A Spare Life (31 page)

I knew nothing of what was happening. Darko hadn't gone to Skopje, but to the consul's house. He was waiting for the airplane that would fly us all back to Macedonia—me alive, Srebra dead in a casket, and him neither alive nor dead. Bogdan decided to go with us as well. It was all the same to me, I just couldn't believe Srebra no longer existed. All the time I was conscious, I wondered if our mother and father knew. Surely, they hadn't called to ask how things were going; I knew them too well to think that—they wouldn't dial a foreign telephone number on their own dime, even if it were a matter of life or death. They would wait for us to call them, after everything was finished, of course. But I hadn't called. Srebra did not survive. Surely they had learned from the media. After all, hadn't the doctor said that there were journalists from Macedonia? But Darko had called them. He told our mother, “Srebra did not survive.” That's all. Then everyone cried and mourned, each in his or her own way. When I felt strong enough, I gathered my strength and called them from the hospital room. My mother's voice was barely audible. All she said was, “Ah, child.” In the background, I could hear my father's sobs. I dropped the receiver. It was then that I, too, began to weep. I shouted and wept, I howled and sobbed. But Srebra could no longer hear me. Had she not survived so I could survive? Hadn't we both signed the paper saying that she was to live? “Liars!” I shouted. “Liars!” “No,” the doctor said, “the separation of your heads was the same down to the millimeter. But the vein was on your side. Her blood killed her. It gushed from the vein into which we had diverted it, refusing to flow properly; we could not stanch it. No force alive could have stopped it. No one from the entire team managed to compress the capillaries and stop the flow. But yours stopped on its own. At exactly 10:25, it seemed to just dry up.”

My wound had been wrapped with tremendous care. I was ready to leave. Srebra's body was yearning for its grave in Macedonian soil. Accompanied by the Macedonian consul in London, we—Srebra in her casket, Darko, Bogdan, and I—left London by plane for Skopje. Journalists from around the world were at the airport, microphones and cameras focused on the plane. I made no statement. None of us did. We were silent, not looking at anyone. My head was wrapped in a special casing of different bandages. The lights from the cameras flashed in my eyes, which filled with tears behind my glasses. I don't know how we reached Skopje. A hearse was waiting for us. The casket carrying Srebra was placed inside and then brought directly to the chapel in the cemetery. We were ushered into a black Mercedes, and the driver discreetly asked the diplomat where we should go. “Home,” I said at once. Bogdan gave him the address. There was no one in front of the entryway. Above, on the balcony, my father stood—a twig in black—swaying as if he might fall at any moment. It was as if he wasn't even there. Darko, Bogdan, and I climbed the stairs to the apartment. Dad stood in front of the door. Terrible scenes of pain and tears followed. My mother and father were withered, lethargic, with dark circles under their eyes. My mother still managed to say to Darko, “You're guilty of this. You drove them to it.” Darko said nothing and shielded himself with his arms gripped tightly across his chest. At first, they didn't recognize Bogdan. They had no idea who he was or what he wanted, thinking he was from the embassy. Then the neighbors began to gather and our relatives arrived. They expressed their sympathy to me, stroking my face. They were sorry for Srebra, and it seemed as if they were not particularly happy I had been the one to survive. It was clear in their eyes, not their lips, twisted in pain. Auntie Dobrila recognized Bogdan, who sat beside me on the arm of the couch in our parents' room, and she hugged him, then me, then him again. Darko stood by the window. The freezer gurgled, and the sound mixed with the sobs and cries in the room and through the whole apartment. Aunt Milka threw herself on the floor and cried, “Srebra! Ah, Srebra, where are you, apple of your Auntie's eye? Who will be the lawyer in our family now? You left a husband, a sister, a mother, a father…” and on and on.
Auntie Magda and Uncle Kole also came, and they caressed my shoulder, saying, “Zlata, now Srebra's left us, too.” When Roza died, he had said, “Roza has left us.” Do I need to say the pain I felt after losing Srebra was twice as great as the pain of losing Roza? Just as my life was now twice as long, my pain was that much greater. When Roza died, I was a child. I wasn't fully aware of the enormity of what was happening, and never completely understood her death. It was as if she moved somewhere, as if she disappeared from my life, not into death, but to some other place. It was like when people move away, when there's sorrow and emptiness in the souls of those close to them, but not hopelessness as well. And the world is not so big; people may meet again sometime, somewhere. That's how Roza vanished from my life, at least when I thought about it now, having lost Srebra. The pain was similar, but not the same. I don't know. The burial was the day after our arrival in Skopje. The scenes repeated: sobs, my aunts fainting, our mother as pale as a dried-up rag, our father completely lost. I hadn't hugged my mother or my father even once. Everyone else embraced me, but not them. Grandpa didn't come. He was forbidden to, so as not to upset him in his old age. And he didn't have the strength after our grandmother's death, exactly forty days prior. My uncle, my mother's brother, came alone, without his wife or my cousins. What a curse had befallen us. Why had everyone in our family started dying? Still, had my grandmother been alive, we would have had to bury her alongside Srebra. She couldn't have endured it. The burial was teeming with journalists. I said nothing. The priest, the same one who married Srebra and Darko, didn't stop chanting “Lord have mercy.” Darko also said nothing. Nor did Bogdan. Not a word. Bogdan was sleeping at Auntie Dobrila's. No food was served after the burial. I won on that at least. “No one will eat or drink because of Srebra's death,” I told my mother. “No one!” Everyone just went his own way. Darko asked me if I needed anything. He clearly needed strength and support. Evidently, his parents were able to offer it to him. I surely could not.

I don't know how the days following Srebra's burial passed, or—even more—the first nights. I lay in our bed alone, and beside my head, it was as if Srebra's head were there. But it wasn't, and that fact jolted me like an electric current. So many things went through my mind… I sought the house I had imagined in childhood that magically lulled me to sleep with its warmth and comfort; it no longer existed, but I still recalled how it looked in my dreams. Now it was only an empty house, lifeless, abandoned by its own tenants. The time passed between delirium and reality, between our bed and the bench in the courtyard of our school, where, in the evening when the school day was done, Bogdan and I sat for hours, sometimes without uttering a single word. We sat and looked at the windows of our primary school, which hadn't been renovated in all these years, at the monument no longer sporting the bust of our patron, at the fountain that Cvetko, our art teacher, had made—it had been placed in the schoolyard with great ceremony, but water never flowed from it. Also missing its bust was the half-hidden monument to Josip Broz Tito in front of the windows, where recess had been held and where our teacher Stojna gave Srebra and me a doll named Leila to play with. That's where we made our one and only little umbrella out of matchsticks bound together with red wool thread, and our only International Women's Day card with grains of corn and wheat glued to it, which Srebra and I then tucked under the couch in the kitchen along with an egg slicer as a present for our mother on the eighth of March. How our hearts had beat, waiting for her to come home from work. When she arrived, we poked both our heads under the couch and pulled out the present to give to her. But she just laughed, broadly, loudly, saying, “That's just what we need—an egg slicer.” But when Srebra and I had examined the egg slicer in its little yellow box in the Slavija store, we had thought how wonderful it would be to have such a thing at home, so that when we boiled eggs for Easter we would be able to place them under the knifelike wires, and the egg would split into ten beautiful yellow and white slices. It was this school where Bogdan had read aloud his essay, “When You Hit Rock Bottom.” It was from this school that we had walked in rows of two toward Bogdan's little house to see his dead mother. From this school,
we went to see the dead parents of other classmates: Natalija's father, Dejan's mother. Srebra and I returned to this school after Roza died. Bogdan remembered the names of all our classmates, all the teachers and principals. He knew exactly who had sat where, with whom, what sort of winter jackets they wore, what kind of boots, if they had sneakers, who wore glasses, who had lice. Bogdan remembered everything. He even remembered the song “I wander the streets…,” which our classmate Juliana sang on every field trip and during breaks between classes. We sat on the bench, which had only two planks remaining, inscribed with names, arrows, hearts, and a variety of sayings. We looked at our childhood school, into emptiness, and Bogdan sang, “I wander the streets” in a quiet voice. I wanted to die, only that. I could shove my head in the oven or hang myself from the chandelier that had always hung from the ceiling a bit off-center in our childhood room, or drink a glass of the hydrochloric acid our mother used to clean the toilet bowl. I wanted to die instantly, for the ground to open beneath me and to simply fall, already dead, into my own grave, with no lead-up to death, no preliminaries. For the earth to close above me and for no one to think about me anymore—about Zlata with the head, the one who survived, while her sister, Srebra, did not. But I was alive, and all those thoughts and memories flooding my mind after Srebra's burial were my organism's self-defense. Life struggles for itself; like when your temperature rises and your body signals that it's unwell, fighting the attacking viruses with heat. That is why I had those senseless memories and suicidal thoughts. I was battling against the pain. The left side of my head was still bandaged, which intensified the feeling that Srebra's head was still there, bound with mine. Nothing could fill the feeling of emptiness I felt on that side. My left hand had been suddenly freed, but it didn't know what to do in space; it had not yet learned how to extend horizontally, wave, grasp, take. I missed Srebra. I missed her body right there, right beside mine, her hair intertwining with mine, her breathing next to mine. Srebra and I separated so we could stop being “invalids,” and no longer have a “physical defect,” but now, with my body alone in the universe, without hers, I felt that the lack of her body, of her head, was a deficit. I felt I was missing an arm, a leg, a
head. Now I was truly an invalid. Bogdan understood my pain, but my emptiness was something he couldn't quite understand, the lostness, the powerlessness without Srebra's body next to mine. “You'll get used to it,” he said, “but I can't guarantee you'll get used to the fact that she died.” “Srebra did not survive,” I corrected him. “Srebra did not survive the operation she wanted so much and had anticipated since she was a child. Much more than I, she had longed for us to be separated. It was her choice. At any price. But I don't know if she was really aware of the price.” In those weeks, Bogdan went to his mother's grave several times. Alone. I went to Srebra's, most often alone, but usually ran into Darko, who would then leave. He was slowly but surely distancing himself from me. He would leave me alone with my sister. He asked me if I wanted to come over and get my things. I told him I couldn't; I didn't want to go back there—it would be too difficult. “Please, bring me the books, all of Srebra's and my books,” I told him. The following day, he brought me a box with the books, along with several bags of my clothes and other incidentals, such as makeup. “I'll keep all of Srebra's things,” he said, “in case you need anything.” He also called my parents and asked if they needed anything—perhaps to be driven somewhere—but they always refused. Our father was in no condition to drive our beat-up Å koda. His hands trembled too much, and he was constantly on the edge of tears. He had no one else to drive him to the cemetery, and it was hard to get there by bus. “I have to pay fifty denars to go, and fifty denars to get home,” I heard my mother explaining to Aunt Milka about why she didn't go to the cemetery more often. Then she wept, sobbing into the receiver, but my aunt always talked over her. I couldn't stand those scenes. I tossed and turned in the bed in our room. I lay there reading. Always the same things. Three books Bogdan brought me from downtown one day. “From Sonja, the used bookseller,” he said. Three thick volumes of Marina Tsvetaeva in a Serbian translation: one volume entitled
Songs and Poems
; another called
On Art and Poetry and Portraits
; and a third,
Autobiographical Prose: My Pushkin; Letters
. Each was inscribed, “In love.” I read the books in no particular order, without bending the pages. Tsvetaeva's songs, her letters, her
notes, her prose, everything, everything. I understood her, and she understood me. It was a different type of reading, different from everything else. I read, but from inside it, as if in sync with the rhythm of her writing. Each sentence was also mine. Everything that was hers was mine, and everything of mine was hers. With one hand, I turned the pages of the three books, with the other, I squeezed the icon. It poked me with its broken edge as my life, stretched like a corpse between Marina Tsvetaeva and Saint Zlata Meglenska, slowly revived. My life wanted to survive. Today, I know I wouldn't have survived that period of my life without Marina Tsvetaeva and Saint Zlata Meglenska. I know. And not without Bogdan, although in the days right after Srebra's burial, I didn't know what I felt toward him. Gratitude, that is certain: a shoulder to cry on; support; a protector, although I don't know from what or from whom; someone to recognize that I existed, that I had survived—something the journalists, with whom I didn't wish to speak, wanted to document more than anything. I wasn't ready. And never would be. Any contact with the media felt like a desecration of Srebra, as if I were becoming famous on her account, on her back, over her dead body. On television, I saw Darko give a statement about the money that had been designated for his wife's and her sister's operation. “Who will pay back the money, given that your wife didn't survive?” the reporter asked. “Will you sue the hospital in London?” Darko's face burned, and he said, “No, I won't. The chief neurosurgeon did everything possible, and even more. The chances for survival were very small, but both of them agreed to the operation. They signed off; each took responsibility for their separation.” The journalist ended the conversation by saying, “Their risk, but our bill.” I was stunned.