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A Spare Life

Page 38

by Lidija Dimkovska


  2001

  ZLATA

  In February 2001, as we watched the morning news on the BBC, listening in shock and disbelief to the report that soldiers in the Macedonian Army and four members of the Albanian National Liberation Army had actually exchanged shots in the village of Tanuševci and staring at the unbelievable headline on the screen, “Crisis in Macedonia,” I felt nauseated. I ran to the bathroom and vomited. When I came back, Bogdan was still watching, engrossed. It was clear—there was armed conflict in Macedonia. “They’re going to kill each other. Albanians and Macedonians just can’t live together,” he said. That’s what all the film coverage and commentaries demonstrated in the days that followed, and for several months thereafter. One particular event circled the globe: An interpreter was killed, along with representatives of the United Nations Protection Force, while traveling in an armored vehicle through Skopje streets. The interpreter’s husband cried as he spoke. She had left behind a two-month-old baby. She hadn’t needed to work, but a colleague had other obligations and begged Mimosa to take her place that day. Both women were daughters of a Macedonian mother and an Albanian father. Because I was upset by these events, I hadn’t noticed how often I felt sick to my stomach. I bought a pregnancy test. I was pregnant. Bogdan was elated. “Just a little bit longer and we’ll buy a house,” he said. He wanted us to tell Auntie Stefka together that she would be a grandmother. We went. Bogdan reminded me they only spoke English at their place. I told her in English. She smiled. “I won’t have much time to look after my little grandson, but I heard you refused your degree, and so you will be a housewife and will take care of your child. That’s not so bad, you know.” I don’t know why she talked to me like that. She didn’t like me; nor I, her. We acted like strangers. I wished Bogdan’s real mother were alive, the dear woman who, in my childhood, cleaned the entryway to our building and only talked about Bogdan: how much she wished for Bogdan to study hard in school, to make something of himself. But Bogdan didn’t finish college. His adopted mother considered it a waste of time for such an intelligent young man like him; he could make a living from the knowledge he already possessed. Bogdan did earn a bit from his knowledge, but she didn’t hesitate to give him money, regularly, every week. She gave him some more money now, and we went out. We walked by the sea. It was yellowish, clean, sharp, and gentle. A feminine sea. I rolled up the cuffs of my pants and raced beside it. Freedom, love, challenge. I got wet. Cleansed. The smell of history is the smell of caught cod. Some motorcycles were parked beside the ramparts and the buildings from a bygone era, and sandy-haired young men in tee shirts emblazoned with various statements of rebellion shouted at each other as if digitally amplified. Then, sudden movement, hard turn of the bikes. You’d think they were driving through a desert and not through narrow cobblestoned lanes that were older than their ancestors. I dreamed of Grandma that night. After such a long time, she finally appeared in my dream. I told her I was pregnant. She didn’t believe me at first. I told her I was just at the beginning of the pregnancy. She put her hand on my stomach, and a warm, kind smile of love spread across her face. In the same room, Aunt Ivanka lay seriously ill. Verče, apparently, hadn’t had children, nor, it appeared, had Aunt Milka. The dream was bizarre; I couldn’t figure out what it meant, even with the help of the dream book.

  I carried my pregnancy in the nicest way possible. I liked to lie in bed and read books. Not just by émigré writers, but more broadly—I read classics, Victorians, a return to Marcel Proust. I discovered contemporary British authors. And I kept returning to Marina Tsvetaeva, whose books formed an ever-increasing pile, in a variety of languages, as I bought whatever I could find connected with her, ordering books from bookstores. I kissed her photograph in its glass frame, and whenever I was sad, I took her in my hands, pressed her to my breast, hugging her. I held her in my embrace, and was comforted by her face, with its eyes wide open, and her sad, barely visible smile. The glass covering the picture was warm, almost like a human touch. My stomach grew, and during an exam at the hospital, the gynecologist asked me if we wanted to know the gender. Bogdan did, but I didn’t. “That’s fine, but I do have to tell you that you are carrying twins. We’ll keep the gender secret, since that’s what you want.” Knowing my medical history, the gynecologist followed my pregnancy carefully, and at each appointment reassured me that the twins weren’t joined anywhere, only to my umbilical cord. The babies began to move in my womb, back and forth, left then right. I felt their heads under my fingers, restless and playful, as they stretched my belly to their will. My stomach had a different rumble than it had before, with a distant sound, as if it were their guts rumbling. Sometimes, I heard strange voices, as if they were crying or cooing inside me. We were three in one. One day, I colored my hair with henna. I lay on the bed with a shower cap on my head and one of Bogdan’s winter scarves tied over it. I looked grotesque with my stomach protruding from my sweat suit and the turban on my head. It was a good thing Bogdan wasn’t home. What would have happened had my water burst then? What if I had to call for emergency help? I could hardly wait the sixty minutes so I could shower and be ready once again for anything.

  My moods shifted, and I noticed that I was thinking more and more about Macedonia, perhaps because of the still-raging conflict, or because I was thinking of motherhood, the language my children would speak, and the past behind me. I longed intensely for Skopje, though not just Skopje. In my dreams, I saw the convent and Sister Zlata, my friends from the monastery. Sometimes, I thought of Darko, and how I didn’t know which monastery he had gone to. I missed my relatives, Srebra most of all—Srebra in her grave. Whenever I touched the icon of Saint Zlata Meglenska, she seemed to be telling me that she wanted me to come home to Skopje. I even thought that, now that I was pregnant, my parents might accept me. I thought I might bring gladness into our home, and something would change in our relationship—at last, they would love me. It was as if I had forgotten that my mother continued to talk mainly to herself, as my father remained silent, only cursing at my mother from time to time, while watching television. The food would be bad, even if we ordered in, because everything would end up in the freezer, whether intended for the freezer or not, to be thawed bit by bit to get as many meals out of it as possible. It was as though I had forgotten that I would still have to wash my face in the kitchen sink, where, in normal homes, people washed dishes, vegetables, and fruit, and that the boiler in the bathroom would be a battleground, because the number of baths my parents took had been set by the pattern of their parents. When Srebra and I lived there, we suffered so much under those abnormal living conditions. Those conditions always made us sad and ashamed, and we always thought we could change something. And now, as I pressured Bogdan to travel to Skopje, I thought we would be able to start over again at the beginning, love each other more, understand each other, and be a family. I thought we would rebuild our relationship on a better foundation and reset our unlove. In the end, we were all marked by Srebra’s tragedy, a tragedy that bound us more than blood, but we would also be marked by the birth of my babies, who would cleanse that blood forever, down to the smallest drop. To be at home at least until I gave birth and perhaps until the babies had grown a little, enough to breathe Macedonian air and have the Macedonian sun shine on them. Surely, I had fallen into some sort of pregnant mania, but it was stronger than I was. I thought about Skopje for hours on end as I lay in the bedroom, where, between bouts of reading, I’d set aside my book and daydream, imagining with open eyes how lovely it would be to marry Bogdan in Macedonia, at Saint Petka, and then give birth in Macedonia so I could write “Skopje” in the children’s passports under “Place of Birth,” and to have them christened at Saint Petka. Then, after we finished life’s most significant rituals—marriage, christening—only then would we return to London.

  I was obsessed with the idea, especially because Bogdan also wanted us to get married before I gave birth. “Perhaps in Brighton,” he said, but something pressed on my heart
, and I said I didn’t want to get married in Brighton, where there wasn’t a single Orthodox church. “Then at St. Barnabas,” said Bogdan. “I’ll find out when the Macedonian priest will be there and we can work something out.” He couldn’t locate the priest for a long time. “Bogdan, let’s go to Macedonia,” I said. “Let’s get married there, have our children there.” But he answered, “Are you crazy? Everyone is fleeing Macedonia, but you want us to go there? You see what’s happening there.”

  When Bogdan told me he had found the priest and that he agreed to marry us on September 1, after the holiday of Saint Bogorodica, I was overcome with spite and said, “No! I don’t want to get married in London! I don’t want to give birth in London! I won’t! I want to go home!” “Home?” repeated Bogdan. “This is our home.” “No,” I said. “This is where we live, but Macedonia is our home. That’s where we were born, and that’s where I want our children to be born.”

  My obsession with Macedonia, the obsession to return at such a critical moment in our lives, was perhaps a post-master’s–degree crisis. I don’t know. But I simply felt our place was there, and it was there that I wanted to say, “I do.” It was there—really there, not in some improvised church—where I wanted to feel the bride’s crown on my head, and give birth to our babies. For their first cry to be in Macedonian and for the midwife to say, “Mašallah! How beautiful they are.” And then, forty days later, the priest who had married us would christen them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and he would clip the babies’ hair then hand them back to us—one to me, one to Bogdan. It was a film I saw playing, not merely flickering, before my eyes; it was so real to me, just what I dreamed of.

  Toward the end of August, with my large belly I called the chapel of St. Barnabas on Manette street, to tell them that the September 1 wedding was canceled. Then I reserved plane tickets from London through Budapest to Sofia. There were no other routes available. Many flights to Skopje had been canceled due to the armed conflict in Macedonia, and foreign correspondents, observers, and guest workers who were working abroad and were worried about their families, were all trying to get there on the regularly scheduled flights, so I simply couldn’t find two free seats through Munich or Ljubljana. I knew there were buses from Sofia to Skopje, and was certain we could find our way. I called Skopje and told my mother that we would be arriving on September 11, would be getting married, and would then live with them until after the birth so we could christen the children. “We have money,” I told her. “We’ll pay for food and the bills. The room is empty anyway.” My mother replied, “A pregnant woman needs to stay home and not go wandering around.” I acted as if I had not heard her, and just said, “The tickets have an open return. We can leave whenever we want.”

  When Bogdan came home that day, I confronted him with my fait accompli. The wedding in London was canceled, which meant that if he really wanted us to get married, he would have to come with me to Skopje. “What can you possibly be thinking, traveling in your seventh month?” he asked. “Do you think they’ll even let you on the plane?” “I’ll wear a billowy dress,” I said, “I’ll hide it somehow.” “And a bus ride on top of that? Couldn’t you find a better flight rather than two planes and then have us banging around on a bus to Skopje?” “I’ll tough it out,” I said.

  Bogdan was angry and concerned. It was rare that I displayed such willfulness without trying to reach a decision with him. He was upset, and that whole evening, he flipped through the TV channels without speaking to me. “Just so you know, I can’t stay in Skopje long. I have to get back. The quiz show is most likely going to begin taping in two months,” he said, after his long silence. “That means, just until the babies are born,” I told him, then added, “It’s not a problem, you can come back if that’s what you need to do.” “So that’s okay with you? You would stay there without me, married with two babies, at your mother’s, waiting for the christening! Rather than give birth here normally, and then for us to go to Skopje for a visit later after everything has settled down…” “Bogdan, please…please,” I begged. That irritated him even more. He took his computer and left, slamming the door. That night, he came home very late, just before dawn. He was calm. As if he’d made peace with his fate.

  I bought a colorful, billowy, Asian-print dress, which spilled freely over my belly. It was black with red flowers, and made me look a bit thinner, lengthening my belly rather than emphasizing its width. We each packed our own bag. Mine was lighter than his because he wouldn’t, of course, travel without his laptop. Ours was the first flight on the morning of September 11. At the airport, the clerk gave me a strange look, staring right at my stomach. “What month are you in?” she asked. “The fourth,” I said. “The fourth? Why is your belly so big?” “I’m carrying twins,” I said, but she still looked at me in disbelief, measuring my belly with her gaze. She was probably wishing she could snap a picture of what a woman looked like in her fourth month of pregnancy with twins. Maybe I really was in my fourth month. She didn’t know how big the belly of a pregnant woman got when she was carrying two babies. Even though she had her doubts, she let me on the plane. In Budapest, there was just enough time for me to buy a miniature Givenchy perfume set so I could give a small bottle to my mother, one to Aunt Milka, one to Lenče, and one to Verče. I had already bought my father a pen with London on it. As we boarded the plane, a young gate agent said, “Ma’am, you can’t travel. It’s quite obvious you’re far along in your pregnancy.” I tried to convince him, but then Bogdan lied for the first time. He told him that I was in my fourth month carrying twins, which was why my belly was so big, and I had already traveled from London to Budapest with no problems. The man requested a letter from a doctor, adding that I couldn’t fly without one. I didn’t have a letter. It occurred to me that I had my health book from England, but inside, it clearly stated what month I was in. I told him I didn’t have anything with me. “That is so irresponsible!” he shouted. “That is so irresponsible. You’re pregnant, traveling to Sofia, and you don’t even have a doctor’s letter or health card with you. You’re risking your own life and the life of your babies, and you could care less!” More passengers and agents, mostly women, clustered around us. They sized me up; one agent who wanted to see how big I really was beneath the dress even touched my stomach. This totally infuriated me. Only Bogdan was allowed to touch my belly, in which our two twins floated. The belly of a pregnant woman is sacred territory. A new life—two new lives—were growing inside. And now some nameless person wanted to measure those two lives with her hands. Instinctively, I pushed her hand away and began shouting at everyone to leave me alone. The pilot, copilot, and flight attendants were walking past us onto the plane. The pilot looked at me for a long time, trying to read me and see what was hidden behind my glasses. He said, “Let her on. My wife gave birth at home, so I have experience with women in late pregnancy. If we have to, we’ll deliver the babies.” Then he gave a rather crude laugh, ducking through the employees’ entrance with his coworkers. The other airport employees then left me in peace.

  The flight was pleasant. Our babies kicked me every which way, and each time I would bolt up from my seat like a shot. Bogdan watched me constantly, keeping a vigilant eye, as if that could somehow prevent any complications. When we got to the airport in Sofia, there was unbelievable chaos. We waited a long time for our bags. The bus for Skopje was scheduled to leave in an hour and a half. That was just enough time for us to take a taxi to the bus station. We finally got our bags. Bogdan dragged both of them, and we climbed into the first taxi we saw for the bus station. The taxi driver demanded double the usual fare. He swore and shouted, “Macedonians—whatever that means. As if there is such a thing. I can’t understand people who don’t even know what they are. What Macedonians are is Bulgarian.” When we arrived, we gave him the money he demanded and got out. As the driver pulled away, he raised something he was holding in his hand, but he took off so fast we couldn’t see what it was. I reach
ed into my dress pocket. I didn’t have my icon. The wide pocket of my dress was flat. It must have fallen out in the taxi. And, apparently, the driver noticed it on the seat and raised his fist so that we could see, but didn’t stop, angry because of our argument in the taxi. He had simply chosen not to give it back to us. Quickly he disappeared down the narrow streets. Without thinking, I set off after him, but Bogdan stopped me. It was useless. We wouldn’t find him. It was one of those illegal Sofia taxis whose driver uses a fake taxi plate and doesn’t belong to any company. My icon of Saint Zlata Meglenska, who had been my inseparable, indivisible companion since childhood, was gone forever. I sat on my suitcase and wept. For my whole life I had been connected with that small chipped icon. And now it was no more. It would likely meet its end tossed out of the taxi’s window into a dump, or resting in the glove compartment under the driver’s documents and chewing gum. No one would ever love it as I had. But that was already in the past… We needed to catch the bus for Skopje. We barely found two empty seats next to each other. Just as we left, the driver turned up the volume on the radio, and we heard that something terrible had happened in New York—an airplane had hit the World Trade Center. The announcer’s voice was shaking, and although we didn’t really know Bulgarian, Bogdan and I understood that the twin towers in New York had been destroyed, there were many dead, and the greatest terrorist act in the world had just occurred. Everyone listened to the report. Conversations fell silent as we all focused on the radio by the driver’s seat, all of our ears pricked. We were all shocked, in our own way. There were remarks, exclamations of disbelief, astonishment, shock, and some, also, of joy. A passenger near the back of the bus shouted in Macedonian, “It’s what they deserved.” And someone from the middle responded in Bulgarian, “Right you are, brother. Let them get a taste of it, too.” I pressed close to Bogdan, twining his hands around my middle. We whispered to each other about how terrible, how simply unbelievable it was. From the shock of this news, I almost forgot about the loss of my icon.

 

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