A Spare Life (37 page)

Sometime after we passed Zagreb, a woman with a long tormented face and a black ponytail came into our compartment and immediately called someone on the phone. It sounded like a child, but I didn't know if it was hers. She spoke to him for a long, long time, explaining how to fry two eggs and top them with a slice of salami. She gave precise directions: “The eggs are in the refrigerator on the balcony; use the silver pan; don't put in too much oil or they'll get greasy and then you can't eat them; two minutes is enough…” Again and again the same instructions. At the end, she said several times, “Enjoy your meal. I'll call you when I'm coming back. If Baba let's me.” She was speaking Bosnian—was
Baba
his grandma or father? Who was this woman with the sunken face calling? I looked at her, but couldn't understand what was going on with her, clearly something unhappy, clearly one of those personal sorrows and misfortunes that slowly destroys a life and compound, until nothing remains but a pile of bones and a puzzled cranium staring into its own emptiness.

The guy with the sandwich got off in Belgrade, and in Niš, a fortyish woman, who was trying to look much younger, got on. She was wearing a thong—a black cord peeked out of her pants, and each time she bent forward to get water or something from her backpack, the cord became more and more visible, shaking with her ample hips, which didn't narrow at the waist but seemed to continue right up to her breasts, where they came to a sudden halt: she was as flat as a board. That made the black cord beneath her pants seem to be both thong and brassiere: her ass and bosom together in one place, drawing attention. It was like a spread in a porno magazine where many small pictures are set close together to create the image of a single body. For a woman like her, who had just come on the train but had already taken off her boots and stretched her legs onto the seat opposite hers—then curled them up on her own—for a not-so-young woman like her, the montage was comprised of her ass and her absent breasts, which the black thong highlighted like a product advertising two for one. It wasn't sexy. With every bend forward, as the belt of her jeans dropped below the level of the black horizontal string, the thong's vertical string exuded the foul smell of dried excrement. I was nauseated.
I burrowed deeper into the poetry of Czesław Miłosz.

Nobody was waiting for me when I arrived in Skopje, which was understandable, because I hadn't called my parents to let them know I was coming. I don't know why I wanted to surprise them. Some streets were closed to traffic because of a large strike led by impoverished workers. Taxi drivers had to wind their way across the entire city in order to continue on to the far side. It occurred to me that I didn't have enough Macedonian denari for a taxi. I had to walk several stops on foot, carrying my backpack. Outside, it was slippery, cold, and dark. I finally found a bus. I arrived home exhausted, hungry. I rang the bell for a long time. I didn't have a key to the apartment. My mother finally opened the door, and after a quick greeting with two glancing kisses on the cheeks, she said, “So now you've chosen to come? Your father just got out of the hospital today.” We stood leaning on the chairs in the dining room, facing the wall on which the needlepoint of “The Goose Girl” was hanging. My father, pale, weak, face sunken, hair white, was bent over following his recent hernia operation; I had just arrived from London, not having slept—tired, hungry, and unwelcome. I was silent. I didn't know what to say. Not one inch of the apartment was my home anymore. When I went into “my” room, I curled up on the floor and didn't know what to do with my hands, with my heart. I had to go to the bathroom. There was no hot water in the boiler. It was cold; the heater couldn't warm the room, which hadn't been heated for two whole years. I wanted to leave the door open so warmth could come in from the kitchen and dining room, where my parents warmed themselves by the woodstove, but I didn't dare. I kneeled before the radiator as if before God. The room didn't dare open itself to me, to warm me. I was a stranger to it. In the bathroom, the little window was open a crack; the handle on the shower had been pulled off; the water sprayed in all directions. I turned on the boiler. I kneeled in the tub, and with barely tepid water, attempted to wash my body. Then I stood up, but let the water run off me for a moment longer. Whenever I showered standing—alone since the operation or with Srebra when she was alive—the water never seemed to go down the drain, but instead spilled onto the floor, and then we had to use all our energy to mop it up, pushing it toward the drain. With my
father's heavy, uncomfortable, plastic red-brown flip-flops on my feet, I stood naked in the tub. I shivered as I mopped up the water; then I opened the window wide to dry the floor more quickly, so my mother could again cover the floor with old newspapers, place a plastic sheet over them, and then, over that, a small mat or rug, the best of which was the blue plastic bath mat that Srebra and I had rolled up and carried home from the department store “26 July” as a victory for home cleanliness. On the floor, prior to that purchase, there had been only a long coarsely woven rug (most likely from the village, perhaps from my mother's trousseau). That rug had red, green, blue, brown, white, and black stripes, but was mainly red, a red carpet for celebrities, a simulacrum of something a family of property would have. I knew that rug down to the tiniest detail. I had thought it no longer existed, but then noticed it rolled up behind the washing machine. I stretched it out on the floor and lay down on it, but I could neither laugh nor cry. I rolled it back up and shoved it behind the washing machine. I went out. My father was lying on the couch. Pale, withered, he didn't look like the father I had known two years ago. After Srebra died, he had completely withered. He tried to smile when I came into the kitchen and sat on the chair by the window. Srebra's and my double chair was no longer there. I didn't dare ask where it was. I sat on an unfamiliar chair and ate bread, ajvar, and cheese. “Why didn't you let us know you were coming so I could have prepared something?” my mother whined. “You don't just show up like this from abroad.” I shrugged. “How is Bogdan? Why didn't he come?” my father asked. “He sends his greetings,” I said, “but he has work and couldn't come.” In that moment, it occurred to me that Bogdan hadn't had work for two full years, except for his quizzes, games, and prize crosswords, and the pocket money his mother sent for the rent. He was always busy with something. He was gone for hours at a time, and when he was at home, he was immersed in the computer. If I approached, he would jump up from his chair, hug me passionately, and nearly always carry me to bed, where he'd undress and caress me almost to unconsciousness, until both of us felt even greater desire for each other than before. But a moment of doubt flashed in my mind when I said he was working and was very busy before it
disappeared, because I was too upset being here, in my home, in our home, in my parents' home.

My mother had tucked all the photographs of Srebra and me into framed needlepoints hung in the dining room. Most of them were photos from Srebra's wedding, but there were also a few of just the two of us. We didn't have a single picture of the four of us: Mom, Dad, Srebra, and me, even though the photographer had twice asked to photograph us as a family at the wedding. Our father had said, “Do we really need that, too?” So we were left with no family portraits except for some black-and-white snapshots from a family vacation, in which my mother and father are wearing bathing suits, and Srebra and I, with our long hair intertwined, are dressed in shorts and the tank tops with the straps long enough for us to pull up over our legs. Once we got a bit older, the four of us together were never photographed again. My gaze passed over the photographs, wedged in the framed needlepoints. I leaned against the chair in the dining room, staring as if I were watching the TV, when I was, in fact, looking below it, into the glass cabinet that held the smallest imaginable cups, which I had always thought were children's coffee cups. That's what Srebra and I had used them for, pouring in real coffee to read the grounds and learn whom we were going to marry when we grew up. Srebra and I had been extremely curious about whom we would marry after we were separated in an operation in London. But now, as I stood looking at them, I realized they actually belonged to a tea set, for serving the milk that was usually added to Russian, Indian, or Turkish tea. There was also a small dish for sugar cubes. Srebra would never know that we had been mistaken about the miniature cups. And about many other things as well. Must I even recall the things we are ashamed of? In the bathroom: pages from independent newspapers under the blue rubber mats. On the wall-mounted steam heater: a rag from old work clothes, most likely a coat. On the hanger: my father's belt. (Sometimes, we touched and studied it carefully, hesitantly. It seemed to be some secret connection between us; or was the belt, in some odd way, the parental link between our father and us?) When we were children, children with conjoined heads, how many times had he threatened Srebra and me with, “I am going to take off my belt,” and we had fallen silent, petrified. We became perfectly still. Once, he actually did take it off when Srebra and I
asked for the rulers with a 1983 calendar printed on them, which our mother brought us from work. We weren't allowed to bring them to school so no one could take them from us. They were kept in our parents' room, probably in the same place as the folder with the pictures from Animal Kingdom. One evening, Srebra and I dug in our heels. We wanted to get our rulers and draw with them, so we went to their room while they were watching television in the dining room, and we climbed up onto the armchair to look for them in the cupboard. A small porcelain ashtray tumbled to the floor and shattered. Srebra and I quickly closed the cupboard and climbed down, but our father had heard the crash and came into the room, took off his belt, and hit the two of us on our behinds, shouting, “You have devoured the world! Voracious creatures!” Then, as he left the room, his shoulder knocked against a ceramic boy that hung on the wall beside a ceramic girl—a pair that was made to hang on a bathroom door because both the girl and boy had their pants down. They were bathroom signs, but in our home, they hung in the dining room. The boy fell and shattered, and that's when our mother jumped up from the chair in which she had been sitting, sullen with furrowed brow, waiting for our father to punish us, and shrieked at him, “Are you blind? Aren't you paying attention? It was so nice there on the wall.” Our father, in a rage like we had never seen before, ran up and slapped her, then left the house—probably going down to the garage. Our mother cried, sobbing, saying nothing, and Srebra and I felt such pity that we forgot about the belt on our backsides. We were shocked by the slap our father had given our mother. Then Srebra and I repeated—I to myself, Srebra half-aloud—“Pervert.”
Pervert
, a word that in our childhood was a synonym for idiot. Who knows how its use, clichéd and crazy, had become embedded in the membrane of our brains.

I lived through those two weeks in Skopje ascetically: one
pastrmajlija
for the three of us for lunch; half an egg, margarine, and a bit of kashkaval for breakfast. I bought fifteen Turkish pastries at the pastry shop near the church, but they sat somewhere in the big room for days without being eaten. My mother, dressed in her blue robe the whole time I was there, kept telling me there was a cake in the freezer. “But,” she said. “It would have to be thawed.” Even when there was something, there was nothing. Post-socialist asceticism. A stomach-grumbling diet program. I was chronically hungry. I went downtown, walked from the Bit Pazar market to the center and from the center to the flower market, where I bought flowers, and then walked back to the Bit Pazar, buying burek, a small meat pie, or a sesame bun along the way. I ate and walked, walked and ate. I lit candles in the church of Saint Dimitrija. I prayed, and a feeling of home, of comfort, washed over me. Oh! How much I had missed in London that smell that doesn't exist anywhere except in Orthodox churches—the smell of icons, frescoes, candles for the living and dead. Then I took the bus to the cemetery in Butel, where I sat on Srebra's grave and arranged flowers around her stone. I brushed the marble with antibacterial towelettes; I sat and spoke to her. I told her everything, without shame, without a speck of the anger or irony that had always been present in our conversations. I told her about things in London, how Bogdan was, how things were in Skopje. I told her Darko had gone into the monastery, had taken his orders, and that was why he wouldn't be coming. I told her what I had eaten that day, what our mother and father were saying. I told her Mom had not taken off her blue robe. I remarked on their habits and ego trips, sometimes with laughter and sometimes with tears. I asked her how often they came to visit, rhetorically answering, “Only for All Souls', right? Dad can't drive. His hands shake, he doesn't see well, and buses are expensive. It costs 100 denari each for them to come. Things are expensive, you know…” I laughed like a fool, because I knew Srebra would have laughed too, had she been alive. If anything connected us and made us close, it was the non-parental way our parents acted, to the point of absurdity, surrealism. I told her our parents had been at the pig slaughter in Bulačani a few days prior.
They had come home with two bags: one with meat, liver, and cracklings for them, the other with ears and trotters for piftija pork aspic for Aunt Ivanka. The next day, our father brought Aunt Ivanka her bag, but the day after, at 7:30 in the morning, our mother realized that they had mixed up the bags, and he had given Aunt Ivanka their bag. Cries and shouts. At 7:30, she called Aunt Ivanka and in a weepy voice, told her that they had mixed up the bags. At twelve o'clock, our father set off to the school with the correct bag, where he met Aunt Ivanka, who was clutching our bag. The handoff took place. Suppressed shame in his eyes, a bit of anger and scorn, something right out of the movies. I told Srebra how I imagined Aunt Ivanka and our father meeting in an empty parking lot or under a dark bridge at night, exchanging the bags as if they were exchanging money and drugs. I began to laugh again. Perhaps Srebra was also laughing in her grave. But the people at the surrounding graves looked at me and crossed themselves, spitting into their jackets against the evil eye—“
Tfu-tfu
, God protect us from such a thing”—just like it had been when Srebra and I were conjoined and people gave us a wide berth or spat against the evil eye, praying that such a thing wouldn't happen in their families.