A Spare Life

by Lidija Dimkovska

  I was shaken by our trip to China. While Bogdan wasn’t indifferent to what we saw and experienced there, for him, it was a lovely trip because we were together day and night. He bought me presents, kissed me in front of everyone, making the woman who interpreted for us call out on the bus, “Look how in love they are!”

  The first night after our return from China, I dreamed about Aunt Ivanka all night. In the dream, it seems she is crossing somewhere. Like she’s crossing from one side of a cube, something like a cardboard box, to the other. Then I dream about the room with the iron beds in the village, where Aunt Ivanka and Mirko usually sleep. It’s Aunt Ivanka’s room, and it’s the same as it was in real life, except filled with flowers in flower boxes. They are like a garden from when she was alive, but now it is my uncle who waters and tends them. In my dream I see the mirror above the bed. In the past, Srebra and I had peeked through the window, and I do that now, alone, but instead of the street, I see only a strip of asphalt, like a small path. The room is bright, happy somehow. It occurs to me that I can take photographs of the house, from all angles, to have as a keepsake. I could even videotape it, but I don’t have a video camera with me. Then I see Bogdan. He has bought himself a suit, from Greece I think, but inside, there’s only a corpse whose heart seems to burst while it lies on a table. Nearby sits Aunt Ivanka; all that’s visible is her head: big, healthy, beautiful, with the lovely hairdo she had in her best years. She says she’ll wash the corpse, she’ll move it. I say that I’ll wash it, but Aunt Ivanka stubbornly tells me to leave it to her and she will put everything in order. I awoke in a sweat. A fever was eating at my heart. In the afternoon, just as I was thinking I should call my mother, the phone rang. It was her. She had never called me herself before. It was as if there was an unwritten rule that I would be the one to call, because I had money. And yet here she was. I knew something big had happened. Something bad. She wouldn’t have wasted money on a call for good news. “Your aunt Ivanka is gone,” she said. “Yesterday, at the hospital.” I was silent, shocked by the news. My mother hung up the phone. I felt lost and alone. Bogdan had gone to Brighton. I left the apartment. I pressed the icon in my pocket until it almost drew blood. I took the bus to Soho, and on Manette Street, I found the chapel of St. Barnabas. The chapel was closed. There was no notice, no announcement about when there would be a service. I could have rung the bell at the house where the homeless center was—it was an integral part of the chapel. I didn’t ring. I stood awhile and then left. I called Aunt Milka from the first phone booth. She had been crying before she lifted the receiver. I started to cry as well. Only then was the pain within me freed, and through my tears, it found a path. How much I missed Aunt Ivanka all of a sudden. In her summer dress—her only dress, an orange-brown one—coming breathless into our room. Ours, mine and Srebra’s. Aunt Milka told me, between her tears, that Aunt Ivanka told her a few months ago she was going to die, and they wouldn’t see each other again. She said the same thing to me the last time I was in Skopje. She had been preparing herself for a long time for the grave: clothes, comb, everything. She had prepared herself to go. She told Aunt Milka that she had hidden the money she got when her company went into receivership; it was for Lenče to finish her studies and have money to feed herself. She had thought of everything. Perhaps she knew her diagnosis and had hidden it. Who knows? She held her fate in her own hands and simply waited for her day of departure. She bought a new jacket for “Then.” I wondered where she bought it. What was in her mind as she carried it home and hung it in the closet, new, with its label still on, waiting for her? When exactly had she gone to buy it? I felt terrible, absolutely lost. I went into Saint Paul’s Cathedral. I found a seat in the corner, sat down, and wept, stroking the icon of Saint Zlata Meglenska in my pocket. Ah, if there were a single Macedonian church in London, would I have gone more often, perhaps feeling the bliss, the blessing of God’s presence in my life again? Women with their heads covered, kneeling on the marble tiles; mellifluous voices, the strong scent of icon lamps; young women kissing the priest’s robe. Warmth. Home. I could have gone to Essex, but I always put off going there because it was there, in the monastery, that I had overcome the pangs of conscience that gnawed at me after Srebra’s death. Saint Christopher with the baby Jesus on his shoulder had somehow freed me of that sin of conscience, and when I left, I no longer felt guilty about Srebra’s death, only the guilt that I survived. If I went there I would feel a new pang, because I no longer felt the one caused by Srebra’s death. I could not confront once again my feeling of guilt that I had survived and not her, even though the doctor told me several times it couldn’t have been otherwise. The vein had been on my side since birth, not on Srebra’s. Bogdan was in Brighton to get money from Auntie Stefka, and I was in London, alone, with Aunt Ivanka’s death thousands of miles away from me. I couldn’t have gone to her funeral. She was to have been buried the day my mother called me. Everything about her stayed with me. Memories, warm and beautiful. Srebra and I pounding out poems for homework on her typewriter, which had almost never been used. How she gave us money before we left for London, fifty pounds to help us get settled. The time we were outside in a green field with Verče when we were little…maybe Lenče had also already been born. We were making wreaths out of chamomile flowers. I think Aunt Ivanka was happy then. The time she lay on our small bed in the kitchen and cried and cried because one of Verče’s ovaries had been removed. How she would sometimes come alone. She’d sit on our chair in the kitchen and cry, complaining about Mirko, Verče, and Lenče, saying she would leave them, that she could no longer reason with them. The time Srebra and I went with her past the Gypsy quarter and we saw two girls wearing one skirt. Srebra and I and the girls exchanging stunned glances: we had conjoined heads, they were conjoined bodies in one skirt. The last time, before I left Skopje and she had dragged herself over to our place to bring me a bottle of rosé for Bogdan, and some coffee, Napolitanke cookies, and an orange towel “to remember me by over there in London,” she’d said. The time she bought Srebra and me the most beautiful blue cardigan sweaters with shoulder pads, which we wore for years. How she took over the task of buying Srebra and me the dresses Grandma had promised us when we were young but hadn’t managed to buy before the end of her life. What a weight on her mind! Couldn’t our mother have secretly given Grandma the money, or bought the dresses herself for Grandma to give to us and thus ease her soul, free herself from her promise? Why did everyone, seemingly with intent and a dose of derision, fail to lift a finger, letting Grandma torment herself with a promise she couldn’t fulfill, even though she wanted to? Every time we saw her, she mentioned it to Srebra and me, and we felt a twinge of awkwardness in our hearts. Those little dresses grew bigger than we were, bigger than love itself, becoming a symbol of our fate—all that we couldn’t have. Our grandmother never made enough money to buy them for us. As we tended the tobacco, diligently threading the leaves in the root cellar, propped against the ice-cold earthen wall with pillows, our hands yellowed and gummy—which we’d later wash with pinkish cream from a round box as the strings of tobacco dried beside the quince below the house—Grandma would say she’d buy us the dresses with the money from the tobacco, but tobacco was always a source of Macedonian pain, unprofitable blackness under the poor’s fingernails. After we stopped planting tobacco, Grandma still didn’t give up on her promise. She never gave up until she died; she simply had no means to fulfill her promise. And the dresses didn’t give up on Grandma. Nor did Srebra and I give up, because we always felt as if we were wearing those dresses and they were the most beautiful clothing, in which we enwrapped our souls. It was Aunt Ivanka who finally bought us real dresses—blue-violet mixed with other colors, and big flowers. They were simulacra of Grandma’s dresses, but to us, Grandma’s two little potential dresses were never equaled. Today, it would be so easy to buy the promised dresses. The stores overflow with dresses. Perhaps it was the same then, but for our grandma it was as impossible, as if God
were somehow personally opposed to the fulfillment of her promise. So the dresses turned into fate. The agony of poverty was cultural, social, and political self-sacrifice from which all that survived was love. Srebra did not survive, Aunt Ivanka died. Love became another name for the dresses and vice versa. Like fate. Like when she made beer cookies, piroshki, pizza, cake; like when she offered them to us with all her heart and soul. How many things I didn’t get to ask her, how many things I didn’t give her. I called Verče. She was heavy with grief. She said, “Mama was seriously ill, and she didn’t recover. It’s obvious that she had decided to die. She didn’t have anything left to live for.” Verče said Aunt Ivanka died because she couldn’t change anything. “My father, most of all,” she said. My uncle Mirko, who destroyed her life, turning it into garbage, bringing junk home from all over the city, stockpiling it in each room, under the beds, in the empty freezer, and in the drawers, not allowing any of it to be thrown away or cleaned up. He gathered old plastic bottles on his black bicycle from around the television station and university, plastic bags, cans and jars, yogurt containers, Tetra Paks of milk. All of it was in their apartment, where no one went anymore, even though my aunt wanted so much to have company. She wanted everything to be clean. She was a homemaker who couldn’t perform her job, because whenever she attempted to tidy up and throw out at least some of the garbage, Mirko slapped her, and then Lenče, in the panic and insanity of a manic state, beat her like crazy, punching Aunt Ivanka until she was exhausted. That’s why she decided to die. To save herself. My uncle had looked for a burial plot for Aunt Ivanka while she was still living: somewhere in one of the villages, anywhere, as long as he could bury her as cheaply as possible.

  On the day of her funeral, my younger uncle came to see my mother in Skopje. He ate breakfast there. It had been such a long time. It was Aunt Ivanka on her deathbed that resolved their quarrels. She had always been the balm for our wounds. I heard the burial was brief. No one came except the closest family members and a neighbor from the building. My mother gave her a towel and some stockings. Aunt Milka made such a scene and cried so hard that people visiting other graves looked at her in disbelief. She was shouting, “Where will we be welcome now? Lenče is ruined, Verče is ruined.” My mother said to me, “Maybe it’s really hard for her; it is her sister, after all…but such is life.” I didn’t ask whether it was hard for her. She said, “Maybe that’s what they do in the village, but this is Skopje. Nobody carries on like that.” It cost fifteen hundred denari for the priest who performed the service at the burial. They barely scraped it together. That’s approximately twenty pounds. Enough for a short list of items I’d buy at the Tesco. That’s all. Verče wore a black scarf around her neck. My aunt, our youngest uncle’s wife, called her husband, four times. Lenče had lost so much weight that my mother was convinced she would also die soon. I dreamed about Lenče a few days after Aunt Ivanka’s funeral. In the dream, she had committed suicide. The dream book interpreted that as a life change—the beginning of a new life. Perhaps that is why Aunt Ivanka died. So Lenče could start a new life.

  Bogdan was completely loving and supportive. Once I got over Aunt Ivanka’s death—if one can get over a loved one’s death at all—I turned once again to my studies. I read and read, analyzed, interpreted, and delved deeper into the works of Eastern European émigré writers. I discovered the works of Albahari, Škvorecký, Hemon, Ugrešić, Drakulić, Kadare, Herta Müller, Miłosz, Goma. I reread the plays of Goran Stefanovski and many, many others. Most of them left their native countries in the early 1990s, largely because of the war and political conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. I compared them with younger émigré authors. My master’s thesis seemed to write itself, employing my hand as its amanuensis. For months, that’s all I did: write and write and write, preparing meals for Bogdan and myself in between. He usually wasn’t home, but when he was, we ate, lay down together, made love, then went to the market or the movie theater, or just for a walk around the neighborhood. We still fell asleep in each other’s embrace as we had on the first day. I was so calm with him, not jealous of anyone. I loved him, and he loved me, but we were both free to carry on our own lives—I with my studies, he with his quizzes, crosswords, and games. He won money often, but also other prizes: a knit sweater, a leather belt, a box of groceries from Tesco, and a shaving kit. His mother, his adopted one, continued to give him money, and we lived well, modestly but pleasantly.

  Bogdan began to dream of having a house. A house with a garden in which our child could play. “In West London, with English grass and a privacy fence.” Although I thought he was joking, he assured me that he really did want to buy a house and would soon have enough money to do so. “I’ve been saving this whole time,” he said. “And I almost have enough.” Had he been saving from the money he got from Auntie Stefka? “That,” he said, “and everything else.” When he left, he always took his computer with him. “What’s happening with that quiz show of yours?” it occurred to me to ask him one day. “We’re still waiting for a license,” he said. “It’s not so simple.” Whenever his friends from the Society of Pro-Western Immigrants from Eastern Europe came over—who, incidentally, still didn’t have regular work though they had been looking for years—I often wanted to ask them about the show, too: how it was going, what was happening, but they were always laughing so loud, drinking beer, and smoking while talking about their home countries, always bringing up negative things and mocking them with cruel irony, so there was simply no space for me to join the conversation. I went on writing my thesis in the bedroom.

  In December 2000, I received my master’s degree. My defense generated considerable interest in the department. Lots of professors who weren’t directly involved in migration studies but were interested in the topic came to watch. At the end of the millennium, Great Britain didn’t know how to treat its immigrants, let alone Eastern European émigré writers. The crisis in the former Yugoslavia was essentially over. The country no longer existed, nor were there any dictators left in the Balkans. From time to time, though, writers from that area would still turn up at the Foreign Office, alongside the many immigrants from Asia and Africa, and the ones from India, who came as if they were coming home and, because they wrote in English, quickly became British writers. The writers on whom I had based my thesis were scattered across Europe and the United States and, almost without exception, continued to write in their mother tongues. But those who did switch to the language of their new country gained visibility more quickly. I tried to prove in my thesis—using studies of writers who had emigrated from Eastern Europe to the West—that language was still an ideological determinant of national literatures, and integration of these authors was most often understood as assimilation. If they changed their language, they got the attention of publishers and readers more easily, but the authors whose works were translated—or even worse, untranslated—remained outsiders in their new cultures forever. These authors were divided between two homes. They lived in a new country while maintaining ties to the old one, but the literary public was more interested in single-country authors, and looked at authors who hadn’t changed languages with contempt. People who are native-born are frightened by otherness, while immigrant authors are also a bit frightened of the otherness of the native-born. There were two parallel worlds in which the national and transnational writers saw eye-to-eye and joked around politely, but an important criterion for their meeting was a degree of dissidence and political exile from “those raging primitive Balkans or the lands beyond the Carpathians.”

  My frank, and, I might add, sharp defense of my thesis provoked a long discussion. From his seat in the amphitheater, Bogdan made a time-out signal. My mentor finally concluded the discussion, and praised me for what I had accomplished over the previous three years. He congratulated me on my degree, handed me my diploma, and joked that from now on, they would no longer take money from my account. He then revealed my secret, which, at the very beginning of our studies three
years before, I begged him not to reveal. I had told him where the money for my education came from, about Srebra, about our operation, about everything, and he had promised that he would keep silent, but he hadn’t said until when. And now, with the degree in my hand, he felt it would be a glowing conclusion to the ceremony, and revealed my secret to all the gathered colleagues and students. Hundreds of eyes stared at me, shocked, with disbelief, fascination, and rapacious curiosity, like the eyes of the journalists when Srebra and Darko got married, or the ones outside our hospital room whom the doctor personally locked out to protect me, or the ones in Skopje when the politicians speculated on television about the money for our operation. I recognized that rapacious curiosity, that feverish frenzy to hear more, to learn something else, something perhaps more piquant than what they had already heard. My mentor didn’t stop there; he told them everything. He had remembered every single detail: about the operation, about Srebra’s death, about the affair with the money, and about my return to London—how I had come into his office with my short-cropped hair and the scar from the operation still visible… He told them everything. He was blabbing like a granny at the village well. I watched him and couldn’t believe it. Inside, I felt Srebra’s rage—not so much mine as hers—and I took the microphone and said I didn’t wish to accept my degree from the University of London and they could take the diploma and shove it. I took it and tore it up—though that was hard to do because it was thick and wound with a gold thread. “I don’t need your diploma, since you don’t understand dignity and respect, since you don’t know what privacy means,” I said, and then stormed out of the amphitheater. Bogdan immediately left the room, calling after me, “Are you crazy? Do you know what you’ve done? You just trampled on three years of study. You trampled on everything you accomplished. Are you nuts? Maybe that’s okay in Macedonia, you can be proud, but here in England, do you think they give a damn? That they’ll respect you more? No, they’ll forget all about you, like you never existed!” He said all kinds of things to me, but I just laughed. I laughed out of some supernatural joy. I took the icon from my pocket and danced in the hallway, kissing it, then Bogdan. He was angry, but he eventually softened. He seemed to understand that what I had done wasn’t so bad. That in some way, I had defended Srebra’s honor, and we were dancing in the hallway of the University of London, and Saint Zlata Meglenska, who usually frowned, seemed to be smiling at me. I kissed her darkened face. Bogdan kissed me, and we went home together. I didn’t take a birth control pill that night, or any of the nights that followed.