A Spare Life (33 page)

That evening, as I watched the evening news in my room on the small black-and-white television, listening as the voice of the anchorwoman doubled the voice coming from the dining room, where my mother and father were watching the same news program, the newsman announced the lead item: “Scandal! The surviving twin from the operation in London paid for by our Health Insurance Fund is now being bullied by the opposition party to transfer 150,000 pounds into its account! After the medical team in London decided to return the 200,000 pounds to the surviving twin as a humanitarian gesture, the opposition party, which evidently convinced the fund, through bribery and manipulation, to finance the operation, is now trying to take the money for itself! The party claims it will return 100,000 pounds to the fund and keep 50,000 pounds for the upcoming campaign. The surviving twin will only get to keep 50,000 pounds of the money the hospital in London gave exclusively to her.” I think my heart stopped. The vein left to me after the operation gurgled nonstop, throbbing in my temple, my ear, my throat, my brain.

“Now that's a fine business!” my mother shouted as loudly as possible from the dining room, and then she burst into my room. She spouted off at me as if I were the one at fault for this affair. Harsh words were spoken that evening, many angry utterances and expressions of hatred, with an absence of affection, appalling attacks and insults. There was only one line all three of us were careful not to cross: naming Srebra. No one mentioned her. No reference was made to her in any context. Thank God we preserved her from our human baseness. That evening, I once again asked myself why I had been the one to survive and not Srebra. She had every reason to live; I had none. They should have cut my head in half, leaving only the side attached to Srebra's. They should have removed everything that remained in my head, removed it piece by piece, so the vein on which Srebra's life depended would remain untouched and the piece of skin and veins from my head would be left attached to hers. Her hair would have grown on that side to hide the wound. She would have been completely healthy and normal. Perhaps at night, my skin on her temple would have prevented her from falling asleep; it might have poked her until she pressed down on it, and that would have weighed on her, but she would have just turned on her other side and fallen asleep in Darko's embrace. Why hadn't Srebra and I agreed on that kind of operation? That kind of operation could even have been performed in Skopje. Without the money from the fund and without joining the party. Why had I been so selfish that I, too, wanted to survive? Now I was alive but dead, completely dead. I lay on my back, just as when Srebra and I had lain there, and I felt that it was my grave. I would be buried alive in it.

The next day, early in the morning, I called Bogdan. I told him I was coming to London. I would try to find a way forward there. “Either with you or without you,” I said. “With me,” he replied. I went to the bank and took out every last pound. I hurried to party headquarters with 200,000 pounds in my purse. Inside, I pulled out the piles of money the bank teller had bound and numbered for me. I set exactly 50,000 pounds on the table. The only one there was the cleaning woman, washing the floor. She said everyone was in the president's office having a special meeting. “Here's their money,” I said and left. I continued on to the Health Insurance Fund. There, I nearly created a scandal in the office of the director's secretary. She didn't want to let me go in. I took out the biggest pile of money. I was certain it was 100,000 pounds because the bank employee was a true professional. I left it on the table in front of her. “Here it is. I sincerely thank you for helping my sister and me get separated,” I said to her. She said, “I had nothing to do with that.” At that moment, the director came out, saw the money, and said, “But your sister didn't survive the operation.” “Yes, but I did,” I said, leaving. “But what am I supposed to do with cash? They'll put me in jail,” he shouted after me, but it wasn't my concern. Then I went to the British Embassy. They already knew me there. They had tried to reach me by phone, they said, but my mother told them I had gone out that morning and she didn't know where. I was led into a large room, where I explained everything to them. The employee was stunned by the way I had handed the money in cash to the party and Health Insurance Fund. He said, “That's not allowed. You graduated with a law degree, didn't you? There are laws, administrative procedures, and regulations. You can't simply walk around Skopje with that much money, leaving it in offices.” I responded that I was aware of that but it's what I had done, and I'd come for an expedited visa. I planned to go to London immediately, on January 1. I would not remain in Skopje. I planned to enroll in a graduate program but had to meet the application deadline. With 50,000 pounds, I was sure to find some program. “That's for certain,” the employee said, “We'll see what we can do. I can't guarantee anything.”

The media didn't stop reporting on the money. They had a statement from the president of the opposition party, who said that no one had asked me for it directly but that I had, of my own accord, given them 50,000 pounds. The director of the fund said, “Most likely, the surviving sister has some sort of mental deficiency, which is why she came in today and left 100,000 pounds on the table.” I was the only one who didn't give a statement. I had raced around the city wrapped in a shawl and wearing a wool hat and large sunglasses, as I disbursed the money, then went home by bus. That evening, in addition to being on all the other news programs, my—our—incident was the topic of the program
Open Club
. Experts from various fields spoke about the situation with the twins, or, rather, the twin. Among them was Darko's father. The debate was sharp. Some thought the money should be returned in full to the fund so someone else could use it for medical expenses. There were so many sick and dying children in the country, but no one offered them help. Others said that, since Great Britain had given the money to me as a gesture of support and condolences, and not to the fund or the party, the money should belong to me—to serve, at least, as material compensation for the loss of my sister. One even said that England should take the money back and not play games with humanitarian acts or gestures, since Macedonia had not yet reached that level of thinking and what they'd done had only created difficulties and nothing else. A government official went after Darko's father, asking him why there was no documentation of the incident, why the request for funds hadn't been made public, and why there was no written verification that the fund had actually paid for the operation. Darko's father said he had met with the vice-premier and it was delusional of the public to think the government didn't know about the case. “I mean, how?” Darko's father said. “The vice-premier, the director of the fund, and I ate lunch together at Del Fufo and agreed to help the twins. But, to avoid kicking up a lot of dust, we decided we would bring the case to the public after the operation.” “Yes, but you helped them because one of them, the one who died, was your daughter-in-law,” another guest interjected. “Had it been someone else, you wouldn't have lifted a finger.” All sorts of
things were said at that round table. Afterward, viewers called in, and every single one asked where I was, why I wasn't participating in the broadcast, and then gave their own interpretations of the situation, radical, trivial, or even shameless. The impression it gave was that the fund had taken a bribe to pay for the operation and the opposition had hidden the payment. And the government had played dumb so as not to appear like it wasn't helping one of its citizens. Potato stew, just like the smell in the bank. I pulled the television's plug from its socket and didn't plug it back in before I left.

I received my visa on December 31, 1996. That night, I barely slept. My mother and father went to bed at ten o'clock. We didn't wish each other a Happy New Year, even after we awoke. On January 1, 1997, I went to Srebra's grave in the morning. I told her everything. I cleared the snow from her grave, and then with the snow made a small snowman on the grave. I tore out the two inside buttons from my coat to make his eyes. I drew a mouth on him with lipstick—smiling from ear to ear. I took the red hat from my head and I put it on him. I blew him and Srebra a kiss, and left. My plane was departing that afternoon. I put my most important possessions into my black suitcase—a few small things and some photographs. I was unable to unstick the poster of Matevski's luminous spheres from the door. I kissed Marina Tsvetaeva on the poster hanging on the door to the room, but didn't take it. I wanted it to be there if I ever came to that apartment again, that home, so that someone would be waiting for me with love. I took Tsvetaeva's books. And I put the small icon in my pocket, checking it three times to make sure it didn't fall out. I called a taxi. My father carried my suitcase downstairs. In the hallway, my mother kissed me quickly on the cheeks and said, “Oh, child!” My father wept beside the taxi. I felt sorry for him. For myself. For Srebra. For my mother. Everything in our lives was broken. I got into the taxi and left.

Bogdan was waiting for me in London. We kissed chastely, and our noses bumped. We laughed and rubbed them together, giving each other Eskimo kisses. A train would take us to Victoria station. An old woman who had been on my flight from Skopje got on the train. She was a granny dressed in a black knit vest and carrying a bag and suitcase. She sat down across from us and asked to see our tickets, pointing at them with her finger. We gave them to her. Then she mumbled in Macedonian, “twelve times two is twenty-four.” Bogdan and I laughed, but didn't say anything. I looked at the London suburbs out the window, a hodgepodge of Dickensian houses and more contemporary structures. The Macedonian woman got out at the station before Victoria. We took another train to Shoreditch, an area in East London. Dark wood stairs led to the attic apartment of building number 130–132. Bogdan rented it a long time ago when he turned eighteen and Auntie Stefka, the woman he had adopted from our neighborhood, told him it was time for him to leave Brighton and confront London. The apartment belonged to a Turkish family, whom I never met. The windows looked down on the street and some neighborhood bars. In the evening, starting at around six, people gathered in front of the bars with drinks in one hand, briefcases in the other, to celebrate the end of yet another workday. Sometimes, Bogdan and I went down and had a drink: I usually drank tea; Bogdan, a glass of red wine. Although we had known each other since childhood and he was with me at critical moments in my life, it was only now that we were living together that we got to know each other as a man and a woman—as girlfriend and boyfriend. He had already given up the job as a bed warmer at the time of Srebra and my successful, or rather unsuccessful, operation. Indeed, how should I think of the operation—as a success or a failure? I survived, but I didn't consider the operation a success, because only I had survived, and not Srebra. The medical profession, however, looked more positively on such results. And, according to the media, the operation was a success. In similar situations, the normal outcome is for neither patient to survive, and seen in that light, ours had been successful.

I contacted the doctor at the clinic. He said that he could hardly wait to see me, and I had an appointment with him that same day. He told me I was in great shape. The wound had healed, and the world's shortest pageboy looked great on me, as did the color. He also noticed I was wearing contact lenses and said, “That's a change for the better.” He said he would like to x-ray my head to see that everything inside was in order. Everything was fine. It was as if I'd never been conjoined with Srebra, as if we'd never shared a vein. “Externally, things are fine,” I said. “But I feel an emptiness in the spot where I was joined with Srebra. It's as if I'm missing a piece of flesh, as if I'm missing that part of my head.” He nodded, and said, “That's normal, but with time you won't have that sensation,” and I wondered how he knew, given that he had never had a Siamese twin with whom he was conjoined above the ear.

“How do you feel psychologically?” he asked. “The worst I've ever felt in my life,” I said. “I have nightmares, and during the day, my conscience gnaws at me, and I don't know how to deal with it. I have crying fits and bouts of despair. I feel lost. Sometimes, something like hysteria comes over me, or I fall into a depression. I can only function normally when I'm with Bogdan. I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to live like this.” The doctor nodded like he understood. “Should I see a psychiatrist?” I asked. He looked at me awhile, thinking about how to respond.

“In conventional medical opinion, cases like yours can't proceed without psychiatric intervention,” he said. “I'm personally against it, however. I am more in favor of people finding their own way, their own remedy, depending on their individual natures. Think about a time when things in your life were good, when you felt happy. Was it in yoga class? Or during meditation, if that has been a part of your life? Perhaps the Hare Krishna chant fills you with hope. Or Sunday mass? Try to recall the happiest moments in your life and repeat those experiences, those feelings. In painful moments, we should return to the things that have offered us support, and when we felt truly ourselves.” He was serious and no longer joking around. I left his office with an open mind, like a book waiting to be written. I told Bogdan about it. He said, “That's good advice. Look, you're in London. You're with me. Take your time, relax. You've weathered the worst of this crisis. After a while, you'll see that everything will be better. And if you need help, do what the doctor said. I'll do everything I can for you. Everything I couldn't do for my mother.”

I still wasn't accustomed to sleeping on my side, but after passionate lovemaking in all sorts of positions he dreamed up, as if pulled from the Kama Sutra, Bogdan turned my back toward him and pulled his body close to mine, curving into an arc, hugging me with his right arm. That is how we fell asleep, in a constant state of excitement, because I felt his penis against my body all night, and I would fall asleep only when he began to snore. I would carefully pull myself from his embrace and turn onto my back. I'd then sleep with my legs spread and my hands on my chest—sometimes crossed, the way Sister Zlata showed
me long ago—but I had nightmarish dreams in which my head would fall from my neck and roll away. I was still alive, but without a head. Bogdan told me I would sometimes cry out in my sleep and wake him. He would shower me with kisses, and then, a moment later, spread my legs and penetrate me without foreplay, and, panting, he would come before I was fully awake. He would make Turkish coffee, we would have breakfast, and then he would leave. “To go chase work,” he would say, but it wasn't quite clear to me exactly what he meant by that. He would return in the afternoon with a whole pile of supermarket catalogs filled with coupons for prize games, or magazines with prize crossword puzzles or announcements for quiz shows. He was obsessed with them and not looking, evidently, for any serious work. His auntie Stefka put money in his account once a month. “Like a paycheck,” I said, but he replied, “Yes, that's what it looks like, but it's only pocket money. She's still trying to make up for telling me when I was eighteen years old that she was tired of being an adopted mother and I should become independent and find my own apartment in London.”