A Spare Life (2 page)

I was often cruel, too, yanking her suddenly in some unexpected direction, but I was more aware that our heads were joined, that we should be careful, every minute, how we moved so as to not hurt ourselves, because the pain in our temples where we were joined was unbearable whenever one of us made a sudden unanticipated movement. Srebra was also aware that we were two in one, but only physically, whenever her head started to ache, not psychologically; she would dream up great plans for her life, and simply took no account of my desires or of our joint capabilities. She was certain that one day, when we were grown and had a lot of money, we'd be able to pay for an operation that could separate us. She believed it so intensely that when our heads were still conjoined, she was making plans as if we'd already been separated.

It was like that with the fortune-telling game, too, when she said in an absolutely calm voice, “I've told you a hundred times I want to live in London, and you didn't write it down. Look, you put down the letter
S
. That can only be Skopje, but I'm not staying here, not for anything in the world! In London they will surely be able to separate us. They have those kinds of doctors.”

My eyes were already welling up with tears. I pinched her with my left hand on her right elbow as hard as I could. Srebra raised her left arm over her head and smacked me on the head as hard as she could. Those blows on the head would hurt for days. Mom once said to her, “If you continue on like this, one day you're going to punch a hole in her brain and then what troubles we'd have!” And, as always, our father added, “You voracious creatures, you've devoured the world!”

Although our heads were not merely joined but also shared a vein by which our blood mixed—in moments of excitement, anxiety, or other extreme situations we felt each other's hearts beating in our temples—we thought differently; our brains were not conjoined. I still don't know whether this was a lucky or an unlucky circumstance of our lives.

That's why, whenever Srebra hit me on the head, she hissed, “Don't you dare tattle!” But this time, she didn't manage to say anything, because I started to cry so desperately that Roza immediately bent over us to wipe my tears away with her hand.

“Come on, Zlata, don't. Look how nicely things are going to turn out for you. Your husband will be a multimillionaire and you're going to have one child, and with all those millions, you're sure to find a doctor to separate your heads.” I was crying and kneeling down, stock-still, sensing that in Srebra's mind she was already leaving for London, alone, without me, and I was nowhere. I felt I was not there, that I did not exist.

“Hey, you guys, what kind of game is this?” Bogdan called out just then, having quietly drawn near. Up until then, he had been sitting a little way off from us on the concrete wall above the driveway, leaning on the door, stealing glances at what we were doing while seemingly engrossed in solving—in his head, without a pencil—a crossword puzzle torn from a newspaper.

“You stay out of this,” Srebra shouted at him. I didn't say anything. I was swallowing the mucus that had collected in my throat from the tears, and Roza just shrugged her shoulders.

“All you think about is marriage. You have nothing better to do,” Bogdan called out, and then exclaimed in surprise, “Hey look, the letter
B
! That's not me, is it?”

Just at that moment, before my face turned red, a flowerpot with a cactus in it fell from one of the balconies and shattered on our fortune-telling squares. We could hear curses and shouts of indignation. The dirt scattered all over the squares we had drawn; my square was the only one now even barely visible. My fortune said I would get married a year before Srebra to a boy whose name began with
B
, that he'd be a multimillionaire, we'd live in Skopje, and have one child. That was not Bogdan, because Bogdan was the poorest boy we knew, and I couldn't imagine him being a multimillionaire. I thought only poor girls could become multimillionaires when they grew up and that boys were either poor or rich all their lives.

We raised our heads. On the second floor balcony stood a single woman named Verka who shouted in a voice husky from cigarettes and alcohol, “You killed my mother! You! No one else! But you'll die, too!”

Auntie Mira, from the balcony above, tried to calm her down. “Now Verka, if you throw flowerpots like that, you'll hit the children. Go on, get back inside.”

At that moment, our father appeared on our balcony in his white undershirt and shouted, “Wait till I come down and get you, you old drunk!” Then he turned to us and called in an equally sharp voice, “Go around to the back of the building. Your mother dropped a towel. Go and get it.”

Verka went in, Roza ran home, and Srebra and I staggered—as always when we walked—to the rear of the building. There, just under the second row of balconies, we saw the towel hanging on a branch of the plum tree we had planted with Roza two years before as a symbol of our friendship. The little tree had already grown quite a bit; it reached almost to Uncle Sotir's window. We caught hold of the towel, and instead of going back around the building and entering through the main entrance, we climbed in through the basement window. The glass had been removed years ago, probably deliberately, so tenants wouldn't have to walk all the way around to get to the back of the building where they made winter preserves, or to the garages, illegally built from odds and ends, so that now, instead of green shrubs and grass, all we saw from our windows were garages: one made with a tarp, another from corrugated iron, a third with concrete, another out of boards.

Bogdan had followed us as far as the window; then he simply said, “Ciao,” and climbed the nearby linden tree.

“Aren't you going home?” I managed to call out after him as Srebra pulled the two of us through the window, but he didn't reply. There was nothing to say; for a year now there had been no one waiting for him at home. We all knew that, but we pretended we didn't, ever since the day his mother was buried and our class went with our teacher to express our condolences. Before that, Bogdan and his mother had lived next to the Slavija supermarket in a small single-room shack with a toilet attached to its back wall. His mother cleaned the stairs in several apartment buildings, including ours. He didn't have a father. Although he was quite poor, he was always carefully dressed, washed, and combed. His mother, who had grown old and ugly before her time, talked constantly about Bogdan: she wanted nothing else but for him to finish his education, become somebody and something. Bogdan lived up to her expectations, both in school and out; he read everything he could lay his hands on, and he loved crosswords. Tugging at their sleeves, he begged the men who read newspapers on the benches or on the balconies to give him the page with the crossword puzzle. More often than not, he didn't have a pencil, so he'd solve them in his head, concentrating to remember the solutions he'd already figured out. The children who didn't know where Bogdan lived had no idea just how poor he was, or that he'd been starving ever since his mother was diagnosed with throat cancer.

We learned all this less than a month after his mother's death from his homework essay “When You Hit Rock Bottom.” That morning, the principal came into our classroom with our teacher, and while we were still trembling from the shock of the principal's sudden appearance, our teacher asked, “Who doesn't want to read his or her homework aloud?” Confused by the question, even though we would all rather not have read our homework aloud, no one had the courage to raise a hand. Only Bogdan did. “Ah, there's someone who doesn't want to. That's why he's going to have to,” she said, and both she and the principal laughed out loud. Bogdan had no choice; he stood up and began to read in a trembling voice:

Before she got sick, my mother bought a little pig and a little rabbit. Soon after that, she went into the hospital. It was winter and we had no heat. During the day I wandered around the streets after school, at night I huddled under three comforters. Every day I went back to the school at night to steal some of the dried flowers from the foot of the memorial to our school patron so I could take them to the pig. My mother came back from the hospital just before Christmas. She couldn't speak. She just lay there watching—first me, then the pig, then the rabbit, one by one. By Christmas our pig weighed twenty-five kilos, but its brother that lived at the neighbors' weighed two hundred kilos. The neighbors slaughtered our pig along with theirs and made us three sausages and some ham from it. Not long after that, my mother went back to the hospital. All winter, until March, I nibbled bits of sausages and ham. I was thrifty; I wanted to save for the future. In the spring, the last sausage began to get moldy, but I still tore off little pieces and rubbed the mold off; that's what I lived on until July. The rabbit got thinner and thinner. One day I decided to pluck its fur and sell it for bread money. While I was plucking it, I pulled off a chunk of pink meat. It started to bleed. The fur hardly weighed a hundred grams. The rabbit was all skin and bones, a living skeleton. I killed it before it starved to death. I cooked it and ate it. My mother came home and died. I survived. Things can't get worse than that.

Everyone in the classroom was speechless. Behind my glasses my eyes filled with tears. From the way the skin connecting our heads pulled tight, I knew that Srebra's face was puckered up the way it did whenever she felt tears coming. The teacher and the principal muttered something to each other, then the school bell rang, and we all ran out of the classroom.

Srebra's steps and mine were never fully in sync; either I dragged her along or she dragged me. That's how it had been ever since we learned to walk: she wanted to walk fast, I still wanted to crawl. If it hadn't been for Granny Stefka's patience, we might never have learned to walk. She'd crouch on the floor holding me up at the same height as Srebra, who wanted to walk, and she'd drag herself silently along with me in tow, so that Srebra would not be stopped in her attempts to walk. When I wanted to crawl, Granny Stefka would pretend to be a cat and get Srebra to crawl all the way to a piece of black cloth that she had set down by the door, playing the part of a mouse. All of us crawling together, Srebra and I with our joined heads and Granny Stefka with her fat belly dragging along the floor.

The day after the incident with Bogdan's homework was a Saturday, and we went out to gather used paper, going from apartment to apartment, from house to house, even carrying paper out of basements. At the end of the day, the custodian and the principal weighed the paper we had collected on a balance scale, calculated what it would sell for, and, before sending it off, handed Bogdan a money-filled blue envelope—our balm for his wounds. After that, no one ever asked how he lived, what he did with the money, or whether he had anything to eat. Later, we found out that he had given the money to the salesclerk at the grocery store next to his shack for a subscription to the crossword puzzle magazine
Brain Twisters
, and now a copy of the magazine accompanied him wherever he went. Whenever we saw him doing crossword puzzles—face flushed, eyes sparkling—he looked a little crazy to Srebra and me. We hardly ever said a word to him if Roza wasn't with us. Srebra used a somewhat mocking tone, but I felt my words turn to stone in my chest; I couldn't get out a sentence from beginning to end. I was blocked as if in front
of a stranger who didn't know my language: you stare at them, and don't know what to say to get them to understand you. Roza had no problem communicating with anyone; she spoke to everybody she met. She was the most outgoing girl on our street and wasn't inhibited with children or adults. Because of Roza, Bogdan felt welcome in our company, but he was never pushy; he didn't look for any special attention, didn't count on any of us. One day, Roza lost an earring behind the building. We looked for it in the tall grass between the garages, near the transformer under the apricot tree that produced delicious orange fruit in the summer—with me dragging Srebra while she dragged me. Srebra stretched her hand into the thorns by the fence separating the backyard of our building from the house of the “brothers”—as our parents called the men who lived opposite us—and pulled out the earring. Next to the transformer there was a large clump of grass called “lucky stalks.” We each plucked a stem, made a wish, then pulled off all the little stems—you were supposed to be left with just the central spike. If we managed to keep the top from tearing off, we hid the lucky stalk, burying it somewhere to make a wish come true. I couldn't hide mine without Srebra seeing me, nor could she hide hers without my seeing, even though the unwritten rule was for the other to close her eyes. I was sure that our wishes would never come true and that only Roza could hope for some pleasant surprises in the future. That's why we gave in to her will, her ideas, and her ever-changing suggestions for new adventures. Every clever or dumb thing we did until two in the afternoon when our parents returned from work and her sister came home from high school we did at Roza's. In the small cupboard in their dining room next to the coffee cups and wine glasses there were two kaleidoscopes, Roza's red one and her sister's blue one. Srebra and I took them without asking permission. I picked the red one, Srebra the blue one, and while Roza rustled about the kitchen, we peered inside at the amazing designs. When I think about it, I don't believe that I ever again held a kaleidoscope in my hands for as long as I did at Roza's. Only once, in a small toy store in Covent Garden, in London, did I come across a similar red kaleidoscope, but when I stared into it, there was nothing like the checkered, angular, or
cubic designs in Roza's kaleidoscope, but rather, rounded ones, with soft transitions in color. It seemed a traitor to the true meaning of a kaleidoscope. While Srebra and I each peered at the sharp colors and figures, one nearly touching the other, Roza came into the dining room holding an odd-looking plastic water pitcher shaped like a bunch of grapes; around its mouth she had tied a thin rope about two or three meters long. “Come on! Let's water the grass,” she said, which meant that Srebra and I should go downstairs, behind the building, under her balcony, and from the balcony she would lower the bunch of grapes with the string, we would grasp it, and then we would water the chokecherry tree that brought springtime into the gloom cast by the garages behind the building each year. We'd also water the other flowers growing in the grass under Auntie Elica's, Roza's, and Auntie Dobrila's balconies. This was the only patch of ground, these few square meters of nature in the midst of the urban chaos behind our building, upon which no garage had sprung up. After we had used up all the water, Roza hoisted the pitcher up to the balcony, refilled it, then lowered it again, and thus we watered every bit of ground, including, finally, the hedge that grew around the green space. Then Roza would come down, having already made plans for a new game.