A Spare Life

by Lidija Dimkovska

  I lived through those two weeks in Skopje ascetically: one pastrmajlija for the three of us for lunch; half an egg, margarine, and a bit of kashkaval for breakfast. I bought fifteen Turkish pastries at the pastry shop near the church, but they sat somewhere in the big room for days without being eaten. My mother, dressed in her blue robe the whole time I was there, kept telling me there was a cake in the freezer. “But,” she said. “It would have to be thawed.” Even when there was something, there was nothing. Post-socialist asceticism. A stomach-grumbling diet program. I was chronically hungry. I went downtown, walked from the Bit Pazar market to the center and from the center to the flower market, where I bought flowers, and then walked back to the Bit Pazar, buying burek, a small meat pie, or a sesame bun along the way. I ate and walked, walked and ate. I lit candles in the church of Saint Dimitrija. I prayed, and a feeling of home, of comfort, washed over me. Oh! How much I had missed in London that smell that doesn’t exist anywhere except in Orthodox churches—the smell of icons, frescoes, candles for the living and dead. Then I took the bus to the cemetery in Butel, where I sat on Srebra’s grave and arranged flowers around her stone. I brushed the marble with antibacterial towelettes; I sat and spoke to her. I told her everything, without shame, without a speck of the anger or irony that had always been present in our conversations. I told her about things in London, how Bogdan was, how things were in Skopje. I told her Darko had gone into the monastery, had taken his orders, and that was why he wouldn’t be coming. I told her what I had eaten that day, what our mother and father were saying. I told her Mom had not taken off her blue robe. I remarked on their habits and ego trips, sometimes with laughter and sometimes with tears. I asked her how often they came to visit, rhetorically answering, “Only for All Souls’, right? Dad can’t drive. His hands shake, he doesn’t see well, and buses are expensive. It costs 100 denari each for them to come. Things are expensive, you know…” I laughed like a fool, because I knew Srebra would have laughed too, had she been alive. If anything connected us and made us close, it was the non-parental way our parents acted, to the point of absurdity, surrealism. I told her our parents had been at the pig slaughter in Bulačani a few days prior. They had come home with two bags: one with meat, liver, and cracklings for them, the other with ears and trotters for piftija pork aspic for Aunt Ivanka. The next day, our father brought Aunt Ivanka her bag, but the day after, at 7:30 in the morning, our mother realized that they had mixed up the bags, and he had given Aunt Ivanka their bag. Cries and shouts. At 7:30, she called Aunt Ivanka and in a weepy voice, told her that they had mixed up the bags. At twelve o’clock, our father set off to the school with the correct bag, where he met Aunt Ivanka, who was clutching our bag. The handoff took place. Suppressed shame in his eyes, a bit of anger and scorn, something right out of the movies. I told Srebra how I imagined Aunt Ivanka and our father meeting in an empty parking lot or under a dark bridge at night, exchanging the bags as if they were exchanging money and drugs. I began to laugh again. Perhaps Srebra was also laughing in her grave. But the people at the surrounding graves looked at me and crossed themselves, spitting into their jackets against the evil eye—“Tfu-tfu, God protect us from such a thing”—just like it had been when Srebra and I were conjoined and people gave us a wide berth or spat against the evil eye, praying that such a thing wouldn’t happen in their families.

  On the way back from the cemetery, I walked several stops. In front of a social services center, or something like that, I came upon something I had never seen before: a truck filled with small roasted chickens. A woman was standing in the midst of them and with a long two-pronged fork, was doling out one bird apiece to people gathered around the truck. People were pushing; some took two. Then, with chickens under their arms or pressed to their chests, they walked past the center’s door. Weak, sunken bodies and faces, collapsing skin and bones, big empty eyes—but their voices, with supernatural strength, shouted, begged, and fought for their lives. It was like a concentration camp. I pressed myself against a post to watch them wait, then take the chickens. Some also grabbed the cardboard boxes a man with bright red hair in front of the center was handing out. I was watching them fight for their lives.

  I thought I had returned to Skopje only because of Srebra, because her grave was in Skopje. I had lied to myself every time I stood by Blake’s grave and looked for Srebra in my thoughts. No, Srebra was born in Skopje, she died in London, and we buried her in Skopje, in Macedonia. She returned to the land she had come from. And me? Who knows where I will end up, who knows where my end is. I wanted to see Roza’s parents. I had never felt as strong a desire as I felt to go to Roza’s home, after fourteen long years. I wanted to go inside her home and find some part of her, something that spoke of our childhood. It was already late when I returned from the cemetery. Along the way, I stopped in a store to buy coffee and a box of chocolates. The following day before lunch I stole away from home and rang Roza’s parents’ doorbell. I hadn’t stood where I now stood, glued to the spot in front of that door, for years, ever since Roza’s death. Roza’s mother opened the door. I went inside. Her father was there, too. We sat in the dining room. The whole time, I looked at the shelf where Roza and Mara’s red and blue kaleidoscopes had been kept. They weren’t there any longer. How warmly Auntie Magda and Uncle Kole welcomed me. I sat and listened as they talked about Roza, about the fateful day before leaving for Greece when Roza stood in the opening between the kitchen and dining room and argued with them. She wanted to go with her grandmother, her grandfather, and her sister at any price. They tried to convince her not to; after all, they were going to Greece that summer for vacation, but Roza insisted, and they let her go. And then what happened, happened. I wanted to tell them about my chain, about the culprit of this tragedy. I couldn’t find the strength. But my eyes flooded with tears. I told them I had never gotten over Roza, ever. I told them I lived with Bogdan, whom they had loved when he was a boy. They mourned Srebra and they mourned for me. Auntie Magda gave me a photo of Roza. There was Roza’s swarthy head with its thick, curly hair. Had she lived, she would have been a beauty. Perhaps she would already be married, with a young child to whom I could have brought a present from London. Roza was dead. Just like Srebra. My tragedy was fresher, and seemed greater. But is one tragedy greater than another? A comedy can be greater than another comedy, but a tragedy? Never. Every tragedy is tragic to the extreme. There can be no comparisons, and while at first glance, the number of victims seems to determine the degree of tragedy, each individual person mourns most for his own: if the one closest to you perishes, that is the greatest tragedy. Roza died when we were children; when no one else in our lives had passed away. She was my first tragedy. My, our, second was when our grandma died. Srebra was the third. Tragedies don’t form a hierarchy. They are arranged alongside one another, not above or below. I said goodbye to Roza’s parents, thinking how hard it would be for me to go there again and face, all over again, their tragedy, our tragedy.

  When I got home, my mother asked where I had been. I told her. How angry she got! Her face grew dark and crumpled, and she sat like a bundle of unhappiness by the oven, in which her pita was baking. She sobbed: “What made you go to their place? No one goes there, and you just up and go. Were you looking for a mother? Who on Earth did you think you’d find?” She sat and sobbed, talking and stroking her robe, but I couldn’t listen to her. I went downtown. I walked through the Old Market, looked in the shop windows, tried on shoes, poked around in the nearly forgotten goldsmith shops and shops selling pillows and slippers. One of the salesmen told me not to go into an Albanian café by mistake, because they might slip something into my coffee or Coca-Cola.

  “There are good people among the Albanians,” I responded. “Yes, that’s true,” he said. “I work with them every day, still—watch out. You don’t really know them.” I laughed at his advice. Then, in Saint Dimitrija, I lit candles for my relatives, both living and dead, for my friends, and for my enemies. I kissed the i
con of Saint Dimitrija—the protector of our home, the saint our family celebrated—whose celebration our lack of love and our misunderstandings had desecrated many times in our lives. I kissed the Holy Mother of God, delivering my life to her before God; I kissed Saint Petka so she might also pray to God for me, for us; I kissed Saint Nedela in her beautiful dress; and then I set off across the stone bridge. I walked along the quay, the wind whistling and tossing the late autumn leaves. Reaching the post office, I called Bogdan from one of the phone booths there. His voice, at first confused and muffled, became dear and tender. All I wanted was to get back to him, nothing else.

  That night, after my mother and father fell asleep, I went into the kitchen to put water in the cup that had been always in my room when I lived in Skopje. My footsteps were silent. I recalled how, when I was younger, I wanted to try to walk silently, but Srebra, out of spite, stomped. We’d then pinch each other and shout through our tears and laughter. I went into the kitchen and stepped toward the light switch. There were exactly four average-sized steps from the doorless opening from the kitchen to the dining room to the narrow wall with the light switch. I knew exactly where it was, but the darkness infused my feet and hands with a slight uncertainty. I stretched out my left hand, and just as I touched the switch, a sharp twinge pierced my body, in my gut. I barely managed to sit down on the couch across from the woodstove and electric stove. I heard a nearly inaudible, dry, curt, resolute, determined, sharp “Go” in my mind. The next day, when I awoke in the old, dilapidated bed, I couldn’t connect what had happened with the actual room. It seemed I had been hallucinating. Two weeks passed quickly. On the day I left, rivers of people were flowing to the voting station to cast their ballots for a new president. “Are you going to vote?” my mother asked before I left. Aunt Ivanka was over; she had come to say goodbye. “What does she need to vote for?” my father said. “Tito,” my mother said. “Tito Petkovski will win, mark my words.” “Well, I’m not voting for him,” said Aunt Ivanka. “I’m voting for Boris Trajkovski; he’s our neighbor and is a fine man, too.” I didn’t vote. I quickly said goodbye to my mother and father with parting kisses. My aunt kissed me three times, dampening my cheeks. She pushed a box of Napolitanke cookies and a bottle of rosé wine for Bogdan into my hands, as well as some coffee and an orange towel in a bag. She said, “I don’t know if we’ll see each other again, Zlata. I’m leaving. I can sense it. I didn’t give you anything, child, neither you nor Srebra.” I hugged her. I climbed into the white Mercedes taxi. Then onto a bus for Ljubljana.

  All night I listened, half-awake, to new folk songs broadcast over the speakers. In Ljubljana, I took a taxi to the airport. Then a flight to Munich and another to London. I arrived the evening of the following day. Bogdan was waiting for me at the airport. I didn’t want us to take a taxi. I wanted to enter London slowly, returning to my second life, because after Srebra’s death this life couldn’t be called anything other than a second one. Two trains took us to Shoreditch. Bogdan pulled the suitcase, as I walked on the sidewalk behind him. I thought, like an Albanian woman in Skopje, and smiled. Bogdan turned around as we were passing a multistory building under construction that had stood unfinished for months, without anyone working, and a torn protective fence. Bogdan stopped, turned toward me, lowered the suitcase, and whispered, “Let’s go in.” Without waiting for me to say yes or no, he pushed me and the suitcase into the brick building. He set the suitcase by the wall, and then pulled me up the stairs to the next floor. The whole place was empty and dusty. Holes gaped in the outer walls with no windows and in the inner walls with no doors. There were construction materials, boxes, and pails strewn everywhere. Bogdan unbuttoned my coat, feverishly pulling me toward him, and kissed me. At first I didn’t even realize what he was doing, what he wanted, but quickly I felt the desire to touch him, and I unbuttoned his jacket and shirt. I groped toward his body until I found his skin, soft, warm, desirable, while we kissed each other madly. We caressed each other. Our passion was vast, immeasurable. He leaned me against the corner of one of the unfinished rooms and spread my legs. He filled me with his desire, and then with his sperm. Panting, we stood looking at each other silently, kissing. We buttoned each other back up and went downstairs. He picked up the suitcase, I set off after him, and we went home. That night, we slept deeply, cathartically cleansed of our absence. We were together again, happy again. I was fully convinced that God could not have sent me a greater happiness: the Bogdan from my childhood was, in fact, my fate, and, like his name, was “God given,” the gift of a new life. At the cost of Srebra’s life.

  One day, when I got home from the university all excited to tell Bogdan I was going to America—the department was sending me to New York to research émigré writers from Eastern Europe living there—he wasn’t there. His laptop was on the kitchen table. I decided to look up New York, to see what awaited me. While surfing the Internet I was suddenly pricked by a curiosity I had never felt before. I’d never opened Bogdan’s computer before. I never read his email. Indeed, I never looked through his files. His computer was always turned off when he wasn’t in front of it, but it had now been on. Had he forgotten to turn it off? Had he rushed off somewhere and forgotten to take it? The worm of curiosity began to eat into me. The chipped edge of the icon poked me in the side. I closed the browser and opened his documents folder. There were recognizable titles: crosswords, prize games, quizzes, computer games. That was all clearly Bogdan. But one file was named PS. Strange name for a file. I opened it. Inside were long lists of passport data, divided into two columns. On the left side were passports from a wide array of countries: Moldovan, Romanian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Albanian, and Croatian passports. On the right, the same faces with British passports. In two parallel columns: the same faces, sometimes the same date but different places, dates of birth, or different last names. Some had both a different first and last name, but each person had two passports. There were more than 120 sets. It didn’t make sense to me. I looked at all the names, dates of birth, and passport numbers. For some, the name was different in the first column, but the date of birth was the same, or vice versa. In each case, there was some error or change. What were all these people with two passports doing in Bogdan’s computer? I asked him as soon as he got home. We didn’t keep secrets, so it wasn’t hard for me to ask. “Let me just go to the toilet,” he said, ducking into the bathroom. He flushed twice. He washed his hands.

  “We’re preparing these for a quiz show. It’s a new show we’re pitching to the BBC. It’ll be called: Guess My Nationality! You know, like the show Kviskoteka, where players have to guess which is the real person: the pilot, the trainer, or the stewardess. Each contestant says, ‘I am so-and-so, a pilot,’ and based on what they say about themselves, people guess which one is the real pilot. Well, this is something like that. For the first episode, people will have to guess whether the person is Moldovan or British. Then we’ll have a show for Macedonians, Slovenians, Ukrainians, Albanians. People will have to guess whether someone is British or from one of these other countries. We’ll include many nationalities. It’ll be quite a show. The facts will be scrambled, so the game is harder, but the prize will be a trip to one of the countries.” He spoke so convincingly: excited, almost feverish, with his cheeks flushed, that he seemed a bit off, almost unnatural. I looked at him in disbelief, and he sensed it, asking, “What? You don’t believe me? Ask the guys in the society. We’re making the show together, and you know how much money we’ll get for it? Everybody in Europe will watch it, maybe even Americans. Who knows, maybe there the show won’t be about countries but about states. Like, is he from Arizona or Florida?” Bogdan threw in all sorts of other things, but I was already tired, and remembered I was going to the States in two weeks. I told him, and we immediately switched topics. He turned off the computer and put it in his bag. Then we lay down, but for a while, we couldn’t sleep. Both of us cleared our throats, held our breath. Our mouths were dry and we had to gulp our
saliva, but I finally fell asleep. The next day, when I awoke, it was as if nothing had happened.