A Spare Life

by Lidija Dimkovska

  I was released. When I stepped outside, it was a cold spring day, the fifteenth of April, 2003. I took a bus to our neighborhood. Marija and Marta—now a bit grown, a year and a half old, with silky hair, almost like Srebra and me, but with Bogdan’s eyes—were waiting at home. We hugged, they laughed, and I cried. I cried and I laughed. My mother and father kissed me briefly on the cheeks. Through the window of my room I saw that the linden under my window had been cut down. I had never noticed that its roots were in the garden of the classmate who had been Srebra’s and my guardian angel in first grade, walking us to school and back. Then one day, other kids started calling him the “guardian of two-headed shit,” and after that he avoided us the way the other children did. He had a crease between his eyebrows when he frowned. From behind the curtain on the balcony in the big room we secretly listened as he played hide-and-seek with other kids. His mother and father cut down my linden, mine, the archive of every moment in our lives. I felt sorry for the linden.

  I was finally free, with no restrictions on where I went or with whom I spoke. People began coming to see me. Verče and her husband and child, my former monastery friends—prompted by Darko, now Father Ilarion, to come and offer me support—and Lenče, just back from the Bardovci Psychiatric Hospital, where she had spent three entire weeks because she hadn’t eaten for a week at home. She had become aggressive and sworn to her father that she would kill him. “She’s probably sleeping with him,” my mother said, “You’ll see. He cut all her hair off.” My mother had apparently “caught them in the act” once when she came back from the market and dropped by their place. I didn’t believe her, although I had thought Mirko was sexually abusing Lenče for years. Once Srebra and I had dropped by unannounced to visit them, and they almost didn’t open the door for us, and they were alone. Aunt Ivanka was at the doctor’s, and Verče at school. The big room smelled of semen. My mother thought Lenče was guilty as well—she wanted it, she was flesh and blood, after all—and that Aunt Ivanka knew and had even said, “Mirko gives her pills and uses her.” At the moment she said it, she was calm, pumped full of medicine. Other friends from primary school, now married with children, also came by. My mother got terribly anxious when guests came, but she played the part of hostess in front of them. Whenever someone announced a visit, she would whisper, “May they be struck blind.” When I asked why she was cursing, she would answer, “I was talking to myself.” She told me that, during the months I was in prison, she had grown sicker and I was unaware of the torments she suffered, with two small children on top of it all. If it hadn’t been for my father, who knows if she would have survived. She heard a constant rushing sound in her head, even now. It had been pressuring her for months; her head was going to burst. No medicine helped. “But if it’s written that you’re going to die, there’s no turning back. That’s it,” she said, and then, filled with tremendous self-pity, she’d lie on the couch in the kitchen and read newspapers. The blue robe was threadbare and mended in many places, but she didn’t take it off. Now that I was home, she no longer took care of Marija and Marta. They were still deeply attached to my father, but they avoided their grandmother, playing with her only when she said, “Hop up onto my truck. Brrr, drive Chucky the punker, drive!” Then they would laugh and squeal, “Taki the pankel, Taki the pankel,” but I didn’t know who this punker was who had entered our family’s lexicon. There were moments I felt I didn’t even belong with my own children. I used all my strength to try to wipe away the time I had spent in prison, and I said, loud and clear, that the topic of conversation was closed, that what happened, happened, and I didn’t want the word mentioned in the house. My mother only nodded, not sure that she could keep from mentioning the prison again. She would say things like, “If you hadn’t lived with that swindler over there, you wouldn’t have lived as a prisoner here.” My family was the most radically pessimistic, and had the least initiative, of any in the world. My mother lived with a focus on her death, not on her life. Not even Marta and Marija—babies left, God knows how, for her to look after—could change her outlook or give her a new outlook on life. No, she found no meaning in anything. She had no goals, no perspective on herself or on us. Objectively, it was perhaps understandable: in her lifetime she had lost a daughter, a sister, her parents, her future son-in-law. But hadn’t I lost a sister, an aunt, a grandmother and grandfather, a husband-to-be, and also my best friend? I recalled how I once thought tragedies were incommensurate. Now I was no longer certain. My mother was clearly in despair, or, as the monks would say, suffering from melancholy. With her pessimism and negativity, she was a servant of the devil; she had none of the joy in life that is given to us by God. She was negligent toward us, resigned to her fate, submerged in her own dark, gloomy place. Heading down, not up. In her view, there wasn’t a single good person in the world. And as for bad people, Mirko, for example—she would say that it would be best if “someone drove a pick into his head and was done with it.” She would offer, only verbally, of course, a hundred euros to the person who would kill him. My skin crawled when she said such things. Marta told me in her baby language that “Gramma’s gonna die.” When I asked her why she said that, she was silent, but Marija added, “Gramma’s gonna die, but Grampa won’t.” I thought that my mother had filled the heads of eighteen-month-old children with her own sickness, telling them, “Grandma will die,” and now they were repeating it. Our estrangement created a closeness between us. We would quarrel and not speak for days, but then begin talking again. When we sat down to eat and I saw only two fried fish for all of us, I would say somewhat jokingly to Marija and Marta, “Look, your grandma is like Jesus, feeding the multitudes with just two fishes.” Marija and Marta didn’t get it, but they would laugh, because I was laughing. My father would then say, “Yeah, yeah, you know everything.” Surprisingly, after I got back from prison, we ate at the dining-room table. I would eat with the children first; then my mother and father would eat. Marija and Marta had highchairs that my father had bought used at the auto market, where all sorts of things, not just car parts, were for sale, and they now stood next to each other where there had been a chair, now relegated to the big room, next to my father’s bed, where there was also a sack of flour. Perhaps my father transformed himself at night from a wolf into a billy goat with white paws so he could ritually devour my mother. But it was my mother, not my father, who stored the sack of flour there. As for my father, he kept his shoes in the garage, and when he had to go anywhere, he went downstairs in his slippers and put his shoes on in the garage. When he returned, he took off his shoes in the garage and came back up in his slippers. He did it out of unspoken spite, because I had told him that his shoes didn’t belong in the bathroom where we all washed up and that Marija and Marta needed to live in a clean place.

  How much fortitude and time I needed to get accustomed to life in that apartment, where living had never been comfortable. The television was usually on while we ate, which had always annoyed me, but I didn’t have the strength to argue. Once during lunch, the Serbian program The Heart of the Problem caught my attention: a mother was talking about losing her eight-year-old daughter, and how her husband committed suicide because if it. Then they showed an exclusive photo of the girl’s murderer—a seventeen-year-old boy, the girl’s neighbor and her brother’s friend. Then the boy, Dragan Spasoević, calmly described how he tricked the girl into coming to his apartment, how he raped her, and how, because he was afraid she would tell on him, he killed her. First, he said, he put his leg on her chest and choked her. When he thought she was dead, he went to the basement to find a suitcase or a trunk, but he couldn’t find one. When he got back, the girl had dragged herself to the door. He got scared, knocked her down, and strangled her until she was definitely dead. He said all this calmly, and with regret, although the psychologist doubted both his conscience and his regret. Later, he began to pray and draw icons, to seek God. The criminologist whom the program consulted said it was just a tactic to get released on
good behavior from prison before the end of the twenty-year sentence, which his lawyer insisted was too long, but Larisa’s mother felt was disgracefully short. The murderer’s parents still lived in the same entryway, and were watching the live show, so the host suggested to the reporter that he go and speak to them on air as well, but a producer notified the host that they were out of time. We all watched the show without touching our food, and by then, Marija and Marta were covered from head to toe in chicken stew. I felt terrible after the program. I didn’t know how to free myself from the brazenness of the sin. I turned on the boiler to wash the girls. Later, after they fell asleep, I took a shower, scrubbing myself with a goat-hair brush. I had spent the last of the money from England, but I had hopes in my pending recompense from the Ministry of Justice for having been sentenced without cause.

  I wanted to take Marta and Marija to the cemetery. My mother and father hadn’t gone while I was in prison. We all went together by taxi. The candles blew out in the breeze. The ritual bread my mother brought crumbled apart on Srebra’s grave. We ate some there, then at Aunt Ivanka’s grave, then at Bogdan’s. My mother said you should go to the graves of deceased family members first, then to the graves of others. According to her, Bogdan had never been a part of our family. But Bogdan and I had been a family for four years, in our London apartment in Shoreditch. He was everything to me: husband, child, mother, father, friend, teacher, and student. Plus, he had been the father of my children. But apparently that meant nothing. The bread made my mother sick to her stomach. Bogdan’s grave was overgrown and untended. My mother brought a spoon to Aunt Ivanka, because she had dreamed that Aunt Ivanka called her, asking her to bring a spoon; for Srebra she brought apple juice, but for Bogdan, nothing. I had no food with me. I took Marta and Marija to him. I told them, “This is your daddy.” They touched the photograph embedded in the stone with their little hands and repeated, “Daddy, Daddy.” I stood there, not knowing what to feel.

  I was never able to feel close to my dead loved ones in the presence of my parents. A few steps from Aunt Ivanka’s grave, which had nearly collapsed from negligence (I was angry with Verče for not finding time to visit her mother’s grave), beneath a glass shelter like a carport, was the grave of a five-year-old child. It looked like a table covered in tulips, with a white cross in the middle. I squeezed Marta and Marija. I would do anything to keep them alive and healthy. Aunt Milka told me over the phone that she would go to the cemetery on All Souls’ Day and perform the rituals—she would mourn for Srebra, she would mourn for Aunt Ivanka and Bogdan. “Even though I never met him, since you loved him, I love him too. May God keep little Marija and Marta healthy.” Then she added that she would ask Grandma and Grandpa if they were together up there, beside God, and she would cry so that others would see.

  I made a cake for Marta and Marija’s second birthday. My mother covered it with yellowish paper from Marija and Marta’s drawing pad. Then she sat on the couch, vacant, gloomy, and silent. Every day, her spitefulness took more of a hold of her. She would lie down on the couch and pretend to sleep. She’d curl up, alone, restrained, untouchable. It was as though she were an artist, a Bohemian who didn’t care what others thought of her, or how her granddaughters would see her. She would barely utter a word. A crushed expression on her face. She didn’t want to make soda bread for me. She said she didn’t know how, she’d never made it before, and my father didn’t eat that kind of bread. She made a loaf of white bread, and I said thank you. But in my family, it was almost rude to say thanks or any other kind, polite word. Especially to my mother. She was insulted: Her nostrils flared, bulging out over her mouth. Her eyebrows furrowed, her cheeks grew sulky, taking on a yellowish tinge. They were still soft, like a baby’s. Her eyes emitted an austere, injured expression. The image of the angry victim. She no longer laughed like she once had, a laugh that could overtake my father’s anger. Only when she called Marija and Marta, “you little bitches,” did she laugh with her old laugh as Marija and Marta repeated the word “bishes.” On their third birthday, Marta asked me if I could give birth to a puppy for them. I laughed. Maybe I really was a bitch, but I couldn’t give birth to a pup. “But Grandma calls us little bitches,” said Marija. “Out of love,” I answered her. Nothing was clear to them. I never understood our odd family estrangement. There was a connectedness between us, an absurd closeness, which we continuously destroyed. I asked myself what I’d think about all this when my mother died. Would I be sorry? Would I hate myself? Would my conscience be clear? I gave her everything she never gave to Srebra or me. I bought her everything she never bought us. The money that we never had when we went into the city, needing new clothes or makeup for our problematic skin. I kept reinforcing my self-confidence, which she kept destroying. She had grown numb to the outside world and was on the brink of an internal abyss. Long ago, when Srebra and I were children, we went on Saturday outings to the Matka Canyon, outside Skopje. My mother fried peppers and put them in a yellow plastic container. A little cheese, a few tomatoes, bread, and that was our picnic lunch. We would climb into the Škoda and silently—if you didn’t count my mother’s cautions and my father’s curses—make our way to Matka. I remember the river. The riverbed and beach were rocky, but I don’t recall ever swimming there. Everyone said Srebra and I would drown if we got in the water, that the river was not the sea, that we wouldn’t float, and anyway…how could we swim with our heads like that? There were many families like ours, but their children swam. We sat on the shore, throwing stones into the water, angry at the whole world and waiting for evening to come so we could go back home.

  My mother still went looking for my dirty clothes to wash them by hand, even after I forbade her from washing my clothes. She searched through my cupboard and left tea strainers inside, saying she would continue to use the orange one, which was more than twenty years old, black, and dirty, but if I wanted to use these, they should be kept in my cupboard. She counted my money, looked at each thing I kept in the cupboard, to see what I was hiding. Is this how she tried to get to know me better? Rather than having a frank conversation, she concocted some mystery about my simple life, then shared her evidence with my father. She was, however, a secret, safe mediator between my father and me. My father and I were uncomfortable when we were alone together. In fact, we were never alone. Marija and Marta had managed to erase the emotional distance between us once and for all. That didn’t mean that we spoke, but our attention turned toward the children, so we didn’t question our relationship. Before, my father used to drink wine or beer with lunch. He’d buy a case of beer and a barrel of Golden Delicious apples; he smoked pork; we ate white bread. But now they bought everything ready-made. They waited for others to give them things. They took little pleasure in anything. My mother no longer made rolls, vanilla cookies, tulumbi, steamed cookies, halvah, apple cake, Russian salad, or her pudding cake. At a time when everyone else was starting to consume more, purchasing things wholesale at supermarkets, my parents lived more and more ascetically, even though Marta, Marija, and I were also living in their home. I wanted us to live as normally as possible, to keep something extra in the refrigerator, to have bananas, grapes, and chocolate, both for them and for us. There was no love between my parents and me. Just as it had been when Srebra was alive. Did I also carry my mother’s genes? Would I become like her, full of meanness? That’s what Aunt Ivanka, when she was alive, used to say in secret: She is full of meanness. But when all was said and done, I didn’t have spare parents. And my mother didn’t love me in a motherly way. If I clutched my back, she asked, “What’s the matter with you? Does your back hurt?” with bitterness, roughness, an absence of love. She got more and more annoyed by my, and perhaps also Marija and Marta’s, presence in our—in their—home. As a matter of fact, she didn’t want to love me, and she most often succeeded. Once, she sat in her room for two full days, angry and stubborn, not making lunch, because I told her to not scrape the pots with a fork, because I had just bought new ones d
owntown. She closed herself up in the big room as if she were a child. She didn’t want to pick up Marija and Marta at day care; she didn’t eat the beans I prepared; she didn’t speak to anyone. A day or two later, though, I went shopping with Marija and Marta, and she came with us. She picked out hair dye. I bought it for her, along with a few bags of pretzels and two beers, so she could drink with my father, and that cheered her up. Only by taking her shopping could I buy her smile. My father barely survived living with her—he was like a flower in an arid climate. I remembered how he came to Darko’s when Srebra was alive and how Srebra and I filled his bag with the groceries on my mother’s list, how he would be silent, closed within himself. He would take them, carrying them home with barely a word. He was more and more like her, but fortunately, not in his heart, only in his mouth. He gossiped with her about the neighbors, anybody who passed by, all their acquaintances. My mother filled his mind with her mean thoughts, but Marta and Marija protected him from them. They were always ready to hug him, to watch cartoons with him, to call “Grampa, Grampa,” and to offer him pretend coffee in small toy cups. But not her. Good Lord, how could such a mother have given birth to Srebra and me! But I didn’t have a spare mother, just as I didn’t have a spare sister, or a spare husband.