A Spare Life (18 page)

That fall, however, the battles in Croatia eclipsed Macedonia's independence. Every day prior to the vote for independence, we had watched news clips from Vukovar, and for several weeks after the vote for independence, all anyone talked about was Dubrovnik. That lasted a long, long time. All through the fall and winter, people talked about Dubrovnik, and everybody had their own story and stuck to their beliefs. Once, Uncle Mirko said the Croatians were lying about Dubrovnik being set on fire; that it was the Croatians themselves who had set tires ablaze to make it appear as if the Serbs were burning their city. Srebra became upset, and I wondered who would be stupid enough to burn such a beautiful city as Dubrovnik. We heard all kinds of things at that time, especially during the first month of our studies, October 1991, when several Macedonian soldiers died in Croatia.

The amphitheater classrooms were always filled with students, and at first glance, we blended in with them. The students were, at least, more cultured than our high-school classmates and didn't cry out in shock when they saw us or ask, “What's with the heads?” or “Is that possible in real life?” We usually sat in one of the back rows so the professors couldn't see us very well, and from a distance we probably looked like two students with their heads leaning awkwardly against each other so they could whisper or read from the same textbook. The lectures were as boring to me as they were interesting to Srebra. She listened, took notes, got excited or upset, smiled, and I felt our joined vein throbbing above our temples, even though I was calm, yawning from boredom. Srebra thoroughly enjoyed each new subject, each new bit of information. Although it was unspoken, it was clear she would take the lecture notes, remember the important things, and drag me to the bookstore and library for materials. It was clear that I would be physically present and like it or not, I would go through the motions of studying law, but she would really study it with consistency and dedication. What a waste of time it was for me to sit in those lectures in the cold amphitheater of the Law Department and listen to material that had no relation to me, that neither interested me nor repelled me; I was absolutely indifferent to the legal system. To me, it was
remote and foreign, and although I was aware it was important and would be even more important now that we had our own country. I was much more drawn to literature and ethnology, which Srebra considered egotistical because of their focus on human nature and individual differences, as opposed to the rules governing society as a whole, which were so precisely defined in the legal system.

Srebra assured me I was mistaken if I thought that law wasn't applicable to the individual; on the contrary, law was precisely the discipline that was dedicated to both the individual and the community, and it was vitally important in our lives. “Let's take ourselves, for example,” she said. “We could sue the state because it hasn't found a solution to our medical problem, or our parents, who didn't ensure that we weren't stigmatized from birth.” Srebra said all sorts of things, all of it vague and remote to my concerns; I only knew that the country of Yugoslavia no longer existed and Macedonia was too small to assume any responsibility for the lives of its citizens, and what's more, we were adults and were responsible for looking after ourselves. “Even legally, we've now been left to ourselves,” I replied to Srebra ironically, and I felt the desire to scratch and scratch and scratch the spot where we were joined, to scrape away the skin covering our shared vein until it bled, and in this attack, driven by passion and rage, tear it apart. I would tear through that irrevocable connection, a connection we despised, didn't need, and loathed from the depths of our souls.

What was happening in Croatia and more generally throughout Yugoslavia was discussed at the university, often in connection with soldiers from the Yugoslav National Army—many of whom were deserting and returning to Macedonia. We all followed the mothers who set out by bus to search for their sons across Yugoslavia, and who burst into the assembly shouting, through tears and rage, “Bring our children home!” New students turned up at the university who seemed older than the rest, with deep bags under their eyes and hollow faces, confused and frightened, or rude and impudent, or drunk; tears ran down some of their faces during lectures, and it was clear where they had come from. While we were all dying to know, no one was brave enough to ask if they had killed someone, if they had been ordered to kill someone, if they had been imprisoned, if they had been tortured, if they had tortured someone else. Once, one of them said, “Fuck it all. How did I end up in the wrong place at the wrong time?” And it was true for all of them—a lost generation that found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time. When we heard about the shelling of Dubrovnik, our colleagues clicked their tongues, happy that they weren't there, but here, at their desks, secure and protected. Some of the professors adopted a pro-Serbian stance, which sparked emotions in the amphitheater. Mostly, however, everyone just wrote down what the professors dictated, forgetting what was happening a few hundred kilometers away. At times, there were even gales of laughter, especially in the middle of lectures, when our old professor of criminal law checked out the female students from head to toe and joked to those wearing short skirts, “
That
is more suited for washing than airing in public.” Srebra and I tried to avoid sitting in his field of vision, in anyone's field of vision, but it was sometimes unavoidable. Still, I think all the events taking place somehow blurred our “oddness,” and it became rare for someone to ask during our breaks what had happened to us, if we had been born this way, if we were going to have an operation, and other questions like that. Most often, it was those from the interior of the country, far from the urban center, who were stunned, and stared at us with frozen expressions, mouths agape, but soon they, too, stopped paying anymore attention than the
others.

When classes ended, we went home, while many others went to the school cafeteria for lunch or off to their dormitories. I felt like Srebra's appendage: I followed her to the photocopy shop, to the library, to the bookstore. I did everything necessary for us to be ordinary students, but Srebra wanted more than that. She wanted us to start preparing for our final exams as early as the first semester, and we sat at the dining-room table at home with piles of notes and thick books to read out loud. First she read for a while, and then I did. The material seemed to go in one ear and out the other. I would yawn, annoying Srebra with my lack of interest, as she wondered how I would pass the exams, and whether I knew this wasn't how to study. “You have no idea how aware I am,” I said to her, “but you were aware that this stuff didn't interest me when you wanted us both to enroll in law.” “Well, you have to,” said Srebra, “because you don't have a choice. We don't have a choice, and if we enrolled in something else, I would be the bored one.” “Great. Couldn't you have found something that interested both of you?” our family chimed in, bewildered. We had not considered that when we enrolled in the university; law was all Srebra wanted—nothing else—and since she compromised when we picked our high-school focus, it was now my turn. “Sure, but high school and university are not the same,” our uncle, the only member of our family with a university education, said. “You should have asked me for advice. This isn't how one goes about studying at the university.” There were moments I was overcome by violent sobbing. I was in a hopeless situation; I did not know how to live like this—how to get used to studying law, how to force myself to accept it. Literature attracted me more and more, as did religion. When Srebra finished getting her books from the library, I would drag her to the literature section to grab novels and poetry collections. From time to time, I got up the courage to drag Srebra to the card catalog to find books on spirituality, and I would take out texts on the Akathist Hymn or the Church Fathers. I was pricked by the edges of the Saint Zlata Meglenska icon in my pocket; it was a presence that marked my life, a refuge in case of danger. I knew she was with me, which made it easier for me to live my life, to sit through the lectures. While the professors, men in ties and
suits and women in suits and high heels, spoke dryly or animatedly, waving their arms and pacing in front of the blackboard, I thought about the past, about eternity, about God, and about art.

We spent New Year's Day of 1992 in bed. Now that our father had finally bought us a small television set—if only a black-and-white one—before the last Yugoslav Eurovision Song Contest, we could watch television by ourselves. We set the small TV on a shelf opposite the bed, after our mother, unleashing a whole host of comments, removed from it the porcelain teapot and cups, various porcelain roosters, lions, a hen with seven small chicks with red beaks and covered with dust. Our father removed the two glass doors in front of the shelves and placed the small television inside. Srebra and I had our own television at last. We watched lying under the blanket because we weren't allowed to keep the heater blowing while the television was on.

Just like every previous New Year's, the tree stood on the small table in the big room, along with pink pudding cake, steamed cookies, and Russian salad. But now that we were grown, we didn't even think about the tree. We tirelessly watched TV, stretched out comfortably on the bed after so many years of watching from the stuck-together chairs in the dining room. In the days after New Year's, the lead news story was that the war in Croatia might end. Surely there wasn't a single normal person who did not feel relieved by this news. But, in fact, the farce had just begun. Things were now beginning in Bosnia. The information one could glean from the news or from other people—most often professors or students who had relatives dispersed throughout Yugoslavia—was always contradictory, and always tragic. The fact was that there was killing, rape, shooting, torture, everything. God alone knew how and why this was happening. The wars coincided with our studies, grotesquely filling our time with the weight of death. Refugees from Bosnia poured into our oasis of peace, as Macedonia called itself. Most often it was veiled women warmly dressed with small children in their arms, carrying bags and suitcases, who sought asylum with their lost looks and worried faces. Some treated them with sympathy and compassion, directing them to the offices of the Red Cross and the UN Refugee Agency; others wanted to drive them away. A third group openly disapproved of the flow of Bosnian refugees. Aunt Ivanka told us a woman in her building was a refugee inspector, and every day, Aunt Ivanka saw her taking boxes of oil, flour, and laundry detergent from her car to store in the basement. Then a racketeer would come, put the boxes in a cart, and sell them at the market. “They ought to be ashamed of themselves,” we said, but our aunt's neighbor wasn't the only one who took advantage of the Bosnian refugees' misfortune. There were many such incidents, most of which were only discovered after the war in Bosnia had ended.

Somewhere around March 1992, a telegram arrived for Srebra and me: “Be in front of the shopping center tomorrow at noon, please.” It was signed Marjan Siljanovski. We looked at the telegram, turned it every which way, but couldn't make sense of it. It was the same Marjan with whom we had corresponded when we were still at our primary-school desks, though we had never met him. We had spoken to him only once on the phone, a full three years ago when he called from Belgrade, but we hadn't received a letter for at least four years, since our first year in high school, when he wrote to us from Belgrade on bright red stationary, including a photograph of himself in uniform. He had written that he was studying at the military high school and that all was well with him, except he was lonely and begged us to write to him more often if we could; that our letters always meant a great deal to him, and that, on his way home on leave, he would get off at the railway station in Skopje so we could finally see each another and get acquainted. “And who knows, maybe I will fall in love with one of you.” That's what he wrote to us. At the time, Srebra and I laughed at his letter and didn't answer it, but then, he called from Belgrade. He'd had a free afternoon and was walking around and wanted to hear our voices. Srebra and I could not have been more confused. Srebra was overcome with hysterical laughter as he was saying something into the receiver; she couldn't stop laughing, and I, also choking with laughter, told him we were late getting downtown and hung up on him. I remember our shared laughter as one of the most pleasant in our lives—young laughter connecting us in that moment and overcoming all our misunderstandings and misfortune. Marjan didn't call again. After the war in Yugoslavia began, I thought of him, and said to Srebra, “I wonder what Marjan is doing now?” And she said, “He's probably in a battle somewhere; after all, he was studying in a military school.” Now, a telegram had arrived from Marjan with the word
please
, and we thought we had to go see him right away, as if his life depended on us. It was absurd to run to meet a person with whom we had only corresponded as children (and only because our mother realized his last name was the same as that of the best cardiologist in the municipal hospital), a person we had never met before who was not only unaware that
we were Siamese twins but also that it was by our heads that we were conjoined. We did not know why we should meet him and what we would say to one another. We were strangers who had nothing to connect us aside from those occasional childhood letters, the last one from several years ago. All afternoon, we turned the telegram over and over in our hands, and that night, we both slept badly, pulling our legs away from each other's, covering and uncovering them, until we fell asleep in the early morning and didn't make it to our first class. We left school after our second class. It was already 11:30. “We're going to go, right?” I asked Srebra, although I had already decided we would, and I saw that Srebra wanted us to go as well. “I'm curious to know what exactly he wants,” Srebra said angrily, and with small steps to avoid bumping into each other or the passersby—returning from the market with their plastic bags and satchels along the thawing sidewalks from which the snow hadn't been cleared—we reached the shopping center. It was only then that we stopped to consider we did not know at which end he would be waiting. In my backpack was the photograph he had sent us from Belgrade. We circled the stores in front of the entrance facing the Workers' Technical College, but there was no one there who looked like Marjan. Then we walked through the entire mall until we reached the far exit, but there was only one person there, a blond guy who was evidently waiting for someone else. And, indeed, before long an extremely good-looking woman wearing a red cape met him. They kissed, and arm in arm, ducked into a small bookstore.