A Spare Life (13 page)

In the summer of 1987, after we finished primary school, our mom and dad told us that we would be vacationing in Montenegro, in the village of Lukin Vir on the Lim River, at our Grandma Stana's house. All we knew about her was that she was our great aunt, Grandma's sister, and they hadn't seen each other since childhood, since the day Grandpa Ljubo came from Montenegro to get Grandma Stana and they eloped on horseback to his village, somewhere far, far away by the Lim River. Who knows how many days they rode? And they lived happily until the end of his life. Grandma Stana was the most happily married old woman in our family, the only one who had married a prince on a (white or black) horse. Mom had a telephone on her desk at the state-owned company where she worked as a typist, and she often used it for personal calls to friends and relatives she would not otherwise have wasted money calling. From her office phone our mother maintained connections with friends and family, near and far. No one else called our relatives in Montenegro, in Kumrovec, in Zaječar, in Pančevo, or in Kumanovo, only our mother, and after she called, everyone would know how everyone was, what they were doing, which of the men or women were getting married, who was building a house, who had gone abroad, and that sort of thing. And so, since Mom kept up these ties with Grandma Stana's son, her cousin in Montenegro, they agreed that summer to go to Ulcinj for a week, while Srebra and I stayed at Grandma Stana's in Lukin Vir, where we would spend our vacation with the second cousins and aunt and uncle we hadn't met before, and the grandma and grandpa we had only heard about in conversation. Things turned out both good and bad. Our uncle, a traditional patriarchal husband with a Montenegrin father and Macedonian mother, wanted a son; our aunt, a tall thin dark-haired teacher with the warmest eyes and voice in the world, gave him five children, four daughters and the youngest, a boy, who was born the same year as Srebra and I. They lived in the city, but spent summers in the village in a big three-story house. The first floor had no walls or separate rooms; everything was one large space: kitchen, dining room—with the longest dining-room table we had ever seen—and the living room in an extension to the house. On the second floor was Grandma Stana
and Grandpa Ljubo's bedroom: under his pillow was a shiny black pistol that we secretly looked at and picked up. It was strange to Srebra and me that anyone could sleep with a pistol under his head, but it was completely normal and understandable to our second cousins. “What? Your father doesn't have a gun?” our cousin asked in amazement. But Srebra and I wondered why he would keep one and what our life would be like if our father slept with a pistol under his pillow. I think the two of us thought at the same moment: “A pistol, that's all we need.” Our aunt and uncle's bedroom was on the same floor, and, of course, our uncle also had a pistol under his pillow, a brown one with a gray handle. Next to their room was another, with five beds for the kids. Above, under the roof, there were two large guest rooms, each with six iron hospital (or prison) cots and nothing else—no chair, no table, no little cupboard. We slept there with our mother and father; Srebra and I squeezed into one bed, even though it wasn't very comfortable—when we pushed two together we saw one of us would be sleeping in the gap between the mattresses on the iron bars, which sent shivers up our bodies. During the day, we went to the beach on the river, always on the side that looked across to a strange house the color of ocher with symmetrical windows and a front door that looked more like it belonged to a building than a house. Grandpa Ljubo would gently hold Grandma Stana by the arm; with the other he leaned on a cane that glistened in the sun as though it were made of gold. Grandma Stana would lie down on the sand, and we children had to cover her so only her head stuck out. “For my rheumatism,” she would say, “It's good for my bones.” Grandpa Ljubo sat in a plastic chair beside her, with his cap and sunglasses, always in a long-sleeved shirt. At home, he sat at the head of the table at every meal in a suit, tie, and hat. We each had a plastic red cup with our name written on the bottom in ink, and from those cups we drank water, juice, or milk. Meals were eaten in silence. During our first days there, some of our cousins got sick during lunch and lost their appetite, and I saw Grandma Stana whisper something to them while glancing at me and Srebra, after which everyone tried not to look at us while they ate, and their appetites returned. Grandma Stana would slip us two halves of a boiled egg
or a piece of chocolate on the sly. One morning, while we were standing in the yard, we noticed a car parked in front of one of the neighbors' houses, and a man got out with two girls our age. The man let the girls out, kissed them, and immediately drove off, while they took their suitcases, climbed up the steps to the house, knocked, and went in without anyone opening the door for them. Grandma Stana crossed herself three times, then turned to us and said, “Don't let me catch you going out with them; they are not suitable friends for you.” We were surprised and kept asking her why we shouldn't get to know them. “Did you see their father? He's not even allowed inside. He's a Shiptar, a damned Albanian, that's why! Svetlana was such a beauty, but she went off to study in Prishtina, where she found him and bam—she was pregnant. For years now her mother and father haven't talked to her; they disowned her in the paper, and don't ever want to see him. They feel bad for the children, though, so they take them during the break. If I were their grandma, I wouldn't let them come. She fell in love with a Shiptar—let her take care of them herself. I don't even want to catch so much as a glimpse of her. That's why I don't want to catch you with them. No one here talks to them; they'll hang around at home for two weeks, and then their father will come to pick them up—he's not allowed to set foot in the house.” It was all pretty incomprehensible to us, the lack of brotherhood and unity among the peoples and nations of Yugoslavia. Srebra, who already attentively followed politics on television while I read, whispered, “Wow! Grandma Stana doesn't know what she's saying.” On the afternoons when we didn't go to the beach, our cousin Tanja got her harmonica and played for us the Macedonian folk song about Biljana bleaching her linen, the only song that connected them to Macedonia, the land of their grandmother. They had a strange attitude toward their grandmother's origins, and she had forgotten the Macedonian language. It was hard for her that not one of her four sisters in Macedonia, among them our real grandmother, had luck like hers, to live life with a husband who carried her in his arms, loved her, and respected her into their old age. “Macedonian husbands are dreadful,” she would say, “There isn't anyone there like my Ljubo.” Yet our mother would tell us, upstairs in the
room before we fell asleep, “Poor Nada, with that Stojko. He's got her trained. She's like his dog, and whatever he says, goes.” During the day, Srebra and I paid more attention to our aunt's behavior, and watched to see whether she was, in fact, so well trained that she was like a dog. In some ways, it was true: she worked from dawn till dusk, cooking for thirteen people, washing the dishes, making apple strudel and cakes sprinkled with grated nuts, plus finding kind words for each of us. Every morning, she beat an egg yolk for Srebra and me to drink. She said, “It's not for separating your heads, if that's why you think I'm giving it to you. It's so you'll have lovely voices, because whoever has a beautiful voice is beautiful, even if they have three heads.” The middle daughter liked to lick Vegeta herb salt, and would get up secretly at night to lap it up. Once, Srebra and I went downstairs for a drink of water, and we found her sitting on top of the dining-room table, with her legs on the chair she had sat on that day, and in her hands, she held the small white container with the red letters spelling “Vegeta.” She was licking the yellow-green dust from her fingers and sighing in pleasure, in delight—the sounds reminding me of the sounds I couldn't release, that remained in my throat and excited me, on those nights with the pointed cap of the clown inside me. Suza experienced that sort of pleasure licking Vegeta, and when she noticed us, she let the jar fall from her hands. It rolled and fell to the floor with a sharp clang, shaking the condiment all over the place. Srebra and I immediately ran upstairs, Suza muttering something after us, not daring to call out for fear of waking the others. The oldest cousins, Vesna and Sonja, were only ten months apart, and behaved maternally toward Srebra and me. They sewed us slacks out of red material that our uncle had bought in the city. He just about ordered them to sew us new pants, noting that we were always in the same pairs of green shorts. They cut pieces of apple strudel for us, showed us the village, took us to visit their neighbors, and in one way or another protected us from the overly curious or hostile glances of the people we met at the beach or around the village. Someone dubbed us the “two-for-one Macedonian,” and that's what we were called until the end of our stay. Our male cousin, our uncle's only son, the same age as us,
had two ways of behaving: usually, he was good and called us “sisters from my auntie,” but one day, he tricked us into going inside the outhouse behind the house, which was used only when someone didn't feel like going indoors. And when we got inside, he locked us in, dropping the bolt, and began to laugh loudly, calling out, “two-for-one Macedonian, double heads, double asses, I laugh and laugh myself to pieces.” And that wasn't all—he untied the dog that was lying peacefully in its doghouse and tied it to the outhouse door, so that, from a distance, nobody could hear us over the dog's barking. Our mother and father were in Ulcinj, and we were alone in Lukin Vir, left, of course, in the trusted care of our relatives. Other than eating and sleeping, no one worried about anything else: we children were always outside, at the beach or in the yard, and Srebra and I most often lay in the grass in the yard on our stomachs. She turned the pages of old editions of the Serbian
Evening News
or
Politika
's entertainment section while I read the collected works of Maupassant that Vesna had ordered for me. Now, as Srebra and I languished in the outhouse, there wasn't another sound to be heard: our cousins had gone to the river, Grandma Stana and Grandpa Ljubo were dozing in the house—likely glancing occasionally at the kettle with beans boiling on the woodstove—and our aunt and uncle were in the city, visiting our aunt's brother, who had suddenly been taken by ambulance to the hospital. For a while, Srebra and I shouted and pleaded for someone to open the outhouse door for us, but as time went by and we realized no one was coming, we grew angry, and the two of us, with a strength that we did not know we possessed, pushed on the door. The bolt gave way, one of the boards splintered, and the door swung loose, pulled from its upper hinge. We went out, stinking of excrement and urine. The dog was barking his head off, though he didn't know why he was barking and why he was tied up there. Just then, our uncle's car pulled up in front of the house. Our aunt stepped out, a black shawl over her head. She was crying silently; pearl-shaped tears were running down her face, and without making a sound, she entered the house with small, tired steps, while Srebra and I set off quietly after her. She paused as if about to nod, her face pale and sallow, then went
directly to her bedroom on the second floor. She closed the door, and we didn't hear her until our cousins got back from the beach. No one went up to check on her, not Grandma or Grandpa, nor our uncle—no one. At the time, that seemed strange. I asked myself how it was possible that no one went up to her to ask how she was, or what had happened; everyone left her alone, and the house was filled with a deathly quiet. Years later, I saw people behave that way in films, leaving the sad people in peace so they could pull themselves together, and that it was the right thing not to pour out sympathy onto the person in pain. How incomprehensible that was to me at the time! “Oh, just wait till Mom hears,” said Srebra, and we no longer knew how to behave there. We gathered with the others in our cousins' room; they were crying and looking at us askance as if we were somehow guilty of the death of their uncle, whom we had never even met. “There are outsiders here who are useless to us but not our uncle who is gone,” said our cousin, sobbing. Sonja and Vesna gave him a sign to be quiet; he looked us directly in the eyes, and he didn't hate us or like us, it just wasn't clear to him what we were doing there right then and what we wanted in their house, from their family, we, relatives who had been absolutely unknown to them until then, intruders on their pain. We also wanted to leave as quickly as possible. Mom and Dad returned from Ulcinj on the day of the burial, when everyone except us had gone into the city; it was the date of our birth, Srebra's and my birthday, but they didn't remember. We were alone in the house, and when our parents found out what had happened, they decided we should leave as soon as possible. Our mother wanted to iron some clothes for the road, and got the iron from behind the couch in the living room, but when she began to iron on the bed, the iron overheated and there was instantly a strong smell. “Oh, dear Mother, it's burned out,” she said. The iron, probably the only one in the house, had overheated. Our father cursed a few times, and Srebra and I felt the blood pound in our temples, our shared blood; it was as if our heads wanted to explode, each in its own direction. Our noses and backs were peeling from being out in the sun for days at a time without sunscreen. Dad was also sunburned. In Ulcinj, he had spent a lot of time lying on the tent
fly during the most intense heat, and now he was peeling too. The four of us stood in the living room, Mom muttering about the iron, Dad clearing his throat and occasionally cursing, until Mom said, “All right now, that's enough. What's happened, happened; the people here don't know where their heads are from the grief, and they don't need to hear that from you on top of it.” Still, no one remembered that it was our birthday. That evening, everyone returned from the burial. We sat in silence; the pale faces of the children and grown-ups merged with the black mourning clothes they wore. Our grandmother got up, went into the kitchen, brought back some bread and cheese, and said, “You need to eat something,” offering it to us. Although we were really hungry, we couldn't eat; the bits of food stuck in our throats, and our cousins were looking through us as though we were invisible. Why didn't we express our condolences? Why did our parents only express their sympathy to our aunt? And we didn't even do that! No one had taught us that one expresses sympathy to a person who has lost someone close. We lay down early to sleep that evening, and the next morning, even before Grandma's rooster crowed, we set off for Skopje. Our uncle had shoved a shoebox with a pigeon in it into the car. It died just as we arrived at our building. The first thing we did on our return to Skopje was buy an iron. Our father wrapped it in pages from the evening paper