A Spare Life (10 page)

Calimero
that Aunt Vaca had given us when she saw us at a fair; our mother even sent us to the fair saying, “Go on, Aunt Vaca's there; she'll give you a shirt.” Aunt Vaca even made shirts with extra large openings that we could slip up over our bodies: red for me, white for Srebra. For years her husband quietly and humbly sold her tee shirts and needlepoint kits at markets and fairs, his wife's excessive attachment to her mother filling his soul with bile. She spent the winter with them in Skopje, and sometimes stayed all spring, in the summer taking her daughter back to the village with her so she wouldn't be alone. One day, the son-in-law took off, moving into their summer place in Bistra. He left everything behind and never returned to Skopje. At a wedding, Mirka screamed at our grandmother, “Why did you
bring the children? So people can make fun of them?” Srebra and I wore yellow dresses with red dots and large zippers up the back. Our grandmother wasn't ashamed of us. But when Mirka went half-blind, she wasn't ashamed of us anymore either. On the contrary, she was happy when we visited her, and gave us the dark purple plums or white cherries that hung in clusters from the tree in her yard. Little by little, Srebra and I got up our courage, and even walked into town, to our aunt Milka's or to one of our other relatives'. As if we didn't care if someone laughed at us. We found it most interesting at Granny Vera's—yet another of Grandma's sisters—who lived near the arched bridge where the town suicides took place. She had a son who was a barber, the biggest drunk in town, which was just something noted by everyone who mentioned him, but no one ever did anything to get him sober. His wife, Elica, with her long black hair—quiet, calm, like a princess in a story—wore her bathrobe and joked around when we went to visit them. The barber was never at home. They had a daughter, our age. Just a few years later she would be raped by someone in the center of town as she was coming home at night from a birthday party, and then she got married in another town. One day she got fed up with her long curly hair and wanted to cut it, but her father-in-law and mother-in-law (who stood in the hallway door every morning to watch their daughter-in-law brush her hair) jumped in and told her it was only on account of her hair that they had accepted her as their daughter-in-law. Several months later, she visited her parents and grandmother. She took barber's shears from her father's drawer and cut her hair as short as possible. A few steps and she was on the bridge, and then she threw herself off. “Well, perhaps it was for the best,” wagged several evil tongues in town. “How could she have had a family if she spent her whole life thinking about the night she was raped? A young girl shouldn't walk alone at night. It happened because her father drank and her mother, well, she never seemed to notice anything.”

Srebra and I stayed only a short time at Granny Vera's, just a few minutes; everyone looked at us with kindness or with pity, but no one said anything, so we went running down the street to Milka's—our favorite aunt. She and our uncle Kole rented the lower floor in the old white house that belonged to Jovan and Pavlina, who had been the godparents at their wedding, both teachers at the high school. The window frames were painted the same blue as the double front door. Our aunt and uncle had two rooms, in one they had a woodstove, a table, and couch; and in the other, two beds pushed together and a third against the wall. Our uncle's civil defense uniform was spread out on the bed by the wall. When Srebra and I stayed there, we slept in their double bed, our aunt in the bed with the uniform, and our uncle on the couch in the living room. They didn't have children for several years after their wedding, and when we were returning to Skopje and stopped in to say goodbye, our aunt came out to the car in her green dressing gown, gave us a big hug, and cried and cried. In movies young brides were in love and happy, but our aunt was sad. On the second floor of the house lived Grandpa Jovan and Grandma Pavlina, as Srebra and I called them, and we particularly liked Grandpa Jovan, because when he came to our grandmother's house in the village, he always gave us money, and once, when we were little, he gave us twice as much, at least that's what our grandfather—who understood about money—told us. In return, Srebra and I had to give our pacifiers to him, and on his way back to town on the bus, he threw them out the window into the little stream that flowed beside the road.

When we were at our aunt's, Srebra and I had the most fun in Grandpa Jovan and Grandma Pavlina's apartment, which they left unlocked when they weren't home, because there was nothing to hide from our aunt and uncle. Our aunt and uncle never went upstairs to their place, but Srebra and I, very carefully, taking care in the hallway darkness not to trip over each other, and with not only our heads stuck together but our bodies as well, climbed the stairs and went into their bedroom with its wide bed covered with a red satin coverlet. Then, kneeling in front of the drawer and glass shelf in their nightstand, we each took a book and carried it down to our aunt's and leafed through it on the couch in the room with the oven where something delicious-smelling was always being prepared. Why didn't our aunt ever notice that we went upstairs to the landlords' apartment and took things that didn't belong to us? Sometimes we took the books with us to the village, and even to Skopje.
Heart
by De Amicis,
Luka the Beggar
by August Å enoa,
Dubravka
by Ivan Gundulić, all these books that belonged to people who never mentioned the fact that we were book thieves when we saw them. Nor did they say anything to reproach our aunt. Perhaps they didn't notice the books were missing from the shelf. More often, however, we stole books from a tiny room on the landing, in which every inch was flooded with books as if they'd been poured from a sack onto the floor. We would open the small wooden door with extreme care, and then Srebra and I would take the books that spilled off the heap and across the threshold. Among them were old atlases, books on arithmetic and biology, novels by Dostoevsky, a blue-covered edition of Njegoš's
The Mountain Wreath
, and many, many others. Every summer, we each returned to Skopje with five or six books from Grandpa Jovan and Grandma Pavlina's library, but no one ever discovered this fact. Years later, after Grandpa Jovan died of sorrow over his daughter's death from cancer, Grandma Pavlina in her old age began planting marijuana in the fields above the town, and not only planting it, but also selling it to the young people in the town. Until the day her former student, then a policeman, popped her in jail where, with nothing and no one to her name, she died from sadness. While they were renting, Aunt Milka and Uncle Kole built a new house, and they moved
there and had two sons. No one spoke about Grandpa Jovan and Grandma Pavlina's house anymore, but Srebra and I continued to dream about how it might have been: I always imagined it with the sign “Drugstore” on the blue double door that was always freshly painted, but Srebra told me that she pictured it with a sign saying “Self-Serve Market.” Srebra and I argued about what the sign might have said, and she added, “A ‘Drugstore' sign is ridiculous. There was only one drugstore in town, and it was in a different place. How could that house have been a drugstore?” Drugstores are supposed to be the cleanest places in the world, but that house didn't even have a bathtub or toilet. Still, our aunt and uncle's rooms were sparkling clean, but completely wiped from our minds was where we went to the bathroom when we visited, where they bathed, or where our aunt washed the dishes. “What you're saying is nonsense,” I said. “How could it have been a store when there wasn't a salesclerk? We just took the books and didn't pay anything for them.” Several hours later, Srebra added in a serious tone, “Didn't you learn in school that that's what Communism is? Take everything you need for free?” Srebra was right, but I hadn't thought of that. I always thought someone would catch us stealing and, at some point, we would end up in an orphanage as punishment. Perhaps in some way that's what I wanted. Our conjoined heads often awakened in us feelings of victimhood, but when no one pitied us, I thought that we could at least pity ourselves. Like our grandma pitied herself when our uncle, her son, found himself a good-for-nothing wife, and the day of the wedding had now arrived. So many preparations! Uncle Kole knew better than anyone how to chop vegetables for the salad, and so, for our uncle's wedding, no one else could do the chopping; we all waited on him. He took a day off without pay to chop all the sacks of cabbage our mother and father had bought at the market in the city. He took a head of cabbage in his mountainous hands, placed it on the cutting board, and quickly and artfully cut it up. On the day of the wedding, he prepared a dressing of oil, vinegar, and salt and stirred it separately with each plate of cabbage. Our father was amazed that our uncle would do woman's work like that. He was happy to carve the pig with an apple in its mouth. Srebra and I set the table
with the dishes, forks, and napkins borrowed from the neighbors. Knives weren't put on tables then, but we set out big platters of dinner rolls and pieces of pita stuffed with leek or spinach, plates of cheese, salad, and other appetizers. Srebra told me that she wanted to climb onto a chair in front of the hallway mirror so we could have a look at ourselves. We took a chair, placed it in front of the mirror, and climbed up, both of us holding onto the wall. We lifted our dresses up to look at our legs: we both had slightly crooked legs, but beautiful knees and ankles. We were disgusted by each other and ourselves. We were thirteen years old, still young, but with the bodies of maturing girls, me with glasses and she without, and hair that fell to our shoulders, intermingling at the inner sides of our heads. When we were ready to get down from the chair, Srebra knocked into the mirror with her elbow; it wobbled and fell. It broke. Our mother, who was at that moment carrying shot glasses filled with rakija, heard the crash. She set the glasses on the ground, came over, and struck each of us as hard as she could on our heads with her index finger and said, “I wish you'd bang your heads together. This is no life with you.” She gathered up the shards of glass, stuck the mirror frame under the bed in the bedroom, said nothing to the others about the mirror, and no one noticed it wasn't there. The spot where our mother struck me hurt, as I'm sure it hurt Srebra. Seven years of bad luck in love, I thought, asking myself which of us would be cursed by the broken mirror: me, Srebra, or our uncle, since it broke on his wedding day. We sat at the table in the room that had been set up for children, and while all the other children gaped and nudged each other with their elbows, pointing at us, Srebra and I spoke with our cousin Verče and stole sips from the small glass of rakija we had grabbed from our mother, who, after smacking our heads, had brought the glasses into the room with the longest row of tables. We dug in, filling our stomachs with everything on the table, and when they struck up the dance in front of the house, and later in the village center, we took spots at the head of the dance, singing, shouting, dancing, kicking our legs to all sides. We were so loud and pushy that the villagers gathered around to watch us, rather than the bride and groom, crossing themselves and nudging each other. Our father cursed loudly, but
Grandma told him to leave us alone; we were children, so let us enjoy ourselves—we only had one uncle. When the wedding was over and our aunt and uncle went to their room and closed the door, we stood in front of the door with Verče, calling out under our breath: “Three cheers for sex! Three cheers for sex!” And giggling as never before. That night, Srebra got her first period, and I puked. I vomited blood. Our mother had to get up. Instead of a sanitary pad, she gave Srebra several torn rags from our grandmother's sewing machine, and she made me drink water with baking soda. It was one of the worst nights of our lives. Our father cursed all night, while our mother tried to calm him. “Don't shout. The newlyweds are next door.” “Fuck your whole tribe,” our father repeated. “Fuck your whole gypsy tribe.” The next day, he fired up the car, and we quickly got in and set off. We skipped the traditional honeyed rakija, and Verče told us later that the women said there wasn't any blood on our aunt and uncle's sheet and, because of the shame, they not only burned the godmother's underwear, as was the custom, but they also didn't give her any new ones, so she had to go home without any. Verče, Srebra, and I giggled hysterically, thinking about our uncle's godmother, twice as fat as our aunt, going home through town, probably on foot, with nothing under her skirt. Our mother could have just kicked herself that she missed the honeyed rakija at her brother's wedding. When we got home we heard that Bogdan and his adopted mother had moved to her sister's in England. “They got their asses in gear,” said Auntie Dobrila. “Just as soon as they got their passports. The child waved as he climbed into the taxi. You should have seen the suitcase he was carrying, a black leather case like olden times. Who knows what was inside?” Both Srebra and I thought of his crosswords, all the issues of
Brain Twisters
and clippings from the newspaper. We were pretty much convinced that was what Bogdan had taken with him to England. I squeezed the little icon in my pocket, jabbing my fingers into its soft wooden surface. Why was I so upset, but Srebra not at all? Why did Srebra say, “As if I care that he gets to go to England; we're going too, someday. Doctors there will separate us.” I remembered that Srebra wanted to marry someone in London, some unknown person whose name began with a
D
. Bogdan was
gone; Roza had died; Srebra and I were left as we'd been before: with the awareness of our misfortune growing along with our bodies, with the curves of our hips, and with the breasts that grew and began to ache when we ran up the stairs, one of us holding the railing, the other the wall. A distant relative was visiting and we thought he, like everyone else, noticed our growing breasts and stared at them. In an old
Rosica
children's magazine that we had kept since nursery school there was a picture I liked of a many-tracked train set in a boy's room. It gave me a feeling of home. Srebra said she wanted to buy a train set with tracks that completely covered the floor of our room one day. We became conscious more than ever of the smells our bodies excreted: the sweat that moistened the hair in our armpits; the grease that crystallized on the tops of our heads; the blood that flowed to our vaginas as if from a hidden well in our wombs. When I got my period, Mom also gave me cloths sewn from old underwear and our father's undershirts. I had to make pads out of them, and over that I put on a pair of special underwear, of which there was a single pair for both Srebra and me. “Thank God your periods fall on different days, so we don't need a second pair,” our mother said. The cloths quickly turned red from the blood. They soaked up the liquid blood, but the clots, pink and dark-red, stayed on top like snot, and, while Srebra covered her eyes with her hands, I changed the rags with ones that had been washed. I threw the dirty ones into a green pot in the bathtub, on top of which we kept a white plastic bowl with violets at the bottom. When Srebra next had her period, she'd use the same cloths, laundered, but with stains that couldn't be removed. We were only able to change the rags once or twice a day, even if they were soaked with blood, because Mom said she had cut up all of the old clothes she had, and we should be careful not to run, because blood would flow more heavily. Srebra's periods were heavier than mine, so she had to change the rags twice a day, and one time, as she threw the dirty one into the green pot, she screamed, “Cockroach!” My head hurt from her sudden tug. I yanked my hands from my eyes and peered into the pot, where a fat black cockroach sucked blood from Srebra's pads. I was nauseated by the sight and began to cry. Our mother came into the bathroom, saw what was happening,
and said, “Oh, big deal, a cockroach.” Later, we took a bath, but with water carried in a white tub from the boiler in the kitchen rather than water from the bathroom heater. We were filled with powerlessness, shame, and anger as we splashed ourselves with water with the yogurt container, and the towels we wiped ourselves with smelled of flour, onions, and mold. It was hardest to tolerate each other when we were naked, sitting in the bathtub, passing from hand to hand the greenish bar of soap that our parents also used, and pouring water over ourselves from the yogurt container, which we also passed back and forth. Our souls boiled with anger and helplessness and hatred toward each other, or perhaps shame in front of each other. “Wash yourselves well,” our mother said, “I am taking you somewhere.” It was September. We had turned thirteen. We had started the seventh grade, and were the most developed in our class, really, like mature women with breasts and hips. That first Friday in September, our father had gone on his first and last business trip to Mavrovo, to a hotel that was under construction and needed a glazier to finish off the work. Our mother took advantage of the occasion. She ironed our skirts, which had large openings in front through which one could see our white slips underneath, hemmed with silky trim. She handed us our blue tee shirts with palms on the chest and large neck holes so we could pull them over our legs without stretching them, and said, “We're going somewhere special.” We were burning with curiosity, since our mother never organized any surprises, not nice ones, that is, and this seemed like it might be a nice surprise. We took the bus as far as the Engineers' Club, and from there, walked to Roosevelt Street, where we turned onto a small street lined with beautiful old houses with gardens. In front of one of them, a white house with stairs leading up to the front door, Mom said, “This is the house your father grew up in. Ring the bell. I'll meet you in two hours at the bend in the road. She turned and quickly set off. Srebra and I stood in the yard, frozen, confused. I had my hand tightly wrapped around the icon in my skirt pocket. Srebra was biting her nails. Her heart pounded in my left arm and mine in her right. We squeezed close together and barely made our way up the stairs, which led to a small porch with a door that was half glass, half metal. We rang the bell. An
older man who looked a lot like our father opened the door. He stared at us, took a frantic step forward as if he might close the door, collected himself, and asked, “Yes?” “We're Stanko's daughters,” I said, rather loudly and decisively, feeling the tapping of my finger against the icon, and that tapping brought strength to my voice. Srebra just stared at him, uncontrollably, so intently that my face was also pulled forward. Our grandfather, our father's father, whispered, “Come in,” and once inside, in the wide hallway, he grasped our heads, mine in one hand, Srebra's in the other. It felt like he was deciding if he should kiss us, but he just held our heads in his hands, then let us go. He took us into the room where our grandmother, the uncle who, two months prior, had fled with his family from Pretor when he saw us there, his wife, and their young daughter, our cousin, were watching television. “Look who's come to see us,” our grandfather stated, pretending to sound happy, but his trembling voice was filled with concern. The room filled with silence which was then cut by the girl's shout, as she dragged her mother toward us: “Look at their heads! Look!” Our aunt, whom we had fleetingly seen in Pretor, was young and beautiful. She smiled sincerely and greeted us, and only then did our uncle and grandmother greet us. Our grandmother was very dark, thin, all skin and bones, with black hair that peeked out from under a brown headscarf tied in the front. She was identical to the aunt who had brought us the chocolate bar with rice, only much older. They made coffee, the first coffee of our lives. Our grandmother read our future in the grounds of our Turkish coffee; our grandfather asked whether we had a car, whether our father was still working as a glazier, and whether we had been to a doctor about our heads. Our uncle kept quiet, watching us. Grandmother kept repeating, “Oh, children, children.” No one asked about our mother. Nor did they ask how we had found their house, or who had brought us there. At one point, I wanted to tell my grandfather that he was an idiot for beating our mother, but the words stuck in my throat and refused to be spoken. Srebra kept hiking up her skirt then jerking it down toward her knees while answering their questions. The little girl ran around, pointing out objects she played with: an old wooden pestle with red embroidery around its handle, an orange juicer