1991–1995
SREBRA
Macedonia separated from what remained of Yugoslavia. That week, on the eighth of September, I was angry with myself, Srebra, and my mother. The previous Saturday evening, when I had taken off my wide, deep-pocketed Bermuda shorts to put on my pajamas, I had left my small icon in the pocket. This had never happened before; it was just automatic that I took it from my pocket or its special little purse and placed it in another pocket or under my pillow before I went to bed. But as soon as I got undressed, Srebra pulled me toward the door of our room to listen to something she heard on television. As she opened the door, I yanked her sharply back, embarrassed that my father might see me in my underwear. Srebra pressed us against the door so she could hear more clearly the announcement on the television that there would be a referendum the next day on Macedonian independence and that everyone over eighteen should go vote yes. “So what? They’ve already said that a hundred times today,” I muttered. Srebra had heard it, too, but she wanted to hear it again. Once the announcement ended, we moved away from the door, put on our pajamas, and got into bed. As soon as we had pulled up the covers, our mother came in, and although she didn’t turn on the light, light filtered in from the dining room. She snatched something from the armchair and went out. The next day, I noticed that I was missing both my shorts and my icon. Mom had hand-washed them with Srebra’s shorts, along with the icon, which she had pulled out when she felt something hard under her fingers. Saint Zlata Maglenska had been soaked, drenched down to the smallest splinter of wood and darkened by the water. It was drying on the sheet metal on the balcony, where my Bermudas and Srebra’s already bone-dry shorts were hanging on the line. I was angry and hurt. I wiped the little icon, which was dry on the outside, but still heavy with moisture inside. Srebra and I put on our shorts and walked to the school to vote. People were pouring in, in groups of two, three, or more. Our mother and father said they would go vote after lunch, which is why we went after breakfast. Unless it was unavoidable, we did not go anywhere with them. That day, our aunt Ivanka invited us to lunch. We could hardly wait to see Verče and Lenče. Our aunt was considered the best homemaker in the entire family even though she lived under the worst conditions because of Uncle Mirko—he was the biggest cheapskate in the world—but she did wonders with what little she had. At our aunt’s you would eat the best piroshki, the tastiest fried pastries, the sweetest beer cookies. At our aunt’s, there was sliced wholesome black bread and the salad had lettuce, though our father called it “rabbit food” and refused to eat it, so our aunt always made him a tomato and onion salad. She knew how to make the best moussaka, the tastiest chicken and rice. For this lunch, she greeted us with her specialty: the honey semolina cake she usually made for Easter. “Today is a holiday,” she said. “This is the first time we’ll have our own country.” “What are you talking about?” our uncle said. “We had a country before, one as big as you could hope for.” Mom chimed in, “You just listen to me—we’ll be wishing for Yugoslavia. Mark my words.” But Dad, as usual, said, “Oh come, now, like you know everything.” “Please, I’m begging you. Can we not talk about politics?” Verče protested. She had been traumatized by politics, because of what happened to her best childhood friend, Dzvezdana, who had just returned from Sweden, where she had lived with her parents up until Tito’s death. She hadn’t really known who Tito was, and while watching his funeral at their neighbors’ house, she had said, “So what if he died? There are other people.” The neighbor went out and was gone just a short time before coming back with two policemen, and they said to Dzvezdana, “So you don’t care that Comrade Tito died?” and while Dzvezdana tried to compose herself in all the commotion, they grabbed her under the arms and carted her off in their van to the police station, where they held her until night, after she’d apologized a hundred times for what she had said. Her eyes were swollen from crying when she got out, but her parents were waiting for her. At home, her father gave her a beating, and her mother sat her down and lectured to her all night about Tito—where he was born and everything he had done—thereby etching forever in her daughter’s brain everything she should have told her in Malmö, Sweden, while Tito was alive rather than now in Skopje, a day after his death. Soon after, they sold their apartment in Skopje, went to Sweden, and never came back, although Verče waited in vain for them every summer vacation for an entire decade. When they announced the success of the referendum and showed Kiro Gligorov congratulating everyone gathered in the square celebrating the news of a sovereign and independent Macedonia, we were not among them, because it was Sunday evening, when we heated the boiler and took a bath. Srebra and I both felt our spirits filled with happiness mixed with pride, and Srebra kept repeating, “I knew it, I knew it.”
That fall, however, the battles in Croatia eclipsed Macedonia’s independence. Every day prior to the vote for independence, we had watched news clips from Vukovar, and for several weeks after the vote for independence, all anyone talked about was Dubrovnik. That lasted a long, long time. All through the fall and winter, people talked about Dubrovnik, and everybody had their own story and stuck to their beliefs. Once, Uncle Mirko said the Croatians were lying about Dubrovnik being set on fire; that it was the Croatians themselves who had set tires ablaze to make it appear as if the Serbs were burning their city. Srebra became upset, and I wondered who would be stupid enough to burn such a beautiful city as Dubrovnik. We heard all kinds of things at that time, especially during the first month of our studies, October 1991, when several Macedonian soldiers died in Croatia.
The amphitheater classrooms were always filled with students, and at first glance, we blended in with them. The students were, at least, more cultured than our high-school classmates and didn’t cry out in shock when they saw us or ask, “What’s with the heads?” or “Is that possible in real life?” We usually sat in one of the back rows so the professors couldn’t see us very well, and from a distance we probably looked like two students with their heads leaning awkwardly against each other so they could whisper or read from the same textbook. The lectures were as boring to me as they were interesting to Srebra. She listened, took notes, got excited or upset, smiled, and I felt our joined vein throbbing above our temples, even though I was calm, yawning from boredom. Srebra thoroughly enjoyed each new subject, each new bit of information. Although it was unspoken, it was clear she would take the lecture notes, remember the important things, and drag me to the bookstore and library for materials. It was clear that I would be physically present and like it or not, I would go through the motions of studying law, but she would really study it with consistency and dedication. What a waste of time it was for me to sit in those lectures in the cold amphitheater of the Law Department and listen to material that had no relation to me, that neither interested me nor repelled me; I was absolutely indifferent to the legal system. To me, it was remote and foreign, and although I was aware it was important and would be even more important now that we had our own country. I was much more drawn to literature and ethnology, which Srebra considered egotistical because of their focus on human nature and individual differences, as opposed to the rules governing society as a whole, which were so precisely defined in the legal system.
Srebra assured me I was mistaken if I thought that law wasn’t applicable to the individual; on the contrary, law was precisely the discipline that was dedicated to both the individual and the community, and it was vitally important in our lives. “Let’s take ourselves, for example,” she said. “We could sue the state because it hasn’t found a solution to our medical problem, or our parents, who didn’t ensure that we weren’t stigmatized from birth.” Srebra said all sorts of things, all of it vague and remote to my concerns; I only knew that the country of Yugoslavia no longer existed and Macedonia was too small to assume any responsibility for the lives of its citizens, and what’s more, we were adults and were responsible for looking after ourselves. “Even legally, we’ve now been left to ourselves,” I repl
ied to Srebra ironically, and I felt the desire to scratch and scratch and scratch the spot where we were joined, to scrape away the skin covering our shared vein until it bled, and in this attack, driven by passion and rage, tear it apart. I would tear through that irrevocable connection, a connection we despised, didn’t need, and loathed from the depths of our souls.
What was happening in Croatia and more generally throughout Yugoslavia was discussed at the university, often in connection with soldiers from the Yugoslav National Army—many of whom were deserting and returning to Macedonia. We all followed the mothers who set out by bus to search for their sons across Yugoslavia, and who burst into the assembly shouting, through tears and rage, “Bring our children home!” New students turned up at the university who seemed older than the rest, with deep bags under their eyes and hollow faces, confused and frightened, or rude and impudent, or drunk; tears ran down some of their faces during lectures, and it was clear where they had come from. While we were all dying to know, no one was brave enough to ask if they had killed someone, if they had been ordered to kill someone, if they had been imprisoned, if they had been tortured, if they had tortured someone else. Once, one of them said, “Fuck it all. How did I end up in the wrong place at the wrong time?” And it was true for all of them—a lost generation that found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time. When we heard about the shelling of Dubrovnik, our colleagues clicked their tongues, happy that they weren’t there, but here, at their desks, secure and protected. Some of the professors adopted a pro-Serbian stance, which sparked emotions in the amphitheater. Mostly, however, everyone just wrote down what the professors dictated, forgetting what was happening a few hundred kilometers away. At times, there were even gales of laughter, especially in the middle of lectures, when our old professor of criminal law checked out the female students from head to toe and joked to those wearing short skirts, “That is more suited for washing than airing in public.” Srebra and I tried to avoid sitting in his field of vision, in anyone’s field of vision, but it was sometimes unavoidable. Still, I think all the events taking place somehow blurred our “oddness,” and it became rare for someone to ask during our breaks what had happened to us, if we had been born this way, if we were going to have an operation, and other questions like that. Most often, it was those from the interior of the country, far from the urban center, who were stunned, and stared at us with frozen expressions, mouths agape, but soon they, too, stopped paying anymore attention than the others.
A Spare Life Page 16