A Spare Life

by Lidija Dimkovska

  1986–1991

  The years spent at school desks must be examined under a microscope. Not only the substance that made up our bodies, but also our souls should be viewed through the eye of a magnifying glass. Everyone noticed, and some even wanted to help us get rid of, the first bouts of acne that broke out on my forehead and chin and on Srebra’s nose and cheeks; our biology teacher said that if we forced out some blood with a needle heated in the flame of a cigarette lighter we could be cleansed and would no longer get acne. “A sewing needle,” she said, “Clean it first with rakija and then prick your fingers to let out some blood and you’ll see, there’s no better cure for acne.” “Use acid perm,” said the hairdresser, who trimmed our hair while we stood, because there was no hairdresser’s chair on which both of us could sit. “I’ll rub it on with a cotton ball, and it’ll burn the acne off.” Both the hairdresser and the biology teacher laughed at us when we were too afraid to try their methods. “Well, if you’re afraid of a needle and acid now, then how are you going to be able to have your heads operated on some day? They’ll actually slice you to separate the spot, though how can they, if you’re not brave?” “We will be under an anesthetic,” said Srebra. They just shook their heads and had the same answer: “Perhaps, but you never know how you’ll react to anesthesia. Some people wake up immediately, and others never fall asleep.” My hair stood on end at such thoughts, even though I never imagined Srebra and I would really be separated. How? Who would pay for it? Where? Would our parents actually take us abroad? And how would they? Drive our Škoda, in which one of us—and most often both—always threw up during the two hundred-kilometer drive from the city to the village? Could we really travel to other countries by car, and if operations to separate Siamese twins were done only in London, could we even get there by car? Over the water? And the bigger question: With what money? Our parents constantly complained about how expensive everything was—how those damn prices were so high—and how there was no money for anything, least of all for luxuries. “That’s a luxury,” our mother would say if we wanted to buy sweat suits and sneakers for gym class so we could at least run, even if we couldn’t play volleyball or basketball. Instead, we wore dark blue cotton pajamas that our mother insisted were sweat suits and black ballet slippers instead of sneakers. These were just more of those things we lacked in our obviously terrible situation in relation to our classmates, who had already begun falling headlong in love with one another, who went out at night to sit on the benches in front of the school or stroll about the neighborhood chewing sunflower seeds. We rarely hung out with them; we spent most of our time with the girls from our class who were considered clumsy and clueless, though not retarded, which is how the other students viewed us. It was typical among our classmates to stand around in a doorway because we couldn’t socialize inside our homes, where the majority of us were alone since our parents were at work. It was as if there was an unwritten parental rule not to let anyone in the house. If a classmate came by to borrow a notebook, we wouldn’t invite her in but stood at the door, even when it was cold out, sometimes for more than half an hour. The same thing happened when we went to someone else’s house; we almost never went inside. Kids only came inside when the parents were at home, and then only if they said, “Come on, come inside. Why are you standing at the door?” I sometimes thought about the fact that Roza was inside our apartment only once in her life: the time we celebrated our birthday with her, Auntie Verka, and Verče. Only once, and even then, she didn’t go into our room but stayed in the big room, our parents’ room, which they considered more appropriate for a birthday party. We never stood in the doorway at Roza’s; we always went inside; it was understood we could wander freely around the apartment—lie on the bunk bed in her room, where Srebra and I were naturally on the lower bunk, and Roza on the upper; sit in the armchairs in their big room, nibble figs at the dining-room table, take the kaleidoscopes by ourselves from their shelf; or go to the bathroom where one of us sat on their yellow trashcan while the other did her business. We could do anything in Roza’s apartment when she was alive. But now she no longer existed. Whenever her mother saw us, she called out for us to visit, and once she gave us each a gevrek, a baked sesame ring. We forced ourselves to eat them—each mouthful sticking in our throats while we stood in the hallway in their apartment, unable to enter the dining room—then turned and ran out. Srebra coughed loudly, choking on a bite until I pounded her on the back. I stuffed half of mine into my pocket, thinking Saint Zlata Meglenska would have something to eat. The gevrek stayed in my pocket until it dried up and Mom found it when she told me to take off my skirt so she could wash it. Later, whenever I ate a gevrek I would gag and cough. My eyes would tear, and I would squeeze the icon I kept in my pocket or in the small shoulder bag I carried when my clothes had no pockets. Why didn’t I gather the courage to tell Auntie Magda that Roza had died because of my chain with its little cross? Everyone said it was fate that a young girl was taken so early, at the threshold of her life. “What is fate?” I asked Grandma. “What is written for you,” she said, and I understood fate to be something already written, perhaps in one of the big books the priests read from in church. “Does everyone have a fate?” I asked. Grandma said there was no person without a fate; God had thought up a fate for everyone. “So,” she said, “your fate is to have conjoined heads; that girl’s fate was to be struck by lightning; another’s is to have no mother or father.” “Do you have a fate, Grandma?” Srebra asked, and the two of us burned with curiosity. “Your uncle is my fate: my only son, married to a woman who doesn’t call us Mom and Dad, who doesn’t know how to make coffee or cook a meal.” Her fate caused her such an excess of pain that we considered it our whole family’s fate. Our uncle’s response was, “What sort of fate is that? What kind of God is that? That’s just nonsense; people know what they want. I took what I wanted. So whatever your grandma wants, she can ask for it.” We heard a third view in church, where the priest who had given me the icon of Zlata Meglenska and before that the cross and chain, said, “There’s no such thing as fate, only God’s will, but you also can’t forget human will.” None of what he said was clear to me. “Then why did Roza die?” Srebra shot back at him impudently. The priest was about to say, “It was written,” but he caught himself and said, “You think she died, but now she sits with the angels and watches you and laughs, living her life up there.” When we left the church, Srebra said the priest was talking nonsense and I should never drag her to church again—she was sick of all that and I was a naive idiot for believing in silly old tales. “The fact is,” she said, “Roza is no longer alive, and let whoever wants to, say: ‘Roza no longer exists.’” That was the first time she used the word “fact,” and the whole way home, the word echoed in my mind, as if it had crossed through the connection of our bodies, passing from her mind into mine, and it became a fact for me that Roza was no longer alive. It was a fact that she would not come back to life as Auntie Verka had promised. Just as it was a fact that we had conjoined heads and well-developed breasts, as the neighborhood women said, and men on the street would call us Samantha Fox One and Samantha Fox Two after the British pinup girl, snickering as loudly as possible, though others called out, “Yeah, but with faces like pickles.” It was a fact that we were growing up and were already young women, and, although the years were passing, not a single boy had paid any attention to us with affection or tenderness, only out of curiosity or malice. It was a fact that Bogdan was also gone from our lives, having seemingly vanished overnight, with not a single trace of the sound of his voice remaining.