A Spare Life (14 page)

Večer
that our mother brought home from work after her director had finished reading it, sealed it with tape, put the package on his black bicycle, and took it to the post office. He mailed it to our relatives in Montenegro. That is how our summer in Montenegro ended. After that incident, Mom rarely mentioned that she had spoken on the phone with them. Still, they remained in our lives, and perhaps we did in theirs.

On December 3, 1988, a demonstration was held in front of the Greek consulate to protest the Greeks' failure to recognize us as Macedonians. A mass of people, flags, banners, shouts, cries of support, well-crafted speeches, and various other events. And then we jostled in the smoke-filled rooms of the Boni and Ani Café across from the consulate with glasses of vodka cut with fruit juice in our hands. Srebra and I went into town quite rarely, to avoid being laughed at, as our mother said, and that made each such outing a special event. We were already high-school students, with free monthly transit passes, so it was easy to get downtown. That evening, when we returned home, our uncle Stojko from Montenegro was there; he had come to Skopje to get his degree in physical education from the university. Why he chose the university in Skopje was not entirely clear to us, but for the first time in his life, he had officially acknowledged his roots on his mother's side and had decided to get his degree in Macedonia. “I'll bet he brought his pistol,” Srebra whispered when we got into bed. I, unaccustomed as I was to talking when the light was off, said nothing, but shivers ran through my body: on the other side of the wall our uncle slept with a gun under his head, across from our father in the other bed. After our mother had arranged everything in the kitchen, she came to our room to sleep in the other bed, which had been empty for years; it had been bought as a package deal with our bed, because it was cheaper that way. Cushions from our mother's dowry decorated with butterflies and kittens lay on top of it. I think no one except our uncle closed an eye that night. He left early the next morning. We didn't mention him again for a long time. Nor did we ever consider going to Montenegro again on vacation. Then, in December 1989, our mother came home from work one day and announced as she came in the door that Stojko had been taken by some idea or other and had gone to Romania to fight either for Ceauşescu or the opposition. “There's good money to be had,” she said, but several days later, we saw on television that the Romanians had killed Ceauşescu and his wife, and though we tried to find our uncle in the crowd of people, we couldn't see him. On December 31, the squares in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Germany were filled with people welcoming the
new year with shouts of “No Communism in 1990!” Srebra said to me, “Do you know what countries are still Communist?” I wasn't sure what the answer was. “Yugoslavia, the USSR, and Albania,” she said. “That's not so few,” I said. “No, it is a lot,” Srebra responded. The next day, January 1, 1990, we received a call from Montenegro, not to wish us a Happy New Year, but to tell us that Grandpa Ljubo had died. Our father's eyes filled with tears. He dressed and put some things he would need in a suitcase. Our mother gave him money for the bus and for while he was there, saying—because she took charge of the money for both of them—“So you can buy candles and flowers,” and he left on the bus to Montenegro for Grandpa Ljubo's burial. Grandpa Ljubo's son, our uncle, arrived at the same time as our father, directly from Romania. In Romania, the dictator and his wife had been buried in secret, but in Lukin Vir, at Grandpa Ljubo's funeral, there were lots of people—the whole village—and countless wreaths, flowers, and all sorts of other things, crying and wailing of young and old, our father among them, and our cousin took his grandfather's gun and shot over and over again into the air, down to the last bullet. Now he would sleep with the gun under his pillow. “God forgive him,” our mother said, and crossed herself three times. I pressed the Zlata Meglenska icon in my pocket; Srebra pursed her lips. We were very sad for Grandpa Ljubo, for Grandma Stana, and for our aunt, but less so for our uncle, even though he had lost his father, because it seemed to all of us that Grandpa Ljubo might not have had a heart attack if his son hadn't gone off to Romania as a mercenary.

And that wasn't the end. Several years later our uncle and our cousin went to Bosnia to fight with the Serbs. That was the last thing our mother heard on the phone; after that, the phone lines were down for a long time. Our cousin was the same age as us, but he was already killing people. Our mother sent Srebra and me by bus to Montenegro to bring our relatives flour, oil, sugar, and noodles. “Why are we going and not Dad?” “You're young women; they'll let you across the border,” she said, not worried that something might happen to us—to us in particular, given how we were with conjoined heads but bodies already those of young women. That was the first time we crossed a Macedonian border and not a Yugoslav one. It wasn't regular border guards who entered the bus, but soldiers with machine guns. First, they stared in shock at our heads moving at the same time as if mechanical, then they grabbed our passports and disappeared for a full two hours, while the driver of the bus swore at us, saying they had been stopped solely on our account, because people with pumpkins instead of heads didn't cross the border every day. “Fuck those heads of yours,” he said, and Srebra wanted to yell at him and spout off a few hundred choice expressions, but I squeezed her hand and said, “Don't, don't, or we'll be stuck here at the border until hell freezes over.” The soldiers carrying machine guns returned and asked us where we were going; I proudly said our uncle's name; he was considered the best physical education teacher in Ivangrad. “Berane,” the soldier sternly corrected me. “In Berane,” he repeated, and I repeated the word, and it was quite strange to me that we had set off for Ivangrad, but in the meantime, its name had been changed to Berane. He gave us our passports but couldn't resist saying, “What's with your heads?” We only shrugged our shoulders—what could we tell him?—and we continued on and reached Berane, where our uncle was waiting for us. With a firm masculine handshake, he said right to our faces in Serbian, “So, Macedonia, it seems, is separatist? You don't want to be with the Serbs, with us? You want to be like the Slovenes and Croatians? If so, Macedonia will collapse; it will totally collapse!” All the way from the bus station to their house, in the car, he kept repeating that we were separatists, and that there was no one like
Slobo MiloÅ¡ević in the whole world. Our aunt hugged and kissed us; our cousin blushed. His forehead and cheeks had deep furrows that didn't correspond to his youthful face. Our oldest cousins had resettled at their aunt's in Pančevo; they found work there, and one of them a husband—the middle cousin got married to a soldier who had fought with our cousin in the war in Bosnia. As for the youngest, she was at work, volunteering at the hospital. Srebra and I watched two long videos of our middle cousin's wedding with all the traditional customs, the fathers' speeches, the winding line dance, and the departure of the bride from her father's house when everyone yells, “Don't turn around, Suza, don't turn around!” which reminded both Srebra and me of a film that was shown on Macedonian television,
Don't Turn Around, Son
, but our aunt explained that if the bride turns back toward her father's house, she will give birth to a girl. And she said that when she got married to our uncle she had turned around, four times even, because it was so difficult for her to leave her father's house, and that's why she had four daughters, and only then a son, “May he have a long and healthy life.” Afterward, our uncle took us to the attic to show us all their reserves. There, covering the floor, stacked on top of each other, were bags of flour and sugar, boxes filled with oil and vinegar, bags of noodles, conserves, and who knows what else. “We have provisions; everything is here if we need it,” our uncle said, and we were ashamed of the few kilos of flour and sugar and two liters of oil in our bag that our mother had us bring to them in case of a crisis or war. “We're not waiting for Macedonians to supply us,” our uncle said and smiled. “But the time will come for us to provide for you.” And then, in a serious voice, he continued to talk about Macedonians as cowards and separatists, how they wanted their own republic, but what would they do with it, what's a republic for a nation like that? It would be much better for the Macedonians to have stayed with the Serbs and with them, the Montenegrins, to live under MiloÅ¡ević. “And those guys to the north can just fuck off,” he said. He then began telling us at length what great warriors the Serbs had been in Bosnia, how each true Serb—even if he were a Montenegrin—was more honorable for having fought in Croatia and Bosnia and how he
had not even considered that his son might not sign up for such a thing. He said, “You should have seen what a good shot Kolja was; he was such a great soldier that he amazed everybody!” Srebra and I stayed silent, our fingers fumbling with our cousin's black wool cap with a cross in the middle, which our uncle had shoved into our hands, and we could barely wait to get outside for some fresh air. Outside, below the house, flowed the Lim River, the same river as in the village a few kilometers from the house. Srebra and I went down to the river, and some force from I don't know where swelled my breast, and I began to sing the Macedonian song “Tell Me Why You Left Me.” At first Srebra was silent, but then she joined in, and we sang that song loudly, as loudly as we could. As we kept walking along the river we sang, “Tell me why you left me and drenched me in sorrow,” and a sorrow spread through our bodies—from our toes all the way up to our shared vein—and the river roared in our heads and the blood rushed in our hearts and tears poured from our eyes as if someone really had left us right then. A pain, almost like a love pang, spread through us from the sound of the song in our throats. That evening, our middle cousin, who was married to our other cousin's comrade-in-arms, made dinner in our honor. On a table stretched across the whole room were roasted lamb and pans of rice and potatoes. Everyone gathered, except our cousins who had moved to Pančevo. When we had eaten our fill, our aunt and uncle stood up and said, “You are all young. Enjoy yourselves; we're going home.” And after they left, our cousin's husband put on a cassette, and the traditional Serbian
kolo
burst forth, and everyone leaped from their seats, hugged each other, and pulled us along with them as they danced the kolo, and it wound around with thunderous repetitions of the words. They sang with unwavering voices—both the men and the women—and spun around, spinning us too, and our cousin's husband's hand slipped from my shoulder and slid down to my breast. I felt him squeeze my breast, kneading it with his hand, singing along, and in the midst of the frenetic dance, the words “Serbo, Serbo, Slobo, Slobo” rang out. I couldn't stand it any longer and screamed as if someone had struck me. Srebra shouted, “Enough, enough. Stop it!” and once everyone had stopped, Srebra began to cry
hysterically, and I right along with her. We shouted over and over again, “We want to go home, we want to go home,” and tumbled to the floor, banging our conjoined foreheads, shouting, “Go home, go home.” Finally they somehow got us outside, stuffed us into a car, and drove us to our aunt and uncle's; the next day, we caught the first bus, having waved hastily to our uncle at the station. We never saw them again. Our uncle died a few months later of a heart attack, and I heard, years later, that our aunt was still alive and had twelve grandchildren each with a name more interesting, more Slavic, and more Serbian, than the last.

But that was many years later. When Srebra and I spent that summer in Lukin Vir for the first and only time, we were in our first year of high school. But the high-school years are not worth recalling, because it was a minimal life, one reduced to traveling to school by two buses in the morning—in the greatest possible crush of people—and the daily smirking of a group of high-school students who pushed and shoved each other on the bus and always banged into us out of malice. Some were so rude that they'd try to push between us, intentionally ignoring the fact that our heads were conjoined and they could not get through. We endured so much physical pain over those four years while traveling on the two buses to school and two buses home, so many jokes because of our deformity, and were constantly singled out. That time wasn't comparable to the years at primary-school desks in our neighborhood, although even during those eight years, someone always teased us about things that weren't our fault. But leaving our neighborhood, joining the passengers on the city buses and later our classmates and teachers in school—most of whom were initially shocked and then revolted by our physical handicap—we saw that in primary school our introduction to society had been extremely limited compared with others at that age, and now it was as if we had been thrown into a boxing ring but didn't know how to box. “You'll learn, and then you'll see how to do it,” the psychologist told us when we went to see him on my insistence, because I felt, two months into high school, that I could not cope with my appearance, which was so critical to being included by the others. “Dress as nicely as possible, be as clean, modern, and attractive as you can. You are beautiful girls, and they'll stop teasing you, you will see. Distinguish yourselves as much as possible in your classes, learn English, speak up in every class, and they'll look at you differently. Even more important is not to argue between yourselves, don't hate each other, and don't give them occasion to hate you. In short, young ladies, love yourselves more than anything so that others might love you.” That is what the psychologist, a chubby man the same height as us, said. The part about studying and distinguishing ourselves was not a problem; both of us were excellent students, and although Srebra wanted to enroll in the social-science track in
our high school, things turned out my way, and we enrolled in language arts. Until then, we had never attended any English or French courses, but we had always loved to learn foreign words on our own, lying on our stomachs on the bed and reading English words from the dictionary. That's why, even from the beginning, we distinguished ourselves in class, industriously studying all the new material and responding to every question. When we both stood or went to the board but only one of us answered, you could hear giggling, sometimes muffled, sometimes loud, from the back desks. The teachers seemed to need time to get used to our duality; it would surprise them every time both of us stood up but only one of us answered. Over time, they got accustomed to it. It was much more difficult for us to follow the first bit of the psychologist's advice: look our best, wash regularly, sparkle with beauty. How? At home, we continued to have a real bath only once a week, on Sunday evenings, so we were clean at the beginning of the week. On Wednesdays we heated water in the boiler, poured it into the white tub, and then carried it to the green cracked pot in the bathroom, and then with the yogurt container, poured the water in turns, first me, then Srebra. Acne broke out on our faces, our backs, and even on our backsides sometimes, and, ashamed or not, we squeezed our pimples and wiped our hands on the insides of our blouses, or, if we were lucky enough, on a handkerchief. When we got our periods, never at the same time, instead of pads we used rags that our mother boiled on the stove in the same green pot and ironed after each washing to get rid of any bacteria. Instead of ordinary underwear, we shared the same single pair of nylon feminine hygiene underwear that didn't leak but did soak our skin, leaving red lines. We only rarely got new clothes, so we wore what we found at home, sometimes even our mother's old skirts and dresses, which were old-fashioned but not yet retro. We didn't get an allowance, and except for when our aunts or uncle gave us a bit of money, we couldn't sit in cafés after school with an iced coffee or hot chocolate attempting to befriend our classmates. We practically had to beg for money for toothbrushes and a tube of toothpaste so we could finally switch from rubbing our teeth with salt on our fingers, as we'd done until then. We had
learned the technique from our father, who, when we were young and had to go to the dentist, took the salt shaker out of the cupboard in the kitchen, wet his right index finger under the faucet, dipped it in the salt, and then rubbed our teeth. Our mouths burned from the salt, and we rinsed them with water as tears came to our eyes from the taste chafing the roofs of our mouths. Now, finally, we had toothbrushes and a gold box of Kalodont toothpaste. Also, the dentist in the state hospital, a young and energetic woman, wasn't disgusted by our looks and had us lean against the wall; then she climbed on a chair and carefully examined our teeth, all the while talking and pointing out the problems with our teeth to the students standing around us. A few of them gaped at our conjoined heads, but most of them were so in love with the dentist that they didn't even consider laughing. The most difficult to follow was the psychologist's third bit of advice: to love each other most of all. How can a person love herself if she is never alone, if she is not independent both physically and psychologically? At first glance, Srebra and I were only physically attached, with the shared vein covered by skin and hair just below my left temple and her right. The doctor at the general clinic told us that through this shared vein our shared blood flowed and we both had A positive blood, and that both our brains and both our hearts were fed by the nutrients our shared blood delivered to them. He didn't see any possibility of separating our heads. As far as we were concerned that was the opinion of an “unschooled doctor” who didn't know all the things that were being done abroad, and even in greater Yugoslavia. “In Macedonia, you can die having your appendix out, let alone during an operation like separating heads,” our aunt Ivanka would say. She knew several nurses at Skopje clinics, and even a medical technician in the state hospital, and everyone said to her, “Don't let your nieces even entertain the idea of having that kind of operation in our country; we don't have specialists like that.” Still, we had heard that there was one, but there was simply no way to get to him, so it was easier for us to believe Aunt Ivanka. We were to be physically marked forever. But our lack of physical independence was not the only impediment to our individuality. The physical spot that joined us had psychological
consequences as well. We couldn't do what we wanted; we couldn't fulfill our own desires, because we always had to depend on each other. I knew that the decision to enroll in the foreign-language track in high school was my choice alone, but it compelled Srebra to study the same thing even though she had wanted to study the social sciences. She wasn't satisfied with the choice and wasn't satisfied with herself. We did not like ourselves most of all, nor was there love between us, although we did feel some amorphous closeness—we were twins, born at the same time, with the same eyes, the same faces, the same bodies. We knew that should something happen to one of us, it would by necessity happen to the other as well. We would warn each other when crossing the street or walking along a narrow sidewalk. We would say, “Be careful” if a car passed close by, or if there was something in our way we could bang into. We would have been very happy, beautiful young twins if we had not had that physical connection. We would have belonged to each other more had we been able to live each according to her own will, desires, and interests. We would have loved ourselves, as the psychologist had advised us, if we had been “normal” girls, and we would have been normal girls with crushes, boyfriends, young friendships, and new life experiences had we been two separate people, each for herself. What gave us strength during those high-school years? For me, it was surely books, and, most significant at critical moments, the icon of Saint Zlata Meglenska tucked in my pocket or in my purse. Her face, scraped, peeling from the wood, always looked directly in my eyes, but her look was stern and sad. Sometimes, it bothered me that she didn't look at me more tenderly, that she never smiled or closed her eyes, but always stared directly in my eyes; she absorbed me with her look, cut me with it, penetrating through me, sternly and sadly. On the other hand, I rarely looked at her; more often, I just wanted to feel her with my hand, hold her in my pocket, and sometimes squeeze her so hard I'd draw blood, to feel her presence physically in my life. Srebra didn't have that kind of dependence on anyone or anything. She was happiest when we sat and watched television, or when I read with my elbows on the table while she stared at the television with her elbows also on the table—my left elbow and
her right pushing against each other. She watched the daily news reports, which spoke about the social structure of Yugoslavia, the post-Tito government, and problems in Kosovo. She wanted to read the
Young Fighter
and
Communist
newspapers, and one day she even begged me to go to the post office with her so she could subscribe to the Slovenian liberal review
Mladina
. The social turmoil in our country attracted her attention, as did wars and social movements throughout the world. It wasn't clear to me whether Srebra was right-wing or left-wing; I don't think it was clear to her either, because she liked positions and ideas from both the left and the right. One day she said, “Yugoslavia is going to break apart.” Our mother, wiping the glass tabletop upon which Srebra was reading a newspaper and I the fifth book of
In Search of Lost Time
, said, “Of course it won't. It's not going to fall apart; Slobo won't allow it.” At the time, many people called Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević by the nickname
Slobo
, but they had no idea what he was doing, whether he was good for Yugoslavia or for Macedonia, and the grown-ups' opinions were tossed around like odd mismatched shoes. If the person they were talking to said something positive about MiloÅ¡ević, everybody else agreed, but if someone said he was a mafioso, everyone agreed that he stole just like the others, caring nothing about the people. Our parents were among those who didn't have their own opinions about him but changed position depending on which guests were visiting. The first thing that came to my mind was that if the situation was as Srebra said it was and Yugoslavia would collapse, then we were too late—we should have gone to Belgrade or to Zagreb for the operation. “Maybe it's better,” said Srebra. “We'll have to go to London.” London had been turning around in her head since childhood. I don't know where she acquired such faith in London, but she had been convinced forever that one fine sunny day, when we were big enough and rich enough for the complex operation, we would definitely have to seek a solution in London. I think it came from the time we were playing a game and Roza mentioned that she had heard there were doctors in London who would revive the queen if she died. Did Srebra wrap up the idea of London back then and hold on to it all these years as a refuge for her hopes? Even though I believed Roza when she said there were
doctors who could revive the queen if she died, London had never become a refuge for me. We were two absolutely ordinary girls from Macedonia, children of a working-class family, with no connections, money, or opportunity to gain access to those London doctors who could revive the queen. “If Bogdan ever comes to Skopje, we could ask him,” I said, and Srebra was surprised that I had thought of Bogdan after the two of us had erased him from our minds following his departure for London with his newly acquired mother. He had never contacted anyone, no classmates, no neighbors, not us who had been, after all, his only friends besides Roza. Yes, were Bogdan to come, we could ask him whether there was a doctor in London who could ease our suffering. But waiting for Bogdan was delusional. Sadness pricked my soul when I thought of Bogdan, because he was inseparably connected with Roza; they were our only friends from childhood, and both had disappeared from our solitary world. We were all together in only one photograph from our childhood: a small faded black-and-white photo in which we kneeled and stared off to the side, at someone or something. Roza, in a white dress with lace, Srebra and I in red dresses with white dots, and behind us, sitting on a bench looking at the camera, are Bogdan, Mara, Viki, and Vesna, all dressed in holiday clothes. You have to wonder when the photograph was taken—was it Easter or Patron's Day at our school? And who took the photo of us? Srebra said she recalled that Uncle Dobre took our picture “before his operation,” because for us kids, Uncle Dobre's life was divided into before and after the operation on his eyes; through some sort of injury he had been left blind in one eye and from then on, he didn't laugh as he had before and didn't tease us while making animal sounds before laughing so long and so loud, so tenderly, that it made all of us children love him. A real misfortune befell us when, after his eye surgery, he stopped laughing and teasing, instead going quickly past on the stairs with a sad and stern face, like that of my Saint Zlata Meglenska. How he cried when Roza died; how many tears fell from his blind eye. The evening of her wake when she was dressed in a child's wedding dress he wept as if she were his own child.