“Hey, why don’t you come with us?” proposed the young man in glasses. “You won’t regret it.” Srebra and I felt a rush of warmth flood our shared vein. At that moment, the professor came in. “We’ll see you later,” I told them. “A convent? Are you crazy?” Srebra muttered when we got back to our desk. “Please, I’m begging you more than ever before,” I whispered, and for the entire class I drew crosses, chapels, and saints with halos on my notepad. Srebra couldn’t contain herself, and quietly hissed at me, “Don’t you see what priests are doing in Serbia? They give their blessing to believers to go slaughter women and children in Bosnia, and you want to go to a convent.” “Sister Zlata is surely not like that… Surely…they are not all the same,” I said, defending her, even though I hadn’t met her, because I wanted, more than anything, to go to the convent. “We are going,” I told Sneže and Ivan—the blond woman and the guy with the ponytail. Later, we learned that they had been a couple for years, as were the slim young woman and the guy with long bangs. On December 31, 1992, we found ourselves at the train station early in the morning. There was another young woman with the group, who had a beautiful white face, olive green eyes, and a limp in her right leg. The older woman from our department had a nine-year-old girl with her, her daughter. Another young man had come, our age, short and nice-looking, with glasses and a trim beard. We could barely find an empty compartment. The women took seats, and the men stood in the corridor. The train was loaded with passengers, and one immediately noticed the refugees from Bosnia with their small children clutching their skirts. It was loud and crowded. The train was unheated, and wind blew from all sides; only the air that we exhaled warmed us slightly. “Why are you studying law?” I asked Sneže, Marina, and Kristina. “Ah,” said Marina, “we are all children of long-established Skopje families, and, you know, we always become lawyers, judges, or jurists. Tradition! We didn’t want to break the chain, so we obeyed and enrolled in law.” Sneže added, “And that’s how we met each other—forced to study law rather than something better, like theology or literature.” “I’ve already completed theology,” said Kristina, “I’m not a student. I just go to classes. I like feeling young again, and I keep them company. Besides, I don’t have a regular job.” “That was truly an ascetic journey,” she said when we arrived. Her little girl had already befriended us and dubbed us the “Double Lottie,” from her favorite children’s book about Lottie and Lisa. We climbed into three taxis, which took us up a steep, snowy road to the monastery.
We unloaded our bags in front of the convent and entered the church. All of them, except Srebra and me, bowed three times before the main icon, kissed it three times, and crossed themselves three times. I wanted to do the same, but I was afraid to pull Srebra over only to have her not want to bow and for us to teeter and perhaps even fall. Sister Zlata was reading the midday prayers. When she finished, we crossed ourselves and went outside, where everyone kissed her hand and said, “Mother, bless us.” That’s what the others said to her and that’s what I said. Srebra merely extended her hand, but did not kiss her. Sister Zlata smiled at us warmly, her big blue eyes sparkling like lakes. How unearthly she looked in her long black mantle: tall, firm, humble, and dignified. She was our namesake—mine and my icon’s—and I felt such pride because of it. She led us into a reception room connected to the kitchen, where a warm hearth awaited us and the aroma of linden tea. She drew tea from the kettle with a ladle and offered us tin cups. A jar of honey stood on the table, and everyone served themselves as much as they wanted. “We also have coffee,” she said. “But no one reads the coffee grounds here,” she laughed, and we laughed along with her. I poked my hand into my pocket and caressed the icon. Look, I said silently, her name is Zlata, just like us. Had Zlata Meglenska brought us here, to Sister Zlata? Was this God’s plan? Three Zlatas in one place. In the distance, we could hear the New Year’s Eve commotion: firecrackers going off, music reverberating from all directions. We sat in a large room with a small chapel in one corner, and each of us was occupied with something: Sister Zlata was teaching Srebra and me how to make candles, Sneže and Ivan were quietly reading a prayer, Kristina and her daughter were attempting to pick up the melody of a hymn, Marina and Kosta were reading the lives of saints, and Darko, the young man with the trim beard, kept us company by making candles with us. When we finished, Sister Zlata called Srebra and me into the kitchen and said we were going to make pita. We scooped boiled beans from a large pot, while she chopped an onion, fried it, salted it, and then mixed it into the beans. Srebra and I blended the mixture. “Have you eaten pita with beans before?” she asked, and Srebra and I shook our heads. “There are many temptations in life, but pita with beans is the greatest. Even so, we monastic people don’t give it up for Lent,” she said, laughing. My eyes devoured her cheerful figure. I even gathered up the courage to ask her how people who lived a monastic life slept, so if they died during the night they wouldn’t be found in some unsuitable position. “That’s a good question, but it’s a secret. However, since you are Zlata and Srebra, and we are namesakes, I will tell you. We sleep on our backs,” she said, “and hold a cross in our hands. If we die in our sleep, our soul skips along the cross and departs—poof—straight to God. The cross is the soul’s stairway to God.” When I heard that, I immediately thought of Roza and my cross that became her soul’s stairway to God. But too early, too early! “But those who marry,” she said, glancing around the room to where the others were gathered, “cannot easily hold a cross while they sleep. It’s sufficient for them to sleep with their arms crossed.” “We always sleep on our backs because of our heads,” said Srebra, “but without a cross, and we can’t cross our arms because our elbows knock into each other.” “You carry your cross inside,” said Sister Zlata. “You don’t need another one.” Is that why Roza borrowed my cross? Is that why? She skipped along the cross to God, leaving us to mourn for her. I felt this was the right moment to show her my icon, our shared Saint, Zlata Meglenska. I pulled it from my pocket and offered it to her. I had never done that before. She held it gently, almost sacredly. She looked at it, crossed herself, kissed it, and returned it to me. “You and Saint Zlata Meglenska are already one,” she said, taking the pita from the oven. It was the most wonderful pita in the world. Just before midnight, we went to bed: the women on couches or borrowed mattresses in the room with the small chapel; the men in the other, empty, room. All night, the sounds of New Year’s Eve reached us, but from a distance. They were not loud and distinct, but more like echoes of the wildest night of the year. The world was outside, but we were in a convent. Srebra and I lay on our couch by the door, and a candle in the corner illuminated the icon of the Holy Virgin. Somehow, I managed to cross my arms on my chest, and after a while, I sensed that Srebra had as well. But it wasn’t easy to sleep with our arms crossed, because our elbows constantly touched and our noses itched. Our arms inched their way down beside our bodies. We had trouble falling asleep. Early the next day, the clang of Sister Zlata’s bell woke us. We dressed and entered the church, read the morning prayers, crossed ourselves, and bowed our heads. Srebra and I were new to all this, but everyone was patient, and everyone was enraptured by one love. I finally felt I belonged somewhere—that this was the world I needed. The others performed the Saint Basil’s Day custom for good luck—crawling beneath the icon of Saint Basil. The small table was narrow, and I didn’t think there was enough room for Srebra and me. As if reading our thoughts, Sister Zlata waited for everyone to finish, then took the icon, kissed it, and placed it on the table where the church books were kept. Now Srebra and I could crawl underneath. Srebra did not want to, both on principle and out of embarrassment, but Darko came up and said, “Nothing is by chance in this world. Everything is God’s plan.” Srebra gave in and pulled me under the table, and while we passed underneath, I prayed to Saint Basil for love. I listened to my inner voice praying for health, for happiness, when all of a sudden I heard myself praying for a man. I was ashamed of myself. I
was certain that Srebra prayed for only one thing, for us to be separated, for us to be freed of one another at last, but that hadn’t occurred to me. Then we had free time. We went to the library, and among the many books, Srebra found Eliade’s trilogy on religion, and I found Dostoevsky’s story “The Meek One.” We took the books and sat on a bench at the large carved wooden table, spending some time reading. Later, all of us peeled potatoes. Sister Zlata spoke: “There are many temptations in this life. It’s easier to be delivered from some, while from others it is more difficult. But we saved ourselves from New Year’s Eve didn’t we?” We all laughed. “And now, sitting and peeling potatoes, we think there is no temptation, but look where our hands are; they are not in the air, or on our chest, or alongside our bodies. They are between our legs, just where the devil loves! Something starts to tickle, a desire we didn’t seek, but which comes unbidden, and the mind goes astray into the world of pleasure, the soul falls asleep, and there you are…sin is not far away. So, it is best if our hands never rest between our legs, but are always busy away from our bodies. See, we should sit like this.” She sat down with her back straight and lifted the potatoes into the air, not touching any part of her body. We all tried to sit like that, but there was no way Srebra and I could sit so straight, because our heads pulled one of us toward the other; for years, we’d had pains in our necks and our backs, soothing them with our mother’s Chinese balm. “It’s not easy,” said Kosta; “my hands ache. It’s better if I stand up.” “Exactly,” said Sister Zlata. “A person should stand, rather than sit, to work and to pray. To avoid sin, a person should stand upright.” “How much can you personally resist temptation?” asked Boro, the man with the misshapen face and the hand that constantly waved back and forth. Sister Zlata thought a moment and said, “Very little. It would be more difficult for me if I lived in the world. Here, I can pray all day, but out in the world, everything comes before prayer. If only God had had mercy on me and made me worthy of a life spent wandering, rather than a life in this palace, then, like Saint Seraphim, I would sleep not in warmth but in the cold, eating roots. If He had only given me the strength to be like Saint Catherine in the desert! If I could glorify the faith as Zlata Meglenska did…” and she turned toward me, adding, “who, for Jesus’s sake, was flayed, hanged, and cut to pieces. But my children, I am far too weak for such adventures of the soul and body. For years, I have been tormented by rheumatism, and at times I get dizzy.” A hush fell over the room. I squeezed the icon tightly in my pocket. On January 3, everyone was getting ready to leave. “Come on,” said Srebra, “let’s get ready.” But something was compelling me to stay. I wanted us to spend our January Christmas with Sister Zlata, in peace and love, and not at home in Skopje, where, once again, Christ’s birth would need to be celebrated quickly on Christmas Eve, where, once again, we wouldn’t open the door to carolers, and where, once again, Srebra and I would eat alone before Mom and Dad sat down to eat.
I gathered my courage and asked Sister Zlata, “Could we stay for Christmas as well?” Srebra recoiled, stunned by my suggestion. “Of course you can!” exclaimed Sister Zlata, happy as a child. Srebra didn’t have the heart to protest. So we said goodbye to the others, thanking them for bringing us to this heaven on earth, and waved to them from the enclosed wooden balcony as they left. Darko turned around a few times to wave at us, and then they were lost to view down the path below the convent. Each of them had taken away a small leather pouch with a small wooden cross inside. We were told we’d also get one when we left. “Darko is kind of strange,” I whispered to Srebra, “wanting to hang around us the whole time, even drying the dishes while we washed.” Srebra only said, “I don’t know why we didn’t leave with them.” That whole day, we cleaned the monastery, read the psalms of David, and learned to sing hymns. For as long as I could remember, my favorite hymn had been the Cherubic Hymn. It now entered my dreams, in Sister Zlata’s voice. Those days at the monastery were lovely. We had time for reading, for prayers, and for cooking, our first such experience, since at home, Mom never taught us how to make anything. Often, when she was making dinner rolls, or steamed cookies, or a cake, she would kick us out of the kitchen so we wouldn’t get in her way and cause her to burn something or make a mistake in the recipe. Sister Zlata prepared food with ease, leaving part of the work for us, laughing, “Who has helpers as good as mine!” I added, “And two-headed ones at that,” and we laughed. Suddenly, Sister Zlata began to sing a new hymn aloud, and it echoed through the monastery, and our spirits were filled with beauty and happiness. Is this what is called bliss? I wondered. As though Sister Zlata had heard my thoughts, she said, “God is a blessing; there is no greater blessing than He.”
We laid down straw in a dark windowless spare cell, and in the middle of the room we placed a good-sized oak sapling decorated with bits of cotton in a flowerpot. A man from the village brought a small lamb that raced freely around in the straw, gamboling about as if it, too, rejoiced in the imminent birth of Christ. On Christmas Eve, early in the morning, children came to the monastery singing a different version of the traditional Christmas Eve song than we knew, and we gave them apples, pears, walnuts, and three candies inside little pouches made from curtain material and tied with interwoven white, blue, and red threads. “I make them gifts every year, and they seem delighted with them,” said Sister Zlata. When the last child left, we went into the church. We kissed the icons, read several prayers, and then withdrew to the convent—Srebra and I to the room with the chapel where we were sleeping, and Sister Zlata to her cell. On the wall in our room hung an icon of Saint Christopher. I dragged Srebra over several times to look at the saint with young Jesus Christ on his shoulder. We had learned of Saint Christopher in a volume about the lives of the saints, and I read his story aloud. A wonderful story about a man who wanted to serve God in a special way, and, unknowingly, carried Christ across the river. As Christ became heavier and heavier, Saint Christopher said to him, “Why are you so heavy, child? It feels as though I am carrying the whole world on my shoulders.” Christ told him who he was, blessed him, and baptized him. The story fascinated me. I hadn’t heard it before, nor had I known that there was a saint with that name. When I finished reading, Srebra said she wanted to shower, since that evening was Christmas Eve. We went down the stairs to the washrooms, which were a bit like school, a bit like camp. We opened the door to the shower, and recoiled, frozen by the view: Sister Zlata drying herself with a towel. She was naked, having just showered. Her hair was down; it was wet, black with threads of gray, and long, almost to her waist. “Oh!” shouted Srebra as we slammed the door shut. Inside, Sister Zlata merely said quietly, “God grant forgiveness, God grant forgiveness.” We fled upstairs to our room. Both of us were quite rattled. Srebra began to laugh quietly, as if her nerves had given way, and I crossed myself repeatedly, not able to stop. I was embarrassed. It made me feel ashamed, but also surprised. I had never considered the fact that monastic people also took their clothes off, washed themselves, that they, too, let the hair they never cut down. I don’t know if they ever combed it. “Okay, quit it, now,” said Srebra. “You quit, too,” I told her, and we finally settled down.
When we went downstairs again, Sister Zlata was no longer there. We washed as quickly as we could, with our eyes closed. Because of our heads, we either had to bend down together or not at all, and in a standing position we were never able to see our legs or our vaginas, just the tops of our breasts and our nipples, which stiffened when the water was a bit cold. We hadn’t been embarrassed in front of each other for a long time—we couldn’t be, we simply had no choice. But now, we both closed our eyes, because we were taken by an unpleasant feeling of intimacy, as if we had broken some rule in looking at Sister Zlata naked, with her hair down, which had otherwise always been covered by her nun’s felt cap and veil. Sister Zlata didn’t say anything when we saw her in the kitchen. She was making a vegetable pie and Lenten beans; Srebra and I fried fish dusted with flour, the way we ha
d seen our mother do it. We had Christmas Eve dinner in the cell scattered with straw and a fireplace in which the gold and orange fire danced along the five-century-old walls of the monastery. It was truly a feast. We didn’t have a round loaf with a coin inside, though, because Sister Zlata considered it a relic from pagan ritual. Instead, we had dried fruit, apples, pears, leek pita, fish, beans, and homemade bread. Sister Zlata sang Christmas carols all evening, and the lamb scampered around the cell, licking our palms as if it, too, rejoiced in the birth of Jesus. It was the most wonderful Christmas Eve of our lives. On January 7, 1993, at the boundary between night and morning, Sister Zlata woke us to go to church. Since she was a nun, she couldn’t celebrate the Christmas liturgy alone. In capes and boots, we went down the snowy path to the village church, where every single person sang, those who could and those who couldn’t. That togetherness in God was beautiful and grotesque and primordial. When we returned to the monastery, it was mid-morning. As always, Sister Zlata lay on the floor, hands crossed over her breast, as if she were lying in a coffin, prepared for heaven. We lay down in our monastic cell, and were as gladdened by the birth of Christ as we would be by the birth of a child.
Before evening prayers, just as we were about to enter the church, someone in the courtyard called out, “Hey, Zlata, Srebra!” We turned—as we always did when someone called to us, not just with our heads, but with our whole bodies like wolves—and at first, we didn’t know who was calling to us. Then we recognized our aunt, our uncle, and our cousin, who was now a young woman. We hadn’t seen them since that one and only visit when our mother left us in front of the door of the house where our father had grown up. We hadn’t gone there since. And now here they were, in the courtyard of the convent, and we hurried to greet them, but with no hugs or kisses. We were extremely reserved with our uncle, and unnaturally cordial with our aunt, who immediately asked us what we were doing, how we were, and why we happened to be there. “We came for New Year’s and stayed for Christmas as well, but we’re leaving tomorrow.” “That’s really great. We came to see the convent, since we’re here on a ski trip and decided to take a walk, but it’s really cold, so we went inside to light candles and were just heading out,” our aunt continued. Our cousin stood bashfully off to the side, her cheeks burning. Did she like us; had she missed us? Was she aware that, just like us, she had, and simultaneously didn’t have, cousins? “You know, your grandmother died,” our aunt said. We simply nodded. We knew she died because someone called to tell our father when the funeral was, but he had merely said, “God forgive her,” and didn’t go. By the next day, I had forgotten that she died; I felt nothing toward the woman, except an ache that she had not been the grandmother to us she should have been. Srebra even said, “She croaked,” but we didn’t laugh. Our father continued to watch television, spend time in the garage, get angry and swear, or call us by our nicknames. Nothing changed in our lives. And now here they were, standing in front of the church, our would-be aunt and uncle, and our cousin, with whom we shared no cousinly feeling. We said goodbye one more time, and went into the church as they climbed into their white Lada and vanished down the path below. The entire time I was in the church, I prayed for my father; for the first time in my life I didn’t think of him just fleetingly in my inner prayers, but I prayed to God to help him find peace while he was alive, to make peace with his brother, his sister, all of them, and to go at least once more to the house he built when he was still a child. When we left the church, Srebra said in a hushed voice, “I never want to see them again,” which was a bit shocking, since I thought Srebra was flooded by the church’s blessing also and had only good thoughts for everyone. Temptation, I thought, but said aloud, “What about Dad? Do you think he doesn’t want to?” Srebra pursed her lips. The next day, we had to leave. Sister Zlata said to us, “You can come whenever you wish. Also, you should know I’ve decided not to give you your small crosses and chains, but will save them for next time.” She was sad we were leaving, because it was clear we got along together well. We had formed a kind of family, even Srebra, who always resisted anything related to the Church, had felt relaxed there. Sister Zlata didn’t say it, but we could almost hear the unspoken sentences: And where else, but in a convent, will people like you be loved? You are beautiful to God, and it’s God’s brides alone that you can possibly be. She asked me to show her my small icon one more time. She crossed herself and kissed it. I pulled Srebra over to the icon of Saint Christopher one last time, and I patted the heads of Saint Christopher and the baby Jesus he carried.
A Spare Life Page 19