When classes ended, we went home, while many others went to the school cafeteria for lunch or off to their dormitories. I felt like Srebra’s appendage: I followed her to the photocopy shop, to the library, to the bookstore. I did everything necessary for us to be ordinary students, but Srebra wanted more than that. She wanted us to start preparing for our final exams as early as the first semester, and we sat at the dining-room table at home with piles of notes and thick books to read out loud. First she read for a while, and then I did. The material seemed to go in one ear and out the other. I would yawn, annoying Srebra with my lack of interest, as she wondered how I would pass the exams, and whether I knew this wasn’t how to study. “You have no idea how aware I am,” I said to her, “but you were aware that this stuff didn’t interest me when you wanted us both to enroll in law.” “Well, you have to,” said Srebra, “because you don’t have a choice. We don’t have a choice, and if we enrolled in something else, I would be the bored one.” “Great. Couldn’t you have found something that interested both of you?” our family chimed in, bewildered. We had not considered that when we enrolled in the university; law was all Srebra wanted—nothing else—and since she compromised when we picked our high-school focus, it was now my turn. “Sure, but high school and university are not the same,” our uncle, the only member of our family with a university education, said. “You should have asked me for advice. This isn’t how one goes about studying at the university.” There were moments I was overcome by violent sobbing. I was in a hopeless situation; I did not know how to live like this—how to get used to studying law, how to force myself to accept it. Literature attracted me more and more, as did religion. When Srebra finished getting her books from the library, I would drag her to the literature section to grab novels and poetry collections. From time to time, I got up the courage to drag Srebra to the card catalog to find books on spirituality, and I would take out texts on the Akathist Hymn or the Church Fathers. I was pricked by the edges of the Saint Zlata Meglenska icon in my pocket; it was a presence that marked my life, a refuge in case of danger. I knew she was with me, which made it easier for me to live my life, to sit through the lectures. While the professors, men in ties and suits and women in suits and high heels, spoke dryly or animatedly, waving their arms and pacing in front of the blackboard, I thought about the past, about eternity, about God, and about art.
We spent New Year’s Day of 1992 in bed. Now that our father had finally bought us a small television set—if only a black-and-white one—before the last Yugoslav Eurovision Song Contest, we could watch television by ourselves. We set the small TV on a shelf opposite the bed, after our mother, unleashing a whole host of comments, removed from it the porcelain teapot and cups, various porcelain roosters, lions, a hen with seven small chicks with red beaks and covered with dust. Our father removed the two glass doors in front of the shelves and placed the small television inside. Srebra and I had our own television at last. We watched lying under the blanket because we weren’t allowed to keep the heater blowing while the television was on.
Just like every previous New Year’s, the tree stood on the small table in the big room, along with pink pudding cake, steamed cookies, and Russian salad. But now that we were grown, we didn’t even think about the tree. We tirelessly watched TV, stretched out comfortably on the bed after so many years of watching from the stuck-together chairs in the dining room. In the days after New Year’s, the lead news story was that the war in Croatia might end. Surely there wasn’t a single normal person who did not feel relieved by this news. But, in fact, the farce had just begun. Things were now beginning in Bosnia. The information one could glean from the news or from other people—most often professors or students who had relatives dispersed throughout Yugoslavia—was always contradictory, and always tragic. The fact was that there was killing, rape, shooting, torture, everything. God alone knew how and why this was happening. The wars coincided with our studies, grotesquely filling our time with the weight of death. Refugees from Bosnia poured into our oasis of peace, as Macedonia called itself. Most often it was veiled women warmly dressed with small children in their arms, carrying bags and suitcases, who sought asylum with their lost looks and worried faces. Some treated them with sympathy and compassion, directing them to the offices of the Red Cross and the UN Refugee Agency; others wanted to drive them away. A third group openly disapproved of the flow of Bosnian refugees. Aunt Ivanka told us a woman in her building was a refugee inspector, and every day, Aunt Ivanka saw her taking boxes of oil, flour, and laundry detergent from her car to store in the basement. Then a racketeer would come, put the boxes in a cart, and sell them at the market. “They ought to be ashamed of themselves,” we said, but our aunt’s neighbor wasn’t the only one who took advantage of the Bosnian refugees’ misfortune. There were many such incidents, most of which were only discovered after the war in Bosnia had ended.
Somewhere around March 1992, a telegram arrived for Srebra and me: “Be in front of the shopping center tomorrow at noon, please.” It was signed Marjan Siljanovski. We looked at the telegram, turned it every which way, but couldn’t make sense of it. It was the same Marjan with whom we had corresponded when we were still at our primary-school desks, though we had never met him. We had spoken to him only once on the phone, a full three years ago when he called from Belgrade, but we hadn’t received a letter for at least four years, since our first year in high school, when he wrote to us from Belgrade on bright red stationary, including a photograph of himself in uniform. He had written that he was studying at the military high school and that all was well with him, except he was lonely and begged us to write to him more often if we could; that our letters always meant a great deal to him, and that, on his way home on leave, he would get off at the railway station in Skopje so we could finally see each another and get acquainted. “And who knows, maybe I will fall in love with one of you.” That’s what he wrote to us. At the time, Srebra and I laughed at his letter and didn’t answer it, but then, he called from Belgrade. He’d had a free afternoon and was walking around and wanted to hear our voices. Srebra and I could not have been more confused. Srebra was overcome with hysterical laughter as he was saying something into the receiver; she couldn’t stop laughing, and I, also choking with laughter, told him we were late getting downtown and hung up on him. I remember our shared laughter as one of the most pleasant in our lives—young laughter connecting us in that moment and overcoming all our misunderstandings and misfortune. Marjan didn’t call again. After the war in Yugoslavia began, I thought of him, and said to Srebra, “I wonder what Marjan is doing now?” And she said, “He’s probably in a battle somewhere; after all, he was studying in a military school.” Now, a telegram had arrived from Marjan with the word please, and we thought we had to go see him right away, as if his life depended on us. It was absurd to run to meet a person with whom we had only corresponded as children (and only because our mother realized his last name was the same as that of the best cardiologist in the municipal hospital), a person we had never met before who was not only unaware that we were Siamese twins but also that it was by our heads that we were conjoined. We did not know why we should meet him and what we would say to one another. We were strangers who had nothing to connect us aside from those occasional childhood letters, the last one from several years ago. All afternoon, we turned the telegram over and over in our hands, and that night, we both slept badly, pulling our legs away from each other’s, covering and uncovering them, until we fell asleep in the early morning and didn’t make it to our first class. We left school after our second class. It was already 11:30. “We’re going to go, right?” I asked Srebra, although I had already decided we would, and I saw that Srebra wanted us to go as well. “I’m curious to know what exactly he wants,” Srebra said angrily, and with small steps to avoid bumping into each other or the passersby—returning from the market with their plastic bags and satchels along the thawing sidewalks from which the snow hadn’t been cleared—we reache
d the shopping center. It was only then that we stopped to consider we did not know at which end he would be waiting. In my backpack was the photograph he had sent us from Belgrade. We circled the stores in front of the entrance facing the Workers’ Technical College, but there was no one there who looked like Marjan. Then we walked through the entire mall until we reached the far exit, but there was only one person there, a blond guy who was evidently waiting for someone else. And, indeed, before long an extremely good-looking woman wearing a red cape met him. They kissed, and arm in arm, ducked into a small bookstore.
We stood there a while, then wandered around; we were growing annoyed that we didn’t know exactly where he meant when he wrote, “In front of the shopping center,” but then we saw him. We recognized him immediately, because the Marjan in the photograph had the face of an old man: wrinkled, a worried face, not like a child’s, and now, as a young man, his face still carried the same wizened look, the same concern. The person walking toward us also had the gate of an old man; he seemed barely able to drag himself along. He was dressed in blue jeans and a black leather jacket. In his right hand, he carried two rabbit-eared cardboard boxes of popcorn that he had probably bought in the square. He carried them carefully, so none would tumble out. Srebra and I were dressed in black duffle coats, red berets on our heads that, from a distance, probably looked like one big hat. We wore corduroy pants and black boots. The winter was cold and had seemed to last an eternity. Before we left the house that morning, I had thought we looked like Little Red Riding Hoods, two in one, and the image had brought a smile to my face. We stood woodenly, motionless, on the stairs by the entrance to the shopping center; we knew he recognized us, though he had never seen us in real life or in photographs. He came closer, looking at us, and the smile on his face turned to surprise. We waved to him. He was now standing before us, with the two green rabbit-eared boxes filled with white and yellow popcorn puffs. “Zlata? Srebra?” and we smiled at the same time and answered, “Marjan?” He couldn’t get out another word. He stared right at our heads, gaping at the spot where they were joined, where our red berets touched, and his gaze cut through our shared vein like a knife. “Are those for us?” Srebra asked, breaking the silence. She took the popcorn from his hands, passed one of the boxes to me, stuffed some in her mouth, and then began to cough. I only held the cardboard rabbit-box; I couldn’t eat. Finally, I said, “As you can see, this is how we are. I’m sorry we never wrote to you; we were children then and were embarrassed.” “Yes, yes,” he stammered, “yes, of course.” “Come on, let’s go somewhere,” Srebra proposed, and we set off toward the square and the stone bridge. He strode along beside us, confused, lost, concerned. “Let’s go to Café Arabia,” I suggested, because Srebra and I went there once when we were finishing our first semester after seeing an announcement pasted on the front door of the Law Department inviting everyone to gather in Café Arabia and drink tea to protest the war in the Persian Gulf. We had really enjoyed ourselves; we drank black tea and ate falafel, while Ali, the owner of the restaurant, spoke, in beautiful Macedonian, against the war. Srebra and I almost never went anywhere, and the outing to the café filled with young people rumored to be comparative literature students, was an incredible experience for me. That night, I had strange dreams: a large pyre in the square, and in the fire—a chair. All the children in the world had been gathered there, and one by one they were put onto the chair in the fire. And they burned. All that remained was the charred body of the last boy in the world, but it was intact, pinkish gold, the color of light meat. And then the torturers broke his arm, his leg, his skull. It was a terrible dream. Still, I wanted to take Marjan there; at that time of day it was empty with only Ali inside, straightening the tables. He remembered us, because no one forgot us once they’d seen us, and he was happy that we’d come. He put us at a table by the window, and brought us tea and a plate of falafel, then went off to the kitchen. Srebra began, “Why did you send the telegram for us to meet?” Marjan hesitated, not knowing whether he still wanted to talk, but then told his story. “I didn’t know you were this kind of twins, but you and my mother saved my life. You were my guardian angels.” We couldn’t figure out how we could have saved his life and just looked at him quizzically. “You remember how I once wrote and called you from Belgrade when I was at the military school? You didn’t write back, so I decided not to write to you again. But I thought of you, and dreamed that one day we would see each other, and I might fall in love with one of you. In February of ‘91, my entire class was sent to Croatia, to Zagreb, and then on to Split. We were told to be on alert and that we had to fight the Croatians. They made me a sergeant, even though I hadn’t finished the military high school. They gave me an apartment in Split and a big salary. I was living well, and nothing happened until May. On May 6, Sašo Geškovski was killed. You probably saw it on television. That night, I called you, but you couldn’t hear me. I called several times, but you just said, ‘Hello, hello,’ and you couldn’t hear me.” Yes, we remembered that night when someone called several times, but the telephone only crackled, and whoever was calling gave up. “That was me. I was calling you, because I didn’t know who to call. There is no telephone in my village. I was so frightened and wanted someone to be thinking of me. I know my mother didn’t sleep at night and protected me from death, but you were also my guardian angels, because my future was connected with yours, and I stayed alive so I could come back and fall in love with one of you.” “And then what happened?” Srebra asked, moving quickly past that last sentence, “How did you save yourself?” Marjan drew close and said extremely quietly, “I fled. I deserted. I left the apartment and everything I had inside: money, furniture, clothing, I left everything. I put on an old pair of pants and a jacket I still had from home. I hid day and night until I crossed all the roadblocks. I arrived on foot from Split. For two months I hid in bushes and behind rocks. And now here I am.” “You’re crazy!” Srebra shouted, and I thought the same. “Yes, I am crazy, but alive. When I got home, my mother almost had a heart attack. She hid me in the basement. Meanwhile, the postman found out, delivering several orders demanding that I return to the Yugoslav Army, and if I didn’t, I would have to answer to the military court in Belgrade. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I got dressed and went to see the mayor of Tetovo. I told him what had happened and that, if necessary, I would condemn myself, but I would not return to that army. He replied, ‘Bravo, young man. There’s no reason for our children to die for foreign interests. Don’t worry a bit. Macedonia is putting together its own army. We’ll give you a job, and you will get an apartment and a salary.’ So I’m a free man now, and I came to tell you.” “Yes, to tell us,” Srebra repeated. We looked at him across the café table, and there was something childish and naive in his wizened face cut through with wrinkles, deeply lined, and pale. His eyes were dark brown, almost black; his eyebrows were thick; his hair was oily and black. He was about twenty, the same age as us, but his body—though built up from his military training—trembled, slack and sick, under his V-neck sweater. This man opposite us was so fragile; his hands shook as he slowly drank his tea; his lips were narrow and pale in a fixed sweet smile. He looked at us with childlike trust, open to our gaze, our judgment, to us. This was the first male, the first young man, with whom we sat and spoke as young women. We fell silent and looked at one another. “Evidently, you don’t like me,” he said with an accusatory tone. “Maybe I don’t look so great now because I’m tired and run down from everything, but everything is going to get sorted out. I’ll get an apartment and a job in Skopje; I am going to be able to support a family.” “Support a family?” I said, surprised. “But you’re only twenty years old. What do you need to support a family for? What family? Your mother and father?” “I want to have my own family,” he said. “A wife, children—I want to live a normal life and not hide from anyone, to live here in Macedonia.” “And how can we help with that?” asked Srebra. “Yes, what are you expecting from us?” I aske
d. He was clearly uncomfortable; he blushed, his lips began to tremble, he could barely speak. “I had never imagined that you had a problem. I thought one of you would like me and you could be my girlfriend, my wife.” “And now?” Srebra curtly put in. “What now?” “Now…now…” Marjan stammered, but Srebra added, “Now, nothing. Now nothing, right?” Marjan fell silent; he didn’t know what to say. He got up, went and paid Ali, quickly put on his jacket, swaying back and forth several times behind his chair, and said, “Okay, well, goodbye. Just know I’m always here for you if you need anything.” He turned and went down the stairs, but Srebra yelled after him, “Goodbye, goodbye to you, too,” and then quietly added, “We’ll certainly never need anything from you.” Now that we were alone, I could sense how angry she was, while I was just confused and inexplicably sad. “Cretin,” she said, “cretinous soldier,” and she poured the popcorn on the table, and pulled me so hard it hurt as we stood up. Ali waved as we went down the stairs. I couldn’t get my thoughts together. I did not know what that had all been about; what that strange situation resembled; whether Marjan was guilty of anything, and if so, of what. For the image he’d made up of two young twins, his guardian angels in the Yugoslav battles? For his illusion of a future filled with love and happiness? For his desire to have a family, because he was mature, nearly grown old, though only twenty? I felt sorry for him, and I silently prayed to Saint Zlata Meglenska, touching her with my fingers, to pray for Marjan, so he could find happiness.
A Spare Life Page 17