A Spare Life

by Lidija Dimkovska

  “He’ll separate you,” Darko said with conviction when we were outside. “He will separate you!” He was euphoric. He was shouting through the street that led to the underground—the aboveground, actually, because here at East Acton, the trains stopped above ground, and only later, at the third station, did they go deep into the earth, down into the depths of our thoughts. “Dead or alive,” I said, although I didn’t want to be cynical. “Alive, alive,” said Srebra, “Oh, I’m so hungry!” But the choice we had to make cut between us like a living wall: Who would live if a choice had to be made? We didn’t say a word about it. After a long ride, we got off near Hyde Park and went into a small, nondescript restaurant with a sign over the door, reading “We serve English breakfast all day.” We were hungry, not from hunger, but from excitement, anxiety, fear, and joy. We ordered three English breakfasts: we each got a fried egg, sunny-side up, bacon, roasted sausage, broiled tomato slices, a pile of boiled beans with hot red peppers, bread spread with butter, and coffee. Breakfast at eleven o’clock. We ate everything. Then we headed to the park. We came face-to-face with an enormous black marble Achilles. Bicyclists and people running in different directions swirled past it. “Look!” Darko pointed out a family to us. The mother was running, and the father ran while pushing a carriage in which a three-year-old boy was loudly laughing, excited by the race. I asked why they ran even on a Sunday, when so much time was spent every other day hurrying about from here to there. But they were a family, and for them, that was something far more important than the running. At that moment, I made my choice: Srebra must live. We approached the Speakers’ Corner. A man standing on a bricklayer’s ladder was speaking loudly, shouting actually, screaming in defense of Jesus Christ. A typical, populist herald of God, so sure of both himself and God. Standing right beside him, though not on the ladder, was a Muslim man who contradicted the Christian in a quiet voice. He kept repeating, “You know, you know,” which was the only thing that could be heard amid all the roar and commotion. An absurd scene, cinematic. Behind them, a young black girl in a pink dress was running around with her father, a large, imposing man. On the other side, a man sat on a chair singing meditative songs, then reading psalms from the Bible. While we were there, not a single person spoke about politics. I thought Macedonia should have something like a speakers’ corner in the park in Skopje for politicians—though not just for them—so they could say whatever came into their minds, talking as much as they pleased. People could say whatever they wanted and lighten their souls. A speakers’ corner for radicals, in every sense of the word. Perhaps Srebra and I should climb on a chair in Hyde Park and speak about our torment. Had anyone ever spoken in Macedonian from the Speakers’ Corner in London? I said none of this aloud; after all, Darko was the son of the vice president of the opposition party in Macedonia—Srebra’s father-in-law, who had found enough money for our medical treatment in London, although it wasn’t clear to us how. Officially, the money had been given to us from the Health Insurance Fund, and had gone directly into the account of the London hospital.

  We continued on to the British Museum. The Parthenon, Greek Gods, Egyptian mummies, Indian deities, terracotta from Taranto, the Rosetta Stone, and, at the end—Macedonian folk costumes from Galičnik. Everything was in the British Museum, the whole world, everything that had existed prior to us, artifacts from every civilization were preserved there. Everything was there, and everything not there was coming. Including us. “Look, they could put us here,” said Srebra, “with the inscription ‘Two-headed Macedonians, embalmed,’ you in black, me in white, like on our wedding day.” “It would be one of the most popular exhibits,” said Darko, and he laughed. All the museumgoers looked first at us, as if we were an exhibit that had stepped out of a display case, and only then did they turn discreetly toward the real exhibits, still affected by the sight, unsure in what era they found themselves. We were not invalids. We were not blind, not autistic; we didn’t have Down syndrome. We “only” had conjoined heads that didn’t immediately strike the eye. It was only after the fifth second they saw it, when our heads moved in unison in the same direction, and our bodies, always leaning to one side or the other, were pulled by gravity, gravity which, in our case, was always off-balance. But we were here in London, seeking an escape from the circumstances of our life. Just one more night, and we would be in the confident and capable hands of our surgeon.

  That evening, we returned a bit early to the hotel. Along the way, we each had a Cornish pasty. As we entered the hotel, the woman at reception handed Srebra and me the key to our room with an expression on her face different from the one she wore as she gave Darko his. She looked at us with a smile playing at the corners of her lips and a secret in her gaze. We weren’t sure why. We took the elevator to our floor. Darko said he would go to his room and then come to ours in half an hour. We went into our room, undressed—pulling our clothes down our legs—then popped into the shower. We dried off quickly, and, seated at the small vanity in our room, dried our hair with the hairdryer. I dried mine a bit and hers, then Srebra dried hers a bit and mine. We knew that this was the last time we would dry our hair in this fashion. We looked silently into the mirror, and in our gaze, everything was condensed, everything we had been silent about all our lives, everything we wanted to tell each other but didn’t for whatever reason, everything was in our eyes, because other than in a mirror, we couldn’t see each other. We loved each other, we hated each other, we were ashamed of each other, we felt contempt for each other, we were afraid of each other, we were close and we were distant. Everything was mixed up in our hearts, our heads; yet, surprisingly, it had all become unimportant, nearly meaningless in the face of our desire to be separated once and for all! Period. End of sentence. While the hair dryer blew on our hair, mixing the strands together, we were aware that, right in that moment, in the loneliness of a hotel room in London, we were separating, and it made us both happy and downcast, more out of fear than pain. Someone knocked on the door. “OK!” Srebra called out. “Come in!” she added even louder. A moment later the door opened, but it wasn’t Darko on the other side, but a young man in strange attire, as if he were from outer space—from head to toe in a shiny silver woolen jumpsuit, with a soft hat that covered him from forehead to chin. Srebra and I gasped at the same time. Srebra said roughly, “Excuse me?” and the young man said in English, “You ordered a bed-warming?” At once I recognized Bogdan, not from our childhood in Skopje, but from the television show we had seen the night before, when he was sobbing and striking his head with his fists, yelling, “Shit, shit” after he lost. It was Bogdan, it really was. “Bogdan!” I cried, but he couldn’t believe his eyes. Evidently, he had not known we were there. Darko had ordered the bed-warming as a surprise. Bogdan stood, holding onto the door, and said, “Zlata? Srebra?” Then he took his hat off and began to pull his arms out of the suit. “You’re not going to warm our bed?” Srebra asked with a smirk, while I stared with mouth agape. He nearly jumped, saying, “If you want me to,” but I waved him off with my hand. My heart nearly flew from my chest, and our hearts and temples pounded in a shared rhythm, which I thought might echo through the whole room. I don’t know how we calmed down. I think it was when Darko came into the room, and, laughing, introduced himself to Bogdan. Bogdan, the childhood friend who had disappeared one day from our lives, was now here, with us, in a hotel room in London, as a professional warmer of hotel beds. It was a new profession—human bed warmers who lay down in specialized attire before the hotel guest got in. It was warm outside, but in the room the climate control had cooled it to sixty-two degrees, and the bed was cold. Some guests really did want a warm bed to climb into, so the hotel came up with this new job. Guests could order a bed warmer, who, hoping for a good tip, would warm it then discreetly withdraw. Bogdan was the only one in the hotel, and, apparently, in all of London, because it was rare for someone to want the service, and the manager had told him he would probably have to let him go because it was simply n
ot worth keeping him on for those few occasions when a guest requested him. Many associations, organizations, and individuals considered the service controversial, but guests seeing the ad for the service hanging in the display case at the reception desk either reacted by laughing uncontrollably (which made the watchman in the hotel, a black man named John, also laugh), or with shock—arguing with the receptionist, defending human rights, intimacy, hygiene, human worth. One guest even said he would order the warmer to warm his bed, but would also fuck him, certain that the service was sexual, because otherwise, what normal person would warm a stranger’s bed with his body, even if wrapped up in protective clothing from head to toe. Stories in the newspapers said that the hotel had crossed all boundaries of good behavior and was offering a service that encroached on an individual’s bodily integrity. It was a scandal. “As for me, this isn’t my first job and it won’t be my last. I finished a technical school program, and since then I’ve done all sorts of things, working in pubs, restaurants, offices, laundries, now here. But I mainly work here just so I can say I have a job. Most of the time I solve prize crosswords (he looked at us knowingly, but also a bit shame-faced, saying, ‘You know how much I liked Brain Twisters’). I play the lotto. I mail in prize coupons, postcards. I answer questions. England has tons of these things, and there are constantly new games. I go on quiz shows; yesterday, for example, I almost won the grand prize, but didn’t. I’d be rich, and wouldn’t have to warm hotel beds anymore. But then I wouldn’t have seen you.” “What about your mother? What’s she doing?” I asked tentatively. “My mother? Are you thinking of Auntie Stefka? That’s what I call her. I couldn’t get used to calling her Mom. She’s alive and well, and when her sister died, she married her sister’s husband, her brother-in-law. He’s an Englishman, a good guy, but I still call him Uncle. I couldn’t get used to calling him Dad. They live in Brighton, and we see each other from time-to-time. I live here, in an area called Shoreditch. I rent a place and usually sleep there, except when I know a client wants me to warm the bed. Then I get an employee’s room in the hotel.” We spoke that night till dawn. About London, Skopje, the operation that awaited us. We all talked, but mainly Bogdan. That night, he was more talkative than he had been all the years of our childhood together, when he silently solved crossword puzzles and we played together and watched one another, at times timidly, at times aggressively, embarrassment and courage mixing like water and oil, depending on whether Roza was around. Srebra had barely any relationship with him when we were children. His presence annoyed her. But since Roza had accepted him as a friend, Bogdan was often in our circle. How had I felt about Bogdan when I was a kid? I had been embarrassed and sorry for him, but I didn’t ignore him. At school, I listened closely when he spoke in class. I was shaken by his essay “When You Hit Rock Bottom.” I had never forgotten him, and whenever we met in the neighborhood, I was confused and couldn’t talk. But it had always passed quickly, because Srebra would pull me away. We talked about Roza. Bogdan remembered every detail of their friendship and at one point said, “Roza was like a sister to me.” We all fell silent. The memories came back and struck each of us like waves hitting a rocky shore, breaking our hearts with pent-up feeling, truths unspoken, thoughts unsaid. Until dawn, we combed through our lives as we never had before. We talked, laughed, kept silent, but we did not cry. Darko attentively pulled the threads of our conversation. He knew when to prompt us, when to stop us, and when to get us to open up a bit more. That night, Srebra and I passed through a ritual confession, a cleansing of our souls, a farewell to our joint heads, and looked toward a new future that would undoubtedly be bright. We went to bed, each of us calmed by her own collection of memories, her own personal history. Srebra and Darko kissed on the lips. Bogdan seemed taken aback when he saw them kiss right beside my face, next to my cheek. He said good night and left, with the promise that he would visit us in the hospital, where, he said, he would see each of us with her own head.

  Before we entered the hospital, Srebra said we should phone our mother and father. “So they’re not worrying about us,” she said, and from that perspective, from abroad in London, it was natural they would be thinking of us, asking each other what we were doing, what we had done. “Let’s,” I said, and after inserting British pounds, we dialed their number in Skopje from a phone booth. Our mother always answered the phone, as she did now. “Where are you? Why haven’t you been calling?” she asked, but her voice was lost. It was so muffled and raspy that we barely recognized it. I felt concern weigh on my conscience. Holding the receiver to our ears under our chins, Srebra said in one breath, “We’re fine. We are going to the hospital right now. They’ve given us a room. The doctor is really good. He said he first has to do an examination and several tests, and then he’ll do the operation.” Our mother was silent for a moment, and then said, “Your grandmother died. Your uncle called this morning. So we are going there.” She choked. In shock, Srebra and I couldn’t utter a word. We heard our mother say, “Bye,” and she hung up the receiver. Srebra and I stood in the phone booth in the hospital courtyard, lost, broken. Darko helped us go into the hospital. We were taken to a room with a large bed that had a special mechanism for raising and lowering our bodies, a bundle of shiny equipment beside it, a gorgeous magnolia out the window, and two green bonsai on the nightstands. The room looked more like a hotel room than a hospital room. It had its own private bath, with the largest shower stall we had ever seen, with an enormous showerhead and two small hand-held showerheads for rinsing. How could there be a stall especially made for Siamese twins and we had never seen such a thing in our lives? The nurse smiled from ear to ear as she showed us all the things in our room and in the bathroom, as though we were her guests and she had given us the nicest room, with a view of a green lawn stretching out beyond the hospital, which from the fourth floor could be seen in all its splendor. “Our grandma died,” I said, barely audible. The nurse gasped and said she was sorry, but added that such was life: old people die, young ones live, children are born. She asked us if we needed anything. We needed nothing but our grandmother, alive, like when she’d held us in her embrace and sang, “This is the way the ladies ride, a gallop-a-trot.” They left us in peace. We lay down in the enormous bed, each with her own thoughts and tears, staring at the television without knowing what we were watching. Darko tried to make conversation, but neither Srebra nor I could get words out of our mouths. That first night in the hospital, I dreamed we were talking to our father on the phone, and he asked us, “What does the doctor say? Is there any chance?” And just as I was about to say, “There is,” Srebra moved the receiver to her ear and said rapidly, “There is and there isn’t.” Then our mother grabbed the receiver and shouted, “So why then have the operation? Why can’t you just go on as you had before? You’re just there for the hell of it. There are people who go around with no legs or arms. You have everything, but you still think it’s not enough.” But I repeated, as if in a trance, “We have nothing! We have nothing!” and Srebra added, “Please, I beg you.” Then she put down the receiver, and in our anxiety, we both wet our pants. When I woke up, I immediately felt the sheet beneath me to see if it was dry. I thought about how our grandma must have already been buried without us, and how we would never see her again. The doctor came in. The tests began, conducted by a team of twelve doctors and nurses, both men and women. What did they not do to us? What did we not endure for those three and a half weeks of both painful and interesting experiences? We gave ourselves over completely, acting as if nothing hurt, as if nothing bothered us. “What obedient girls,” a doctor said. “Very Balkan,” added our doctor, and he laughed. He had this irony in him, as well as a sense of humor that made anything forgivable. He was a neurosurgeon, an intellectual who allowed himself both humor and irony, everything in the service of the relationship he was building with us. A nurse came in with a razor and said they would have to shave our heads. As the nurse shaved me, I felt my head getting smaller, as if it were b
ecoming smooth and round as it never had been before. Even the nurse was surprised by what she saw. “You have such small heads,” she said. “They’re so Jewish!” When we looked at ourselves in the mirror, we saw two strange faces, unrecognizable at first. We each looked first at herself and then at the other, and saw how much the hair determines a person’s look. Now, with no hair, we looked funny, almost grotesque. “Your hair will grow back, I guarantee,” the nurse said and then bit her lip slightly, as if realizing that she shouldn’t have said the words “I guarantee.” While she might be able to guarantee our hair would grow back, she couldn’t guarantee anything else—the outcome of the operation, for example. But she had guaranteed our hair would grow back normally, if… When he saw us, Darko laughed happily, looking relaxed. In fact, Darko laughed the whole time we were in London, as if he had swallowed some happiness medication. He tried to get us to relax, take away our worries, infuse us with hope. He laughed in a joking way or in a simple, childish way. He even went as far as to flick little stones and blades of grass at us. He scampered around, teasing, sparkling with optimism, trust, and faith in God. I think Srebra had forgiven him for everything, everything, and she seemed to have forgiven me as well, though she didn’t speak to me at all. Over the course of those weeks, Bogdan rarely came to the hospital. I felt heavy in my soul asking myself why, but at the same time asked myself why I expected him to come every day like Darko did. Darko was Srebra’s husband, while Bogdan was nothing to Srebra and me, after so many years in which we hadn’t thought of each other. Why did I miss him after the one night in the hotel that we spent talking and talking and talking? Days later, an hour after we went into the operating room and were left alone to get accustomed to the room, to talk, and to see Darko, Bogdan also came. “Here?” Srebra was asking uncertainly. “Yes, here,” the nurse confirmed, adding, “Don’t worry, we’ll sterilize everything again. Just relax and spend some time together.” The operating room was enormous, like a high-school gymnasium. It was bright and equipped with the most modern medical instruments and machines.