A Spare Life (15 page)

Left to ourselves, without friends or boyfriends, I felt that Srebra and I spent our high-school days reminiscing about our childhood, which had irrevocably passed, trying to connect our present life with what had been—and nothing was as it had been. Auntie Verka continued to drink and sing, swaying on the stairs, sometimes alone, sometimes with the Gypsy Riki, who came back to her time and again, until the fateful evening when he disappeared forever from our building—first to the police station, and then who knows where. That evening, as Srebra and I returned from school, we stumbled upon some commotion in the entryway, and then our curious neighbors approached from all sides and two police officers came with clubs in their hands. We were surprised but not frightened, because the police had their hats on, which meant no one had died, and we grasped that Riki had tried to rape Auntie Dobrila. He had frightened her and she had attacked him with a flowerpot and a stick of wood, so he had run to Auntie Verka's, where no one would open the door under any circumstances. Everyone finally dispersed without the police doing anything concrete, but two hours later, we heard shouts again, as two new police officers grabbed Riki under his arms, led him outside, and shoved him into a blue van. We never saw Riki again, and Auntie Verka never mentioned him. She drowned herself in alcohol, until one day, shortly before we finished high school, her son came and carried her out of the apartment in his arms; he locked the apartment, and we never heard anything more of her. The apartment remained locked and empty for several years, and when a young family with a small child moved in, it was as if the story of Auntie Verka was erased forever. None of the neighbors ever mentioned her; no one asked where she was or what had happened to her; everyone seemed to breathe more easily now that she was no longer there—now that the stench of cigarette smoke, rakija, and burned food no longer wafted from her apartment. That's how people from our childhood disappeared. Our high-school years, which, by definition, should have been the most frenetic and exciting, were, in fact, the most boring, following the well-worn path of home—two buses—school—two buses—home, and on Fridays or Saturdays, though not every week, to the Central movie house, the theater to
see a play, or, rarely, to a café, and only twice to a disco, once to Hearth and once to Tourist. At both places, the bouncers told us they would let us in that once, but the next time, they would let us in only if we had gotten pretty enough to attract other young people. I don't know why they had to do that, since even without any special events, there were long lines in front of the discos, and they let in only girls or couples, but not groups of young men, and the only time we went, two guys immediately attached themselves to us so they could get in. Once inside, they got lost in the crowd, and we bopped along with several other girls from our class, one next to the other, swinging our heads first left, then right. Everyone who passed by, drink in hand, stared at us, pausing for a moment and nudging each other. One group of three guys and two girls crashed into us, as if by accident, crushing our fingers and shoving us in the groin, and then, pretending to apologize, they moved on, laughing, but we just pulled ourselves together and kept dancing until midnight; then we caught the night bus at the Record stop, and, still subjected to sneers and tasteless jokes, we arrived home at last.

The custom of not celebrating birthdays in our family hit us hardest in 1990, when we turned eighteen. We bought a red candle in a red glass jar with a lid from a woman at an improvised market in front of the Žito Luks bakery. The candle seemed so unusual that we wanted it for our birthday, but when we got it home, our mother shouted not to light it because it would be a shame to burn such a beautiful and expensive candle; it would be better if we kept it as a souvenir. So the candle stood in the bathroom for years, on a plastic decorative dish on top of the shelf where shoes were kept, and it was only later that I realized it was a memorial candle, like those placed in Catholic cemeteries. Sometimes, we were drawn by some magic force to the drawer in our room where the almanac with its horoscopes, fortune-telling guides, and perpetual calendar was kept; it was still open to the page of our uncle's birthday. It was noted that he would be married twice, which had been our grandmother's hope for years, that he would find a better wife than our aunt, maybe a doctor or a nurse. We wanted to read about ourselves in the almanac, but I told Srebra that it might be better if we didn't, because the text would apply to two people, and did she really want us to continue this same joint life, with no hope of separation? “You're right,” said Srebra. “It's better that we don't know what awaits us.” Also in the drawer was the book
Mara's Wedding
, and inside it was a matchbox with Marjan's address; he had been writing ever since he first wrote to us as pen pals in primary school, addressing the New Year's greeting card to the “male or female twins.” In the card for 1985, in addition to the wishes for success in the new year, he had written a postscript that read, “Write to me,” along with his address in Jegunovce, near Tetovo. At the time, Srebra and I couldn't control our laughter, but also our anger that some kid from Jegunovce had sent us a New Year's card, and what's more, he wanted to exchange letters with us. We ripped up the greeting card and threw it out the window onto the driveway behind the building. Our mother scolded us and ordered us to go and get it, because Marjan had the same last name as a well-known cardiologist at the state hospital in Skopje. “That might be his father,” Mom said, “but even if he's his uncle, that would still be good; we might need him. You never know; you
have to stay in contact with a family like that.” So Srebra and I went downstairs and climbed through the glassless window frame in the basement, and found the torn and scattered pieces of the card. We gathered up the pieces, which were wet with snow and dirt, and Roza, who had just scattered scraps on the balcony railing for the hungry sparrows, urged us to put the card back together, but we hadn't found all the pieces. For Mom, it was most important for us to find the piece with Marjan's address; we absolutely had to write to him, we had to, and she would send the card through the courier at work. I don't know why we obeyed her, but we did, and for years, Marjan wrote us letters and greeting cards at regular intervals. Then all at once, he stopped, and we no longer wrote to him either. Each time he wrote, he invited us to Jegunovce to visit his parents so we could actually meet each other, but we always found an excuse, and we never invited him to come; we never sent him our photograph, so he never found out about our handicap. He must have thought we were two normal twins with strange names, though names like ours, he wrote, were not a rarity among Macedonians in the Tetovo region, and there were even many boys named Srebre or Zlate. We never asked him whether the well-known cardiologist was a relation of his, and, thank God, no one needed him.

In 1991, at school the day before the Yugoslav selection for the Eurovision song contest, which Srebra and I followed every year without exception, our geography teacher spoke about the position of each republic within Yugoslavia: “Yugoslavia is a mother with six children and two stepchildren. Mother and stepmother.” Our teacher, with her great pregnant belly covered by a dark blue dress, leaned despondently on the table, her elbows resting sideways on the lectern, her blue eyes washed out, her skin pale, her hair short and greasy. From a classmate in Macedonian class we had learned that a year earlier, her husband ran over their three-year-old son while backing the car out of the garage. The son had died. Now she was pregnant again, just on the verge of giving birth. She could barely walk; she barely spoke. I was obsessed with her story in the days before she gave birth, just before our graduation evening. I asked myself whether it was possible, just three or four months after the death of one's child, to conceive another child. A second child, after the first no longer existed. At night in bed, conquering the sadness, the pain, the consciousness, the emptiness, the hate, the resistance, the loss, the memory, motherhood, fatherhood, for one's body to feel arousal, carnal desire, for the clitoris to tremble, the penis to harden, and for two despondent bodies to merge into one in orgasmic joy, in relaxation, relieving the stress and depression, and in that moment of conjoining, for them to conceive a new life? The child's room is empty; there is no one there to awaken. Does the new child replace the old one? Will it be a simulacrum of his brother, wear his clothes? Will it have the same name? Will it sleep in his pajamas in his little bed? Will it be loved because of what it is, or unloved because of what it is not? Will it be a child or stepchild to its own mother and father? What drove me to think about that, I do not know. I had my sorry experience with the clown doll, the only sexual probing of my body, not counting my own fingers, which from time to time I poked under the elastic of my pajamas and underwear while Srebra slept, and entered my body, for a moment; I would reach the climax of sexual arousal, of ecstasy, but immediately afterward I was disgusted by myself, and instead of falling asleep in sweet bliss, I would be unable to close my eyes, thinking of my misfortune, of Srebra's misfortune,
of our inability to have our own lives and sleep with our own, real boyfriends, spread our legs to a man's sexual organ like all our peers. I envisioned our geography teacher in that act, only three or four months after the death of her child, spreading her legs to her husband, and him entering her and conceiving a new child, and in that moment of union, they are infused with joy and pleasure. Perhaps for a moment, they forget their dead son run over by the family automobile through the inattention of his own father, the little body still disintegrating in its tiny coffin in the earth. And perhaps afterward, they don't feel happiness, but disgust. Perhaps they cry in the night, their backs turned to one another, filled with self-loathing, hatred toward each other, she with her unspoken, smothered reproaches that bubble to the surface from time to time during the day, causes him to run from her, stay longer at work just so he doesn't have to hear that he was guilty of the death of their son, and she shuts herself up among her geography atlases filled with photographs of their child, crying and moaning, while in her womb a new life kicks. O God! O holy Saint Zlata Meglenska, is that life? What awaits us? In my mind I could see the past, I could see the present, but the future had no color, no scent, no sign, no omen, no beacon, nothing. We only thought about tomorrow's trip to the village and how we would take the small black-and-white television set so we could watch the Eurovision song contest taking place that year in a hall in Sarajevo. The songs of the six republics and two provinces played one after another, immediately following an advertisement for Nivea face cream and the evening news, which had broadcast demonstrations against the government of Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević that took place all day in Belgrade. Our father clicked his tongue without saying anything; our grandmother crossed herself three times; our mother only said, “Good God Almighty.” But we quickly forgot about the unrest in Belgrade when the Yugoslav singers began to sing. The group Baby Doll won. On Monday, our art teacher asked whether we had watched Eurovision. She quoted the saying: “The village burns; Grandma combs her hair,” then asked: “Did you see what's happening in Belgrade? It has finally occurred to people that they need to stand up to MiloÅ¡ević.” Srebra, who followed
the news and made connections between events happening elsewhere in the world and in our country—and thought about them but rarely shared her thoughts with me—said, “Yes, finally.” The art teacher looked at her in surprise. She was the only teacher in our whole school who cared about our situation. We called her by her first name, Lala, which is what she told us she would like to be called. “I must do a drawing of you so you will have a picture as a memento once you are separated,” she had said to us, and her words infused us with an assuredness that we would be separated some day, and both of us were stunned by her confidence. “Do you think so?” Srebra asked her uncertainly. “Yes, we live in the twentieth century,” she replied. “Do you know how far medicine has progressed out there in the world?” “I don't know,” I said, but inside, I felt I believed her, and it was in that instant that I began to like her, or to put it more precisely, began to respect her more than any other teacher in the school. Srebra liked her more, but I respected her more. After the matinee showing of
Dead Poets Society
at the Kultura movie theater we raced down Partizanska Street toward her, and when we caught up to her, the last person in the entire school going home, we nearly ran into her. She wrapped our heads in a hug and held us and we cried, out of sympathy, enchantment, admiration, sadness, joy, everything. That evening, we sat in a café in the Leptokaria mall, and while we drank juice, she told us about how, one day, she got totally fed up with everything: maintaining her ideal weight; her firm, smooth stomach; her smooth, hairless, cellulite-free legs; sick of all the care she had given her body in her youth; sick of the young men she changed like socks; sick of the high heels she wore to the receptions famous artists invited her to. She was fed up with being young, beautiful, blond, so she lay in bed for months. She just lay there and ate and didn't shave her legs, didn't color her hair, didn't paint her nails, didn't iron her clothes, didn't exercise; she just lay there and ate everything that came to hand. She emptied all the shelves in her mother's pantry, shook out all the boxes of crackers, snacks, and cookies, licked all the jars of jam and Eurocrem. Within a few months she had eaten more than she had in her entire life, and she got fat—three times as heavy as she had been; she fought against her
own body. “And now,” she said, “Look, I'm fat, but happy. I don't have a boyfriend, no one looks at me, no one bores me, I don't waste money on makeup and creams, I don't worry about what I eat, I'm free, free. I draw and I live.” Srebra and I, our mouths full of the baguette sandwiches she had ordered for us, listened and nodded as we ate. We never bought ourselves baguettes, but we liked them more than anything. After rehearsal for the children's show
A New Year's Tale
, in which Srebra and I played a two-headed star who made children's dreams come true, Lala brought us the leftovers of the baguette sandwiches and talked openly to our classmates: “What makes Srebra and Zlata different from you? Is it the one small spot where nature joined them? Is that it? Is that enough of a reason to exclude someone from your group of friends, from society?” They kept quiet and bowed their heads, swallowing mouthfuls of baguette with mayonnaise and ham; it was unpleasant for Srebra and me. Lala was aware of that, so she asked us, “Why should it be uncomfortable for you? It should be unpleasant for the majority, not for the minority.” We performed the show at the retirement home in the Zlokukani neighborhood, at a hospital for sick children, and at the Drugarče library. For a long time thereafter, some of our classmates called us the two-headed star, but Lala had given us self-confidence, which seemed to make us stronger, and we only smiled at the joke with pride. Before our eyes hovered the pale cheeks of the children from the hospital as they clapped for us with their little hands and waved with tears in their eyes when we left. Lala taught us it was more important to give than to receive and that everyone was good for something. Both Srebra and I thought of her when, on May 4, we watched the Eurovision contest and the group Baby Doll sang a catchy, but extremely dumb, song entitled “Brasil,” which received only one vote. “The village burns; Grandma combs her hair,” Srebra said, intentionally quoting Lala. “Yugoslavia won't exist anymore.” To my shame, the first thing that came to mind was that if Yugoslavia ceased to exist, it would no longer have an entry in Eurovision, and that made me sad.