A Spare Life (11 page)

with a rusty sieve, a beat-up, three-legged wooden stool. I thought that perhaps our father had sat on that stool when he lived here. And perhaps our grandmother had strained tea through the strainer with the rusty bottom for him when he was sick. But nothing recalled that, years earlier, our father had lived here. In this house, which, our mother had said, our father built with his own hands when he was still a child, there was no history of him; his past did not exist. Srebra and I looked at the clock on the wall, and in the extremely tense atmosphere of quiet with spurts of words that cut the air with exaggerated weight, we wanted those two hours to pass quickly so we could leave, tear ourselves away from our might-have-been relatives, from this family that was not for us, and go back where we had come from, to our home, such as it was. As we were leaving, our grandfather gave us money, a thousand Yugoslav dinars, and our little cousin gave us a kiss, but the others said goodbye with just a handshake and a big smile. They did not say, “Come again.” Nor did our mother ever say we should go there again. Her goal had been accomplished: those grandparents, our aunt and our uncle, and our little cousin most of all, had become part of our thoughts, of our lives. We were aware of their existence, aware that there were people living in the center of the city, in the house that our father had built when he was a child, out of which our grandfather had driven Srebra and me when we were only a few weeks old, and these people, in some way, belonged to us, as we did to them. Before we met them, we had not considered them part of our lives, but now, now that we had met them and were certain that we did not want them to be part of our lives, they had become a part of it. And we had become a part of theirs. That was the most significant. They could no longer sleep peacefully, let alone live, without also thinking of us. That's what our mom said. Years later, we heard that our grandfather died in great agony, suffering, on the brink of death for days, neither here nor there, neither in this world nor the next. As for our grandmother, she nearly died of hunger, locked in one of the basement rooms where our grandfather had mistreated our mother when they lived there, from where he had driven us. Our grandmother died sick, racked with pain, unaware of anything going on around her. Shame on our uncle's family—they fed her
bread and water and left her to die with our father's name on her lips. Much too late, much too late. Not even after our grandfather's death did she gather the courage to seek out her son, to see him. She died like a dog. They say a man dies in the manner in which he lived. The one who lived in inner agony would die in agony; the one who thought of life as a game would die playing; the one who suffered his whole life would die of illness; and the one who loved greatly would die of love.

The years spent at school desks must be examined under a microscope. Not only the substance that made up our bodies, but also our souls should be viewed through the eye of a magnifying glass. Everyone noticed, and some even wanted to help us get rid of, the first bouts of acne that broke out on my forehead and chin and on Srebra's nose and cheeks; our biology teacher said that if we forced out some blood with a needle heated in the flame of a cigarette lighter we could be cleansed and would no longer get acne. “A sewing needle,” she said, “Clean it first with rakija and then prick your fingers to let out some blood and you'll see, there's no better cure for acne.” “Use acid perm,” said the hairdresser, who trimmed our hair while we stood, because there was no hairdresser's chair on which both of us could sit. “I'll rub it on with a cotton ball, and it'll burn the acne off.” Both the hairdresser and the biology teacher laughed at us when we were too afraid to try their methods. “Well, if you're afraid of a needle and acid now, then how are you going to be able to have your heads operated on some day? They'll actually slice you to separate the spot, though how can they, if you're not brave?” “We will be under an anesthetic,” said Srebra. They just shook their heads and had the same answer: “Perhaps, but you never know how you'll react to anesthesia. Some people wake up immediately, and others never fall asleep.” My hair stood on end at such thoughts, even though I never imagined Srebra and I would really be separated. How? Who would pay for it? Where? Would our parents actually take us abroad? And how would they? Drive our Å koda, in which one of us—and most often both—always threw up during the two hundred-kilometer drive from the city to the village? Could we really travel to other countries by car, and if operations to separate Siamese twins were done only in London, could we even get there by car? Over the water? And the bigger question: With what money? Our parents constantly complained about how expensive everything was—how those damn prices were so high—and how there was no money for anything, least of all for luxuries. “That's a luxury,” our mother would say if we wanted to buy sweat suits and sneakers for gym class so we could at least run, even if we couldn't play volleyball or basketball. Instead, we wore dark blue
cotton pajamas that our mother insisted were sweat suits and black ballet slippers instead of sneakers. These were just more of those things we lacked in our obviously terrible situation in relation to our classmates, who had already begun falling headlong in love with one another, who went out at night to sit on the benches in front of the school or stroll about the neighborhood chewing sunflower seeds. We rarely hung out with them; we spent most of our time with the girls from our class who were considered clumsy and clueless, though not retarded, which is how the other students viewed us. It was typical among our classmates to stand around in a doorway because we couldn't socialize inside our homes, where the majority of us were alone since our parents were at work. It was as if there was an unwritten parental rule not to let anyone in the house. If a classmate came by to borrow a notebook, we wouldn't invite her in but stood at the door, even when it was cold out, sometimes for more than half an hour. The same thing happened when we went to someone else's house; we almost never went inside. Kids only came inside when the parents were at home, and then only if they said, “Come on, come inside. Why are you standing at the door?” I sometimes thought about the fact that Roza was inside our apartment only once in her life: the time we celebrated our birthday with her, Auntie Verka, and Verče. Only once, and even then, she didn't go into our room but stayed in the big room, our parents' room, which they considered more appropriate for a birthday party. We never stood in the doorway at Roza's; we always went inside; it was understood we could wander freely around the apartment—lie on the bunk bed in her room, where Srebra and I were naturally on the lower bunk, and Roza on the upper; sit in the armchairs in their big room, nibble figs at the dining-room table, take the kaleidoscopes by ourselves from their shelf; or go to the bathroom where one of us sat on their yellow trashcan while the other did her business. We could do anything in Roza's apartment when she was alive. But now she no longer existed. Whenever her mother saw us, she called out for us to visit, and once she gave us each a
gevrek
, a baked sesame ring. We forced ourselves to eat them—each mouthful sticking in our throats while we stood in the hallway in their apartment, unable to enter
the dining room—then turned and ran out. Srebra coughed loudly, choking on a bite until I pounded her on the back. I stuffed half of mine into my pocket, thinking Saint Zlata Meglenska would have something to eat. The gevrek stayed in my pocket until it dried up and Mom found it when she told me to take off my skirt so she could wash it. Later, whenever I ate a gevrek I would gag and cough. My eyes would tear, and I would squeeze the icon I kept in my pocket or in the small shoulder bag I carried when my clothes had no pockets. Why didn't I gather the courage to tell Auntie Magda that Roza had died because of my chain with its little cross? Everyone said it was fate that a young girl was taken so early, at the threshold of her life. “What is fate?” I asked Grandma. “What is written for you,” she said, and I understood fate to be something already written, perhaps in one of the big books the priests read from in church. “Does everyone have a fate?” I asked. Grandma said there was no person without a fate; God had thought up a fate for everyone. “So,” she said, “your fate is to have conjoined heads; that girl's fate was to be struck by lightning; another's is to have no mother or father.” “Do you have a fate, Grandma?” Srebra asked, and the two of us burned with curiosity. “Your uncle is my fate: my only son, married to a woman who doesn't call us Mom and Dad, who doesn't know how to make coffee or cook a meal.” Her fate caused her such an excess of pain that we considered it our whole family's fate. Our uncle's response was, “What sort of fate is that? What kind of God is that? That's just nonsense; people know what they want. I took what I wanted. So whatever your grandma wants, she can ask for it.” We heard a third view in church, where the priest who had given me the icon of Zlata Meglenska and before that the cross and chain, said, “There's no such thing as fate, only God's will, but you also can't forget human will.” None of what he said was clear to me. “Then why did Roza die?” Srebra shot back at him impudently. The priest was about to say, “It was written,” but he caught himself and said, “You think she died, but now she sits with the angels and watches you and laughs, living her life up there.” When we left the church, Srebra said the priest was talking nonsense and I should never drag her to church again—she was sick of all that and I was a naive idiot for
believing in silly old tales. “The fact is,” she said, “Roza is no longer alive, and let whoever wants to, say: ‘Roza no longer exists.'” That was the first time she used the word “fact,” and the whole way home, the word echoed in my mind, as if it had crossed through the connection of our bodies, passing from her mind into mine, and it became a fact for me that Roza was no longer alive. It was a fact that she would not come back to life as Auntie Verka had promised. Just as it was a fact that we had conjoined heads and well-developed breasts, as the neighborhood women said, and men on the street would call us Samantha Fox One and Samantha Fox Two after the British pinup girl, snickering as loudly as possible, though others called out, “Yeah, but with faces like pickles.” It was a fact that we were growing up and were already young women, and, although the years were passing, not a single boy had paid any attention to us with affection or tenderness, only out of curiosity or malice. It was a fact that Bogdan was also gone from our lives, having seemingly vanished overnight, with not a single trace of the sound of his voice remaining.

Toward the end of eighth grade, Caci, who sat in the back, called all the girls over and told us with wide, glistening eyes and burning lips, “You won't believe this, but I fucked someone for the first time last night! It was amazing! You've got to try it. It's the best thing ever.” We all blushed, nudging each other with our elbows and stepping on each other's feet. My heart was beating like crazy, and I thought everyone could hear it. Srebra poked me in the stomach with her elbow, lightly, but enough to bruise my spirits, if not my body. All day long, I couldn't get Caci's words out of my head. Srebra and I had seen grown-ups making love on television, but had never seen a porno film, only romantic scenes between couples. In those films, people always said they
made love
, but Caci said that she'd
fucked
. How could she say that word? I felt such trembling inside; it was like someone had poured cold water over me, but my cheeks burned. That afternoon, Srebra wanted to go visit our cousins Verče and Lenče. When we left, Verče came with us as we started off for home, stuffed with Aunt Ivanka's piroshky, and Verče pointed out a small store that had opened in the neighborhood. “It's a toy store,” she said. I convinced Srebra to go in to see what they had. We always carried a small red wallet with our joint funds, because we didn't each have our own, and it was now in Srebra's pocketbook. Srebra only agreed to go in because she liked to shop more than I did, to look at things, and buy things if she could. It was rare, though, that we went to stores. We didn't have money for that sort of thing, and got embarrassed when salesclerks stared at us as if we had fallen from some other planet, asking us, without hesitation, if we had been born this way, what had happened, how long we would stay attached. The same sort of salesclerk awaited us in the toy store, and while we answered her questions with a yes or no, we looked at the stuffed bears and dogs, the plastic dolls, the buckets with shovels and rakes, and the assortment of other things. Our childhood had contained none of these things, and in our inexperience, we wanted to touch everything, to stroke them, look closely at them. Verče said it was too bad that we hadn't brought Lenče, too, so they could pick out a Hula-Hoop together. My hand was drawn to a clown on the shelf, his legs hanging down, his cloth cap twirled up into a point
and stiffened with shellac, his long arms hanging alongside his body. He didn't have a typical clown face; a small nose not a big red one, cheeks rosy rather than red, eyes not covered by makeup. I liked him at first glance and decided to buy him. Srebra was surprised and voiced her disapproval, but I yanked the purse to my side and shook out all the money in front of the salesclerk. Hugging the clown close, I dragged Srebra outside. As Verče turned to head back home, she laughed, “Well, Auntie will be happy you got something you'd been missing in your life.” A bit worried, we wrapped the clown in a bag, but the tip of his hat poked out. Our parents yelled when they saw it. “You're fifteen years old, and you're still buying yourself toys! I'm telling you, you won't amount to anything,” our mom said. “Just screw the lot of you,” our father added, “You voracious creatures, you've devoured the world! You don't know what it means to earn one's bread; that's why you buy such nonsense. You'll just go on with those heads of yours.” They said all sorts of other things. But inside I felt more and more aroused; shivers of excitement passed through my body; I felt something in my lower body unfold like a poppy, and droplets dampened my underwear. I wanted night to come quickly, so I could lie in bed with Srebra and wait for her to fall asleep. But that night Srebra had difficulty falling asleep, as if she too were caught up by my wakefulness. The clown lay drooped over in the narrow space between the wall and the pillow. I slept on the right side and Srebra on the left, with our legs pointing not toward the door but away from it. When I was certain Srebra was sleeping, breathing deeply with her mouth open, I pulled the clown on top of me with my right hand; I laid him on top of my body; I positioned his legs up toward my head and his head down; I poked the pointed cap between my legs, and—without moving out of fear I would wake Srebra—I clenched my legs around the clown's head. The tip of the cap seemed to cut through my pajamas, penetrating me. Sexually aroused for the first time, I clenched the clown's cap tighter and tighter, turning it left and right, but rather than the point of the cap, it was my pajamas, and my underwear beneath, that went deeper and deeper into my vagina. I was afraid to pull down my pajamas, because although Srebra fell asleep quickly, she also
awoke quickly. I felt pleasure, but it was incomplete: an emptiness remained between my legs; bliss was located somewhere deeper than I had imagined. As quietly as I could, I tossed the clown over my head onto the floor. I called him Bobby. He was my first lover. I fell asleep with dissatisfaction in my body. I awoke with dissatisfaction in my soul. When Srebra woke up we got out of bed and I saw that the clown had been lying there all night with his arms crossed, as if in prayer. I took my icon from under the pillow. Srebra had to run to the toilet. The door nudged the clown aside as we went to pee. All day I thought about the incident with the clown. I passionately wanted his pointed cap between my legs, but, somewhere deep inside me, I burned with shame before God, and most of all before Zlata Meglenska, with her serious, worried face on the small icon. I had been given the icon as comfort for Roza's death so I could ask the saint to pray for Roza's entry into heaven. And that is how I prayed silently to Zlata Meglenska while pressing the icon in my pocket: “Holy Zlata Meglenska, pray for Roza so that she may rejoice in the Heavenly Kingdom with the angels.” But, I confess, I also prayed for myself, for this or that, an A in mathematics, a pair of jeans, for God to bring our father to his senses when he shouted and cursed, for our mother's health so she wouldn't lose consciousness again, and, in moments of despair over our conjoined heads, I begged Saint Zlata Meglenska to pray to God to separate us, and if he did, we would serve him the rest of our lives. My first encounter with the clown burrowed into my mind, and unconsciously, I asked myself, “Will I do it again tonight? How will I feel when I get up? What if Srebra finds out? Is it okay? Is it a sin? What is a sin? I'm not sleeping with a man, but only a toy clown, so I am not tempting anyone. The Lord's Prayer says: ‘Lead us not into temptation.' But what if a person wants to be tempted?” There were so many questions with no answers. Day has its order, and nighttime its own. Daytime was shared with Srebra, every movement, every slight shift was shared, unavoidably, locked within the physical coordinates of our existence, fixed in the bond between our heads, in the piece of flesh covered in skin and hair, where the blood intermingled, pulsating in our brains. As much as we hated that spot, which
from the moment of our birth, had destroyed our lives before we became conscious of it, we considered the spot sacred, untouchable. We preserved it for skilled, miracle-working hands in some future time; we allowed no one to pull our hair aside to look at it, much less touch it. But there were countless times people tried. Everyone who offered advice wanted to pass their hands in the space between our heads, to examine how we were joined, what the connection looked like. They wanted to see why it couldn't be removed, or perhaps dried out in some way to simply fall off, or be cut with a sharp knife, okay, not at home, but at a doctor's office—any doctor could do it. Doctors have diplomas after all: Can doctors really receive so much schooling and still not know how to separate heads? Our neighbors and our aunts and uncles on both sides of the family to the second and third degree, everyone wanted to help, everyone had some idea how you could separate Siamese twins, but if someone tried to touch our holy place, Srebra and I would go crazy, our faces would turn red, our eyes sparking with rage. The power of Amazons rose up in us, a power that destroyed everything in its wake. Usually, we ran out of the house, or grabbed the person trying to touch us in our painful spot, shouting loudly to leave us in peace. Only once, long ago, in a moment of complete trust and friendship, we let Roza briefly touch our Achilles' heel. We put ourselves in her firm hand, which gathered all the tenderness from every cell in her body so she would not hurt us, and she just lightly passed her hand along the skin mixed with strands of hair that covered the vein in which I often thought I heard our blood streaming, merging, flowing from one brain to the other, one heart to the other. Her touch was a light breeze, and she said, “There's nothing to feel; it seems like the vein is deep inside. Like you have a spare vein.” We found it hardest to stop our grandmother from touching us, because the village fortune-tellers had passed on various recipes for separating heads, and she often made us drink mixtures of herbs steeped in homemade rakija or slurp soup made from the heads of pigs, goats, or lambs sieved through gauze and spiced with paprika that was kept hidden behind the small altar door in the village church. When those remedies didn't achieve the miracle, everyone blamed us, saying
such things couldn't work if they weren't done in combination with the spot getting rubbed with various homemade creams imbued by God's breath—or the fortune-teller's at least—with healing power and miraculous effect. There was no way we would let a living soul rub cream on the spot where we were conjoined, although there were moments I wanted to give in, to abandon myself to these folk doctors in the hope that they might actually succeed in separating us. But Srebra was convinced that one day, when we were grown and rich (although I don't know how she thought we would become rich!), we would go to London, where there were doctors for such an operation, although I personally was not convinced there were any. And why London and not New York or Paris? Someone said even in Zagreb we could have this kind of operation, and another said it was possible to find a specialist for us at the Military Medical Academy in Belgrade. “There's one in Skopje, too, apparently. He's the best; maybe he could try,” Auntie Dobrila once said. I was almost ready to try, but Srebra said that she wasn't an idiot and would not take the risk. “We're not going to be someone's guinea pigs,” she said. “It's different in London; they'll have experience with cases like ours.” “That costs money. Who's going to pay? And how do you know the operation will be successful? It's not that simple,” our mother said whenever anyone started in on the topic. Dad was even more convinced that the time wasn't right, that there was simply no chance of success. “Perhaps children of some rich bigwigs can go and find that kind of surgeon. But we're working class; we don't know the language or how to make ourselves understood there; and not just there, even here, where would we find the money for that kind of operation? Who would give it to us? Anyway, they're used to the way they are; they've been that way since they were born.” “No, we are not used to it,” we wanted to shout, each thinking that we still did not know each other the way our father thought we did, but in his presence we always felt embarrassed and could not utter a word. We gave in to our fate, but our souls gathered bitterness, anger, pain, and rage. That's why I preferred nights to days, when Srebra and I lay next to each other on our backs, each in her own darkness, her own world, her own quiet; separated from each other on the verbal,
spiritual, and existential planes, we felt we were separate, almost as if we were physically separated, even though any time one of us turned a bit the other felt it and the link between our heads would ache like a tooth, like an inner ear, like the sting of a wasp. We knew this feeling quite well, because we shared the long pillow our aunt sewed especially for us, filled with stuffing from two Lio brand pillows, each of us positioned for maximum comfort, Srebra with her knees raised, and I with one leg over the other. In the darkness we immediately fell silent. We were not like sisters who chatter and tell secrets before falling asleep. On the contrary, even if we both had our eyes open long into the night, we remained silent, each in our own world. It was only the swallowing of saliva, the scratching of noses, or sighs that revealed that we were awake, but we still maintained our silence and fell asleep like two strangers compelled to sleep in the same bed. After I bought the clown, it always sat on the bed, pressed against the wall, head lying on the part of the pillow by my head, where it was simple for me to pull him toward me, or on top of me, once I sensed Srebra was asleep. Before lying down, Srebra would tell me to get him off the bed—he was taking up space, and the foldout bed was narrow enough to begin with—but I didn't give in. I told her that since I had bought him, I would sleep with him, period. “Well, then, why's he always on the floor in the morning? He takes up your space, too, so you throw him off in the night.” I told her he fell off by himself. After several attempts to have sex with him through my pajamas, I got up the courage and one night slowly, silently, with the most controlled movements of my right hand, I stretched the elastic of my pajamas and underwear, and pushed his head between my legs so the tip of the cap poked inside me. I pressed with all my strength, and the tip went deeper and deeper inside, and although I felt a pain similar to that in our connected spot, I also felt pleasure like I never had before—bliss spread through my body, all the way up to where we were conjoined. I had the clown penetrate me three times that night, and then, in exhaustion, shame, anger at myself, and unable to bear the pleasure, I tossed him off. I felt a certain disgust, and, breathing deeply but taking care not to be heard, I fell asleep with my legs spread out, one leg touching Srebra's. In
the morning, I noticed a drop of blood on his cap. I was stunned, but ignored it. Srebra also noticed it. She was surprised and thought we had gotten it dirty somehow. “But how,” she asked, “since we don't even look at him? He just sits here all day; you bought him for no reason.” I suggested that perhaps the stain had been there when we bought him, but we hadn't noticed, and now that the sun's rays were coming through the window directly onto his head, the spot was visible. “Yes,” said Srebra, “the salesclerk sold him to you like that, and he was so expensive.” We went to pee, and it was my turn to go first and Srebra's to sit on the trashcan. There was also a red spot on my underwear. Srebra noticed it too, although she usually looked at the ground while I sat on the toilet. She shouted madly, “You've got a red spot that matches the clown's!” “Well, so what? Maybe my period is coming,” I said, but that was impossible, for it had ended just a week prior. “No, it's not your period, you idiot! You're doing something with that clown; you're doing something!” Srebra shouted, and she jumped up from the trashcan, dragging me by my underwear toward the bathroom door. I was barely able to pull up my pajamas. Our parents were already at work, and we had to go to school. Srebra kept shouting at me, insulting me with words that I had never heard come from her mouth before: