign of them, although a trace of them remained with us, particularly with our father. Who knows what pain he felt, what fury? He didn't say anything about it. Nobody said anything about it. Ever. Was he able to sleep that night? What was he thinking while lying on his bunk in our bungalow? Mom was in the bunk below him and she moaned all night, but Srebra and I lay in the big bed, trying not to let it squeak and reveal that we were awake, while, for the thousandth time, we pictured the faces
of our would-have-been uncle, our would-have-been aunt, and our would-have-been cousin. We would never know that side of our father. What had come between us to keep us forever estranged from him? We felt uncomfortable that we were living at the same time, that we were contemporaries with our own father. With our mother, we at least argued. We acted as if nothing had happened. Other than that incident, the most important event, like on every vacation, was the purchase of toy trucks for our little cousins. We stood for a long time every evening in front of the stalls where tourists gathered, while Mom picked something out: toy trucks for her nephews, and for Grandma, a souvenir thermometer or decorative plate with a motif of the place where we were vacationing. No toys or souvenirs were bought for us. When we got home from vacation, we saw that the fish in the aquarium we bought just before going on vacation had died. Our uncle, Aunt Ivanka's husband, was supposed to feed them. Mom also discovered that, in the cupboard where we kept the bedding, the small envelope under the afghan with their engagement rings was gone, and two rakija glasses made of thin green crystal with gold engraving were missing from the china cabinet. She and our father cursed our uncle all day. Finally, our father took the aquarium with the dead fish into the bathroom. We heard the toilet flush and then the apartment door opening. Later, we'd see the empty aquarium collecting dust on a garage shelf. Mom hand-washed all the clothes we had taken with us to Pretor, and when they dried, she packed them into several bags and suitcases, and we set off for our grandparent's house in the village. Our uncle was supposed to get married at the end of August. Grandma who'd said she wanted to give her son a wedding in a
kotel
—Srebra and I laughed and corrected her:
hotel
—now expressed no such desire. She and Grandpa didn't have any money. They'd spent it all on the foreign-language course our uncle took, and no one knew whether he had actually learned any English during those months. The wedding had to be held at home, upstairs and out in the courtyard. Srebra and I weren't included in the wedding preparations. Our mother and Grandma chased us out of the house so they could bake dinner rolls, make Russian salad, and prepare steamed cookies. Srebra and I
wandered around the village and ran around on the threshing floor, bumping into each other, recalling two summers prior, in our childhood, when, on this same threshing floor, we had played with a beat-up, blue-colored brass plate while Grandma and Grandpa threshed. Our family's mule, Gjurče, was now old and worn out. The heat, the sharp hay, the two of us playing with that brass plate under the apple tree made us feel happy and safe, although, at the time, it was still not yet clear to us why we were the only ones with conjoined heads. We tried to play the game again, but it no longer held our interest. I recall my feeling of sadness, nostalgia, and a certain sorrowful pang that I'd grown up, that I'd outgrown the game. I felt a vacant place in my soul. Srebra said, “This is so stupid, as if I'd play with plates. I'm not a little kid.” That same feeling had flooded over me the previous year in Skopje, the last summer of Roza's life, when, as in previous summers, we pretended to make winter preserves. Our parents were making preserves outside. Roza carried a platter of coffee to the grown-ups. It was the first coffee she'd made in her life. Everyone complimented her on how good it was. We waited for her to serve everyone so that we could play together, but as soon as we set up the dishes and pots for our preserve-making game, Roza suddenly stood and said, “I don't want to. I'm too big for such games.” And I was flooded with emptiness and sadness, as if I had lost something valuable that would never return. That is how it was that summer in the village. Every game Srebra and I had once played together, whether we'd wanted to or not, was now distant, lost in time. In those moments of melancholy—though we hadn't known the word then—something pulled us again and again to the house of a distant relative, our mother's cousin, whom almost no one went to see, because he had a child, two years old already, who, people said, was retarded, adding: “God save and protect us. God forbid this from happening to us.” His wife was a tall woman from the next village with big green eyes and red cheeks—a very warmhearted woman. Although she was young, she acted more like a grown-up aunt, giving us money whenever she saw us. Srebra and I had been feeling guilty since the boy was born, and we happened to be in the village and were the first to go visit him.
“Don't stand behind the baby's head,” the wife said to us when we saw the baby for the first time. But we did, and soon the child fell ill and became retarded. Srebra and I secretly blamed ourselves, because if you stand behind a baby rather than facing him, he rolls his eyes to see who's there, and it scrambles his brain. For years, we cursed ourselves, thinking the baby's mind had been affected by our behavior, until one day, years later, he died at the Bardovci Psychiatric Hospital. Our mother's cousin came to our apartment in Skopje then, chilled to the bone, and he sat on the chair in the dining room closest to the television, watching a program about the Slovenian Communist Edvard Kardelj. Srebra and I sat on the small couch in the kitchen, ears pricked, listening to him talk to our father. He spent the night at our place, and the next day went to see his dead son for the last time. How did he feel? How could he talk about politics with our father, about work in the paper plant, about the town wiping out horticulture in the village? His son had died, paralyzed, with a diagnosis we never learned. And he never visited the grave. His wife didn't even know where the grave was. They erased the child from their lives, and gave birth to other children, but did they forget him? He had a big head that fell to his shoulders and immobile arms and legs that were soft, as if they had no bones. And all of it was, apparently, due to a shot of penicillin. Srebra and I loved the child. Still, when we were in the village and had visited him we sometimes cried out in our sleep, and our mother or father woke us and scolded us, saying because he was disturbed, we were getting disturbed as well, and our heads were already messed up without that. The day we learned the boy had died, Mom told us, “Little Igor has gone,” and in her voice we heard relief. Was erasing the stigma more important than the life of the child? It was. But when he was alive, Igor was a part of our village life: we had conjoined heads and he, a big floppy one that fell every which way like a rag doll's. His mother went from house to house with a woven basket, asking for eggshells. Everyone saved them for her, and she ground them with a bottle on the tabletop, as if rolling out cookie dough, and gave little Igor ground eggshells mixed with milk by the teaspoon, because she had heard that it could help children like him. She once gave us a
spoonful mixed in cornelian cherry juice, saying that our heads could surely be separated if we ate eggshells. Our heads didn't separate, nor did Igor survive. Yet life continued. When we went with our grandmother for a visit and a coffee with her oldest sister, Mirka, who lived in the upper part of the same village, Granny Mirka told us not to look into the well—“the devil's down there and he'll call you down to him”—but we looked anyway. Staring down into the well was sort of like a primitive black-and-white television, but when I told that to Srebra, she said the small television we had bought in Skopje for May Day, so we could watch Eurovision, was much better. During the summer, we didn't bring it with us; Dad said there wasn't anything interesting on. But we were bored. The children in the village didn't want to play with the “weirdo girls from Skopje.” We could just barely hold on until our uncle's wedding, after which we would return to Skopje. When our parents were with us in the village, Grandma didn't have much time for us. Once she'd finished all her chores in the evening, it was too late for us to sit for hours in her lap and cuddle. During the day, we knocked around the village or strung tobacco, or, from time to time, went to Granny Mirka's. She was nearly blind and was terribly attached to her daughters, especially Aunt Vaca, who lived in Skopje and sold needlepoint kits and tee shirts at fairs throughout Macedonia and Serbia. All the children in the whole extended family wore tee shirts with characters from the TV series