On the train, I said firmly to Srebra, “If we never manage to get separated, the best thing for us would be to go into the convent.” But she responded more firmly, “We will get separated!” Once we were on the train, I began to think about life outside the convent. All the days there, we had heard nothing about what was happening in the world; we hadn’t even thought about the war in Bosnia, or anything else. Now, at the railroad station we saw women with children waiting for someone, for a train, for anyone who could help them, someone to take them to a refugee camp or other place of asylum. “I wonder what has happened?” said Srebra, and indeed, after we got home and quickly wished our mother and father a Happy New Year—fleeting kisses on the cheeks, which we only did at New Year’s or when we were going to leave to stay more than two months in the village—we heard on the evening news about new horrors in Sarajevo and throughout Bosnia. I think we were less pained by what we were seeing on the screen than shocked, asking the question, “How is it possible that this is happening? How is it possible?” The January examination period began, and at some of the exams, we saw the friends with whom we had traveled to the convent. They told us they went to the church in Krivi Dol every Sunday. They said the most beautiful liturgy in the city was held there and one had to go early because there were so many people and the church was quite small. Sometimes not everyone could get inside, so some had to remain outside in front of the door to take part in the service. But that winter of 1993 was very cold, with black ice and heavy winds, and it was difficult to get up early on a Sunday morning and endure our mother’s questions: “Where are you going? How can you be so foolish as to go to church in such a storm? The bus doesn’t go there, and the snow isn’t cleared; someone will grab you and take you off somewhere. Who goes to the church? If you need a church, there’s one here…” and on and on. In fact, we didn’t get to experience many Sunday services because the boiler hadn’t been turned on on Saturday night. I longed for a real liturgy, for angelic singing, for my Cherubic Hymn, for communion in God with people who were spiritually close to me. For a while, I somehow forgot about the church in Krivi Dol. It was Easter service when we went there for the first time. We climbed uphill a long way, past the skating rink in the fortress, past the closed disco, looking from the heights down on the Vardar River and the city stadium surrounded by the spreading greenery of the city park. We walked on and on while buses rolled past us. One even stopped, and the driver, a young man, asked, “Aren’t you going the wrong way? This isn’t the way to the nuthouse.” Then he and his co-driver had a good laugh; another kept honking his horn as if it were a wedding, but we finally made it to the church. As soon as we entered and heard the melodious voice of the priest and the small choir accompanying him, we forgot our exhaustion, our anger, and our shame, at least I did, because in the depths of my soul, I gave myself over to the liturgy, which pierced straight to my inner unrest. All the school friends with whom we had traveled to the convent were there—Boro, Kristina, her daughter, and Darko, who winked when he saw us and shifted his position several times in the crowd. The women stood to the left, the men to the right. Most of the women wore headscarves and long full skirts. Srebra and I had neither headscarves nor full skirts. We could only wear shallow hats in winter that reached down to where we were conjoined. Perhaps we could have tied a scarf over both our heads. But it wasn’t important. We all floated in a kind of bliss. At the end, we received a wafer, and many of the others also took communion wine. We didn’t, because we hadn’t fasted, gone to confession, and repented for our sins of thought, word, or deed. The priest drew wine from the chalice with a spoon and placed it and bread in each person’s mouth; we sang. Later, at home, Srebra said, “How can everyone use the same spoon? It must be a hotbed of bacteria,” immediately adding, “I know what you’re going to say, sickness doesn’t spread to those who believe in God.” “What do you know?” I retorted. After the service, everyone greeted one another in the churchyard with hugs, saying, “Christ is risen. Truly, He is risen.” It was lovely. Darko brought us back downtown in his car. He asked, “Will you come regularly?” “Yes,” I said. “No,” said Srebra. “No?” asked Darko. “But I thought I could see you here.” See you, he had said, thinking only of Srebra. “See you, he said; he was only thinking about you,” I said to Srebra at home. “He must have been confused,” said Srebra. We didn’t mention it again until the following Sunday. Darko drove us home again, but we didn’t want him to drop us off in front of our building, because someone might see and then gossip about it, especially our parents, and then we’d have to explain who he was and why he was bringing us home. Men were a priori excluded from our lives, and it would be, of course, absurd for anyone to be interested in us, especially in one of us, as Darko now was in Srebra. Was he blind or weird? And how could he be interested in one of us, or even both of us for that matter, when we were predestined to be alone, or more precisely, because we were already a pair we could never be a couple with a man? Darko studied architecture, and, in addition to religion, he was also interested in politics. He told us he was a member of the opposition party. Srebra attentively followed all the political events in Macedonia and the former Yugoslavia. Although I was always forced to watch television with her, my thoughts were not on what was being shown on the screen, or I simply read a book, and events seemed to slip past my attention, so I didn’t know that the new Macedonian parties had young members, and not just middle-aged men and the occasional woman. In our family, politics were talked about in the most reductive, and I would say, populist, manner. Our mother and father changed political views whichever way the wind was blowing: If they listened to Serbian news, they were convinced Serbs were dying in Bosnia, rather than Bosnian Muslims. If our president, Kiro Gligorov, said the acronym FYROM—Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia—that was fine as long as we were granted entry into the UN; then they agreed with him, but they also thought opposition members Ljubčo Georgievski and Branko Crvenkovski were young and bright. It was only about Albanians that they had a single point of view, which was negative and stereotyping, as it was in so many families, even those with educated parents. For years, nothing changed. The general politics of compromise, a remnant of the one-party system, ruled for a long time in our family, in which, except for our uncle who changed from a Communist to a liberal, there were no parties, nor even party sympathizers, but only commentators on the things that had a direct effect on our lives. The fact was, Macedonia was becoming more and more of a country with its own national symbols, its own money and government structures. The fact was, the war in Bosnia wasn’t ending, and we had all become accustomed to that; people were dying, but we lived more or less normally, carrying on with our own joys and sorrows. Srebra had found herself in the study of law, and I studied as much as I had to, but the rest of the time, while Srebra delved deeper into supplementary readings, I immersed myself in novels and poetry. Books were my best friends, and that was not just an empty slogan taught to school kids. When I thought of friendship, I grasped that we had rarely had friends in real life. As kids, we had Roza, but she died, and it was my fault—that was clearer to me now than ever before, and I had never, ever found the courage to admit it to her parents. Most likely they knew, because Roza hadn’t had a chain of her own, so she must have borrowed it before going on that fateful trip to Greece. On the stairs, whenever we saw her mother, father, or sister—who now had her own little daughter who looked so much like Roza—we greeted each other warmly, with sadness in our voices, especially noticeable in her father, who was never again quite himself. He dragged himself around in black clothing, his face sallow; he spoke quietly, timidly. The loss of his daughter had caused his shoulders to sag, and seeing him so bent, so sad, made you sad, as though Roza had died yesterday. No one in the building ever mentioned Roza anymore; everyone had closed that chapter in their lives, or more precisely, from our everyday experience. The changing years swept everything before them. No one spoke of Auntie Verka either, whom we cou
ld have also counted among the friends from childhood. And everyone had forgotten Bogdan. New people lived in the apartment of his adopted mother, a young couple with no children. For a long time we didn’t have friends, until our New Year’s trip to the convent, when we became close with Sister Zlata and the colleagues from the university who had invited us. The loneliness of all those years had become a natural condition, and I have always felt that it was the books that kept us from going crazy, regardless of whether they were legal tomes or novels. When I read entrancing novels, I felt aroused almost every night, even though, in the novels, characters rarely made love. I was particularly aroused while reading The Kalevala just before bed. It wasn’t obvious why such an erotic charge came from such a spirited work. Given our age and the whole situation, I felt entitled to self-gratification. I poked my fingers inside or twisted the end of the blanket on my side of the bed and slowly, so as to not wake Srebra, rubbed it against my vagina, pressing it inside and feeling bliss spread throughout my body. I would fall asleep, but then would wake up several hours later feeling like a monster. I knew God saw everything, and I was ashamed before Him, so I’d recite the Lord’s Prayer ten times to myself, until I fell asleep again. A new schism was growing in me, a division between my longing for God and my longing for a man. What would it be like to be with a man, to be under him, on top of him, to be one body joined from two, not by our heads but by our sexual organs? Some of the other students at the university were already pregnant, and I thought about the way in which they became pregnant. During exams, they frequently used pregnancy as an excuse for their lack of preparedness. Srebra and I never spoke of these things. I don’t know how she controlled her sexual needs or whether she even felt such things at all. She usually slept peacefully through the night. And during the day, we heeded Sister Zlata’s advice not to put our hands in our laps lest the devil lead us into temptation. Sister Zlata! Sneže and Ivan told us that they had heard she’d been thrown out of the convent and sent to a village near the Greek border, to some small abandoned convent, and that the convent we had gone to was now a monastery, with new monks. How difficult that was for me! But why did they throw her out? She took such great care of the convent. She was so good! Kristina said she’d heard that she had begun to go out, that’s what the villagers said. She would go walking about, singing, crying, or laughing hysterically, and once, she threw herself on the ground in front of the convent doors, thrashing her legs. She was unable to stop until a priest from the village sprinkled her with basil, and he then managed to pull her back inside. She had gone mad, the villagers said. But, poor thing, she was just a holy fool, nothing else. A holy fool! How I loved that expression. I had read an entire book about holy fools in Russia, and after that I couldn’t be apart from God’s Pauper by Kazantzakis or Narcissus and Goldmund by Hesse. Srebra seemed to want to say, “I knew it,” but if she had, I think I would have dug my fingers into her side. She kept her peace. We continued to go to services in Krivi Dol regularly, Srebra saying that she wasn’t affected by the singing, that she only went out of a desire to see the other parishioners, to see how they reacted, whether they fell into a trance, whether it was a collective delusion, and to hear what the priest said in his sermon: Would he mention the war in Bosnia? Would he take sides? Many Macedonian priests were allying themselves with the Serbian Church that held the view that Serbs were the victims, not the torturers. The Serbian priests sent soldiers into battle, marking their foreheads with the sign of the cross more to symbolize the Serbian eagle than the Christian cross. Srebra approached services analytically and objectively; I went subjectively. I was the one who experienced the blessing in the prayers and hymns, the wafer and the candles. Once I even took communion. I dragged Srebra into the line and, with her walking beside me against her will with her arms drooping, I, with arms crossed, opened my mouth as far as I could to not spill a single drop of the communion wine. I had managed to eat no fats for a whole week, which irritated our mother and father terribly. I only ate boiled beans, not fried, bread and onions, peppers, tomatoes, and cabbage with a little red pepper and salt, but no oil. Still, I didn’t go to confession, because we didn’t have our own spiritual father, unlike most of those who went to Krivi Dol. “I don’t have one yet, either,” said Darko, who always drove us back to our neighborhood, and, when it was cold, insisted on picking us up. More and more often after service, we went for coffee at Café Kula just the three of us, and we two would sit on chairs pushed together in the garden outside with him across from us, or in winter, we sat on the banquettes in a booth. We drank coffee or tea and talked about this and that. He wanted to build a church in his neighborhood someday, where, he said, there wasn’t a single one: “I can’t see why they wouldn’t build one; there will be more and more churches now,” he said. “People are returning to the faith, and it’s high time, now that we have our own country, and everything belongs to us.” He did not talk much about the party, unless Srebra asked him specifically. We learned that his father was vice president of the party and was on television sometimes. It seemed to me that most of the time, in fact, we were silent, drinking our tea or coffee. Darko would occasionally take Srebra’s spoon and hold it and, as if unobserved, lick it, before returning it to her plate. He would help us put on our coats, always brushing Srebra’s hair from her collar.
That is what our meetings with Darko amounted to until New Year’s Eve 1993, which we spent at his house, with the friends with whom we had gone to the convent. We listened to classical music and church hymns, then to the group Anastasija, then more classical music. It was still the Christmas fast, and we ate Lenten food. The only thing that reminded us that it was New Year’s Eve was the tree his parents had decorated before they left to celebrate at a restaurant. The tree was large, sparkling, decorated with many colored lights and ornaments. Its gaudiness reminded us that it was New Year’s Eve, even though we just wanted to spend the night as simply as possible, far from the New Year’s Eve atmosphere in our homes or on the TV. At midnight, it was inevitable, however, that we would all wish each other a Happy New Year. Everyone wished each other a Happy Holiday with a hug, Srebra and I, as always, hugging everyone jointly, touching them with our faces. They grasped our heads with both hands and hugged us at the same time, which somehow seemed more natural. But Darko hugged me first, lightly, his hand across my back, wishing me a Happy New Year. Then he held Srebra’s head in his hands, just below the ears, looked into her eyes, and said, “I love you.” At that same moment, he kissed her on the lips. I felt his breath, there, on my left cheek, his cheek nearly touching mine, but he didn’t move. He closed Srebra’s mouth with a long, deep kiss, holding her head the whole time, which caused a pain in my temple. Our joint vein gushed; our blood had never poured through at such frightening speed; Srebra’s entire body pulsed, and she transferred that throbbing into my head, then down to my chest. Afterward, she couldn’t catch her breath. She dragged me to the bathroom, and we locked ourselves inside. I was overcome by uncontrollable laughter, but Srebra began to cry, quietly, controlling her voice. She was sinking into tears, I into laughter. We finally calmed down. We sat there, each of us half-perched on the lid of the toilet, and brushed our tears away. “He loves you,” I told her, and she said at the same time, “I love him.”
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