A Spare Life (7 page)

One morning, we spent the first hour of the school day in front of the building, lined up in rows, listening to the director give a speech about the life and works of the national hero in honor of whom our school was named. There were many green-uniformed soldiers in the schoolyard standing around with their smooth faces and attractive eyes. The morning was very cold. It was the first of April, and we were celebrating our school's namesake. Srebra and I were wearing espadrilles—black with decorative yellowish buttons. Our toes were so cold we stamped our feet the whole time, but the cold spread upward, throughout our bodies. We shook like branches, and it was more obvious than with the other students, because our heads shook in unison as if someone gave them a shake every five seconds. Even if one of us tried to stop, the other's head would go on shaking. The director continued reading his speech. A soldier approached us from behind. His head touched our hair as he said, “Hold out a bit longer and I'll take you somewhere.” Srebra and I were taken aback, but said nothing. Each of us sank into the cold and our own thoughts, which were definitely the same that day—thoughts of our mother, who, during the night, had felt sick again, just as she had throughout almost the whole year, and our father had taken her to the doctor yet again. That morning she hadn't gone to work, and our father told our uncle to stay at home with her in case something happened. The pain in our toes was like the pain in our chests—sharp, unbearable, devastating. Finally, the director stopped talking. Since it was a holiday, they let us go home early. The soldier behind us said, “Come on. Let's go someplace and drink something warm.” I liked the soldiers a lot. They all seemed good-looking to me. They infused me with trust. They conveyed something protective. Perhaps I would have agreed to go with him, but Srebra dragged me along the path and said we were going home, our mother was sick. The soldier tried to persuade us that she would get better. He said we could go home soon, that he was alone and wanted female company to pass his two hours of free time, and we were extremely nice girls, despite our conjoined heads. “That's nothing,” he said. “I've seen people with two bodies and one head. You at least have hope that one day you'll be separated, but for those with only one head and
two bodies, there's no such hope.” “He's lying,” Srebra whispered to me while dragging me as hard as she could toward the road, and finally, we set off at a run, staggering left and right as if drunk, leaving the soldier alone by the school fence. Halfway home, we caught up with Roza, who was also hurrying home. “Do you know that last night, my sister Mara and I played the fortune-telling game? Mine came out the same as last summer.” “Well, of course! How else should it come out if you did everything the same as the last time?” Srebra laughed. “No,” said Roza. “This time I put the number
33
in the square so I'll get married when I turn thirty-three, and everything still came out the same.” “Are you crazy?” Srebra shouted, and it wasn't clear to me either why Roza wanted to get married when she was so old. “Well, that was the age Jesus was when he was resurrected,” she said. “I want us to be the same age on the most wonderful day in our lives.” Good Lord. It didn't make sense that Roza would wait so long to get married, and more importantly, if her P would even wait that long. What if he wants to get married earlier? “I'll explain it to him,” Roza said. “I'm going to Greece with my grandma and grandpa on April 15. Mara wants to come too. Grandma and Grandpa haven't been for almost forty years! They've been told they can go for one day, and we want to go with them. Mom and Dad don't want to let us. They say what's the point of going for just one day, but Mara wants to see where Grandma and Grandpa lived before. We've never been—we always just go to Katerini—and I want to call Panait; it's cheaper if you call from a village to a city within Greece.” Srebra and I were, I think, jealous of Roza, because, at least for one day, she would go abroad, to another country, unknown to us, even though it was so close, a country with which we shared a border. We arrived home. Mom was lying in the big room, half asleep. Our uncle said, “It's a good thing you're here. I have three hundred things to do, and I can't sit here all day.” When it came time for lunch, Mom got up, fried some chitlins with eggs—my favorite—and chopped up a bit of garlic for the dipping sauce. She was feeling better. That afternoon, our father said, “Come on. Let's go to the Hippodrome. Let's get some fresh air.” It was the only time we ever went to the Hippodrome, our only family
outing in the fresh air, unless you count the one trip we took to the city park in Skopje when our cousin Miki was at our house, and, to show that his aunt and uncle were good people, we all went to the park, where our parents bought him a candy apple on a stick, but nothing for us. While we walked around, I remember the feeling that washed over me: pride that we were walking in the park, even though everyone gave us a wide berth and talked about us, horror-stricken. But at the same time, it was unpleasant for me, the way it is when strangers pay too much attention, or when you think that someone does something because they have to, not because they want to. Still, in some way, that walk in the park, our one and only, was lovely. Before going to the Hippodrome, our mother put on a dress and nice shoes. She put on her gold necklace, too. We put on our espadrilles and, after a ten-minute drive, arrived at the Hippodrome. We got out of the car. It was a beautiful April afternoon, and it was no longer cold on our legs. We stood for twenty minutes beside the car, not knowing what to say to one another. We were embarrassed that we were there, and sad, and soon wanted to end the outing, get back into the Å koda, and go back to the safety of our home where Dad would sit in front of the television set, Mom would sit on the couch in the kitchen with her embroidery, and Srebra and I would sit at our table by the window with the book about Heidi. The light there had a forty-watt bulb. On the table, some crumbs from our lunch scratched our elbows. The wall clock counted the time covertly, with regular silent beats. It was a white wall clock with the inscription “YU Auto Repairs” that had been presented to our mother at work on March 8, International Women's Day, after which the noisy old wooden clock disappeared under one of the beds in the “big” room, becoming a clock in suspended animation, entombed in an archive. On those April afternoons, we played with Roza every day somewhere inside the building, or we played pachisi on the steps (but then we'd also call Bogdan so the four of us could play), or dodgeball in the street out front, which Srebra and I would always lose, because we couldn't coordinate our running. Or we simply walked through the neighborhood, and the early spring breeze caressed our bones. It carried to us the scent of love, but we knew nothing of that. We thought, however,
that Roza might know, because she was in love with Panait, and he with her. No one was in love with me or Srebra, and we were not courageous enough to fall in love. Srebra really liked Enis, a young Turk in our class, while I preferred his brother, Orhan, who was in Roza's class and occasionally came to our class during recess to sing the Croatian hit song “Oh, Marijana,” accompanying himself on the guitar. Neither Enis nor Orhan paid any attention to us. We sat at our desk with the chairs pushed together, and then Bogdan would come sheepishly over to us, stopping in front of the desk to ask us the name of the composer of the ninth symphony, or something similar, but neither of us had any idea how to solve crosswords, and we'd just shrug our shoulders, looking sullen or sympathetic. But it was like Bogdan didn't notice. He circled around our desk, taking our pencils, comparing his eraser with ours. Now that he was living at Auntie Stefka's (that's what he called her even though she was his new mother), he had a proper set of school supplies, much better than ours—a pencil case with colored pencils, markers, a pencil, an eraser, a pencil sharpener—while we had only one small case with two pencils, two pens, one sharpener, and one eraser. “Look how stuck-up he's acting,” Srebra said to me as we walked to school and saw him in front of us, alone, in clean pants, a nice jacket, his bag over his shoulder. I wanted to hurry and catch up with him, but Srebra pulled me back. She had no desire to walk with him. His presence always annoyed her, both when he had been poor and now that he was rich, and it was only because of Roza that she agreed to let him be part of our group when we played in front of the building. In our red orthopedic shoes with yellow-white plastic soles, me with the ugliest glasses in the world, the two of us in checkered skirts and long blouses fastened with belts around our waists, heads conjoined at the temples, surely we were a grotesque sight from which old women would shield their gaze, while children shouted, “retards” at us.

The day they took class photos in the courtyard, one class at a time, Srebra and I looked down when the shutter clicked. The atmosphere was light, playful, as if only the insects flying about had any weight. The cross on my chain sparkled in the sunlight. I touched it from time to time to see if it was still in place. As Srebra and I were walking home from school, a young Rom kid ran up to us and unexpectedly blocked the path, stretching his hand toward the chain, but without even thinking about it, Srebra and I pushed him away. He staggered, fell backward, then quickly stood and lunged again, but I had already hidden the chain under my blouse and was holding onto it with my hand. He had to give up, but still called us cunts, sluts, a two-headed dragon, scarecrows. He ran off toward the small houses in the Rom quarter, crammed off to the right side of our school. How we hated the Roms who lived there; how afraid we were of them. Now Srebra and I trembled as we hurried home. I was on the verge of tears, and Srebra was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. “They should build some sort of district, a camp, and gather all of them and put them there so we won't need to see them anymore!” Srebra said, but I didn't say anything, although at that moment, it seemed like a good solution. We were still in primary school! Where did we get such monstrous thoughts and wishes? Whose fault was it that we had those ideas in our conjoined heads? The school? Our family? Our upbringing? The state? Our own character? Grandma bought spindles and sieves from the Gypsies in the village, or she sold them bread and sheep's milk cheese. Our classmate Juliana—with shiny long black hair, beautiful complexion, and deformed legs; first alphabetically in the attendance book—had low grades but a good soul and a beautiful voice. She transfixed the whole class on every bus excursion with a Serbian song that began something like, “I wander the streets…,” a song I've missed all my life. Juliana later became a member of a dance troupe, and saw the world many of our classmates never saw. The last time we saw her, at the fair in Skopje, she was selling blouses and skirts. We recognized her, but we didn't say anything, I don't know why. In her childhood, she had the most colorful orange-yellow-green fur coat. Another girl, Å enka, from the neighboring class, had lice
more often than anyone else in the school. On Sundays, we went with Roza to school so we could watch Rom weddings from a distance, but more interesting still were the Rom circumcision rituals: a young boy perched on a horse cart decorated with red ribbons, scarves, and gold chains, seated on blankets of the most picturesque colors, and two horses slowly pulling the cart as young girls and boys sang, played, and danced around it in colorful clothing and jangly earrings, necklaces, and belts. The music drowned out the car horns; the father of the brave boy who had been circumcised walked alongside the cart with a bottle of beer, and every few seconds passed it to the child to drink. The boy was already woozy from the alcohol and surely from the pain between his legs as well, but everyone distracted him, entertained him, slapped him on the shoulder, on the ear, and he didn't pass out while the procession wound its long way through the streets. After a while, we'd go home, embarrassed and horrified by the thought that his weenie had been cut, but too ashamed to ask anyone why it was done or how. And that was the sum total of our relationship with “The Gypsies,” unless we counted Auntie Verka's Riki, with whom we never spoke, or the young Rom girls who adopted the unmarried twins in the building next door as their mothers but with whom we never played, even though they dressed twice as nicely as we did and were twice as clean, certainly bathing more regularly than our once-a-week Sunday bath.

At the beginning of April 1985, Greece was mentioned often on television. Mom said, “Well, they're saying Aegean Macedonians will be able to enter Greece. It seems Papandreou will open the border, and they won't require visas. Just imagine how many people are going to go. Every living Aegean Macedonian will go, from as far away as Australia and America.” “Roza's going too,” said Srebra, “with her grandma and grandpa.” “Oh, that's right, they're Aegean, so they will come from Germany and then head down to Greece. They probably still have a house there; maybe some land. People left all sorts of things behind when they fled.” Neither Srebra nor I were clear on who fled, why, or from whom. At school our history teacher never explained it clearly. We only knew it was very significant, and the evening news didn't open with the war between Iraq and Iran but with the agreement signed by Greece and Yugoslavia to open the border for one day so that people who had been child-refugees could visit their homes. What's more, they wouldn't need visas, which they had purportedly been unable to get precisely because they had been child-refugees. We weren't sure how they could be child-refugees: Roza's grandparents were old. They were going to come from Germany and continue on to Greece with Roza and her sister. It's all Roza talked about. The afternoon her grandparents arrived in Skopje, Roza came to the front of our building and stopped resolutely in front of us. “Zlata,” she said, “can I ask you to do something for me?” “Yes,” I said, surprised by her tone. “Will you lend me your chain to wear in Greece? Just for a day. We're leaving tomorrow at five in the morning. In the evening, when we get back, I'll give it back to you.” I looked at her, surprised. Srebra yawned. “This isn't like going on vacation. We're traveling with our grandparents, who haven't been there for almost forty years. I want to have something with us, something Macedonian,” she added. I wasn't certain the chain the priest had given to me was Macedonian and not bought from the Bulgarian sellers of halvah, rose perfume, and pendants. Still, carried away by Roza's enthusiasm, I took it off and handed it to her, “Just until tomorrow,” I told her, feeling its absence from around my neck. “Yes,” said Roza, and turning, shouted, “Ciao!” and went inside.