A Spare Life

by Lidija Dimkovska

  A couple of days later, Bogdan moved in with Auntie Stefka. Now we lived in the same building, almost neighbors. In the building next door, the twin single ladies were adopted by two Rom girls. They never went outside, and we never hung around with them—following the wishes of their “mothers,” they still went to their old school. Every morning, all four of them took a bus to a different neighborhood where the school the girls attended was located. Then their mothers continued on to work, and in the afternoon, they all came home together. At the time, we had such an intolerant attitude toward Roms that we simply didn’t want to be around them, not at school or outside in front of the building. “Gypsified” was the word grown-ups used when something was ugly, unclean, not how it should be, and we once heard our mother say on the phone to our aunt, “To tell you the truth, it would have been better if I had given birth to Gypsies rather than these two.” When she heard her say that, Srebra began to sob, shaking me, but I scolded her, even though I couldn’t look her in the eye: “What are you crying about? You know they don’t love us.” With something approaching envy we looked at the happy face of the single woman who lived in the building next to ours who had been adopted by a stout girl with mild developmental disorders. The girl wore glasses with thick black frames and walked with her feet pointing outward, limping with both legs. Her hands were fleshy, white like snow, and she always held her adopted mother’s arm, and the single woman, with a smile in her eyes and on her lips, supported her new daughter. There was something heavy, solemn, almost tragic in her gait; her whole being displayed a sense of concern. And that is how it was for years, until the most tragic moment in her life and in the life of her new and only daughter.

  Most important, however, is that in March of 1985 we went on a three-day excursion to Ohrid. On the bus, Bogdan sat behind us, solving crosswords. There were ten of us to a room at the children’s resort. Srebra and I always had to share a bed, and the beds there were particularly narrow. On the first night, I dreamed that our mother was falling from the eighth floor of a building. The girls were sleeping. Srebra did not move when I opened my eyes in the horror of the night and the loneliness in my soul. At the moment in the dream that my mother fell, I felt I was also falling into an ever-greater emptiness, that I had broken something that could not be fixed; that my soul was broken. When I told Srebra the next day, she screamed at me in our reflection in the cupboard mirror: “Really, it seems like you want Mom to fall in real life. And then we’d have to figure out what to do.” I could barely wait for the three days to pass to go home so I could tell Roza what I’d dreamed. Roza always understood other people’s dreams: “That’s odd,” she said. “I also dreamed I fell from the eighth floor. But how can that be, when our building only has three floors? Forget it; it’s all nonsense.” I don’t know why I’ve never been able to forget that dream. Not so much the dream, in fact, as the emptiness into which our mother fell, and I along with her (and, whether she wanted to or not, Srebra). It haunts me in my sweaty hands, in the beating of my heart, in the pain in my head. “My head hurts, too, because of you,” Srebra would say angrily, because a reaction in one of us gave rise to the same in the other. If one of us laughed, the other laughed; if I was upset, so was Srebra; and when Srebra was hungry, I felt hungry as well. We did not know how to explain it any other way than the way our grandma put it: “Your blood mixes. That’s why.”

  Roza suggested that we go to the movies, to a Bruce Lee film. We had never been to the movie theater before. We dressed nicely, begged our parents for money, and set off to the neighborhood theater, which was in an old building from before the earthquake that also housed the district registry department. There was nobody else there. The cashier covertly spit into her blouse to ward off the evil eye when she saw us, then called through the window, “They won’t show the film. You’re the only ones here!” We were terribly disappointed. I begged Srebra and Roza to at least go to the church, a two-minute walk from the theater. Srebra wanted nothing to do with it, but Roza agreed. “Why not?” she asked. “Maybe they’ll give us a communion wafer.” I hoped that as soon as I went in, all the anguish that had taken root after my dream about our mother’s fall might disappear, that everything in my soul would be as it had been before, and all memory of the fall would vanish and never return. Whether the priest caught something in my look behind my glasses, I cannot say. It was clear that he recognized us from the few times we came to church with our mother and aunt. I smiled at him. He gave me a thin chain with a cross. He only had one, he said, and Srebra and I should take turns. Srebra immediately said she didn’t need a cross, but Roza asked, “When will you have more? I’d like one, too.” The priest smiled and said he’d surely have them by Ascension Day. On the way home, while Roza walked in front of us deep in her own thoughts, Srebra whispered, “You think God created us and that’s why you want the cross. I don’t need one. I’m certain we’re descended from monkeys.” Roza turned and shouted, “C’mon! Don’t you two know how to do anything but fight all the time?” I wore that chain around my neck day and night. I didn’t take it off even when I bathed, huddled with Srebra in the beat-up old bathtub, or during radiation treatments for Srebra’s sinuses. I wore it to school, even though we weren’t supposed to wear religious symbols there. Even when we began wearing lighter clothing, I still wore my white turtleneck blouse that had ten buttons up the back so I could pull it up over my legs, and beneath the blouse, stuck to my skin, were my chain and cross. It was like a rope to save me from falling. I rescued myself with it when I felt something pulling me down toward an unclear abyss that I sensed almost physically—deep, dark, black.

  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 dru
nk, 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 Škoda, 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, Šenka, 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.