A Spare Life

by Lidija Dimkovska

  Bogdan and I lived together happily, with no quarrels or complaints. His tenderness and passion knew no borders. He literally carried me in his arms, listened to me, comforted me, understood me. He was the love of my life, and he said I was the love of his. “I can hardly wait for you to finish graduate school so we can have a child,” he said. “But you do know it takes three years?” I laughed, and that night, as usual, I took a contraceptive pill. There were times when I, too, could barely wait to finish school so we could have a baby. A small beautiful child with a modern name: Maya, David, Dora, Sergei.

  It had been two years since I had been to Skopje. From time to time I called my parents. My mother always picked up, so I never got to speak with my father. These were informational conversations—what I was doing, how university was going, what Bogdan was doing, what they were doing (nothing), what was new (what should be new?), if they went to the cemetery (well, your father’s hands shake so much he can’t drive the car anymore, and it takes two hours on the bus). They had been there on All Saints’ Day, had brought things and cleaned the grave—a lot of grass had sprouted. Then I would change the subject and ask how Aunt Milka was doing (sick, hit with ten injections), how Aunt Ivanka was doing (she’s upset at Lenče and Mirko and has gotten so thin you can hardly recognize her), Verče (who knows what she’s doing, she only goes from work to home), Lenče (back and forth between the hospital and home—she beat her mother again, turned her black and blue; Mirko taught her all of that, mark my words), my uncle (he doesn’t call; Snežana doesn’t let him). “Does Darko call you?” “No,” she said, “he doesn’t call anymore; your aunt Ivanka told me he’s gone off to the monastery and become a monk; she saw his father at the bank, God preserve him… Oh and yes, I met Miki and his girlfriend; ugh, she’s worse than you: dark, skinny, a nothing! A ponytail tied up with a rubber band!”

  I listened, laughing with self-irony. She had always thought I was ugly, worthless, Srebra and I. Probably from the time we were babies. Worthless. Like bats, but with conjoined heads to boot. Perhaps that’s why we never had our pictures taken as babies. Only beautiful people get photographed. These were the things my mother talked to me about on the phone—always distressing, always filled with negativity. Everyone was on the verge of death or at a critical moment in life. If it was summer, it was hellish, you couldn’t breathe. If it was winter, it was cold, the radiators had frozen, and she just hung around at home with my father. They were sinking in their own misery.

  Two full years after my move to London, I said to Bogdan, “I can’t put it off anymore. I have to go to Skopje.” “Go,” he said. “But I’m not going. I’ll wait for you here.” I bought a ticket and left on the first plane to Ljubljana. There were no direct tickets to Skopje, so I decided to go from Ljubljana to Skopje by train. It was the beginning of November 1999. I had bought a few presents in London and a lot of food for the trip. I had a long trip ahead of me, and I ate a lot while traveling. The evening before I left, I prepared a bag of food: some chocolate, juice, water, bread sticks, salty snacks, chocolate milk, a banana, a tangerine, and the next day, before I left, I also put into the bag a sandwich I packed in foil and a plastic bag, along with a folded napkin. I ate almost the entire trip. I ate and read. My stomach got full, but I simply had to empty the bag before I arrived, filling it again with the remains and wrappers. To lighten it. To lighten myself. On the train from Ljubljana, the young man sitting across from me took a loaf of bread and a small wheel of kashkaval from his backpack. Everything was neatly covered in plastic wrap. He took out a knife—a real one, long and sharp—from a black leather case, and on the little table by the window, he cut two pieces of bread and four pieces of kashkaval with precision. He made himself a sandwich, wrapped up the bread and cheese in the paper, returned the knife to its case, and bit into the sandwich. I thought: what precision, cleanliness, polish, order. The man was from Slovenia. My food was not as beautiful. I had a feeling that it didn’t have an enticing aroma, but stank. How much can one manage to eat during a train trip from Ljubljana to Skopje? Nearly twenty hours of nibbling, chewing, sipping. I recalled there was a town in Slovenia called Litija. When I was young, instead of playing catch or volleyball on the schoolyard during gym class, we played “Partisans and Germans.” I was called Sister Lita, and Srebra was Sister Kerol; we were orderlies for the wounded Partisans. Lita was short for Litija. I had read that name somewhere, probably in an atlas, and had dreamed up the character Litija, but I don’t know how. Beyond the schoolyard fence ran the Kumanovo–Belgrade highway. One day, our classmate Olivera said that she wanted to run away from home and that was the road she was going to take. She said she was going to run away from the smallness of her home (her mother and father slept in one bed, and she and her sister—a younger sister who often wet the bed—slept in the other). Her grandmother slept on the narrow bed in the kitchen. The grandmother knew Russian so well she could translate an entire movie into Macedonian. She would turn her back to the television and translate aloud while Olivera followed the subtitles to see if she was correct. She was. We wanted to leave home along that road, too, and go somewhere far away, out into the wide world. Srebra had gone into the widest world, into the heavens, but I remained in London. And now I was traveling toward Skopje, toward the source of my entire life, which had clearly been running dry but was now reviving. I took out a book to read. Since I had moved to London I only read books in English, for the simple reason that I had no more books written in Macedonian. I had decided not to bring anything back from Skopje besides new books in Macedonian. I didn’t know what awaited me at home. Yes, I thought, home. My home was still in Skopje, at my parents’ apartment. I longed to go to Srebra’s grave, to kiss it, caress it, and tell her everything. Although I often went to Blake’s grave in Bunhill Fields, which had become my substitute grave for Srebra’s, I was still aware that it wasn’t there, but in Skopje, in the cemetery in Butel, where Srebra—her remains and her spirit—was buried.

  Sometime after we passed Zagreb, a woman with a long tormented face and a black ponytail came into our compartment and immediately called someone on the phone. It sounded like a child, but I didn’t know if it was hers. She spoke to him for a long, long time, explaining how to fry two eggs and top them with a slice of salami. She gave precise directions: “The eggs are in the refrigerator on the balcony; use the silver pan; don’t put in too much oil or they’ll get greasy and then you can’t eat them; two minutes is enough…” Again and again the same instructions. At the end, she said several times, “Enjoy your meal. I’ll call you when I’m coming back. If Baba let’s me.” She was speaking Bosnian—was Baba his grandma or father? Who was this woman with the sunken face calling? I looked at her, but couldn’t understand what was going on with her, clearly something unhappy, clearly one of those personal sorrows and misfortunes that slowly destroys a life and compound, until nothing remains but a pile of bones and a puzzled cranium staring into its own emptiness.

  The guy with the sandwich got off in Belgrade, and in Niš, a fortyish woman, who was trying to look much younger, got on. She was wearing a thong—a black cord peeked out of her pants, and each time she bent forward to get water or something from her backpack, the cord became more and more visible, shaking with her ample hips, which didn’t narrow at the waist but seemed to continue right up to her breasts, where they came to a sudden halt: she was as flat as a board. That made the black cord beneath her pants seem to be both thong and brassiere: her ass and bosom together in one place, drawing attention. It was like a spread in a porno magazine where many small pictures are set close together to create the image of a single body. For a woman like her, who had just come on the train but had already taken off her boots and stretched her legs onto the seat opposite hers—then curled them up on her own—for a not-so-young woman like her, the montage was comprised of her ass and her absent breasts, which the black thong highlighted like a product advertising two for one. It wasn’t sexy. With every bend forward, as
the belt of her jeans dropped below the level of the black horizontal string, the thong’s vertical string exuded the foul smell of dried excrement. I was nauseated. I burrowed deeper into the poetry of Czesław Miłosz.

  Nobody was waiting for me when I arrived in Skopje, which was understandable, because I hadn’t called my parents to let them know I was coming. I don’t know why I wanted to surprise them. Some streets were closed to traffic because of a large strike led by impoverished workers. Taxi drivers had to wind their way across the entire city in order to continue on to the far side. It occurred to me that I didn’t have enough Macedonian denari for a taxi. I had to walk several stops on foot, carrying my backpack. Outside, it was slippery, cold, and dark. I finally found a bus. I arrived home exhausted, hungry. I rang the bell for a long time. I didn’t have a key to the apartment. My mother finally opened the door, and after a quick greeting with two glancing kisses on the cheeks, she said, “So now you’ve chosen to come? Your father just got out of the hospital today.” We stood leaning on the chairs in the dining room, facing the wall on which the needlepoint of “The Goose Girl” was hanging. My father, pale, weak, face sunken, hair white, was bent over following his recent hernia operation; I had just arrived from London, not having slept—tired, hungry, and unwelcome. I was silent. I didn’t know what to say. Not one inch of the apartment was my home anymore. When I went into “my” room, I curled up on the floor and didn’t know what to do with my hands, with my heart. I had to go to the bathroom. There was no hot water in the boiler. It was cold; the heater couldn’t warm the room, which hadn’t been heated for two whole years. I wanted to leave the door open so warmth could come in from the kitchen and dining room, where my parents warmed themselves by the woodstove, but I didn’t dare. I kneeled before the radiator as if before God. The room didn’t dare open itself to me, to warm me. I was a stranger to it. In the bathroom, the little window was open a crack; the handle on the shower had been pulled off; the water sprayed in all directions. I turned on the boiler. I kneeled in the tub, and with barely tepid water, attempted to wash my body. Then I stood up, but let the water run off me for a moment longer. Whenever I showered standing—alone since the operation or with Srebra when she was alive—the water never seemed to go down the drain, but instead spilled onto the floor, and then we had to use all our energy to mop it up, pushing it toward the drain. With my father’s heavy, uncomfortable, plastic red-brown flip-flops on my feet, I stood naked in the tub. I shivered as I mopped up the water; then I opened the window wide to dry the floor more quickly, so my mother could again cover the floor with old newspapers, place a plastic sheet over them, and then, over that, a small mat or rug, the best of which was the blue plastic bath mat that Srebra and I had rolled up and carried home from the department store “26 July” as a victory for home cleanliness. On the floor, prior to that purchase, there had been only a long coarsely woven rug (most likely from the village, perhaps from my mother’s trousseau). That rug had red, green, blue, brown, white, and black stripes, but was mainly red, a red carpet for celebrities, a simulacrum of something a family of property would have. I knew that rug down to the tiniest detail. I had thought it no longer existed, but then noticed it rolled up behind the washing machine. I stretched it out on the floor and lay down on it, but I could neither laugh nor cry. I rolled it back up and shoved it behind the washing machine. I went out. My father was lying on the couch. Pale, withered, he didn’t look like the father I had known two years ago. After Srebra died, he had completely withered. He tried to smile when I came into the kitchen and sat on the chair by the window. Srebra’s and my double chair was no longer there. I didn’t dare ask where it was. I sat on an unfamiliar chair and ate bread, ajvar, and cheese. “Why didn’t you let us know you were coming so I could have prepared something?” my mother whined. “You don’t just show up like this from abroad.” I shrugged. “How is Bogdan? Why didn’t he come?” my father asked. “He sends his greetings,” I said, “but he has work and couldn’t come.” In that moment, it occurred to me that Bogdan hadn’t had work for two full years, except for his quizzes, games, and prize crosswords, and the pocket money his mother sent for the rent. He was always busy with something. He was gone for hours at a time, and when he was at home, he was immersed in the computer. If I approached, he would jump up from his chair, hug me passionately, and nearly always carry me to bed, where he’d undress and caress me almost to unconsciousness, until both of us felt even greater desire for each other than before. But a moment of doubt flashed in my mind when I said he was working and was very busy before it disappeared, because I was too upset being here, in my home, in our home, in my parents’ home.

  My mother had tucked all the photographs of Srebra and me into framed needlepoints hung in the dining room. Most of them were photos from Srebra’s wedding, but there were also a few of just the two of us. We didn’t have a single picture of the four of us: Mom, Dad, Srebra, and me, even though the photographer had twice asked to photograph us as a family at the wedding. Our father had said, “Do we really need that, too?” So we were left with no family portraits except for some black-and-white snapshots from a family vacation, in which my mother and father are wearing bathing suits, and Srebra and I, with our long hair intertwined, are dressed in shorts and the tank tops with the straps long enough for us to pull up over our legs. Once we got a bit older, the four of us together were never photographed again. My gaze passed over the photographs, wedged in the framed needlepoints. I leaned against the chair in the dining room, staring as if I were watching the TV, when I was, in fact, looking below it, into the glass cabinet that held the smallest imaginable cups, which I had always thought were children’s coffee cups. That’s what Srebra and I had used them for, pouring in real coffee to read the grounds and learn whom we were going to marry when we grew up. Srebra and I had been extremely curious about whom we would marry after we were separated in an operation in London. But now, as I stood looking at them, I realized they actually belonged to a tea set, for serving the milk that was usually added to Russian, Indian, or Turkish tea. There was also a small dish for sugar cubes. Srebra would never know that we had been mistaken about the miniature cups. And about many other things as well. Must I even recall the things we are ashamed of? In the bathroom: pages from independent newspapers under the blue rubber mats. On the wall-mounted steam heater: a rag from old work clothes, most likely a coat. On the hanger: my father’s belt. (Sometimes, we touched and studied it carefully, hesitantly. It seemed to be some secret connection between us; or was the belt, in some odd way, the parental link between our father and us?) When we were children, children with conjoined heads, how many times had he threatened Srebra and me with, “I am going to take off my belt,” and we had fallen silent, petrified. We became perfectly still. Once, he actually did take it off when Srebra and I asked for the rulers with a 1983 calendar printed on them, which our mother brought us from work. We weren’t allowed to bring them to school so no one could take them from us. They were kept in our parents’ room, probably in the same place as the folder with the pictures from Animal Kingdom. One evening, Srebra and I dug in our heels. We wanted to get our rulers and draw with them, so we went to their room while they were watching television in the dining room, and we climbed up onto the armchair to look for them in the cupboard. A small porcelain ashtray tumbled to the floor and shattered. Srebra and I quickly closed the cupboard and climbed down, but our father had heard the crash and came into the room, took off his belt, and hit the two of us on our behinds, shouting, “You have devoured the world! Voracious creatures!” Then, as he left the room, his shoulder knocked against a ceramic boy that hung on the wall beside a ceramic girl—a pair that was made to hang on a bathroom door because both the girl and boy had their pants down. They were bathroom signs, but in our home, they hung in the dining room. The boy fell and shattered, and that’s when our mother jumped up from the chair in which she had been sitting, sullen with furrowed brow, waiting for our father to punis
h us, and shrieked at him, “Are you blind? Aren’t you paying attention? It was so nice there on the wall.” Our father, in a rage like we had never seen before, ran up and slapped her, then left the house—probably going down to the garage. Our mother cried, sobbing, saying nothing, and Srebra and I felt such pity that we forgot about the belt on our backsides. We were shocked by the slap our father had given our mother. Then Srebra and I repeated—I to myself, Srebra half-aloud—“Pervert.” Pervert, a word that in our childhood was a synonym for idiot. Who knows how its use, clichéd and crazy, had become embedded in the membrane of our brains.