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.
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.
A Spare Life Page 3