A Spare Life (27 page)

free from shame and the pressures of conventional conversation. In fact, Srebra was describing the weight on her soul. Darko, awakened by her scream, stood in the bedroom doorway, disheveled. He was aware of how hard this was for her, how much she still loved him, but also of how the pain didn't allow her to forgive him. God would forgive him before Srebra would. That's how it is with people; their hearts are in their heads, and their heads are in their hearts. Even for those whose head is attached to another's. At breakfast, Darko asked her hesitantly, “Are we still husband and wife?” Srebra was silent a moment, and then said in a tired voice, “Yes, we are. But until Zlata and I are separated, I can't think about it. We have two options: either we get divorced and Zlata and I leave, or we wait until after the operation, and then consider what to do. But I can't live with you as my husband until Zlata and I are separated.” Srebra spoke rationally, calculated and cold. Why hadn't she thought so rationally before the wedding? Why hadn't she pressured me, pressured us to find a solution—money, a surgeon—and begun her own life, and I mine? Had she been afraid? I had been. In Macedonia, we were written off as a hopeless medical case. No one had given any serious thought to our situation. All our family doctor said was, “An operation like that is doomed to fail from the start. You have a shared vein. How can you be separated? Who could perform such an operation? I've been a doctor for many years, and I've never heard of such a thing.” And that had been that. Conversation closed. But since then we had read how, in the history of medicine, there have been surgeries to separate twins, both successful and unsuccessful. Back in the nineteenth century, a surgeon in a London hospital separated two young girls, though, to be honest, they had been attached at the shoulder rather than the head. Our family doctor hadn't heard about that. But now we were gripped by a zeal, by a fury, and we could no longer cope with how things stood, not on account of ourselves, because we were used to being two in one, but on account of the events that had taken place: Srebra's abortion and my nighttime drunken adventure with Darko. None of that could be brushed away or forgotten. I don't know whether Srebra really knew what had happened that night or whether she just sensed it; neither
Darko nor I admitted to anything. But it seemed she had begun to hate me because of it. Throughout our lives we had always hated each other a bit, outwardly, in our relationship and in our words. We hated each other more than we loved each other, although in our souls we did, surely, love each other. I don't know how one couldn't love one's own sister; I don't know if blood can be the same as water. “For better or for worse then,” Darko said, and kissed her cheek. Srebra said nothing. She could let him go if she wanted. We could go back to our parents if we wanted, but the fact was she didn't want to let him go. She still loved him, even if she couldn't forgive him, and we could not go home. “There's absolutely no way I would go back there,” I told Srebra. “But if you don't want to live with Darko, we can rent a place. Or we can go to the convent.” “Darko is my husband, and as long as he's my husband, we will live here,” Srebra pronounced, and that decided it. Although she said those words with unspoken hatred toward me, I was relieved. On no account did I want to return home, though, to tell the truth, I did miss it sometimes. It was, after all, our home. We still called it
home
. We had spent our entire lives there, in that room, in that apartment, which—through all the good times and bad—smelled, nonetheless, of home. There are only two kinds of home:
Home
with a capital letter, the place one has come from, and
home
with a lowercase letter, which are the places one moves to. We moved from our Home as if we had moved to a foreign country, as if we had emigrated. The mix of pain and joy, sadness and enthusiasm; we were at the border between the old, familiar, somewhat terrible life and a new, unknown, certainly far lovelier life. For us, moving to Darko's apartment had been as if we had moved, or better yet emigrated, to America, or Canada, or Australia. It was clean, orderly, warm, with a constant supply of hot water, a full refrigerator, a washing machine, a dishwasher, new bedding, and sparkling pots and pans and dishes. I felt as if we had left our Home for sanitary reasons. Srebra's marriage had been for love, but also as an escape, a voluntary expulsion from the conditions under which we had lived. At Darko's, we had become more beautiful. We could shower whenever we wanted. To iron our clothes, we laid them on an ironing board, not spread on the couch in the kitchen. Our
clothes had never been properly ironed before. We ate fresh vegetables, had as much yogurt as we wanted—not just a tiny little cupful. We cooked what we wanted, and Darko always left enough money in the drawer in the bedroom for all our needs: cosmetics, clothes, shoes, as well as for small pleasures such as books and CDs. We were finally washed and combed, with skin clear of acne, smooth heels, white teeth brushed with warm water. We were like two village girls who don't know what city life is like and are so delighted at having discovered it that they want to take every advantage.

We actively sought funds: writing letters and sending requests to hospitals around the world for days on end. Our father still came to visit, and we put groceries into a bag when he left, never mentioning our operation, although he saw the brochures from hospitals, our open address book with telephone numbers, letters, and stamps scattered on the small table in the living room. Whenever we called our mother, she told us bizarre things. She said that Aunt Ivanka had come to visit and had told her, “Mirko is lying in one bed sick from all those teas of his, and Lenka is in another, neither dead nor alive.” After one of their visits to the village, she told us that, in a bedroom cupboard in the village, she found a nest with eggs inside. Now, who would have put it there if not Snežana, our unloved aunt? Our mother had fainted, and an ambulance came, barely saving her. Snežana had been at Aunt Milka's for All Saints' Day, and while she was there Aunt Milka lay down, unable to move for two hours. But Snežana released her, still alive. Aunt Milka said she would become anxious from time to time, and would feel like everything was collapsing. “Why?” we asked our mother. “Poverty,” she answered. Yes, poverty drives people crazy. In Macedonia, more and more people were going crazy. Our mother cried, complaining that our uncle hadn't come to the village for the entire two weeks they were there. We defended him, saying it wasn't his fault—Snežana was his wife; after all, he lives with her, and the time he spent living with us was too short for him to love us more than his wife.

Darko's mother and family rarely came, but when they did they brought full bags of groceries, saying that they had been to the store for themselves, and had picked up things for us that might come in handy. Then all we would talk about was the operation. His father always said, “It will happen, it will happen; I'm working on it.” Then one day he said, “Why don't you become members of the party like Darko? That would help things along, and, of course, it's easier to request money for a member of one's own party than for just anyone.” “Everything is easier with a party membership card,” his mother said. “And it's not only that, it's necessary—people need to belong somewhere. It's not like it was before 1991, when everyone could be a member of the party or not and it didn't matter, because as long as there was socialism, there was no opposition.” That shocked me. But Srebra said, “If that's what we have to do, we'll do it.” “Excellent,” Darko's father said. “Come to our office on Monday. We'll take care of everything, and people will get to meet you and understand what I'm always talking about, and then it will certainly be easier to find the money.” That evening, the three of us argued. I argued with Srebra, because I didn't consider it right to join Darko's father's party just so we could get the money; Srebra argued with me because she insisted that we join, officially. “What does it matter to us?” she said. “The most important thing is that we find the money; everything else is secondary.” “Even if it means stepping over corpses?” I asked her, but she said, “Whose corpses?” “Morals are a corpse,” I told her, but she said, “You don't even know what you're talking about. A corpse is the baby I no longer have. That is a corpse.” Our quarrels always unfolded in parallel—we spoke next to each other because we couldn't look each other in the eye. This made it seem as if we were talking into the air. Our disagreements never ended or resolved. Darko argued with both of us: with Srebra, to convince her that even if she didn't join the party, he would still do everything to get the money and that it was dishonorable to become a member just for that reason and without ideological conviction; she would be using the party, and he was surprised by how Srebra had changed. Hadn't she been interested in politics? Hadn't she finished a law degree? Wasn't she the one
who understood such things? Darko argued with me because, he said, I had no political convictions. I wasn't for things or against them; it was all the same to me who was in power and what happened to us. He said, “You only think about yourself. You read novels, and that's it.” Then I reminded him that in Bosnia there was still shooting and killing, but no one here paid any attention to it any longer and he and his party hadn't lifted a finger to help. But he shot back immediately that that wasn't true—many volunteers in the Bosnian refugee organizations were, in fact, members of the party. We talked about all sorts of things that evening. I even heard myself say to him, “Your Orthodox people killed children in Srebrenica.” But Srebra yelled at me, “His? So, you're not Orthodox?” “No,” I said, “I'm of the Orthodox faith, but the Orthodox are those who ostensibly believe in God but only through their sense of national identity.” The discussion lasted the whole weekend. We shouted, kept silent, pleaded with each other, ate, and cried. What topics didn't we cover! Whether Dostoevsky was a generally Christian writer or more specifically an Orthodox one. Was the Russian philosopher Berdyaev correct when he talked about the perfection of Christianity and the imperfection of Christians? Would it have been better for Yugoslavia to stay together? Who was to blame for the war: the Serbs, the Slovenes, the Americans, or Tito? Were young people in 1968, about whom we had heard from our parents, more engaged than today's youth? Should there be a death penalty? Is party membership necessary? We were wrung out from these long discussions—angry, calmed, exhausted. We didn't go to services at Krivi Dol that Sunday morning. We felt it would be a desecration to hear the holy liturgy with such thoughts in our heads. On Monday, Srebra dragged me from the apartment. She had resolved to get her party membership card, and I was also resolved—resolved not to get one. “Let's walk through the city first,” I said, and instead of going straight downtown, we got off the bus by the National Theater. Something pulled me toward the National Gallery of Art, housed in the fifteenth-century Daut Pasha baths—its breast-shaped domes with their erect nipples poking into the air so seductive, so erotic. The cashier just said, “Go on” and let us in without paying. It was probably because of
our heads; we were often admitted for free. It was usually the older women who worked as cashiers, and they, it seemed, felt pity for us, but then they would spit against the evil eye and pray that such a thing didn't happen in their families. We entered the left wing of the baths, behind the piano. On the walls were large paintings of radiating spheres by someone named Matevski—one of ours, a Macedonian who lived in Paris. Oh, how those spheres washed over me, how their colors—red, orange, yellow, white—struck me, leveling me. I had never seen such colors before; the globes were fully four-dimensional: a saturated color, a light gathered like a dewdrop, a concentrate of light, a well of light. My blood rushed to my head and my cheeks burned. Srebra, too, was enthralled by what she saw. I couldn't contain my delight. My heart was beating madly, and I couldn't calm myself. I took off my glasses and I could still see all those spheres, so dramatic that I could see them even without my thick lenses. Matevski became my Matevski, the Macedonian painter of my life. Srebra laughed hysterically, saying how remarkable, how impossible it was: “Look over here,” she said. “He's painted our heads. Look how the spheres touch and intersect one another, and inside, there, that is definitely us.” After we stood a long time in front of the paintings, we left dazed, picking up some posters that stood on a small shelf by the ticket window, and then tottered over the stone bridge, staring at them. We stumbled over each other, laughed, and almost sang, while the passersby looked at us then turned away, horrified by the sight and the atmosphere that surrounded us. “Do you still want to join the party?” I asked, when we had finally calmed ourselves and had arrived in the city center. “Well, why not?” she asked. “Come on, let's go to London or Paris. Let's find this Matevski, too, and let's get separated. Let's begin a new life.” “Then will you forgive me?” I asked, and she began to whistle, to whistle like a lark. It was so lively, so filled with energy that I just let it go. It was the first time since the abortion that she had been like this, normal. We went to the party headquarters, where they had been waiting so long that Darko's father had been getting nervous. He presented us by saying, “This one is my daughter-in-law, and this one is her sister.” Everyone greeted us, smiling, bright, clean-shaven,
freshly combed, kind, not staring, only looking discreetly and with concern at our heads. Then, suddenly, with glasses of juice and Evropa chocolates, the forms were brought in. Srebra immediately filled hers out, but I just looked at mine, reading it but not taking the proffered pen with the party logo. Srebra signed hers and gave it to the secretary, but I said, “I can't join now.” Darko's father's face turned red, but he said nothing. They served us coffee, and while Srebra chewed a chocolate, the party secretary said, “So, you are seeking funds for your operation. The country must help people like you, but look who's leading it: former Communists. Nothing functions as it should, but we are already working on it; the money will be found.” “The money will be found,” Darko's father repeated as he led us to the door. The others waved to us, smiling, saying, “Goodbye and good luck.”