A Spare Life (4 page)

That New Year's Eve, as usual, our father decorated the holiday tree while Srebra and I crouched down and watched him put up the ornaments, wind the frayed red garland around the tree, and place a few puffs of cotton here and there on the green branches. The tree was small, a half meter tall, with just a few meager decorations. He decorated it himself so we wouldn't break the ornaments. There were only six of them, each different. Then he picked up the tree and brought it into the large room, their room. He set it on the small table in the middle of the room, and our mother immediately placed a bowl of Russian salad with mayonnaise to its left and a plate holding a cake filled with pink strawberry pudding sprinkled with ground walnuts to its right. And so the New Year's Eve atmosphere was created, though not in the dining room, where we sat on hard wooden seats around the table to watch television, nor in our room, where Srebra and I slept on a foldout couch, with Mom's sewing machine in the middle of the room covered with an embroidered sheet on which stood a vase filled with plastic flowers. No, there was no New Year's Eve festivity there, only in our parents' cold room, in which Srebra and I spent just a few minutes a day, just long enough to have a look at the tree and nibble a bit of the cake.

While they ate lunch at the small table in the kitchen—our father seated in our large chair and our mother perpendicular to him—Srebra and I, who had already eaten, stood in the dining room listening to a Serbian song playing on the radio: “They're asking me, they're asking me, apple of my eye…” Our hearts pounded wildly in our temples. Srebra's face seemed clouded over; I think she wanted to cry, but I was somehow elated, as if enchanted. I could hardly wait for 1984 to pass so we could enter the new year, which would surely bring us something new, a new life, perhaps new hope for our future. The children's magazine
Our World
had wanted to publish a photograph of us with the caption, “The new year will also bring hope to Skopje's twin sisters conjoined at the head.” Our teacher, however, wouldn't allow them to photograph us. “As it is,” she said, “everybody gawks inquisitively wherever we go. If you turn up in the papers, there will be no end to the photos! Everywhere we turn, there will be journalists. My mother-in-law lives with us, and she's a village woman. If she saw that, she would gossip with the neighbors about me and the kinds of students I have. Over my dead body will they photograph you, and that's that!”

So, on account of the gossipy habits of our teacher's mother-in-law, the media did not find out about us during our childhood, and the editor of
Our World
was too kind a man to wish us any harm.

That evening, right at midnight, we had planned to perform the play
Alphabet Soup!
on the front steps of the apartment building with Roza, but when Srebra announced it, our father snapped, “Whoever feels like watching can go ahead and watch; I'm staying inside.” Mom added, “Really, we're not going to go out there and freeze for some stupid thing. You just do whatever you think up, and now it's a play you want to perform?” Srebra and I slipped silently out of the house and rang the bell at Roza's. Her sister came to the door all dressed up, about to head out for a New Year's Eve party; we told her that the play was canceled, and she shouted to Roza while putting on her coat, “Roza, the play's canceled.” She came out, smiling, and pinched our cheeks. Then she closed the door behind her, and the two of us, tugging at each other and jumping up the stairs two at a time in tandem, ran home in our stocking feet. We went into the bathroom. It was bitterly cold; the little bathroom window was never closed. Standing in front of the mirror, we each pulled our hair into a ponytail with a red rubber band. When we pulled our hair back into ponytails, the spot where our heads were joined was visible right above my left ear and her right. The skin passed from one to the other. There was no scar, nothing. Our temples drifted into each other's like desert sand. There was just enough space between the fused spot and my ear to poke the temple of my glasses through. We were so similar that if I didn't wear glasses, no one would have been able to tell which was me and which was Srebra. We looked at each other in the mirror, our gaze fixed and powerless. We stood there a long time without saying a word, Srebra with her sullen face, I with tears streaming down behind my glasses. Finally, Srebra dragged me over to the toilet. After she flushed, we unlocked the door and went out.

New Year's Eve smelled of roast chicken and potatoes. Srebra and I ate first, and when we got up from our big chair in the kitchen, our father sat down in it; our mother sat perpendicular to him, and they ate. Then Srebra and I went into the large room to see the New Year's tree on its little table one more time. We stood for two or three minutes trembling with cold, nibbling a bit of the cake with the pink filling and sprinkled with ground walnuts. We waved to the tree and left the room. Later, the four of us sat around the table, each of us with a little yellow plate of roasted peanuts, and watched the New Year's Eve program that was broadcast from Belgrade. A half hour before the start of 1985, our parents lay down, and Srebra and I snacked on the last of the peanuts and quietly counted down to midnight. Then we quickly turned toward each other as much as we could and exchanged fleeting air kisses, murmuring, “Happy New Year.” Right after that, a movie began in which Demi Moore had both a male and female lover. They were emitting shrieks and lying on top of each other. The women were touching each other's breasts, and when Demi Moore was with her husband, he put his hands over her hips, grasping as much of them as he could. She was moaning with pleasure. My heart was pounding like crazy. I felt an excitement between my legs. Srebra must have felt it too, because she kept gulping down her saliva. Suddenly, the door to our parents' room opened. Our father stood in the doorway. He stepped into the dining room, turned off the TV, and said sharply, “Go to bed. That's not a movie for children.” Srebra and I went and lay down. Usually we slept on our backs with our hands alongside our bodies and our legs stretched away from each other's. That New Year's Eve we lay on our stomachs, with our faces in the pillows. I was on her side of the bed, she on mine. We moved our bodies as far from each other as possible without causing pain in the spot where our heads were joined. My left hand was tucked up under my stomach, and Srebra's right hand was tucked under hers. The two of us were thinking of the day when our summer game of fortune-telling would come true, when we would have husbands with whom we too could cry out in pleasure. We didn't dare think about women. Sleep overtook us in that position. When we awoke, it was the
first day of 1985.

That year, January 6, our Christmas Eve, fell on a Sunday. Early in the morning, you could hear knocking on doors as carolers went door-to-door singing traditional carols. Srebra and I never went out caroling on Christmas Eve, not even when we were younger; we couldn't stand it when people opened the door and gasped when they saw our conjoined heads and then, confused and not knowing what to say, they'd shove a few chestnuts into our hands before locking the door after us, crossing themselves in horror at the encounter, some even spitting on the spot to prevent something like that happening to them. We were conscious of the fact that it was best if the coordinates of our lives moved between home and school—to the store, around our building, and no farther, not to other buildings or neighborhoods—just to places where people already knew us, though, even there, we weren't really accepted. That is why on Christmas Eve we stood silently in the hallway, listening as carolers sang and knocked on the door, while our hearts raced like mad. We did not open the door even for Roza, because there was always some other child with her. If our parents were home, our mother would open the door and give each caroler an apple, even as our father asked, “Why are you opening the door?” Although we didn't open the door ourselves, we wanted Mom to tell us how many children had been there, whether they were older or younger, boys or girls, what they were carrying in their bags. But on that January 6, by the time our mother got around to opening the door, the carolers were already gone. Srebra and I were still lying in bed and, just like every other Sunday morning for the past several months, listening to a Tina Turner song that reverberated from the neighboring apartment. It was always the same song, every Sunday morning for months. It was Christmas Eve and our mother made a leek pita pie, and the traditional round loaf with a coin baked inside was small and soft. Srebra and I sat on our chair, Mom and Dad stood as Mom divided up the loaf, and the coin was inside the piece that had been set aside for God. Then we shared walnuts, chestnuts, apples, dried plums, and figs. Just as it did every year, the ritual lasted about two or three minutes. Our father muttered, “OK, OK, that's enough,” then took a step back toward the divider between the kitchen and the dining room, stopping with
one foot there, one here, arms crossed, ready to sit down on the chair in the dining room and turn on the television. Srebra and I were eating the Lenten leek pita along with cheese, even though it was a fasting day. We didn't scarf down all the leek pie so there would be some left for our parents. When we finished, they sat down to eat, and we stood, leaning our elbows on the back of one of the dining-room chairs, staring at the television screen. This is how Christ was born in our house: quickly. I always thought of him as a premature baby lying in an incubator. Srebra and I went to our room, sat down on the floor, and turned on the yellow heater behind our backs. I asked her what she thought about God. She said that she did not think about him and that God didn't exist, that we had evolved from monkeys; after all, weren't the two of us absolute proof that man descended from monkeys? Surely some simian mistake had caused us to be born with conjoined heads, because if God were perfect, as they say, why hadn't he made us normal and not like this, disfigured for our entire lives. I didn't know what to say; Srebra was convinced that, while my God may have created other people, he certainly hadn't created us; we were clearly descended from apes. I wanted to go to bed as soon as possible. I needed to scrunch down under the quilt and move my body as far away from Srebra's as possible, as far away as our heads would allow, so I could be alone with my thoughts. I had one specific thought that helped me fall asleep on my most difficult nights: “my” house, the house I would have one day in a beautiful Skopje neighborhood, after Srebra and I had been separated and each of us was able to live as she wished. The house had two floors, with rooms and furniture that never changed in my imagination; for years, I always pictured it the same way, the rooms clearly laid out: tables, beds, pictures on the walls, dishes, everything. I would live in that house with my husband, who would be named Bobby—I really liked that name—a doctor, and he would have his office in the back part of the house. Our bedroom would be on the upper floor between the bathroom and the children's room. I would sit for entire days in the armchair in my large library, reading books and writing novels. Since we would have lots of money, every month I would visit a poor family on the outskirts of the city and bring them
everything: food, clothing, medicine, toys for the children, anything they needed. And I pictured their house in detail as well, always the same, and I pictured them too, always the same, as if they really existed, as if we had known each other for years. What didn't I imagine before falling asleep? I went deep inside that house of mine, until the sweetness of sleep overtook me.

But that night, as soon as I fell asleep, Srebra elbowed me in the ribs to wake me up. “Mom's sick! Hey, Mom's sick,” she whispered. I opened my eyes in the dark and pricked up my ears to hear the voices coming from the dining room. “Let's go,” said my father. Then my mother, in a tired voice, said, “Take my bag.” They left; they locked us in and left. Where? To which hospital and why? Srebra and I lay on our backs, silent. We swallowed the spit collecting in our throats. We lay there without saying a word, without moving, as if frozen, until an hour or two later when they returned. They went to bed quickly, got up at the usual time, five thirty, went to work, and we went to school a bit later. On our way home from school, we had the same thought: boil some water in the little pot with the red cover (the one that came with a packet of Vegeta seasoning, one of socialist Yugoslavia's rare marketing successes), shake in the chicken soup packet, add noodles, boil it, pour it into small deep china bowls, chop up some stale white bread, and then deliver this pleasure to our stomachs, which, during the day, only ever had a roll spread with margarine,
ajvar
, or a small cheese-filled bun for a snack. We'd slurp up that soup as if it were human warmth while Mom, pale, distracted, or sick lay on the couch in the kitchen and watched us silently, absently, or worked mechanically on her needlepoint, pushing the needle through the small openings. Our father would be rustling down below in the garage. Srebra and I sat on our chair, and all our sadness, shock, and concern floated in the chicken soup with the crumbled stale bread, which, homeopathically transformed into a transitory feeling of security and happiness, caressing our souls like the soft warm blanket we didn't have in our childhood because we were covered with heavy quilts, or roughly woven covers, scratchy shag wool throws, or small tattered blankets that smelled of dust and decay. That soup from a packet, served with boiled beans, was one of our favorite, but also one of the most unavoidable, meals of our primary-school years. As we slurped our soup greedily, we glanced, either surreptitiously or openly, under the couch on which our mother was lying, where, ducking our heads, we had hidden the small first aid booklet, and during moments of our mother's dizzy spells, when we were not sure what was
happening to her, we madly turned the pages with trembling hands, hearts in our throats. Although we tried to remember how to do artificial respiration and revive a person, nothing stayed in our heads, and we never really learned how to give first aid. When our mother got up to use the bathroom, Srebra and I, as if on command, would sneak into the pantry, open the refrigerator and, one after another, quickly take swigs from the blueberry juice that was purchased only when our mother was sick—on those days when she wore her blue robe with its yellow-green flowers. That's how we knew for sure she was sick, and we felt a tightness in our chests, and in the spot where our heads were conjoined it felt like the striking of a wall clock. Her robe covered her body almost to her feet, protecting it with cotton, and announcing to her surroundings that her body underneath was weak, vulnerable, and sick. On the days Mom wore her blue robe, she was drowned in a world of her own. She had the unhappiest face in the world, and never smiled. What was it: depression, nerves, or some other illness? Or was it only tremendous pain? Reliving the memories of her first year of marriage when her father-in-law beat her with a broom and she was pregnant with us, and then nursing babies with conjoined heads? All the torments, all the human evils that had injured this poor typist? Whenever she felt she was at death's door—we knew that by the whispered sentence, “I'm going to die”—our dad would start the car and take her to the doctor. When she felt like that he would shut us into the big room so we wouldn't see it if she died. And outside, the hit song “Julie” echoed, filling the air with lightheartedness and sadness at the same time. One day, several years later, when we returned from school, our mother was sitting on the balcony doing “The Gypsy” needlepoint pattern and crying. At moments like that, neither Srebra nor I knew what to say, what to do. We stood, leaning on the balcony and turned toward her, silently, our hair hanging loose, intermingled, our two heads with one head of hair reflected in the window of the balcony door. All at once, our mother stood up, left everything behind, and went out. We saw her from the balcony as she hurried, nearly at a run, down the street that led to the store. She returned with a bar of chocolate. She opened it and ate it herself, without offering us a single small
square. That day, Srebra and I ate beans without meat again, but she ate chocolate, in silence. Then her sickness went away. Surely, the fortune-tellers and seers to whom she went also had a share in it. One of them had “foretold” that the thermometer from Ohrid in the kitchen behind the door had mercury in it and was making my mother's blood pressure drop, so it had to be changed. And that she had to drink English ivy tea. Black magic? Several times, we found rags burned black and sooty in front of our door. Who had left them there and why? Did something from that ominous magic touch us? Srebra told me, “Magic does not touch those who are descended from monkeys, it touches those who are descended from God.” I felt faint with fear.