But the night had no end. Later, just before dawn, Srebra woke me, dragging me from the bed. “I have to get to the bathroom, I have to, get up!” We could barely drag ourselves to the bathroom. I tumbled down onto my chair while she sat down on the toilet. She sat there for a long time, but nothing came out. Then, suddenly, something splashed into the toilet bowl, like a small turd falling. Srebra jumped from the toilet seat, and I from the chair. “What’s the matter with you?” I yelled at her, sleepily. “Blood,” she said. “Look, everything is red.” I wasn’t wearing my glasses, and although I peered into the toilet, I could not see anything. “It felt like something fell out of me,” she said. “Like a ball. Look, blood,” she was upset, shaking, and I shook along with her. I cried out, as loud as I could, “Darko!” and as Darko awoke, we dragged ourselves to the bed. “Darko, I’m bleeding.” Srebra trembled, trembled as never before in her life; we trembled as never before in our lives. I was completely awake, but everything was jumbled in my mind: me, Srebra, Darko, the night. I knew Srebra had lost the baby, but I didn’t say it aloud. Darko must also have known, but he said it was nothing, everything was all right, and then he helped Srebra put on clean underwear while we sat, hunched on the bed. Then we got dressed. Darko started the car and we drove to the municipal hospital, where, at the entry ramp, they shouted to us that cases like ours weren’t admitted at night, thinking we had come because of our heads. Srebra didn’t look pregnant, and, while Darko explained everything, a group of nurses passed by, holding slices of burek. The smell filled the night, and it was like the atmosphere after a party. We followed them; there wasn’t a single doctor around. They finally led us into a small room, but they didn’t know how to lay the two of us on the bed, so they placed us crosswise. The doctor, who had been more curious about our heads than about Srebra’s pregnancy, told her, “A piece of tissue from the embryo tore off and fell out while you were urinating.” And while we stared at him in shock, he added, “Tomorrow, we’ll abort it, and then it will be over.” I asked in an unsure voice, “Can’t the baby be saved?” and he looked at me and said, “What baby? It was a three-week-old embryo, a chromosomal mistake, a monstrosity. It’s for the best that it turned out this way.” Then he stood and told the nurse to give Srebra a referral for surgery and left. The nurse added, “Sometimes this happens for psychological reasons as well,” and gave Srebra the referral. We immediately left, dragging ourselves from the doctor’s office, bent over nearly double. Darko already knew everything; the doctor had told him the same thing, but without the personal commentary. Srebra was completely silent. In the operating room, we lay like two fallen branches, as if we had each lost an embryo. I didn’t move at all; I didn’t want to move Srebra even an inch. She was still dazed from the anesthesia. They hadn’t given me any, although I had asked for it. They told me to close my eyes if I didn’t want to watch. As it was, I couldn’t see down to where the forceps removed my unformed nephew from Srebra’s womb. I listened to the surgeon tell the nurse, “It will be difficult for this one to give birth after this,” and the nurse muttered, “God listened.” I wanted to shout at her, rebuke her for invoking God in that way, with her mean-spirited conviction that Srebra shouldn’t have a child, given how she was, joined to me, but I didn’t have the strength, and wanted to sink into myself. When they brought us back to the recovery room, they placed us on a bed beside the wall, and I squeezed up against the wall so there would be enough room for Srebra. Three more women were brought in, one after another: two didn’t want to have children, so they had come alone to have an abortion; the third wanted one, but this was already her fourth spontaneous miscarriage. That was all she said, and then she sank into silent sobs. The two who didn’t want to bear children and had been saved from it were having a lively conversation a half hour after their operations. They talked about life on Mount Vodno, about houses and apartments, furniture and gardens, their husbands, their work, and most of all about upholstery and wallpaper. They exchanged telephone numbers. They would be in touch to work out exchanging contractors. But their babies, along with Srebra’s baby—unformed, undeveloped, tiny, strange, almost invisible—were sent to a garbage dump somewhere or to a cosmetics factory. Who knows? Darko came to get us that afternoon, after Srebra had completely revived, had come back to full consciousness and to herself, not only recovering from the anesthesia, but also from her confrontation with herself, with her loss, with her despair. She was silent the whole time, even when Darko asked how she felt, if she was all right, if she wanted anything. She was silent and dragging along beside me to the car. In the car, while the radio played, “Stay with Me, Stay with Me,” a song I hadn’t heard for years, she said nothing, nor did she say anything as we rode the elevator up to the apartment. When we got inside, I turned toward the bedroom, thinking she would want to rest, but she yanked me with surprising strength toward the living room. We sat on the couch, while Darko bustled about, asking whether she wanted some orange juice or something. She swallowed, cleared her throat, and said, loudly and clearly, “Sit down!” Darko sat. “I know,” said Srebra, “I know.” “What?” Darko asked in surprise, but my heart jumped. “What you know, too. I don’t need to say it. You know I know. Right?” Both Darko and I were silent. It was clear to Srebra that I knew what she was talking about; the wild beating in our temples gave me away. My cheeks burned, giving off heat that Srebra could feel on her skin. “Take your hand out of your pocket; your icon will break—look how sweaty your hand is.” She grabbed my free hand. “Look.” Darko was sitting in the armchair, and, although he shifted nervously, he had had time to collect himself, and said as self-assuredly as he could, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “You do, too,” Srebra said, with a voice like a squeezed lemon: without force, but sharp, sour, and unflinching. “But your God forgives everything, right?” she said. After a few minutes—a full eternity—I quietly asked, “And yours?” “In my case, only the court decides whether to forgive. But that’s no longer important. What is important now is that we get separated, Zlata. Once and for all. With Darko, or without him.” Srebra wasn’t saying anything new. After all, for our entire lives, we had been dreaming—privately, or together, even saying it aloud—that one day we would be separated, having the operation and finally living according to our own wishes. Or we would die. Though in our imaginations, there was never death. We dreamed of a successful operation, and we imagined ourselves alive, healthy, and separate afterward. Srebra was ready for anything now, for a shared death, or for mine, or hers. She could no longer endure our bond. No longer. It was too much for her, without a baby and without the husband whom she willfully distanced from her, because, as she said, she knew. But how? How did she know that the night before the miscarriage, drunk and unconscious of the consequences, we satisfied our basest passions? There were none baser; we had fallen into the greatest, most terrible, most shameful sin. “All right,” said Darko. “Either with me or without me.” That is how the conversation ended: unclear, unspoken, unexplained, yet at the same time clear and irrefutable. Darko picked up the phone and called his father. He told him about Srebra’s miscarriage. No, no, he didn’t want to talk with his mother. He told him that he had never before asked for anything, but now he had nowhere to turn. His father might have to call the president, he said, but the money for the operation must be found. “Whose?” “Srebra’s,” he said, and then added, “and Zlata’s—they must be separated… No, no, that’s not what the doctor said,” he added, already annoyed. “Does someone need to have said that for them to be separated? Is that it? They’re twenty-three years old. How long must they live like this? How long will we have to live like this? Call someone. You’re the vice president, after all. The whole party is behind you. Surely someone has a connection to the monetary fund. Yes, it’s likely expensive. We haven’t inquired, but still, ask for the money. If not, we will take out advertisements to raise the money for the operation. Someone might be more humane than the party, right?” Darko was s
arcastic, for the first time ever, and his father probably was as well, because Darko added, “Yes, I am a member as well, but only a member; you are the vice president, and you have power.” He said some other things to his father as well, speaking passionately, convincingly, but his face was pale, and the receiver trembled in his hand. When the call ended, he was silent. He went into his study, where, in a corner, stood an icon of the Virgin Mary with a lamp and candleholder in front of it. After several minutes, he called us, but Srebra didn’t want to stand. Darko persisted, begging us to come in, so we got up, and, wondering what he wanted, entered the room. He stood in front of his small shrine and read prayers for the forgiveness of sins, then he passed a prayer book to us, but Srebra wouldn’t take it. So I did, and Darko and I read one prayer after another, and crossed ourselves, but Srebra didn’t. I took my icon of Zlata Meglenska from my pocket, and passed it to Srebra to kiss, but she brushed it away. I didn’t pass it to Darko, I don’t know why, and he seemed not to notice. We read the Akathist Hymn to Mary, and tears fell from Darko’s eyes. For a moment I envied Srebra, because he loved her so much, but then I remembered that she knew and could no longer love him. Thoughts swirled in my head. I missed Sister Zlata and I missed God. Before going to bed, I gave Srebra a sleeping pill, and I took one as well, of course. We slept thanks to the pills, not the prayers. Darko slept in the study, with the candle lit and the icon lamp filled with incense from Mount Athos, which he had received from his friends at the church in Krivi Dol. Srebra and I were alone again, sisters, but in the much more comfortable bed in Darko’s home, rather than at our parents’ house, but we were more unhappy than we had ever been in our lives, nearly on the brink of death. Our parents knew nothing about Srebra’s miscarriage, although I knew she would call them the next day to tell them. “What has been written will unfold,” I heard our mother say into the receiver, “Don’t be upset, you silly fool, you are not the first and won’t be the last. Besides, what would you do with a child, given your situation and how people talk about you?” Srebra’s hand holding the receiver was clammy, but she didn’t hang up. “We’re going to have the operation,” she said. “We’re starting to collect money.” “Where could we possibly find the money?” Mom said. “You haven’t said anything about it for years, and now it occurs to you. What next?” “It didn’t occur to us? It didn’t occur to you!” shouted Srebra. “We aren’t asking you for money; we’ll find it ourselves.” Our mother repeated her favorite saying: “Do whatever you want. You’re the smartest girls in the world, and you do whatever you want; you don’t listen to anyone, and now you find yourself in a fine mess.” That broke the camel’s back. Srebra hung up the receiver, then lifted it again. She called a taxi. “We’re going home.” “Don’t!” I said. “That will make too big a deal out of it. Calm down, please. Darko will sort things out with his father about the money, you’ll see.” But Srebra was already pulling me outside, into the elevator, then down to the street where the taxi was already waiting for us. The taxi driver went crazy when he saw us. “You’re them!” he gasped. “You’re the ones. I let out a passenger here who told me about some girls with their heads stuck together, and now here you are…” “Yes, that’s us,” Srebra said. “Would you like to see how we’re attached? Would you like to touch?” “No. That’s not necessary,” the driver said, and he started the engine. I immediately said, “To the cemetery in Butel.” I could tell Srebra was boiling; she didn’t understand why I told the driver to go to Butel. The driver did as I said, and after a long drive through Skopje traffic, he dropped us off at the cemetery entrance. There were a few heavyset women selling bouquets of carnations and daffodils. We didn’t buy anything. Behind our backs they crossed themselves and moved away a bit, spit to ward off the evil eye, and prayed that such a thing would not happen in their families. We went into the cemetery. “Why did we come here?” Srebra asked. “To find peace,” I said to her. “Both in ourselves and between ourselves. Here, where everyone is dead, will be the best place to find peace. And I held out the little finger of my right hand to her, but she didn’t give me hers. I recited the rhyme we said when we hooked pinkies to end a quarrel, but didn’t add “cut,” because Srebra didn’t want to make peace, not this way, not so quickly. “Just think about whose grave we have never visited,” I said to her. “Roza’s. It’s the right thing for us to do, come here once, together, as she knew us, before we’re separated and have our own lives and don’t think about her. She wouldn’t even recognize us any other way, you know.” “You actually think we’ll find her?” Srebra asked sarcastically. “We’ll ask someone; there must be some sort of manager. A registrar or something.” But there was nothing. The guard said he was new and had no information about where anyone was buried. “You have to ask the family for that information,” he said. “You don’t just come like this to a cemetery. You could wander around all day, and someone might grab you and rape you; there’s all kinds that come out here, and they come looking for all kinds, one head, two heads, just as long as they have somewhere to put their you-know-whats.” Although he was young, he was giving us a lecture as if he were some old relative. “Have you been raped yet?” Srebra tossed back at him. But I was already dragging her toward the older graves, from the eighties. There was no order to the Butel cemetery, no way for a person to get oriented. We wandered among the graves, staring at the inscriptions and photographs. We rested on a bench, stood awhile beside a child’s grave, a young girl, who had recently died at the age of three. Her poor parents hadn’t made a grave but a monument—a throne on pillars, strewn with fresh flowers and wreaths and small plush bears and other animals, a white house of marble with red ribbons and balloons tied to all four columns. It was more like a birthday party than a grave. Tears fell down Srebra’s cheeks. “I didn’t bury my child,” she said. “It was only three weeks old,” I said. “It wasn’t a child yet; it was an embryo.” “It was a baby,” she said. “My baby, and I didn’t bury it.” Our mission to find Roza’s grave was a failure. Srebra didn’t even look. She just walked beside me, absently, drowned in her own misfortune. I dragged her along the pathways. I felt Roza no longer meant anything to her, that she didn’t remember her. Who knows whether she was even buried here. It would have been more logical for her to be buried in Triangla, which was closer to her home and not out at the end of bus route 59, all the way out in Butel. I pulled Srebra toward the cemetery exit, which we found only with difficulty. The guard waved to us. We hopped on the 59 bus and set off. We didn’t go to our parents’ apartment. That night, I dreamed about our father: He was wearing a long black overcoat (something he brought from his childhood home, something that remained from his life with his parents); his chin was stubbly; his hair was thick and straggly. He was lying dead in a hearse. I looked at him through the balcony rails and realized that he was not dead, just seeing what it would be like. Srebra cried out in her sleep. I woke, and woke her as well. She said a skeleton had been lying on top of her all night. She had grabbed its head—no its skull—under the blankets, thinking it was Darko’s, but the skeleton wanted to enter her with a bone instead of his penis. Her head was covered by the blanket. She wanted to scream but had no voice. She wanted to pull the blanket off, but she didn’t have the strength, and the skeleton’s bones touched her through the blanket. A horrible nightmare. How much freer a person is to retell her disconnected thoughts when half asleep, not yet in control of her words, not thinking of the consequences of what’s being said, completely free from shame and the pressures of conventional conversation. In fact, Srebra was describing the weight on her soul. Darko, awakened by her scream, stood in the bedroom doorway, disheveled. He was aware of how hard this was for her, how much she still loved him, but also of how the pain didn’t allow her to forgive him. God would forgive him before Srebra would. That’s how it is with people; their hearts are in their heads, and their heads are in their hearts. Even for those whose head is attached to another’s. At breakfast, Darko asked her hesitantly, “Ar
e we still husband and wife?” Srebra was silent a moment, and then said in a tired voice, “Yes, we are. But until Zlata and I are separated, I can’t think about it. We have two options: either we get divorced and Zlata and I leave, or we wait until after the operation, and then consider what to do. But I can’t live with you as my husband until Zlata and I are separated.” Srebra spoke rationally, calculated and cold. Why hadn’t she thought so rationally before the wedding? Why hadn’t she pressured me, pressured us to find a solution—money, a surgeon—and begun her own life, and I mine? Had she been afraid? I had been. In Macedonia, we were written off as a hopeless medical case. No one had given any serious thought to our situation. All our family doctor said was, “An operation like that is doomed to fail from the start. You have a shared vein. How can you be separated? Who could perform such an operation? I’ve been a doctor for many years, and I’ve never heard of such a thing.” And that had been that. Conversation closed. But since then we had read how, in the history of medicine, there have been surgeries to separate twins, both successful and unsuccessful. Back in the nineteenth century, a surgeon in a London hospital separated two young girls, though, to be honest, they had been attached at the shoulder rather than the head. Our family doctor hadn’t heard about that. But now we were gripped by a zeal, by a fury, and we could no longer cope with how things stood, not on account of ourselves, because we were used to being two in one, but on account of the events that had taken place: Srebra’s abortion and my nighttime drunken adventure with Darko. None of that could be brushed away or forgotten. I don’t know whether Srebra really knew what had happened that night or whether she just sensed it; neither Darko nor I admitted to anything. But it seemed she had begun to hate me because of it. Throughout our lives we had always hated each other a bit, outwardly, in our relationship and in our words. We hated each other more than we loved each other, although in our souls we did, surely, love each other. I don’t know how one couldn’t love one’s own sister; I don’t know if blood can be the same as water. “For better or for worse then,” Darko said, and kissed her cheek. Srebra said nothing. She could let him go if she wanted. We could go back to our parents if we wanted, but the fact was she didn’t want to let him go. She still loved him, even if she couldn’t forgive him, and we could not go home. “There’s absolutely no way I would go back there,” I told Srebra. “But if you don’t want to live with Darko, we can rent a place. Or we can go to the convent.” “Darko is my husband, and as long as he’s my husband, we will live here,” Srebra pronounced, and that decided it. Although she said those words with unspoken hatred toward me, I was relieved. On no account did I want to return home, though, to tell the truth, I did miss it sometimes. It was, after all, our home. We still called it home. We had spent our entire lives there, in that room, in that apartment, which—through all the good times and bad—smelled, nonetheless, of home. There are only two kinds of home: Home with a capital letter, the place one has come from, and home with a lowercase letter, which are the places one moves to. We moved from our Home as if we had moved to a foreign country, as if we had emigrated. The mix of pain and joy, sadness and enthusiasm; we were at the border between the old, familiar, somewhat terrible life and a new, unknown, certainly far lovelier life. For us, moving to Darko’s apartment had been as if we had moved, or better yet emigrated, to America, or Canada, or Australia. It was clean, orderly, warm, with a constant supply of hot water, a full refrigerator, a washing machine, a dishwasher, new bedding, and sparkling pots and pans and dishes. I felt as if we had left our Home for sanitary reasons. Srebra’s marriage had been for love, but also as an escape, a voluntary expulsion from the conditions under which we had lived. At Darko’s, we had become more beautiful. We could shower whenever we wanted. To iron our clothes, we laid them on an ironing board, not spread on the couch in the kitchen. Our clothes had never been properly ironed before. We ate fresh vegetables, had as much yogurt as we wanted—not just a tiny little cupful. We cooked what we wanted, and Darko always left enough money in the drawer in the bedroom for all our needs: cosmetics, clothes, shoes, as well as for small pleasures such as books and CDs. We were finally washed and combed, with skin clear of acne, smooth heels, white teeth brushed with warm water. We were like two village girls who don’t know what city life is like and are so delighted at having discovered it that they want to take every advantage.
A Spare Life Page 25