A Spare Life (49 page)

Sometimes at work, we went to extremes with our journalistic cynicism. Once, Gjorgji, the journalist who covered German-speaking regions, said, “Just imagine that Macedonia made an agreement with Germany to exchange our entire populations. All the inhabitants of Macedonia, absolutely all of them—children, young people, old people, everybody—move to Germany, and all the residents of Germany resettle in Macedonia. That would be really crazy!” We laughed at the suggestion. It seemed absolutely crazy, but it would have been a great way to change the world order. Our name would no longer be so important. Everything is relative, just like history itself. “The Germans would still call themselves Germans, out of inertia, and Macedonians would call themselves Macedonians, but we'd be in Germany.” “Or lost Germans,” added Keti, quite taken with the idea. And that night, when she was on air, she proposed the idea to her listeners for discussion. I was awake; being awake all night three days a week had totally altered my biorhythms. I couldn't sleep even when I was home, so, with headphones so as to not wake Marta and Marija, I followed the nighttime news and conversations on our station. So many people called in with comments, saying lots of crazy things. Some were already offering their home to the Germans who would be resettled in Macedonia; some asked whether they could take their car, their bike, and their computer with them or had to simply leave everything behind. Keti led her listeners through the labyrinth of our game. She was interested in what they thought best: Should the exchange include possessions, and what about pets, or the villagers' sheep, or pigs awaiting slaughter? The fatalistic listeners said it would be best if the exchange were carried out without those things; people should only take clothing and medicine and start over from scratch, with whatever the former homeowners had left them. I laughed that night. But when I turned off the radio, I was bothered by the question that I've been obsessed with for years: Is it possible for a person to get over the death of those closest to her and laugh, joke around, and just talk once again? Is time really the best medicine for everything? Is life stronger than death? The dead are, in fact, dead only when someone thinks about them. When we aren't thinking about
them—caught up in the current of our everyday lives—they are as alive as those whom we simply haven't seen in years, out of negligence, inability, or for some other reason, like my uncle. Forgetting protects us from death. It's absurd, but true.

When I went to work the next day, I learned that Avni had submitted his resignation. He felt the proposal to exchange populations was too similar to what the Serbian Academy had proposed for an exchange of populations between Serbia and Kosovo. Our academics had also once had a similar idea about Macedonians and Albanians. Although this had been a joke, we understood that Avni was genuinely offended. The director said the incident could cause us to lose our license. “And then,” he said, “you'll just blame it all on God.”

I was heading home from work across the stone bridge. I was surrounded by the roar of construction equipment; the city is littered with construction sites. Along the bridge there were tables piled with shredded cabbage. The vendors were shredding and shredding cabbage. They were selling special knives for chopping and shredding cabbage. Beside them lay half heads of dirty cabbage. The outer leaves hadn't been peeled away and they were unwashed. What do all these people selling knives do with all the waste? Do they bring it home and eat nothing but cabbage for days on end? Boiled cabbage, cooked sauerkraut, cabbage salad, cabbage a hundred ways… I thought of my uncle Kole. What a pro he was at cutting cabbage. I hadn't seen him in years. Aunt Milka came at least once a year. She would sleep at our place, on the couch in the kitchen. We would get Lenče and go to the cemetery, visiting one grave after another. She would go back home sick. The crying, sobbing, and memories took so much out of her that, two years ago, I told her not to come to the cemetery with us anymore. She never came again. How much I missed her. She was alive, and I didn't have much family left alive in my life. I decided to go and visit her for a day. I would walk to the village and visit the graveyard. I would light candles for Grandma and Grandpa, and see their house, which I hadn't been to for years. It now belonged to my uncle, and I could just imagine what shape it was in. I went. Marija and Marta had a school trip that day to the village of Pelintse. I got off the rickety Yug-Tourist bus and headed up the path to Aunt Milka's house. When she saw me, she couldn't believe her eyes, and kept hugging me, kissing me, and crying. My uncle was still at work. I called my other uncle and told him I wanted to go to the village and the cemetery, but to see the house as well. “Can I have a key?” I asked him, although I wasn't certain he would give me one, especially since we had not seen each other in so many years, and because he had been angry at me when I didn't lend him money for his new house in the city. He had chided me over the phone, saying that he had wiped my bum when I was little, mine and Srebra's. “I'll come with you,” he said. We hugged when we met. We walked down the village path toward the graveyard, and my uncle said, “Do you remember when you and Srebra were little and I asked you what you would
be when you grew up? You said, ‘a writer,' and Srebra said, ‘a lawyer.'” “I didn't become a writer. I can't write, even now. Writing is a solitary act, and I still feel Srebra's head beside mine. And she'll see what I'm writing. I feel embarrassed and uncomfortable, so I can't write,” I said, ashamed. “Here we are,” my uncle said, waving his hand as we passed through the half-closed gate of the cemetery. And what did I see! The cemetery was full of weeds and garbage. Grandma's photograph had come loose and blown off among the other graves. It was lucky that my uncle found it. The photo's frame and the glass covering it were broken. I stood by the grave while he tidied up, and I felt they were truly gone.
They're not here anymore
, I thought. Surely, they must have found their place in heaven at last, close to God. Are they together with Srebra, my mother, and Aunt Ivanka? Maybe even Bogdan as well? That's how it should be. In heaven, one's loved ones are surely together. Grandma and Grandpa's house was full of garbage. Layers of trash: entangled nets and strips of rags, clothes, towels, sheets, odds and ends—bottles, vases, sanitary pads—everything broken, trampled on, destroyed. The dignity of our family home—desecrated, despoiled, soiled, disgraced. A house full of garbage. The house of our childhood, the home of our spirit. I didn't have the strength to speak to my uncle. I couldn't. I kept silent, gulped, took pictures of the walls, which had remained more or less the same, with the same paintings, photographs, and decorations. That was all that remained of the house. On account of my uncle, I didn't say a word. It felt as though my outer voice had gone mute, as though all that remained was this, my inner voice. I returned from the village that evening exhausted, upset, and filled to overflowing with an emptiness from which I might burst. Marija and Marta were already home; they hugged me, then went back to Facebook. I told my father what had happened. He said, “What in your mother's name drove you to go there?” Then he bit his tongue, because my mother's spirit was also there. She had grown up in those rooms. It was from there she set off on her life's path to Skopje. My father went back to watching television. I noticed that they were rerunning the series on the brave men in vests and white shirts—young Macedonian revolutionaries from the time of
the Ilinden Uprising at the beginning of the twentieth century. When Srebra and I were children, that series was broadcast on Sunday evenings, when we had our bath. Srebra and I always managed to wash up in time to catch the beginning. Usually we lingered in the bath, taking turns rinsing off in the thin stream of water from the shower. To our mother, it seemed like we took hours, and she would bang on the door and yell, “Come on, what are you doing in there? Did you drown?” We usually watched that series with our father, in silence. Mom was always the last to bathe, and then she did the laundry by hand. With her hair still damp, she would hang the clothes on the balcony before calling Srebra and me to help her empty out the tub and battered green pot that served our family's hygiene loyally for so many years. Six months after my mother's death, I threw the pot away. Now my father was watching the
Our Years
series with a certain sadness in his eyes. To Marta and Marija, though, it was boring. They're always on their laptop, or messaging with friends on Facebook, or watching fantasy movies about new-age vampires.

In 2011, from the end of April through the first of the May holidays, I was on duty three nights in a row in the editorial room, because Vesna had begged me to swap days so she could go to Spain with her husband. There was one breaking story after another: the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton, the killing of Osama bin Laden, the announcement of the beatification ceremony for John Paul II, and the death of Ernesto Sabato, author of
The Tunnel
. The tunnel that led to my life without Srebra. I had read
The Tunnel
on the plane to London when we were going to get separated. Srebra had read Seneca's
Letters
. That tunnel was the blood flow of my subconscious. “How beautiful they are!” sighed Marija and Marta, watching Kate and William's wedding on the Internet. They liked nothing more than to be on Facebook gathering new friends, posting everything and anything, and liking things. I'm only on Facebook because I'm a journalist, and our radio station cannot ignore social networks. I don't post anything personal. I never talk about myself. Nor do I have the time to—so many things are happening every single moment of the day. Tragedies and comedies from across the globe penetrate my life instantly, the moment they occur. I lie in wait for them, eyes and ears at the ready. On top of that, 2012 is a leap year, which means one extra stack of information from the 366th day. One extra night without sleep.

Today is Saturday, August 18, 2012. Yesterday, I turned forty. Marija and Marta made me a cake by themselves, the first cake they ever made. When I praised them, telling them they'd baked me the most beautiful cake of my life, they said, “We found a recipe on Facebook; that's why we call it Facebook cake.” We laughed. “Can we bring some to Auntie?” Marta asked, “It's her birthday, too.” “And we'll bring some to Daddy and Grandma,” added Marija. On our way out, we met the postman, who had a package for me. I opened it right there in the doorway. Inside was the collected works of Marina Tsvetaeva, a new, English edition. I couldn't believe it. “Haven't you heard of Amazon?” Marta asked, and she and Marija giggled. “Grandpa paid with his credit card.” I hugged and tickled them. Then we all laughed together, my father, too. We went to the cemetery. At each gravesite we left a piece of cake on a paper plate, with a plastic fork, a white napkin, and we lit a candle. As we stood in front of the graves, it seemed as though I heard a birthday greeting from each one. Congratulating me on reaching forty, for surviving the curse of death that had clearly marked my life. My father didn't wish me a Happy Birthday; he did not know how. Srebra and I had always been upset about that, but no one had ever wished him a Happy Birthday in his life. Now I forgave him. I gave him two pieces of cake.

This morning, when we got up, Marta and Marija turned on their laptop first thing, like they always did. They're sitting at the table, whispering to each other. I sent their grandpa to the market to get tomatoes, cucumbers, and a watermelon. I am making pizza. They tell me they can wait for breakfast. They're very excited about something on the laptop. One shouts, “Look! That's how you count.” The other whispers, “No, like this, from right to left.” “But do you count it even if it's already circled?” It sounds like they're doing some sort of math problem, which seems odd, since they are still on break for another few days. I don't usually peek at their computer, except when they're not at home. Then, out of fear, like every other mother of eleven-year-old girls, I check their browser history, but I've never found any suspicious websites. My father comes home from the market, and Marta and Marija take the computer to their room before coming back so we
can eat. We always eat together if I'm home. The dining-room table is the center of our life. We sit there at least once a day, three times on weekends. Sometimes, before a special meal, I recite the Lord's Prayer, but I'm the only one to cross myself. In our family, God is my business. That's what Marta and Marija say, joking with me. They praise the pizza. I peel a cucumber for them. I twist off the top of the cucumber, and from its headless body I drag the poison from its veins, up through its open pores. The poison is white, from the bitter gut. Foam bubbles around the cucumber's twisted neck, and the water in its body grows sweeter. I divide it for them. I think,
This is how you pull bitterness from a cucumber, but from life
? Beginning in my childhood, the death of those closest to me has been the bitterest foam. Tonight, with my full forty years, I confront my past, my whole life. I don't shut my eyes all night. No, I do not have a spare life. But in this one, I have people to live for. Unfortunately, my children have also tasted the bitterness of our family misfortune. Let them, at least, eat unbitter cucumbers, and when they grow up, may they drink only sweet coffee.

After breakfast, Marta and Marija say they're going outside, but they want to know if Grandpa still has chalk in the garage. “Of course I have some,” he says, going down with them to get it. Then he comes back, since one of his Turkish television series is about to start. “What do they want the chalk for?” I ask. “They're going to draw something,” he responds, which surprises me. I go out on the balcony. In front of the building, on the sloping lane in front of Uncle Kole's garage, Marta and Marija crouch on the pavement, chalk in hand, and count aloud, over and over again. I strain my eyes, narrowing them into slits, because that's how nearsighted people see best. My lenses stick even closer to my eyes, and I'm not mistaken, I can see quite well. In front of Marta is a big square with the number
23
inside it, and around the edge are circled:
B
for her husband's name,
R
for rich,
S
for her city, and
2
for children. Marija had an even bigger square with the number
22
inside, and circled around the edge,
D
for her husband's name,
M
for multimillionaire,
L
for her city, and
1
for a child. No, my eyes hadn't deceived me. Marta and Marija are playing the fortune-telling game.