A Spare Life

by Lidija Dimkovska

  We could not find happiness as long as we were the way we were. But even if we had been normal, I wouldn’t have loved Marjan. He wasn’t my type. He was too timid, too submissive; his aged child’s face posed no challenge. I knew exactly how life would be if I were a normal girl and married him: He would work on the military base; I would be a homemaker and the wife of a soldier; we would live in an average apartment; I would give birth to at least two children, probably not have a job outside the home, because military men were committed to the idea that their wives should not work. On Sundays, we would go to his parents’ in the village for dinner, and during the week, he would be tired from work and would watch television all evening or play with the children (sons if possible). That is what our lives would be reduced to, because it was rare to find men with military educations who were interested in the arts. He would find excuses for why he would not go to the theater, why he could sit through a movie with Sharon Stone but not a Dutch film, why he yawned through poetry readings, why he didn’t read literary books, but only crime novels and things like that. Perhaps I wasn’t being fair, but that is exactly how I imagined life with Marjan—monotonous and provincial. I wanted to ask Srebra how she imagined life with him, but she was too upset, and we never spoke another word about him.

  In the examination session of June 1992, Srebra passed all her exams, but I passed only one, and that by sheer will. All the other students had written exams, but ours were oral, to prevent us copying from each other—that is, so I couldn’t copy from Srebra. After the professor entered the marks on our report cards, he told me: “You, unlike your sister, do not like law. It’s obvious you’re forced to study it on account of your sister. That’s a serious problem: both for you and for us. You should withdraw. Either study seriously or withdraw and just come along to the lectures. Read something that interests you. Enroll in some other department as a part-time student.” It was good advice, even though I had become indifferent to what I studied, or whether I studied at all, given the overall outlook from the news and other reports about the war: the horrible pictures of a young girl marrying her fiancé who had been killed in the marketplace in Sarajevo; the images of the swollen eyes of refugees; the viewpoints and attitudes of those around us sympathetic to the Serbian position; the atmosphere at home, where our father and mother understood nothing but commented on everything about the former Yugoslavia in their own idiosyncratic way. Srebra and I were already mature young women with big breasts and hips, though our conjoined heads were viewed as grotesque, perhaps even revolting. There was no indication anywhere that it was possible to realize our dream of an operation. It was a luxury to think about something like that and egotistical to want a solution for our personal problem under such conditions, with the barriers, new borders, death, death, and death. I knew my parents would be furious if I withdrew and switched to the Philology Department and studied literature part-time, because I would have spent a whole year of my life supported by them with nothing to show for it. No, from that moment on, I decided to force myself to truly study law. For the fall exam session, I registered for three exams. I studied all summer, even when Srebra and I went to the village to our grandmother and grandfather’s. There, we shut ourselves in the room with the blue table, blue chairs, and a blue vase with plastic flowers. We settled comfortably on the couch and crammed. We studied together for the exams Srebra hadn’t passed yet, reading aloud from our thick textbooks. There was no TV in the village, but the old radio picked up things we couldn’t get in Skopje. Every station spoke of the war. On August 26, 1992, a barely audible station announced that the Serbs had set fire to the library in Sarajevo. Everything was burned. Grandma and Grandpa only said one thing about the war: “Ordinary people die, but the big shots sit around and devour everything.”

  On September 1, 1992, we returned on the Proletar bus to Skopje, and a man of about forty, with bright red cheeks, wearing a light brown suit and holding an old map of Yugoslavia in his hands, was seated across from us. He kept his eye on us, but he watched us less with surprise than curiosity. We were accustomed to being looked at with much ruder and more impertinent glances. He would look out the window, then at the map, then at us. Srebra and I looked straight ahead. I usually felt nauseous when we rode the bus. After a while, the man got up the courage and spoke to us in English. He asked how to get to Belgrade from Skopje—whether there would be an evening bus. Srebra and I didn’t know. Then he asked where he could spend the night in Skopje, where it would be least expensive. Srebra and I didn’t know that either. He laughed, unperturbed, as if still expecting we would help him somehow, give him some sort of advice. But in fact, we really didn’t know where he could sleep cheaply. Even though he was asking about Skopje, we had never slept in a hotel, and we’d heard that both the Continental and the Grand were expensive—hotels for foreigners. He was foreign, but judging from his worn shirt, he wasn’t wealthy enough to stay in an expensive hotel. We didn’t say anything; we just giggled, looking straight ahead all the way to Skopje, our heads swaying left or right in response to the curves in the road. At the bus station in Skopje, something inexplicable rose forcefully in my breast, and just as we got up from our seats, I said, “Come with us.” Srebra heard me and started, but he only asked, “Really?” I merely replied, “Yes.” “My name is Gary,” he said, and it was only then that we introduced ourselves. We got our bags and started off across the stone bridge. “Slebla, Zhlata,” he repeated several times with a wide grin. Srebra didn’t say anything the whole time, and she pulled me left and right out of spite, causing us to walk as if drunk. There was hardly anyone on the bridge except for a few people who were actually drunk, staggering along submerged in themselves—meditative drunks turned inward, not outward.

  Gary walked self-assuredly with small hurried steps, trying to follow the rhythm of the four legs and two conjoined heads—now quickly, now slowly. Little by little we made our way to the Record bus stop. We had to wait for the night bus. There were other people waiting as well, young people with cigarettes or slices of burek in their hands, loud, drunk, filled with summer-night self-confidence. There were women our mother’s age, as well as other, older women wearing skirts below their knees, viscose blouses, sandals with low heels, handbags over their shoulders, and shopping bags in their hands, evidently returning home from their jobs in cafés or some other odd business that stayed open till midnight. Gary looked at them discreetly, with curiosity and intensity—not with the gaze of a tourist but of someone who really wanted to comprehend how life was lived here, why people lived the way they did. The bus finally arrived. We got on and I took enough money from my purse to pay for Gary as well; nighttime tickets cost double the regular fare. Gary thanked me several times, touched by what he understood to be Balkan generosity, but what was simply a normal gesture for us. As always, the other passengers gaped at us wide-eyed, elbowing each other. Those who were our age laughed out loud, but this time, they also looked at Gary, with his big red Adidas bag with white lettering and pockets with zippers. We were speaking English. Our neighborhood’s main street happened to be under repair that summer, and all the buses stopped at an improvised stop a bit farther than our usual one, and we had to get home somehow with all our bags, guiding Gary through the small, dimly lit neighborhood streets. Srebra unlocked the door and we went in. We brought Gary straight to our room. Our bed was made; from time to time, our mother surprised us by setting up our bed. Until that moment, we hadn’t thought about how we were going to arrange everything: where Gary would sleep; how to tell our parents that we had a guest staying over; how they would react—whether our father would get angry and shout or whether our mother would be the one shouting. We left Gary in our room, and went into our parents’ room. Mom was always a light sleeper, and she often woke up during the night and stood in the bathroom or sat on a chair in the dining room when one of her strange dizzy spells took hold of her. She got up immediately, asked what was the matter, whether we had gotten home all righ
t. “A foreigner came home with us, a guy from England. He had nowhere to sleep,” I whispered to her. “What? What sort of foreigner? Why?” our mother asked, a bit confused, getting out of bed as if she wanted to see him immediately, to see why he was here, but then she remembered she was in her pajamas. So first she took off her pajamas, put on a bra, threw on a viscose blouse and a skirt, and just as she was ready to confront our guest, she remembered something. In the half darkness, she fumbled for something in the ashtray on the little table and then placed around her neck her gold chain with a half-moon clasp, saying, “A foreigner has come to our home. Let’s not let him think Macedonians are unrefined.” She woke our father, but he couldn’t grasp what was happening, so our mother explained everything to him in a whisper, and then she followed us out of the room, knocked on our bedroom door, and the three of us went in. Gary was sitting on the other bed, confused, not knowing what to do or say. Mom approached him, greeting him warmly and saying in Macedonian, “You’re from England? Such a large country. What brought you to Macedonia?” Srebra translated for him, but didn’t translate the bit about England being a large country. Gary smiled. He said he’d wanted to see Yugoslavia once again as it had been, but he was too late; the country had already disintegrated, even though there was no war in Macedonia. “We’re an oasis of peace,” Srebra interjected, and I had to explain that that was what our first president, Kiro Gligorov, had nicknamed Macedonia. “An oasis, a holy oasis of peace, but there will be shooting here, too, and won’t we be surprised then,” our mother said, but Gary only smiled kindly, exhausted from his trip. Mom quickly took our bedding out of the room and remade the bed with a white sheet, white pillowcase, and blue blanket, the complete set she kept for guests. We said goodnight to Gary and left the room. We lay down on the empty bed in our parent’s room. The next morning, our mother got up early and made fried dough pastries. The whole apartment smelled of cooking oil and yeast dough. After Gary woke and washed up in the bathroom—it didn’t occur to any of us that there wasn’t any hot water in the boiler—we led him out onto the balcony. Mom had put out quite a spread: warm pastries, yogurt, tomatoes, even ajvar—probably the last of this year’s pepper relish—kashkaval, bread, salami; everything in the refrigerator was arranged on the balcony table, and we all sat on the brown plastic stools. Our father was already down in the garage, but Mom kept appearing on the balcony and then disappearing again. She made coffee, brought out glasses of juice, fluttered around our overnight guest from England, sparkling, decked out in all her gold jewelry. After breakfast, Gary pulled a pocket edition of the Bible from his bag and begged us to find our Macedonian edition. Then he asked us to go to the book of Ruth and to read it aloud with him. First he read a section in English, then we read the same verses in Macedonian; that is to say, I did, because Srebra refused to read. Then we took him downtown, and after a walk through the Old Market, Gary had to catch the bus to Belgrade. Before he got on the bus, Srebra asked him in a hoarse voice from the depths of her soul, “Gary, do you know if there’s a doctor in London for our heads?” “London has everything, so there is probably that kind of doctor, too,” Gary said, and then, waving for a long time, a smile on his red cheeks, he left. We went home in a strange mood, a bit sad. We knew almost nothing about him, except that he was from the Beatles’ hometown, Liverpool, and that he was married with three sons, the youngest a three-year-old. He left us a family photo to remember him by, which pleased our mother. “He’s a serious person,” she said. “It shows. It’s no small thing to have three children, though what was he thinking, traveling here during the war?” Our father added, “God save and protect us from such people.” The incident with Gary was discussed for a long time at home, whenever guests came or Mom spoke with our aunt and uncle on the phone.

  The fall examination period was approaching. We didn’t have time for anything except studying. Before each exam, Srebra and I made a big hot chocolate with lots of sugar. I always sensed I passed those exams thanks to the energy-producing cocoa that we drank before taking them. Our mother left for work before us and so couldn’t do the custom of pouring water on the stairs to give us good luck, as she had done for our uncle when he was living with us and attending his foreign-language course. We took exams and went to lectures, then took more exams and listened to more lectures. Everything was the same and everything was new at the same time. Macedonia already had its own governmental structures, while in Bosnia, more and more people died. One cold November day, it was announced that Croatian forces had destroyed the old Turkish bridge in Mostar. “What a bridge that was!” our father sighed. “It was so old!” Then, just before New Year’s, we finally got a call from Tomče, our uncle in Slovenia. Our mother scolded him on the phone: “You disappeared for three years. We thought you died. You didn’t think to call? I tried so many times to find you, but I couldn’t understand the Slovenians. The whole time they were shouting Ni, Ni at me.” This is how we learned that, when the war broke out in Slovenia, Tomče had fled to Austria, to Graz, fearing he would be drafted, and he found work as a mechanic in an auto-repair shop run by a Slovene from the Austrian region of Styria. He had been living well, but didn’t travel to the former Yugoslavia, because he was afraid he would get stuck in some army or in a camp. But now he was going to come back to Slovenia, he said. Things had been better for him there—he knew Slovenian, had friends, and his relatives were there. Everything would be as it had been before. It was unlikely he’d come to Macedonia, he said, until all the conflicts ended. At the end, he added, “I hope you are not siding with the Serbs.” Our mother didn’t know how to answer, so she just said, “As if I care about who’s for the Serbs and who’s against them; what’s important is that you are alive and healthy.”

  At the university, Srebra and I mingled more and more during our breaks with the other students. We would sit down for a while with a group and attempt to participate in their conversations. Some were still distant, our physical defect bothering them, but we were sufficiently mindful to notice and to keep our distance from them. During the breaks, there was one group in our department that was always the same: a slim, almost bony, young woman with long thin hair, a blond beauty with large blue eyes and a modest body, a tall guy with a ponytail and small beard, a shorter guy with glasses and long bangs. There was also an older woman with a long braid down her back and a man who likely had some illness, because his left hand constantly shook and the left side of his face grimaced strangely. They were gentle and calm, spoke quietly and discreetly, always keeping off to the side. They dressed modestly, but neatly—the women didn’t wear makeup and wore long skirts or wide pants that appeared old-fashioned somehow; the men wore blue jeans and inexpensive shirts. When any of them encountered Srebra and me or simply met our glances, they smiled, almost imperceptibly, discreetly. I liked this group and felt they must be good people. During one break, I dragged Srebra over to where they were seated on the top steps of the amphitheater. The older woman was holding an apple and a small knife in her lap. She was cutting slices and sharing with the others. When Srebra and I approached, she immediately offered us slices as well. We took them, thanked her, and right away they all asked us how we were, how things were going. We all already knew each other; we had been in the same department a long time, but only now were we formally acquainted. They were talking about what they were going to take with them to the monastery. They said they were planning to go to a convent for New Year’s to see Sister Zlata, and to avoid the New Year’s Eve craziness. They would spend the night there in peace, and then there would be a vigil. This was the second year that they were going to the convent on New Year’s Eve. It felt to me as if Saint Zlata Meglenska moved in my pocket, jumping with joy when she heard their conversation. “What about you? Will you celebrate New Year’s Eve?” the slim student asked kindly. “We never celebrate. We just watch television and eat peanuts,” Srebra laughed. “It’s hard to celebrate New Year’s Eve with joined heads,” I said, laughing at my own expe
nse. And they burst into laughter. “Everything is good for something,” said the older woman, and we all laughed again. How good I felt in their company! Later, Srebra said that each of them was a bit eccentric, and that if they weren’t such zealots, they would really be ideal. For me, it was precisely because of this that they were ideal—they believed in God, or at least tried to believe in God. Although my relationship with God was undefined, I felt we were on the same wavelength.