A Spare Life (45 page)

With a lump in my throat, I asked my mother if she would bring Marija and Marta to visit me while I was in prison. “If not,” I said, “it would be better to give them to a children's home. Surely, the people there would bring them to me, or hear from my lawyer. It won't be unpleasant for you.” “
O tom potom
,” my mother said, using a Serbism for “more about that later.” She would use Serbian phrases whenever she wanted to express something important, something that ostensibly didn't exist in Macedonian. Marija and Marta still hadn't been christened. I told my mother to go to the church and beg the priest to come to our house to christen them. The children could have gone to the church, but I wanted to be there for the christening. My mother got dressed, all in black (at home, she always wore her blue robe). I asked her why she was wearing black, and she said, “So people won't say, ‘Look how she dresses after all those people she buried: a daughter, a sister, her parents, and a future son-in-law.'” Even when she went to throw out the garbage, she dressed in black. It disgusted me. I was more and more annoyed with having to stay in my old home. I missed our London apartment, and more than anything, I missed Bogdan. I loved him, I desired him, I was angry at him, but he was dead. Gone forever and not coming back.

The next day, just as my lawyer arrived to announce that my house detention was to end that day, the priest arrived with all the things he needed for the christening. I recognized him immediately. He was old and confused, but he still had a big belly. It was the same priest who had given me the chain and cross, and the little icon of Saint Zlata Meglenska. Now he had come to christen my daughters. “Very lovely, Marta and Marija, Christian names. But how can we do this without a godfather? The children must have a godfather.” He cast a rather rude glance at my lawyer. “If there's nobody else, it'll have to be you.” My lawyer found himself with no way out. There was no one else, so he agreed. We christened Marta and Marija on the dining-room table. Marta always cried more than Marija, but at the christening, Marija was the one who kept crying, and I simply could not calm her. Marta looked inquisitively at the priest, reaching toward his beard. The ritual was short, and when it was over, the priest took his money, gathered the items for the christening, and we stepped out into the hallway so I could see him off. He said, “I recognized you. Terrible things have happened to you, child. Do you still have the little icon I gave you? I haven't seen you since so I could tell you either to bring it to church so I could bless it, or to throw it away. May your eyes be shielded from it. It turns out a Satanist left that icon at our church. He left other, similar, icons later, at night, apparently, in front of the church door. One of them—Saint Petka, I think—was spattered with blood. I didn't know that when I gave it to you. I thought someone had left it for his own soul's sake. Later on, we discovered that it was the Satanist. One time, he even desecrated our church door, scribbling all sorts of things on it. He's now rotting in Idrizovo.” Then he bit his tongue, remembering that I, too, would likely rot in Idrizovo. He didn't wait for a response. He walked through the door, his cassock flying behind his old, large body. I closed the door. I stood in the hallway, looking at myself in the mirror. I looked at myself through my own eyes, hidden behind my lenses, wide and powerless. Tears appeared in the corners of my eyes. I stood for a long time without being aware of it. My lawyer's voice, as he was leaving, brought me back to reality. “Good luck,” he said to me. “Good luck,” I told him.

During those nine months people rarely came to our house. Ties with family and friends are so relative. What we understand as closeness, seems inconceivable later, as if we're demanding too much, as if we have no shame. Estrangement is a virus of this new century. Not even babies seem to want their aunts, uncles, and guests to change their diapers. They are restricted to their parents, who are bound even by law to care for them while they are young. They don't want the day to come when aunts, uncles, or someone else would ask for some sort of favor, reminding them that “I wiped your bum.” In fact, there's no greater injustice than to throw at people the fact that you helped them when they were babies. Which is precisely what my uncle said over the phone: he had wiped my bum when I was young, mine and Srebra's, when we were in the village and he was in school, but now I don't want to help pay for his new house. And I had spent all that time in England. I was stunned. Does a person need to make a list of all the people who fed her, swaddled her, bathed her, carried her, put her to bed, and so on, when she was a baby? Then punctually settle their requests to pay back the debt? Even if, at the time, there had been no debt, but pure, overarching, genuine love. I had loved my uncle unconditionally, but the time came when he began to love me conditionally, reminding me that he had wiped my bum, mine and Srebra's, when we were little. It was good that Grandma and Grandpa weren't alive. Surely they turned in their graves, and not just once.

On September 11, 2002, while the world remembered and paid respects to the victims of the twin towers in New York, and we returned from the cemetery following the one-year memorial for Bogdan—my conscience gnawed at me that a whole year had passed since his death—a police van was waiting for me in front of our building. I gathered my most important things. It was quite an emotional scene with my babies; they were only ten months old, but they seemed to understand that I was leaving them, that I had to go without them, to prison, and I would be able to see them every two and a half weeks, to hug them, if, that is, their grandma and grandpa brought them to see me. They cried and kicked as if they knew. My mother and father shut themselves with Marija and Marta into the big room, and I crossed myself before stepping outside. Then I went as if I were going to face a firing squad. In my cell were Kristina, Anka, and Jasminka. Four months later, a woman named Marina was also placed with us. Kristina, a professional thief who targeted old women, was pregnant. She had already robbed four old women by following them home from the bank. “There's no better place to pick a pocket than on a bus or in an elevator,” she said, laughing. “And old Macedonian women, pensioners, are weird and stupid. Especially the ones who get their pensions deposited directly into their accounts. They go to the bank early in the morning and take out the whole check. So they can make ends meet. They don't put the money in their wallet, but stuff it, along with the receipt, in the bag they usually take to the market. But after they withdraw the money from the bank, they don't go anywhere else, just back home. It's really easy to follow them, get on the bus after them. They go into their building, their legs aching, and they press the button for the elevator. You joke with them politely, but you should also look a bit concerned. You get into the elevator with them and then take a map of Skopje from your pocket and ask them in English if this is the right address. There's supposed to be a dentist's office here in the building, and your tooth really hurts. You ask if she knows what floor it's on, and, as the woman looks confusedly at the map, you reach underneath, thrust your hand into her bag, take out the money. Then you fold up the map and leave the elevator saying, ‘No, it's the other entryway. Thanks, goodbye,' and you
go back down in the elevator. She unlocks her door, still in a daze because of the strange encounter in the elevator, and at home, after she's taken off her shoes, had a glass of water, and sat down in an armchair to catch her breath, she remembers her pension and looks in her bag, but there's nothing there.” That's how Kristina spoke, laughing, in her sixth month of pregnancy. One day, however, the husband of one of those pensioners was already at the door, waiting to fetch a newspaper as soon as his wife returned with her pension, and she said to him, “Take some money, and buy bread, too,” and dug into her bag, but there was no money there. Her husband raced to the elevator after Kristina. He grabbed her and struck her so hard that her jaw hurts even today. Luckily, he didn't break any of her teeth. Then he held her tight and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Help! Police!” The old woman had already called the police…so now here she was. “But you just wait and see when I get out of here,” she said. I was a bit afraid of her, because there was something vengeful about her. “When you give birth, you won't think about that anymore,” I told her, but I wasn't convinced that would be the case. Anka was in jail because she had been caught at the border with cocaine in a small cooler. They hadn't believed she was merely returning from a vacation in Greece. Jasminka had beaten her mother, an elderly woman, into a coma. The mother had woken from the coma when the canary she loved more than anything in the world alighted on her breast. Jasminka's father had thought to bring the canary with him to the hospital. The canary died exactly forty days later. Jasminka's mother and father found Christ and became true believers. Jasminka felt a little of their influence, and perhaps during her six-month jail term she would become a better person. Who knows? One can only hope.

When I told my story, nearly all of them recalled the media coverage of our operation. They asked me about everything: why Srebra hadn't survived, how Bogdan had died. Bogdan's murderer was in the men's section of the same prison. “What will you do to him if you see him?” Anka asked. “I hope I never see him again,” I told her. What would I do to him? I didn't have long nails to plunge into his face. I didn't have the strength to beat him up. I didn't have a knife or a pistol to kill him. And it was a good thing I didn't, because at home I had two children who were nearly orphans. I wasn't sure my mother was giving them enough to eat, making cereal every three hours, boiling soup with chicken and carrots, giving them Humana formula made properly, according to the directions. I had more faith in my father, but I still told him a hundred times that the children needed to eat every three hours. God, how I missed them! The only ones who might not be able to grasp what it means to miss their children are those who, for whatever reason, have no children. My soul ached in my body, my heart weighed like a stone in my breast, the vein left to me after the operation rushed like a river. My entire being longed for the fruits of my womb. Every two weeks, my father came to the prison, bringing Marta and Marija. My mother usually didn't feel well, so she stayed home. I always worried that they had forgotten me, that they would cry when they saw me, that they wouldn't love me. On the phone, I sang them the little song I had made up just after they were born, which I had sung every night before they went to bed: “Tick tock, tick tock; I am here, knock knock. Marija and Marta, go to sleep now with this song, and someday you'll grow big and strong.” They recognized the song. It was my connection to them. I told my father to sing it before bedtime, too. At first he said, “Oh, come on, that's nonsense. What won't you think of next?” I insisted, however, and told him he could at least do that for me; after all, they were his granddaughters. I didn't add that I was his daughter. He probably did sing it to them, and when they came to the prison and I sang it, they blinked, confused as to whether it was time for bed or they were listening to an echo of their mother from a past they didn't understand. That little song remained our strongest link while I was in prison. If the meetings were happy, the separations
were so painful that, afterward, I lay down, physically sick, with a mouth full of bile and pains in my stomach and back. My periods lasted two weeks, but the prison doctor always had the same answer: “A psychosomatic reaction.” I read every book in the library: the textbooks Srebra and I had used in primary and secondary school; I reread Stale Popov's
A Patched Life
,
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, and Koneski's poem “The Embroideress.” I read and read. I sank into myself, into the things I read, but there wasn't a single book by Marina Tsvetaeva in the library, and all the books of hers that had been in our apartment were who knows where—lost forever. My life was a lost life.

Marta and Marija had their first birthday on November 7, 2002, a Thursday, not a visiting day. I called them and sang “Happy Birthday.” They cooed and said, “Mama, Gamma, Gampa.” I asked my mother if she had made them a cake, and if they were going to blow out the candles. She said, “How are they supposed to know it's their birthday and blow out candles?” “You didn't make a cake?” I asked again. “I didn't close my eyes all night; my ears were buzzing so badly I thought my head would burst, and now I'm supposed to have baked a cake? I can barely move. If your father hadn't given me a massage, I would have gone out of my mind.” I didn't respond. I thought,
We will celebrate other birthdays, my children. You'll see. This is your first but not your last.
It didn't make me feel any better.

Four months later, a young woman turned up in our cell who seemed somehow familiar. Marina. I had thought so much of Marina Tsvetaeva, and now God had brought a different Marina, either out of spite or as a joke. Tall and strong, with black oily hair and black-framed glasses. She was so familiar it seemed like I had seen her just the day before. I remembered that this was the girl who had adopted the single woman from the building next to ours when we were children. She had a mild mental deficiency and always walked with her feet pointed outward, with a slight limp, leaning on the arm of her adopted mother. I had never asked myself how a child with a developmental disability could adopt a mother at all. Perhaps one of the clerks in the town hall pushed her toward the single woman with the dignified, suffering look—the woman who always dressed in a navy-blue suit, tidy, quiet. Or perhaps the girl's psychological problems weren't so great. She didn't go to our school, nor did she go to a school for emotionally disturbed children. She went to school in the Kozle district, near the Institute for Respiratory Diseases, where her mother worked as a nurse. They always walked arm in arm, her adopted mother gently holding Marina's hand in hers, elbows linked. And now Marina was here, in the women's prison. She had killed her adopted mother. Most terrible of all was that she had kept her mother's body at home for nearly three weeks, until the neighbors called the police because of the unpleasant odor emanating from their apartment. The neighbors had smelled it the
whole time, but hadn't thought it was anything so terrible. Marina's mother died from a blow from a blunt instrument, and Marina kept watching TV in the living room, next to her dead mother, who was already decomposing. She went to the store, cooked, ate. At the police station, she confessed that she had struck her mother on the head because she wasn't obeying her. Marina didn't realize what she had done. She spent only one day in our cell before she was taken to the Bardovci Psychiatric Hospital. I don't know if she recognized me when she saw me. I don't think so. She was lost but somehow carefree. Our encounter was strange. She was someone who had practically been my neighbor, someone whom Srebra and I had often run into on the street as she came home from school with her mother, but we had never played together, nor been friends. When I thought about it, I understood how excluded she had been from our lives. She never left the house alone; even if she could have, she had no friends. We all avoided her. Even Srebra and I considered her abnormal. It seems absurd, when lots of people considered us mentally deficient simply because of our conjoined heads, but we lived far more normal lives than Marina. My father confirmed the story for me—a bit sketchily—when he came to visit with Marija and Marta. But I wasn't listening to him. I just hugged and kissed my little angels, as they clapped my face and said, “Mama, Mama.” My strength began to fade. Blisters developed in my mouth. My waking hours, even more than the nights, were despondent, disturbed, and lonely. One night, Father Ilarion—Darko—appeared in my dream. When he saw my distress, he said, “Ask.” I replied, “I don't know what to ask. I'm at the bottom.” Or did I say, “In hell”? I don't know. In his eyes I saw both understanding and a possible answer. Had I become too distant from God? It was a bad time in my life. When I woke, I went off to clean the bathroom—if that's what you'd call the rickety shower stall at the end of the hall. I had decided to be the good fairy that cleaned the prison while the others slept. I mulled over the dream. Why had Father Ilarion appeared to me? Why as a monk and not as Darko? Or as Srebra's husband? Disgusted with myself, I thought about what we had done to Srebra, falling into the sin of that sweet liqueur and arousal in the middle of the
night, only a few months after their wedding. We destroyed Srebra's life. Yes, we killed her before the operation. She lost the embryo and had decided we needed to be separated at any cost. She didn't survive and now Darko was in a monastery, I was in prison, and Srebra was in her grave. With all my other dead. And my girls were growing without me. They had grown from babies to toddlers without my witnessing the changes.