A Spare Life (47 page)

My mother still went looking for my dirty clothes to wash them by hand, even after I forbade her from washing my clothes. She searched through my cupboard and left tea strainers inside, saying she would continue to use the orange one, which was more than twenty years old, black, and dirty, but if I wanted to use these, they should be kept in my cupboard. She counted my money, looked at each thing I kept in the cupboard, to see what I was hiding. Is this how she tried to get to know me better? Rather than having a frank conversation, she concocted some mystery about my simple life, then shared her evidence with my father. She was, however, a secret, safe mediator between my father and me. My father and I were uncomfortable when we were alone together. In fact, we were never alone. Marija and Marta had managed to erase the emotional distance between us once and for all. That didn't mean that we spoke, but our attention turned toward the children, so we didn't question our relationship. Before, my father used to drink wine or beer with lunch. He'd buy a case of beer and a barrel of Golden Delicious apples; he smoked pork; we ate white bread. But now they bought everything ready-made. They waited for others to give them things. They took little pleasure in anything. My mother no longer made rolls, vanilla cookies,
tulumbi
, steamed cookies, halvah, apple cake, Russian salad, or her pudding cake. At a time when everyone else was starting to consume more, purchasing things wholesale at supermarkets, my parents lived more and more ascetically, even though Marta, Marija, and I were also living in their home. I wanted us to live as normally as possible, to keep something extra in the refrigerator, to have bananas, grapes, and chocolate, both for them and for us. There was no love between my parents and me. Just as it had been when Srebra was alive. Did I also carry my mother's genes? Would I become like her, full of meanness? That's what Aunt Ivanka, when she was alive, used to say in secret: She is full of meanness. But when all was said and done, I didn't have spare parents. And my mother didn't love me in a motherly way. If I clutched my back, she asked, “What's the matter with you? Does your back hurt?” with bitterness, roughness, an absence of love. She got more and more annoyed by my, and perhaps also Marija and Marta's, presence in
our—in their—home. As a matter of fact, she didn't
want
to love me, and she most often succeeded. Once, she sat in her room for two full days, angry and stubborn, not making lunch, because I told her to not scrape the pots with a fork, because I had just bought new ones downtown. She closed herself up in the big room as if she were a child. She didn't want to pick up Marija and Marta at day care; she didn't eat the beans I prepared; she didn't speak to anyone. A day or two later, though, I went shopping with Marija and Marta, and she came with us. She picked out hair dye. I bought it for her, along with a few bags of pretzels and two beers, so she could drink with my father, and that cheered her up. Only by taking her shopping could I buy her smile. My father barely survived living with her—he was like a flower in an arid climate. I remembered how he came to Darko's when Srebra was alive and how Srebra and I filled his bag with the groceries on my mother's list, how he would be silent, closed within himself. He would take them, carrying them home with barely a word. He was more and more like her, but fortunately, not in his heart, only in his mouth. He gossiped with her about the neighbors, anybody who passed by, all their acquaintances. My mother filled his mind with her mean thoughts, but Marta and Marija protected him from them. They were always ready to hug him, to watch cartoons with him, to call “Grampa, Grampa,” and to offer him pretend coffee in small toy cups. But not her. Good Lord, how could such a mother have given birth to Srebra and me! But I didn't have a spare mother, just as I didn't have a spare sister, or a spare husband.

But perhaps my parents' lives wouldn't have fallen apart if they had been able to work for the rest of their lives, or at least another ten years. Both of them were sinking, my father without his job in the glass factory, my mother without her typewriter in the YU-Tire repair shop office. They had been satisfied when working, fulfilled. My father had a belly full of good hot meals in the cafeteria, my mother had her customers (my mother had always talked about her customers, her
stranki
, but Srebra and I had thought they were her foreigners—
strantsi
—and we'd always wondered what language she spoke to them), the paper she brought home, the stolen coffee, the evening paper
Večer
, and the half a gevrek that was hard by snack time. And she had her stories about events at work, about Pavlina the engineer, about Comrade Director.

But now, the two of them were pensioners, and we all lived together. I received the compensation for my jail sentence for criminal activity I had not committed. Marta and Marija went to kindergarten. They were growing—they talked, they asked questions—but I still couldn't find work, and, rather than work in a boutique or café, I preferred not to work at all while looking for something fulfilling that would make me happy. The compensation was enough for me to live a normal life and have the means to support my children and my parents.

On July 9, 2005, I woke up thinking about how, had Srebra lived, she would have been celebrating her tenth wedding anniversary. Surely, she and Darko would have had a child, maybe two. I chased the thought from my mind. It was the hottest day of the year. Two days later, when the heat had lessened a bit, I went into town with Marija and Marta to light candles at Saint Dimitrija. I took them to get ice cream at Café Malaga. They tried stracciatella gelato for the first time. On a television outside the café, the lead story on the six o'clock news was about the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. A memorial service was being held for the eight thousand dead. Serbian president Boris Tadić placed a wreath. Mothers lay on the graves like exhausted swimmers in a crying marathon. On the Serbian channel, Professor Gojko Djogo pounded his chest with Serbian innocence: “I would hide both Mladić and Karadžić if I could,” his voice resounded. The mothers wept. Images of men and boys, walking like skeletons to their executions under the watchful eyes of Dutch soldiers. Marta and Marija ate stracciatella, unaware, thank God, that life held more tragedies than happiness. One of their few tragedies already had a name: “Daddy.” The time would come when I'd have to tell them about Srebra as well. And about our conjoined heads. How I had survived, but their would-have-been aunt hadn't. About their father's murderer. About my innocent guilt, for which I'd received compensation that enabled us to eat stracciatella gelato. Still, I could never go back in time and be there when they started to use the potty or said their first word. At the small table beside us sat a slightly older couple with a baby in a carriage. The husband was wearing a tracksuit and held a cigarette in one hand while occasionally rocking the carriage with the other. From his mouth came words that soiled our ice cream:
cunt
,
cunt-sucker
,
fucking cunthead
. Someone owed him 1,500 euros. Malevolence poured from him, a clear reflection of the world in which he belonged. His wife, prematurely aged, black-haired, petite, and with a ponytail, looked at a bunch of papers in a binder, and, with her right hand, typed numbers on a black calculator. He was talking to her, but she didn't seem to be listening to him, and only rarely did she respond to something he said. The ice cream melted in the dishes.
I wiped Marta and Marija's faces clean, and we left.

On November 5, 2005, two days before Marija and Marta's fourth birthday, someone broke into our storage cellar during the night and took everything he found: my empty suitcase from London, a pile of bags and backpacks, a box filled with bottles of oil, jars of winter preserves, and a sleeping bag. My father discovered the burglary when my mother sent him for onions. When he told us, my mother fell apart. She shouted and wrung her hands. She fell on the dining-room floor, gasping, then lost consciousness. I immediately sent Marija and Marta to my room. I told them to stay there and not move. They began to cry. They didn't understand what was happening. My father called the police. A half hour later, a young police officer appeared at our door. He went with my mother and father to the storage cellar. They filed a report, and the police officer left. My mother came upstairs, still in hysterics. She got a sheet of notebook paper, and, with a trembling hand, wrote: “11/5/2005 storage cellar opened then closed again, twenty kilos of oil stolen along with a suitcase, two bags, one large and one small backpack, six jars of ajvar, three jars of Russian salad…” She listed everything that the thief had stolen. If only we knew who it was.

After that, she fell apart completely. She barely ate or drank. She didn't cook. She did not have the strength for it. Nor did she take off her blue robe. My father bought her a container of blueberry juice, from which neither Marta nor Marija dared steal a drop. She didn't get up to blow out the candles with them on their birthday. Marta called from the dining room, but her grandma did not come. Marija said, “Grandma is sleeping.” My mother was lying on the couch, and she looked empty, pale, sunken, as weak as a reed. She would gain strength all at once and get up, go into the big room, climb up onto a chair, and look through the wrapped blankets and wool afghans on the shelves, lightly touching them, almost as if caressing them. She would then open the cupboards and take out objects she had never used: new pans, a ceramic meat dish that she had been given one year at work for Women's Day, crystal fruit bowls. From under my father's bed she pulled out an entire set of fish plates. She counted the plates, looking at the fish, and when Marija and Marta ran around shouting, “fishy, fishy,” she chased them away, saying, “Don't break them.” Under her bed there was an unopened mixer, a new violet bedspread, and new shoes. She would take each object in her hand, stroke it, touch it to her face, and then return it to its place. Then she'd put down the cushions on the foldout beds, come back into the kitchen, lie down on the small couch again, and watch me while I cooked. In a barely recognizable voice, she'd tell me not to add any more salt, to cut the onion finer, not to fry the beans too much, not to waste so much oil. Marija and Marta fled whenever she looked at them. My father sat in the dining room watching television, and every once in a while, he said, “God help us. She's being eaten alive over the storage cellar.” My mother took a sheet of paper from a large notebook, a diary from 2000, and wrote in Serbian in large block letters, “I'm writing a letter to you, but since we're not together, what's a letter to do?…” On December 18, 2005, she died in her sleep. My father had gotten up early and, as usual, lit the woodstove before we awoke. Then he went out for bread. As usual, he went shopping early so he wouldn't run into anyone from the neighborhood. Once, watching him from the balcony as he hurried along the street, head bowed, racked with shame, I bit
my lip. That morning, Marija and Marta woke at seven. They slept in the other bed in my room, and they'd climb in with me so we could hug and tickle each other. It was a Sunday morning, and we lazed about. At around seven thirty, they went to see their grandpa in the dining room so they could watch cartoons together. At eight, I came out of my room. My mother still hadn't gotten up. At eight thirty, I told Marija and Marta to go wake Grandma, because she had been sleeping a long time. At first, they didn't want to. Their aversion to her had grown as she became ever more locked in her world following the storage cellar break-in. But they went. I heard them yell, “Grandma, Grandma, get up! Mama's calling you.” “Hey, Grandma, it's snowing outside.” When we didn't hear her voice, my father and I went into the room. She was calm, pale, and already cold. She had died in her sleep. My father went crazy. I did as well. I automatically ran to Auntie Dobrila's. I told her…though I have no idea what I said to her. I know she came, said there was nothing to be done, and that there was no point in calling a doctor. “She's very cold,” she said. “It looks like she died in her sleep.” Then she rang our neighbors' doorbells. Soon the apartment was filled with neighbor women. Auntie Magda wasn't there. She stood on the stairs and called, “Zlata, Zlata, bring the children to me.” I brought them to her. They didn't want to go, and they struggled, but Auntie Magda got them inside somehow. They knew her. Whenever we met on the stairs, she patted their heads, and I had told them that Auntie Magda was Roza's mother, but Roza had died. An ambulance arrived, and the medics confirmed the death. They gave my father and me injections to calm us, and left. I don't know who took charge of the funeral. There were only a few people there: some neighbors, Aunt Milka, my uncle but not his wife, Verče with her husband, Mirko, and Lenče. Almost the same people as had been at Aunt Ivanka's funeral. Aunt Milka fell to the ground, crying, sobbing, and wailing. “She buried a child, a sister, a son-in-law, and now she's gone, too. Who will protect us, who will watch out for us? You were like a mother to us, our oldest sister. O Lord, have mercy.” Aunt Milka said all kinds of things in her pain. The rest of us cried silently. A strong wind was blowing, and snow gusted from
all sides. After the burial, we shared the memorial food quickly and went our separate ways. Only then did I go get Marija and Marta from Auntie Magda's. I entered the forgotten world of Roza. On the floor of the dining room, where Roza, Srebra, and I had once played, Marija and Marta were playing. Dear God, how many people in my life were already dead! Was this just?

In the week following my mother's death I was like a ghost. I won't even speak about my father. Marija and Marta went to school, and we didn't pick them up until closing time. I sat at home, in a timeless zone. I forced myself to prepare things to eat, and I thought about my mother. In the large room, I stood and looked: I saw the row of blankets kept for years on her shelves. I opened the cupboard and looked at all the things my mother had preserved for who knows when. I lifted the couch cushions, and beneath them, in boxes, faded with time, were the unopened mixer, the fish service, and the violet bedspread. I put her new shoes on her feet so she'd have them in the grave. I looked at all these objects, so important to my mother, and something within me grew, as if sprouting directly from my pain: I would bring these things to her grave, these things that had been so important to her. Let death warm her more than life had. After we conducted the seven-day commemoration, I asked the cemetery administrator whether it would be possible to buy another gravesite next to my mother's. “For your father?” the clerk asked. “Yes, you can have it. But, as you can see, there aren't many more spaces. People buy them for themselves.” I paid for the plot. As we were getting ready to go to the cemetery for the fortieth-day rituals—just my father, Marija, Marta, and I—I began putting into the taxi the bags filled with all the things, unused, but so beloved by my mother. My father looked at me inquisitively. “Where are you taking all that?” he asked, and I said, “We're bringing them to Mom. They're hers.” In the trunk I put all the never-opened blankets (gifts from aunts for Srebra and my graduation), unopened sets of dishes, the unopened mixer, all the boxes of chocolates and packets of coffee she had received from guests, the jar of honey I brought from London the time I visited alone, everything, everything that she had kept for some other time, saying, “Just put it there.” Everything about which we had said, “Open it. You can't carry it to the grave.” And she'd replied, “You never know.” Everything. We would put everything in the grave so she could take it with her. I never knew if I came from a poor family or a miserly one. I decided to give my mother everything she had saved, saved for herself or someone else, but not for us.