A Spare Life

by Lidija Dimkovska

  We slowly made our way to the Bulgarian–Macedonian border. On the Bulgarian side, the driver stopped, switched off his engine, and collected five German marks from each passenger. Bogdan and I didn’t have any marks, so we gave him ten pounds, which seemed like a lot to us, but he said that’s how it worked if we wanted to get across the border quickly: he’d give the border guard the money and they would let us go, or we could wait at the border for two to three hours. And after what had just happened in the States, it would likely be longer.

  It happened exactly like that. The border guard examined our documents, took the money, and let us go through without customs control. A long column of vehicles wound ahead of us, and the bus crawled through the zone between the Bulgarian and Macedonian borders. I could see the Macedonian flag billowing on a small white building. Outside the building stood a cluster of police and dogs. Bogdan, who was sitting anxiously by the window, nearly shouted, “Look over there. Look how many dogs there are!” Other passengers on the bus were also shouting, still in shock from the news of the attack in New York. It appeared that something was happening at the Macedonian border. Suddenly, a man was standing right beside my seat. He was a passenger on the bus, dressed in a black leather jacket, white tee shirt, blue jeans. He had a dark complexion, several days worth of stubble on his chin, uncombed greasy black hair that was disheveled and pushed to the side. He was holding a package about the size of a box of cookies wrapped up in brown tape. With no introduction, he began talking quickly: “Take this. Jesus Christ. Take it already. Stuff it under your dress!” I looked at him, shocked. “Go on, stuff it under your dress. It’s big enough. Don’t look at me like that, you whore, stuff it in there before I do it myself!” He was shouting and pushing the package at me. “What’s that look for? I’m talking to you!” Although he was panic-stricken, I recognized his voice. He had been the one who responded to the news from New York by calling out from the back of the bus, “It’s what they deserved.” Bogdan grabbed the package and threw it to the ground, shouting, “Stop it, you idiot!” The man, nearly mad with rage, turned bright red, bent down, grabbed the package, and, as he was straightening up, pulled a knife from his pocket. The blade flashed before the stunned passengers. Everyone turned toward us. I don’t know how Bogdan’s body found its way on top of mine, but at the last second I heard Bogdan’s cry and the passengers’ shrieks. The driver hit the brakes, and the bus came to a halt. I pushed Bogdan off of me. Then I saw the knife plunged in his chest, and while everyone around me screamed and jumped up, my cry lodged in my throat and I was lost in darkness. I lost myself from time and space.

  I came to in a small hospital room. They told me I was in Skopje. Everything with the babies was fine. I felt my stomach. They kicked at me. For a moment, I fell into a kind of bliss, but the next instant, I jolted: “What about Bogdan?” Silence. Just like in a movie, the nurse didn’t know what to say. “The young man…” I understood. Once again I fell, sinking into myself, into my own grave. I don’t know if I was in the hospital for hours, days, or months. I came fully awake the day two police officers came into the room. They were kind. One was younger; the other had gray hair. They expressed their condolences and asked me how I was. “When is your due date?” I couldn’t remember. They told me they had been following the whole incident, and the killer was in jail. He was captured immediately, right at the border. A “known criminal,” they said, “dealing in drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, and now a murderer as well. He won’t get less than twenty years in prison!” There had been drugs in the package. “Where’s Bogdan’s body?” I mustered the strength to ask, and they told me it was already in the morgue. When I was better, I would be able to bury him. “Does his mother know?” I asked, and they told me she knew. It had been their duty to notify her. She was shocked, but had said she couldn’t come. “We barely understood each other,” they said. “She couldn’t find the words in Macedonian.” “Your parents know, too,” they said. For a minute, no one spoke. Then the older one said, “We are here to ask you about something, but you’re the one asking us questions.” He meant it as a joke, but I was confused and in an exhausted dreamlike state, likely caused by sedatives. “What?” I asked. They told me it had also been their duty to examine and confiscate our luggage along with the killer’s. Everything had been sent for expert analysis, including Bogdan’s laptop. “We found something we can’t explain,” the older policeman continued. “There were thirty files on your partner’s laptop with falsified passports. And in your suitcase, in the large folder containing the ultrasound photo of your babies, were the passports of four Macedonian citizens, but not Macedonian passports, falsified British ones.” He fell silent. I looked at him, stunned. Then he added, “There weren’t any passports in his suitcase, just in yours.” I kept staring at him, but nothing made sense. I was too weak to grasp what he was saying, but somewhere, as if through a tunnel, my mind went back to the time in London when I came across the file with passport data. Bogdan had assured me that it was for the new quiz show, and I had believed him. Now Bogdan was dead, and I decided to keep believing in him until the day I died. “They were for a show that Bogdan was pitching to the BBC,” I said. The officers looked at me quizzically, surprised and sympathetically. “The passports had already been counterfeited,” the younger one said. “We found the people in our international database. Counterfeiting passports is a felony. You’re being charged for being an accomplice and for the cover-up. Do you understand what’s happening? What’s happened?” the older officer asked me paternally. I didn’t. I was only aware of one thing: I lost Bogdan on that bus, Bogdan had died, the man with the package had killed him, and had I taken the package, Bogdan would still be alive.

  Once again, I lost myself between dream and reality. I don’t know how I got to the cemetery for Bogdan’s burial from the hospital. I know there were lots of police officers at the burial. We buried him near Srebra’s grave, and the only ones there were my mother, my father, Verče, Auntie Dobrila, and I. Aunt Milka couldn’t come—or more precisely, my mother convinced her not to come. My mother’s relationship with my uncle had once again cooled. The burial took place as if in a parallel universe. I simply walked beside Bogdan’s coffin. No. I didn’t walk, my belly simply carried me forward. The officers walked behind us in silence. The hired men lowered Bogdan’s coffin into the grave. I covered my mouth with the palm of my hand, kissed it, then lowered my hand: a last kiss for Bogdan. The grave was marked with chalk: Bogdan Majstorovski 12/5/1972–11/9/2001. His mother hadn’t come. I telephoned her later. She said she’d been unable to get a flight. I said nothing, crying. She cried, too. Then she hung up.

  Immediately following the burial, two police officers grasped me and led me, gently, almost tenderly, to a police van with barred windows. They showed me the warrant for my arrest: concealing falsified travel documents. I tried to break free and get out of the van, but a young police officer said it would better for me—“and for the babies,” he said—if I were calm and obedient. If I wasn’t guilty, the remanding judge would simply release me, the officer said. But the remanding judge didn’t release me. “The passports were in your bag, in a folder with your babies’ ultrasound pictures. Surely they didn’t get there on their own,” he said. And it was impossible to prove the laptop was only Bogdan’s. “Furthermore, in the hospital you told the officer that Bogdan was creating some sort of quiz show with that data, which means you knew about it, but didn’t report it. You can’t be so naïve as to believe he wanted to make a show with passport information. How is that possible when it’s quite clear: on the left side are citizens from Eastern Europe with passports from their countries, and on the right side is the data that would be needed for their new British passports. And those new British passports weren’t issued by the government, but manufactured, counterfeited. With special paper, a special printer, and well-studied passport numbers. And a large number of passports! Those passports were made somewhere: a basement, an apartment, somewhere secu
re. Perhaps in your home?” “No, no, no,” I insisted. But it didn’t help. I wasn’t helped by the lawyer representing me either, a former colleague of Srebra’s and mine from the law faculty. He had been a member of our class. He had been an excellent student, who, needless to say, remembered us. He told me he had been following our situation, including the affair with the money for the operation. I simply couldn’t prove I wasn’t guilty. Because of my late-stage pregnancy, the officials granted me house arrest. Three months. So I couldn’t flee the country. With newborns, it would be even more difficult. I had no choice.

  They drove me in the police van to my parents’ apartment. It was the first time I entered their home since arriving in Skopje. I was taken from the hospital to Bogdan’s burial and from there straight to the interrogation. An officer helped me out of the van as the neighbors watched me from their balconies with varying expressions of astonishment. I was led to the entryway and then into the apartment, where I signed some documents and was told that I couldn’t leave and I couldn’t have visitors. My mother and father stared fixedly at us; I could barely stand, and when the police officers left, my mother said from the hallway, “Turn off the light.” I went into my room, lay on the bed, and panted, my heart beating, and it felt as though the vein that had joined my head with Srebra’s was beating too, yet Srebra no longer existed, Bogdan no longer existed, nor did Aunt Ivanka, Roza, Grandma, or Grandpa. Nobody. There was no one left alive any longer. So many deaths were connected with my life; so many people had died on me. It was as though I was the one person in the entire world chosen by God to have all of her close relatives killed. The one person who should remain alive while all those around her were dead. Inside, I carried two lives, the children Bogdan would never have, and I was the wife he would never have. I lay in my old bed in Skopje, and our babies kicked in my womb, and I wished I would vanish, go somewhere far away—into the void, if such a thing existed. For days, I just lay there, only getting up to get the food my mother prepared for me. She was pale, gloomy, wrapped in her blue robe. I carried the dishes into my room and ate there, alone, leaning against the sewing machine. Then I leafed through books, photo albums, listened to old cassettes, and, in moments of despair, remembering that Bogdan had been killed right before my eyes because of me, I sobbed with my head in the pillow. I don’t know if anyone has ever shed as many tears as I did for all those near to me. And I couldn’t even visit their graves. When my mother heard me crying, she would come into my room and say, “Go ahead and cry now, since you’re smarter than anybody; after all, you know everything.” Once again, I showered only on Sunday evenings, and on Wednesdays rinsed myself with water from the green pot. One day, my father brought me a letter the postman had left on top of the mailboxes because the number of the apartment was missing from the address. It was for me. From Bogdan’s mother in England. It was only three sentences: “Admit your guilt so the matter will be closed and we won’t be harassed here. They might search our place, and as Bogdan’s mother, I could be extradited. I beg you, Zlata, confess!” I had nothing to confess. I didn’t have even the smallest amount of guilt, and still didn’t believe that Bogdan could have been involved with counterfeiting travel documents. Surely I would have noticed something! Something more concrete than the file on his computer. Bogdan wasn’t that sort of person. He was so good, so humane, filled with understanding and love. He carried me, he loved me more than anything in the world. But lying on the old bed I had shared with Srebra, alone with my thoughts, I slowly put together the mosaic of our life in London, which was forever changed, and the consequences of which, evidently, my unborn twins and I would carry. Yes. Hadn’t I noticed the list of passports on Bogdan’s computer? And like an idiot, I had believed he really was creating a TV show with the young men from their Society of Young Pro-Western Immigrants from Eastern Europe. It was likely they had been counterfeiting the passports together, creating programs and selling the passports for large sums of money. But where did they do all of that? Where? We had no secret compartment in our apartment in London. We didn’t have a basement or an attic. Maybe where one of the other guys lived? Or in Brighton, at his adopted mother’s? The idea flashed through my mind. Maybe that was where…in the basement of the large family home where first Bogdan’s aunt lived with the partner whom she had never married, Bogdan, and Auntie Stefka. Then, after his aunt died of cancer, Auntie Stefka married her sister’s partner, who became Bogdan’s stepfather. There was surely space there for the computers, printers, and special machines for counterfeiting passports. Where else would the money have come from that Bogdan received from his adopted mother every week for years? And why else would she write a letter telling me to confess so she wouldn’t be interrogated and pursued in England? I didn’t know, but the possibilities rolled around in my head, even though I refused to believe they were true.

  I spent the final weeks of my pregnancy under house arrest. I exchanged barely a word with my mother and father. For days at a time, I lay in my room and only got up to get the food from the dining-room table that my mother had left for me. It was understood, though unspoken, that I would eat in my room, as if I weren’t even allowed to leave that room while I was under house arrest. My father kept silent and grew thinner. My mother talked to herself, always saying horrible things. We didn’t have a memorial for Bogdan the first week after burial or for the fortieth-day commemoration. I wasn’t allowed to go out, and my mother and father didn’t go to the cemetery even to visit Srebra. My mother went to church only to light candles. I wanted to tell her, “Light one for Roza, too,” but kept silent, because Roza had not been mentioned for years in our home, as though she were a taboo subject, especially since my mother couldn’t stand Auntie Magda.

  My mother still cooked the same foods—beans on Friday, potatoes and meatballs on Saturday, stuffed peppers on Sunday, fried dough on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday… Always minimal: three small drumsticks for three people, three stuffed peppers, or one pastrmajlija baked on a large baking sheet. I was pregnant, and, aside from all my other pains, hunger sometimes took hold of me. I’d empty the plate placed on the sewing machine table in my room, and missed my grandma’s stews: rice and macaroni with small bits of meat (there were always nice bits of meat for Srebra and me), potatoes and rice with roasted meat, thick pancakes, round loaves of soda bread, leeks and meat spiced with red pepper, boiled wheat ground with walnuts and sugar, baked apples, baked squash, French toast, peas our mother sent her. My mother moped around the apartment for days on end talking to herself: “What’s happened to us, why not to someone else? Just funerals, just blackness. And it wasn’t chance: Snežana must have been hexing us her whole life. She wants to exterminate us. May her heart be devoured. May she never see the light of day.” My mother cursed my aunt, the eternal culprit of all the misfortunes that befell our whole family. As soon as she married my uncle, she began to demonstrate her—uncommon at that time—new-age interests, and perhaps talents as well. Who knew? She read books about white magic, about black magic, and about life beyond the grave. At one point, she believed in reincarnation, but then in resurrections and God, and then, at some other point, in Satan. She gathered magic spells, and then tried to perform them. In the village, we often found small nests of twigs with a single red Easter egg, or a person made of straw with red lipstick flecked along the length of its body. Whenever my grandmother found these items, she simply tossed them in the woodstove, and let the fire burn them. How beautifully the twigs of the nests sputtered as Grandma crossed herself in front of the paper icon of Saint Nicholas affixed to the wall. We children were never afraid of our aunt’s interest in witchcraft, but it apparently frightened the adults. And now, listening to my mother cursing and damning her, now that I was grown up myself, a secret fear splashed over me like her words. I thought, what if she—the wife of the uncle we loved most in the world, the one who took him from us, so we only saw him once over five or six years—really had the ability to kill those close to us? Perhaps a
t her house, all of us were miniaturized in straw with our hearts pierced by a toothpick. And perhaps that was why we were all slowly dying off, one after the other. First Grandma, then Srebra, then Grandpa, then Aunt Ivanka, and now Bogdan. There was no love lost between my mother and my aunt—they couldn’t stand each other. Why would she kill Aunt Ivanka—if in fact she had—by planting an illness in her body, as well as her soul? Making it so Aunt Ivanka simply didn’t want to get better, resigning herself to her fate, her death. Why spare my mother if she really could perform death spells? Srebra and I had a strange relationship with our aunt. When we were little and our uncle married her, we both wrote little songs entitled “My Aunt.” I wrote about an idealized aunt with blue eyes, blond hair, a slender figure, sweet smile, steady hand, and a quick step. My aunt really liked my song. Srebra’s song was more realistic: my aunt has brown eyes, is heavy, nearly two hundred pounds, with dark brown curly hair that she never brushes, is the biggest lazybones in the family, and only knows how to make cakes with ten or a dozen eggs in them. When the domestic impulse for baking a cake took hold of her, both we and Grandma knew that for the next few days, there would be no fried or poached eggs. My aunt would go all out: mixing things, filling several pots, and using up all of Grandma’s golden reserves of oil, sugar, and flour. And when she set the cake in the refrigerator, everything would be left unwashed and scattered. She would go off into her room, lock the door, and fall asleep, snoring more like an old man than a young bride. That was our aunt in Srebra’s song, or, if not exactly a song, a poem. When our aunt read it, she became terribly angry. She tore it into tiny pieces and screamed at Srebra, “This is on your head, and it’s too bad Zlata will also have to pay because of you.” Srebra made a sign that she was a bit cuckoo, but the incident was soon forgotten, or at least we thought it was forgotten. But if she killed Srebra, why did she also kill Aunt Ivanka? Aunt Ivanka was the one who got along best with her; she understood her more than anyone else. She always let her have her way and helped her out. She took our cousins with the gorgeous olive-green eyes out for walks, the ones who, when they grew up, became completely estranged from us and never contacted us again. They didn’t even come to Srebra’s or Aunt Ivanka’s funerals. True, I wasn’t at Aunt Ivanka’s either, but it was hard to come from London the same day as the funeral, but from somewhere in Macedonia—surely not. Aunt Ivanka got along with everyone, and wanted to please everyone to the best of her ability, but my mother was convinced that part of my aunt’s mission as a witch was to kill her, too. But then why had Bogdan died? After all, Bogdan had never even met my aunt. As a child, he surely noticed my uncle when he lived with us while studying a foreign language, but do chance two-second meetings with grown-ups, our friends’ uncles, really remain in a child’s memory? Bogdan couldn’t have been one of my aunt’s victims. Did she forever hold on to the little song idealizing an aunt that I wrote when I was young, but then decided to do something to me, anyway, taking what was most important in my life: Bogdan? Then I thought about Roza. Could she have taken Roza from me as well? Surely not. As far as I can recall, I didn’t see my aunt between the time I was given the chain with the little cross and when I lent it to Roza. In other words, the chain couldn’t have had a spell on it. I hurled such conjectures at my mother, who continued to say Snežana wouldn’t rest until she exterminated the lot of us. “Just mark my words,” she murmured to herself. “She will mow us down like the plague.”