Читать книгу A Spare Life - Lidija Dimkovska - Страница 9

That year, January 6, our Christmas Eve, fell on a Sunday. Early in the morning, you could hear knocking on doors as carolers went door-to-door singing traditional carols. Srebra and I never went out caroling on Christmas Eve, not even when we were younger; we couldn’t stand it when people opened the door and gasped when they saw our conjoined heads and then, confused and not knowing what to say, they’d shove a few chestnuts into our hands before locking the door after us, crossing themselves in horror at the encounter, some even spitting on the spot to prevent something like that happening to them. We were conscious of the fact that it was best if the coordinates of our lives moved between home and school—to the store, around our building, and no farther, not to other buildings or neighborhoods—just to places where people already knew us, though, even there, we weren’t really accepted. That is why on Christmas Eve we stood silently in the hallway, listening as carolers sang and knocked on the door, while our hearts raced like mad. We did not open the door even for Roza, because there was always some other child with her. If our parents were home, our mother would open the door and give each caroler an apple, even as our father asked, “Why are you opening the door?” Although we didn’t open the door ourselves, we wanted Mom to tell us how many children had been there, whether they were older or younger, boys or girls, what they were carrying in their bags. But on that January 6, by the time our mother got around to opening the door, the carolers were already gone. Srebra and I were still lying in bed and, just like every other Sunday morning for the past several months, listening to a Tina Turner song that reverberated from the neighboring apartment. It was always the same song, every Sunday morning for months. It was Christmas Eve and our mother made a leek pita pie, and the traditional round loaf with a coin baked inside was small and soft. Srebra and I sat on our chair, Mom and Dad stood as Mom divided up the loaf, and the coin was inside the piece that had been set aside for God. Then we shared walnuts, chestnuts, apples, dried plums, and figs. Just as it did every year, the ritual lasted about two or three minutes. Our father muttered, “OK, OK, that’s enough,” then took a step back toward the divider between the kitchen and the dining room, stopping with one foot there, one here, arms crossed, ready to sit down on the chair in the dining room and turn on the television. Srebra and I were eating the Lenten leek pita along with cheese, even though it was a fasting day. We didn’t scarf down all the leek pie so there would be some left for our parents. When we finished, they sat down to eat, and we stood, leaning our elbows on the back of one of the dining-room chairs, staring at the television screen. This is how Christ was born in our house: quickly. I always thought of him as a premature baby lying in an incubator. Srebra and I went to our room, sat down on the floor, and turned on the yellow heater behind our backs. I asked her what she thought about God. She said that she did not think about him and that God didn’t exist, that we had evolved from monkeys; after all, weren’t the two of us absolute proof that man descended from monkeys? Surely some simian mistake had caused us to be born with conjoined heads, because if God were perfect, as they say, why hadn’t he made us normal and not like this, disfigured for our entire lives. I didn’t know what to say; Srebra was convinced that, while my God may have created other people, he certainly hadn’t created us; we were clearly descended from apes. I wanted to go to bed as soon as possible. I needed to scrunch down under the quilt and move my body as far away from Srebra’s as possible, as far away as our heads would allow, so I could be alone with my thoughts. I had one specific thought that helped me fall asleep on my most difficult nights: “my” house, the house I would have one day in a beautiful Skopje neighborhood, after Srebra and I had been separated and each of us was able to live as she wished. The house had two floors, with rooms and furniture that never changed in my imagination; for years, I always pictured it the same way, the rooms clearly laid out: tables, beds, pictures on the walls, dishes, everything. I would live in that house with my husband, who would be named Bobby—I really liked that name—a doctor, and he would have his office in the back part of the house. Our bedroom would be on the upper floor between the bathroom and the children’s room. I would sit for entire days in the armchair in my large library, reading books and writing novels. Since we would have lots of money, every month I would visit a poor family on the outskirts of the city and bring them everything: food, clothing, medicine, toys for the children, anything they needed. And I pictured their house in detail as well, always the same, and I pictured them too, always the same, as if they really existed, as if we had known each other for years. What didn’t I imagine before falling asleep? I went deep inside that house of mine, until the sweetness of sleep overtook me.

But that night, as soon as I fell asleep, Srebra elbowed me in the ribs to wake me up. “Mom’s sick! Hey, Mom’s sick,” she whispered. I opened my eyes in the dark and pricked up my ears to hear the voices coming from the dining room. “Let’s go,” said my father. Then my mother, in a tired voice, said, “Take my bag.” They left; they locked us in and left. Where? To which hospital and why? Srebra and I lay on our backs, silent. We swallowed the spit collecting in our throats. We lay there without saying a word, without moving, as if frozen, until an hour or two later when they returned. They went to bed quickly, got up at the usual time, five thirty, went to work, and we went to school a bit later. On our way home from school, we had the same thought: boil some water in the little pot with the red cover (the one that came with a packet of Vegeta seasoning, one of socialist Yugoslavia’s rare marketing successes), shake in the chicken soup packet, add noodles, boil it, pour it into small deep china bowls, chop up some stale white bread, and then deliver this pleasure to our stomachs, which, during the day, only ever had a roll spread with margarine, ajvar, or a small cheese-filled bun for a snack. We’d slurp up that soup as if it were human warmth while Mom, pale, distracted, or sick lay on the couch in the kitchen and watched us silently, absently, or worked mechanically on her needlepoint, pushing the needle through the small openings. Our father would be rustling down below in the garage. Srebra and I sat on our chair, and all our sadness, shock, and concern floated in the chicken soup with the crumbled stale bread, which, homeopathically transformed into a transitory feeling of security and happiness, caressing our souls like the soft warm blanket we didn’t have in our childhood because we were covered with heavy quilts, or roughly woven covers, scratchy shag wool throws, or small tattered blankets that smelled of dust and decay. That soup from a packet, served with boiled beans, was one of our favorite, but also one of the most unavoidable, meals of our primary-school years. As we slurped our soup greedily, we glanced, either surreptitiously or openly, under the couch on which our mother was lying, where, ducking our heads, we had hidden the small first aid booklet, and during moments of our mother’s dizzy spells, when we were not sure what was happening to her, we madly turned the pages with trembling hands, hearts in our throats. Although we tried to remember how to do artificial respiration and revive a person, nothing stayed in our heads, and we never really learned how to give first aid. When our mother got up to use the bathroom, Srebra and I, as if on command, would sneak into the pantry, open the refrigerator and, one after another, quickly take swigs from the blueberry juice that was purchased only when our mother was sick—on those days when she wore her blue robe with its yellow-green flowers. That’s how we knew for sure she was sick, and we felt a tightness in our chests, and in the spot where our heads were conjoined it felt like the striking of a wall clock. Her robe covered her body almost to her feet, protecting it with cotton, and announcing to her surroundings that her body underneath was weak, vulnerable, and sick. On the days Mom wore her blue robe, she was drowned in a world of her own. She had the unhappiest face in the world, and never smiled. What was it: depression, nerves, or some other illness? Or was it only tremendous pain? Reliving the memories of her first year of marriage when her father-in-law beat her with a broom and she was pregnant with us, and then nursing babies with conjoined heads? All the torments, all the human evils that had injured this poor typist? Whenever she felt she was at death’s door—we knew that by the whispered sentence, “I’m going to die”—our dad would start the car and take her to the doctor. When she felt like that he would shut us into the big room so we wouldn’t see it if she died. And outside, the hit song “Julie” echoed, filling the air with lightheartedness and sadness at the same time. One day, several years later, when we returned from school, our mother was sitting on the balcony doing “The Gypsy” needlepoint pattern and crying. At moments like that, neither Srebra nor I knew what to say, what to do. We stood, leaning on the balcony and turned toward her, silently, our hair hanging loose, intermingled, our two heads with one head of hair reflected in the window of the balcony door. All at once, our mother stood up, left everything behind, and went out. We saw her from the balcony as she hurried, nearly at a run, down the street that led to the store. She returned with a bar of chocolate. She opened it and ate it herself, without offering us a single small square. That day, Srebra and I ate beans without meat again, but she ate chocolate, in silence. Then her sickness went away. Surely, the fortune-tellers and seers to whom she went also had a share in it. One of them had “foretold” that the thermometer from Ohrid in the kitchen behind the door had mercury in it and was making my mother’s blood pressure drop, so it had to be changed. And that she had to drink English ivy tea. Black magic? Several times, we found rags burned black and sooty in front of our door. Who had left them there and why? Did something from that ominous magic touch us? Srebra told me, “Magic does not touch those who are descended from monkeys, it touches those who are descended from God.” I felt faint with fear.

But that January in 1985, I just wanted the days to pass until winter break when we’d travel alone with our cousin Verče on one of the Proletariat bus company buses to the village and directly into the embrace of our grandmother. The fire blazed in the only warm room in the house; while Srebra and I sat in our grandma’s lap, Verče had already found something to amuse herself—she had pulled a lead pellet from her pocket and was sticking it into the woodstove with tongs to see if it would melt. “Tomorrow we will go into town,” our grandmother said. “We’ll see the girl your uncle wants to marry. But don’t tell your mother, she’d yell at me, asking why I took you along and brought shame to us in front of the in-laws.” “We won’t tell her,” said Srebra, but I had a gigantic lump in my throat. We could hardly wait. Grandma, Verče, Srebra, and I went to the house of the girl our uncle, our mother’s brother, was in love with so we could have a look at her. She and her sister were standing at the window—the chosen one was a brunette, her sister a blond—like a picture of angels and divine brides in heaven, although the only thing that our prospective aunt-to-be had of that image was the plump body of a woman in a baroque painting of paradise. At first, when her parents saw Srebra and me, they could not help their open mouths uttering “Oh!” Then they scowled, but, finally, her father smiled as broadly as possible. He stood behind Srebra and me and hugged the two of us, placing his hands on our breasts. He ran his hands across them, as if by accident, while we stood, stunned, looking at the tapestry hanging on the wall. His wife went out to bring some juice; Verče sat in front of the television set; our grandmother settled down next to her and looked around. When our prospective aunt appeared, her father let his hands drop from our breasts. Our cheeks burned with shame. “Were they born like this, or did it happen to them afterward?” the mother asked our grandma, pointing to us as she served the juice. “That’s how they were born; it’s fate,” our grandma said. “What’s your sign?” asked our potential aunt. “Your uncle and I have compatible horoscopes, both our signs and rising signs.” “You have beautiful, beautiful granddaughters, even if they are like that,” her father laughed again. He had a leering expression, white teeth with a few gold ones interspersed. Later, as we were waiting for our grandmother to put on her shoes, he passed Verče in the hallway and grabbed hold of her by the breasts, too, as if by accident, while helping her put on her coat. Verče was twelve years old and as flat as a board, but we were a year older and almost unnaturally mature, our nipples obvious under our blouses. And in all our future meetings, at the engagement party, at the wedding, at every family event connected with our uncle and aunt, her father always greeted us warmly with his firm grip, immediately throwing his arms around our necks and literally taking hold of our breasts. Srebra and I would freeze, red with embarrassment. We hated him and we hated ourselves, while his wife, smile in place, chatted on about nothing. They were the owners of a fabric store called Makedonka. On occasion, our aunt gave us a meter or two of some material or other—I remember one that was a dirty white color, with a brown and orange palm tree in the middle, or maybe two palms: our aunt sewed us skirts with elastic waistbands and a flounce. They didn’t look great on us because of the elastic waistbands. We usually wore them with light brown tank tops that stretched enough so, like all our tops, we could pull them up from our feet.

From the very beginning, our grandmother did not like our uncle’s choice. For a daughter-in-law she had wanted a nurse, someone hardworking and as cute as pie, with long hair, a fair complexion, smiling, beautiful, and blond. The woman our uncle had selected was the diametric opposite of Grandma’s ideal. Our uncle cried behind the house when our grandmother told him she was not the girl for him, then took off somewhere. Our aunt cried sorrowfully, “My poor little brother. He’s the only one with any education, and now look…” she sobbed, then set off after him. Srebra thought it was funny, but I cut off her laughter with a sharp pinch to the hip. Verče suggested we take a walk through the village. No sooner had we set out than we met Vida, our grandma and grandpa’s neighbor. Granny Vida was most interested in whether our father had settled things with his family. She always asked when we saw her, and Srebra and I always said we didn’t know anything about it, that the topic was not mentioned in front of us. “So what about you? Are you looking for a cure, or do you plan to stay like this?” Granny Vida asked. Srebra and I did not know anything about that either, because Srebra and I didn’t know where to find a cure, and it always seemed to us that our mother and father weren’t looking, and that we’d continue on with conjoined heads to the end of our lives, old maids, scorned by everyone. Perhaps we’d end up like our neighbor Verka. Deep down, our grandma also seemed to think we’d be old maids, because she frequently told us about an old maid in the village. “She gets her paycheck, eats, and drinks; she’s like a buffalo. What does she need a husband for? A wife with a husband doesn’t eat or drink; she just slogs along looking after children, who then bring home lazy, unwashed daughters-in-law.” Another old maid in the village was Slavica, the agent who interrogated our grandfather that winter, though about what no one told us. Thin, tall, bony, with dark skin and hair, a gold tooth, and eyes that blazed with malice and power, she was the queen of Yugoslav Communism in the village, a member of UDBA—the secret police—dressed in a long leather coat. Who made those leather coats the UDBA agents wore? For years, even after the breakup of Yugoslavia, they wore them over their business suits. Every time Slavica showed up at the house, Grandpa, as if on command, threw a heavy wool jacket over his shoulders, and with peasant opanci on his feet, grimy from working in the animal stalls, went off somewhere with the agent. When he returned, he didn’t want to eat dinner or sit with us in the room with the woodstove, but lay down in his room, where he pulled the quilt and heavy woolen blankets over his head and trembled like a branch. Several years later, they found him, beaten, not far from the vineyard. He spent several days in the hospital and then came to Skopje. Srebra and I were alone. We had just returned from a book fair we had gone to with our school and were at Auntie Dobrila’s; she made leather slippers at home on an industrial sewing machine. We sat on the couch and watched her. She was not bothered by our appearance nor was she ashamed of us. She jokingly referred to us as the “ass and underpants” as if we chose to be together all the time rather than being forced to. Our grandfather arrived at our apartment and rang the bell over and over until it finally occurred to him to ask Auntie Dobrila where we were. We unlocked the door to our place and let him in. He came in and sat on the couch in the kitchen. He was confused, anxious, his head bandaged. This was not our grandfather from the village; he was like some other person. We didn’t know what to talk about. We left him there and went back to Auntie Dobrila’s. We returned after our mother and father came home from work. We read the court decision aloud several times, but still didn’t understand whether our grandfather had been charged, or had brought charges against someone else. The next day, he left on the first bus, and we went to the Prohor Pčinski Monastery with Roza’s class—her teacher taught history—for Roza had begged for us to be taken along to see the monastery where the Antifascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia had met. Srebra and I sat in the front seats of the bus, across from Roza, and all three of us looked straight ahead, through the bus’s windshield, while the radio played the Serbian pop song “Those Green Eyes Were Mine.” Our grandfather never came to Skopje again, and we never went to Prohor Pčinski again. Nor did he allow our grandmother to come to Skopje more than once every two or three years. It made him angry that she sat on the balcony where everyone could see her. Was he jealous? Or did he think that it wasn’t her place, a villager, to be out on the balcony? Or was he afraid that, in his absence, our grandmother would seek out her first love, a man named Kole, whom she had loved for seven years before she married our grandfather? She hadn’t known how to write, so her sister, Mirka, had written letters for her, which she sent to him baked in loaves of bread. He appeared to her in a dream just before he died, and now that he was dead, she was more sorry than ever before that she hadn’t married him and sat in a city garden in Skopje enjoying herself, rather than being tormented by village chores. Unrealized love, a life of pain. Her stomach ached until the end of her life. Every evening she licked sugar in place of morphine.

That winter vacation, after we met our prospective aunt, our Aunt Milka told us that our father had telephoned from work to tell her that our mother was in the hospital. “She was feeling sick to her stomach,” our aunt said. “It’s a good thing it’s vacation and you’re here, or who would have taken care of you?” That evening, while Srebra and I were sleeping with Verče in the bed in the room with the woodstove, our grandma lying at our feet like a dog, I began to run a fever. When she noticed that I was sick, Srebra got really angry. We hated each other most when one of us was ill, because the other one also had to lie there as if she, too, were sick, and, more often than not, would get sick herself. And now, of all times, while white snowflakes blew outside and Verče had already asked Grandfather where the sled was, I got sick. I was burning with fever and almost delirious as I drank yogurt our uncle brought from town especially for me. Srebra covered her nose and mouth with a handkerchief so she would not get sick too. Verče kicked about the room, turning the cassette player on and off. Finally, she put on a Riblja Čorba tape and left the room, and all day, between dreaming and waking, I listened to songs from their album Buvlja pijaca. Srebra looked at the ceiling with her mouth and nose covered, fists clenched. At such moments, she hated me more than anything in the world. I hated her too, because I felt her hatred. Our mother was far away; we didn’t even know which hospital she was in. Most of all, we were afraid she would die. I quickly recovered, and before the end of vacation, Grandma took us to the village center. We stood on the path near the village school and looked downhill toward the small river, where, when she was younger, our grandmother had washed clothes with the other women from the village. The village priest threw a wooden cross into the shallow, partially frozen river, and several men and boys dressed only in leggings, naked from the waist up, jumped into the water at the same time and poked around until one of the younger boys pulled the cross from the water. The priest called out, “Blessings upon you, Jovan! God bless you!” He patted the boy’s shoulder, which was turning blue, sprinkled him with basil, and presented him with a small grayish-black radio-cassette player. “Grandma, how come Grandpa didn’t come to jump in after the cross? Or Uncle?” I asked, but, walking along behind us, she said, “Oh, they’re not keen on such things.” Grandpa only went to church on Saint Nicholas Day, and our uncle was a young Communist. It was Epiphany, and the Blessing of Water, a celebration of Saint John the Baptist’s baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River, when God presented his beloved Son to the people while the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, flew above their heads. For years I asked myself, and once I asked Srebra: “Why in the form of a dove, and not some other bird?” Srebra said that monkeys loved to catch doves, and that is why the Holy Spirit appeared to them in the form of a dove. I didn’t believe her. But really, why in the form of a dove? And was it because of the Holy Spirit that Uncle Boro, who lived on our street in Skopje, kept a dovecote filled with such beautiful white doves? The only dove we ever had, which our uncle in Montenegro gave us, suffocated in our Škoda just as we pulled up in front of our building. That was an emptiness nothing could fill, a dove that was impossible to replace, not even by one from Uncle Boro’s dovecote. Was it the loss of my personal, private Holy Spirit? Two days before we were to go back to Skopje, our grandma said, “Your uncle is going with you. He’ll stay in Skopje till the summer; he’s taking a language course. Look after him. He’s the only uncle you’ve got. Let him eat whatever you’re eating. Give him whatever he wants, so his weenie doesn’t fall off. He’s a grown man, after all.” Our grandfather yelled, “Come on, stop it, don’t go prattling on, he’s not a child.” Our uncle spent so long in town saying goodbye to the girlfriend who was to become his wife that summer that he barely caught the bus we were on. Perhaps Grandma thought that if he weren’t with her for half a year, he would forget her. Did they really sell a cow so our uncle could study a language that he was never going to need, or was it to distance him from this girlfriend, whom they did not want as their daughter-in-law? We arrived in Skopje. Our father was waiting for us with the car at the station. First we dropped Verče off; then we went to our apartment. Our uncle asked whether our mother had returned from the hospital. “No,” answered our father. “They’re letting her go Friday.” Srebra and I said nothing. What awaited us at home was the little woodstove, its fire burned down, and a pot of beans our father had boiled. First Srebra and I ate with our uncle sitting perpendicular to us; then Dad ate by himself. Our uncle had to sleep in the big room, on the foldout couch by the door, in the room where our parents slept. Together, we somehow made up the bed. We’d have to wait for Mom to return from the hospital so she could empty a few things from the cupboard and give him space for his clothes. The next day, our uncle went to visit her. We did not. Dad said we shouldn’t go to the hospital; a hospital is no place for children. When our mother got back two days later, she brought dolls made from felt: one pale yellow, the other orange. The dolls were long and attached to wooden sticks. Someone had been selling them in the hospital. They were not for Srebra and me; they were just to have around the apartment. We put one in our room on the shelf; the other sat in the big room on top of the old television. After our mother put on her blue robe, she lay down on the couch and silently looked at us seated in our chair. What concerned us most was whether she would laugh as she had before. Her laugh was the only thing that eased our anxieties about being unloved children. When our mother laughed, it gave Srebra and me confidence; we grew more sure of ourselves. In those moments we heard her laugh—and she laughed loudly, almost hysterically—Srebra and I felt close to each other, and carried our misfortune more easily. Our father almost never laughed; he only let out a sound that was supposed to resemble laughter, a sort-of laugh released as an exhale, as if he were clearing his throat, a laugh he had second thoughts about. As it turned out, for a whole month after her return from the hospital, where they had removed a cyst from her ovary, Mom didn’t laugh in her usual fashion. It was not until she went to work again and was once again able to tell us who said what and who did what, in particular about “Comrade Director,” that she was able to laugh as she had before. One evening, before going to bed, our uncle, wrapped in a heavy wool blanket and shivering, accidentally broke one of the globes on the lamp that hung in the big room. Afraid of what our father would say, he opened his drawer (the top one was his our mother had decided), took out his pants, and got himself ready in case our father should happen to kick him out of the house. My heart was beating like crazy because I loved him and was worried and afraid for him. Srebra loved him too, but she argued with him, calling him an idiot whenever we played a pinching game and he pinched us too hard. Our father did get very angry, but he controlled himself and didn’t kick Uncle out, but that evening in front of the television, he muttered the same thing for hours: “As if people like that should study languages, the bastard; because of people like that the country will fall apart…” Our mother sobbed silently on the couch; Srebra and I watched the quiz show Kviskoteka, but both our minds fled to the big room, where, scrunched down under a quilt and thick wool blanket, our uncle’s body trembled. What we loved most was when mother vacuumed and shooed Srebra, me, and our uncle into the hallway, where we sat until she was done. In the hallway, we played hopscotch on the brown carpet with its brightly colored lines. Srebra and I held each other tight under the arms and hopped each on one foot, while our uncle hopped on two. We laughed until our uncle turned completely red in the face, including all of his forehead, and then Srebra would toss at him: “You look like a monkey’s ass.” Something oppressed my spirit, though, something indefinite, but our uncle said, “And you look like a witch.” In the evening, Mom boiled some noodles, and we grated the cheese that was brought from the village. When our uncle wasn’t lying in bed, he sat in the dining room and watched television, silently, trying to be invisible. Mom always asked him if he wanted to eat, as if it were not quite clear, since, during the day, he ate in the student cafeteria, and for some reason all of us expected that he would never be hungry at home. I think we all secretly prayed that he would say no so there would be more for us. Also, Dad often yelled at him, like he did at us. Our uncle was nearly full grown, the only one in our family to finish university, and was now enrolled in a foreign-language course. He was a man on the verge of marriage, but our father treated him like a child. When our father insulted him because of some minor thing even Srebra felt sorry for him; I could hear her swallow the lump in her throat. I wished we had a caged lion on our balcony, so every time Dad screamed the cage would open and the lion would charge, frightening him. Those six months with our uncle in our home hardened Srebra and me. We became more decisive, more contrary. And our hope grew that one day our heads might be separated, because our uncle told us he had read in an English textbook that in London there were many talented doctors, who, many years ago, had separated two babies whose heads were joined. “I told you,” Srebra threw at me. “I knew it.” In Skopje, we didn’t know any doctors like that, although every doctor and nurse we met in the clinic hallways—eye clinics for me, and ear, nose, and throat for Srebra—stopped and approached us. They asked our father what had happened, how we had been born with conjoined heads, whether it hindered our development, whether we had one brain or were our brains conjoined. Always the same sophomoric questions. Srebra and I, first one then the other, would silently twirl our father’s car keys, while he answered the curious doctors and nurses: “Their brains are separate, but they share a vein; I don’t know, I don’t really understand it, but that’s what they told us. This one has sinus problems, and that one doesn’t see well. There is no one who can perform the operation. It is a very difficult operation.” And then we would go into the office of either an eye doctor or an ear, nose, and throat specialist. Sometimes at home, Srebra and I played patient and ophthalmologist. We would stand a ways back from the wall calendar. I couldn’t see the numbers and letters on the calendar, but Srebra could. We hadn’t known how to tell our mother and father that I didn’t see well, so we didn’t—it was discovered during the first routine school checkup. Srebra often called me, “blind idiot,” and in those moments, I was grateful to her. I thought Mom and Dad would ask why she was calling me blind, but they never asked, because all the ugly words spoken during a quarrel were understood merely as symbols, part of the war of words, not as expressions of reality. Later on, over the years, we would go to the eye doctor, and I would sit in the special chair for my examinations, and Srebra, attached, would sit in a normal chair, while the doctor with questionable personal hygiene would breathe in my face and fit glasses, often missing the opening for glasses between our joined spot and my ear, poking us with the glasses right where it hurt the most. Srebra, keeping her lips firmly pressed so as not to inhale the doctor’s bad breath, covered first one eye with her palm then the other, silently guessing the letters and numbers on the chart. Then she would whisper them to me when I couldn’t get them. The doctor appeared not to notice her whispering, or, perhaps because of it, he prescribed thicker and thicker lenses, which stuck out of the black frames, the cheapest ones possible, which my father selected. Every trip to the doctor was followed by complaints: “This is becoming intolerable. All we do is go to doctors’ offices. Screw the two of you. You voracious beasts! You just know everything. You think you’re just smarter than everyone. You’ve devoured me.” Srebra wouldn’t put up with it for long, saying, “Who else is there to take us to the doctor? You’re our father.” That would make him even angrier, and he would swear all over again. I felt terrible that we exhausted him with our ailments. I was embarrassed that he had to take us to the doctor’s, take vacation days from work, get up at night to make tea when we were sick, rub skin cream on our behinds when Srebra and I, in a gust of cold wind, backed into the gas stove, and when he had to give Srebra nose drops every eight hours, which he usually gave to me as well, just in case. It was as if we were someone else’s children hanging around the house, not knowing what to do in their world, with insufficient light for my eyes and insufficient heat on winter nights for Srebra’s sinuses. Her nose ran in torrents. To wipe it, she needed two or three handkerchiefs a day, which our mother hand-washed and dried on the top of the gas stove before returning them to her. Only radiation of the sinuses would help—a ten-day treatment in the clinic by the Bit Pazar. But when they saw us, the clinic staff did not know what to do. They would have to cover my eyes with the red cloth, too. They bound our heads with one long cloth, wrapping it around twice, over my glasses. They pointed a red-hot lamp at Srebra’s face. We had to close our eyes and stay like that for twenty minutes. But I peeked stealthily at the red lamp with one eye. My glasses were pressing on my nose and I quickly got bored with the red of the lamp, so I lifted the cloth a bit more, and, through the other eye, a view through the window unfolded. Outside, I saw the red city buses raising dust, and on the grass by the side of the road sat Albanian men with white felt caps on their heads and Albanian women wearing raincoats and headscarves, while children ran everywhere. Where does their desire come from to sit wherever there is grass on the slope by the road with its constant flow of traffic and spewing gas fumes? Did they feel like Americans or tourists in Central Park sprawled out under the trees with a sandwich or can of soda in their hands? The veiled women and old men with felt caps spread along the road breaking bread and nibbling onions. There was freedom in their sprawled figures that didn’t apply to us. We sat on chairs without backs, side by side in a clinic by the Bit Pazar, in front of a red lamp, eye to eye with the glow. It would be lovely if we, too, could lie on the grass by the road, look at the sky, and eat sunflower seeds. I thought how pleasant it would be to sit on the grass with Roza, who would surely dream up all kinds of new games and funny sayings, or with Auntie Verka—how many interesting things would happen between her and the Albanians on the grass, how many arguments, but then again, maybe not, because Auntie Verka, unlike us Macedonians, liked Albanians and Roms and drunks and whores. She didn’t like ordinary people, provincials, as she called them. That’s why she picked a Rom as her lover, a guy named Riki—“The Gypsy,” we all called him—who moved in with her, with his big belly and huge behind. They sang and drank together in the apartment. They fought or cried out in pleasure. It was never as loud in our building as those two years when Riki lived with Verka. During that period, Srebra and I did not dare go to her place, and she no longer sent us on little errands to the store. After the radiation treatment for Srebra’s sinuses, we discovered when we got home that there was no power in any of the apartments, because Riki had cut it off. He was angry that no one ever said “Good morning” to him. Curses, howls, everyone shouting—he, Auntie Verka, all the apartment residents. Someone called the police. Two older policemen came into the building and grabbed him, and at the bottom steps they kicked him, beat him with their truncheons, and swore at him. Along with our dad, we barely got past them. Roza was sitting on the railing of the upper stairs, eyes wide. “This is a madhouse,” she said as we went by her. “C’mon, let’s go somewhere,” she whispered, and we needed to get out of there so badly that, without saying anything to Dad, we sneaked past the gathered residents and ran outside. We headed automatically toward the store. Roza said she wanted to buy some snacks. As we left the store, we ran into Bogdan, who was going home to his small shed attached to the back of the store. “Hey, Bogdan, what are you up to?” Roza said, “You’re never around; you don’t hang out with us anymore.” We stopped. Bogdan turned red, then got up his courage and said, “Well, I’m going home to pack.” “Where are you going?” she asked. “I’m moving in with Auntie Stefka,” he said. “How did that happen?” Roza asked. Srebra and I just stood there silently. Bogdan shrugged his shoulders, mumbled something, and then went into his house. We returned home, wondering about what he’d said. Bogdan was moving in with Auntie Stefka! Stefka was a single woman, like Auntie Verka, a decent person, quite young, our parents would say—though she seemed old to us, if still pretty, with long black hair that she wore in a bun—who lived in our building. There were also single women living in the building next door—twin sisters on one floor, and an older woman on another. It wasn’t clear to us why each entryway had an apartment for an unmarried woman, sometimes even two women, singles, as we called them, because that’s what we heard our parents call them. “My sister says Prime Minister Milka Planinc has decided that each entryway should have a single woman, and she gave them apartments so they, too, could have a life,” Roza explained on the way home. “A woman who doesn’t have a husband or doesn’t want to get married can send an application to Planinc, and she gives her an apartment, and that’s how she becomes a single,” and that seemed logical because we’d heard that Auntie Verka’s son had arranged for her to get the single-woman apartment in our entryway. “But why was Bogdan going to live with one of these single women?” That was not clear to Srebra. “You know, my parents said something about how children can now adopt a mother for themselves,” Roza recalled, adding, “older children, like Bogdan, whom no one wants to adopt.” It seemed pretty weird to me that a child, even an older one, could pick out a mother for himself. Somewhere deep inside me a thought crept in—which mother would we select if we did not have a mother? “Grandma,” was my internal reply, but Grandma was not a single woman, and among the singles we knew, we were only close to Auntie Verka, but she was a drunk, and thus not allowed to be adopted, and Riki was living with her. I knew there was a special home for children without parents, which is exactly what it was called: Home for Children without Parents. From time to time, our parents threatened to send Srebra and me there. They’d take us there and then we’d see, Lord only knows what, that that was a place for the likes of us. But no one ever mentioned that Bogdan should live in such a home, even though it was logical that a ten-year-old child, which was how old Bogdan was when he was left motherless, shouldn’t live alone. But Bogdan had been living alone for three whole years since his mother died. He ate in the school cafeteria, wore clothes the store clerk gave him, and when he had to go to the doctor or some other official place, our classroom teacher went with him. It had seemed to all of us that Bogdan didn’t want to leave his place. He spent hours there, solving crossword puzzles in Brain Twisters, to which he’d subscribed with the money that we had raised for him by collecting old paper. And now, suddenly, Bogdan was to move in with Stefka, the most entrancing, but also the saddest, single woman on the street, always in high heels with her hair in a bun that revealed a white face with large dark eyes. At home, we told our father straightaway. He didn’t say anything. He went down to the garage to kill the day he had taken off work to take us to the doctor, but when Mom got home, we also told her, and she turned to our father and said, “I told you. Didn’t they say on television that it had been decided? Each child whose mother and father died simply has to select a new mother and adopt her. Good Lord, save and protect us, instead of grown-ups adopting children, now children adopt parents. A new law in Belgrade, that’s what they said, because there were many single women, and since the state pays for their apartments, they can at least look after a child.” That afternoon, Auntie Dobrila came for coffee. She always came when she needed tweezers to pluck the three hairs that grew near her mouth; she had no tweezers at home, so she used ours, which had been bought at a fair. All us females sat in the kitchen, Srebra and me on our chair, Auntie Dobrila perpendicular to us, and our mother across the table, where no one ever sat when we were alone. That chair was for the dishcloth that Srebra and I used to wash our faces in the evening before we went to bed, using the last of the warm water from the kitchen boiler. On the table stood a yogurt container we used as a bucket for scraps; Srebra and I spun it around to read the label for the hundredth time while our mother shot us a look telling us not to. That used to happen sometimes when Auntie Zorica came to visit, too. One evening, we were looking for our mother to give her our key, and she was visiting Auntie Zorica who was seriously ill and who died a few days later from cancer. I wanted to go into the bedroom to see Auntie Zorica one more time, but Srebra was against it. The death of a neighbor was announced from the balcony of the deceased in the form of a loud cry and weeping, and soon the entryway bell would ring. And that’s how we found out about Auntie Zorica. But now, sitting with Auntie Dobrila, the only conversation was about the singles in the neighborhood. Auntie Dobrila also confirmed that it was true; children without parents could adopt a mother—any single woman—and move in with her. “Now, how did that child come up with Stefka?” wondered my mother. But Auntie Dobrila wasn’t surprised. “She’s the youngest, the prettiest, the healthiest; she earns a good salary. The child will live better and better!” “Well, you never know, maybe she likes young children for…well…for those things…” commented our mother. “Anyway, that’s who Bogdan chose; Mara from the Slavija market took him to the town hall, where all the singles from our neighborhood had been summoned, all except Verka, because she’s a drunk and couldn’t be selected, and Bogdan saw them all and liked Stefka the most, so he chose her. People were waiting all day; there were so many children and singles.” Bogdan was lucky to have gotten a mother from our neighborhood. When they heard he was an excellent student, they took pity on him and said, “This child has a future,” so Bogdan will move in with Auntie Stefka. “What won’t they think of,” said Mom. “Children adopting their own mothers. That didn’t exist in our time; how could a child know how to adopt a mother?” “No, seriously, believe me, it’s better for a child to adopt his mother, rather than have some pervert—excuse me—adopt him and turn him into an addict,” Dobrila assured her. There was nothing bad to say about Stefka. A single woman, she had some education, having completed a commercial high-school course. She did not have parents. Their house, in a village in eastern Macedonia, had burned to the ground, and when she heard about it while living in the student dorm, something severed within her; she was beautiful, young, but sad, very sad, just work then home again. She didn’t have friends, or a boyfriend, or anything. When her sister was still young, she had gone off to England, and that sister was all Stefka had left. Now at least Bogdan might heal her wounds a little. She would have someone to converse with. And she had money; she could take care of him. That’s what Auntie Dobrila thought, and Srebra and I agreed with her. But we were still curious which other children would adopt which other singles: Who would adopt the sister-singles, twins but not Siamese like us? Who would adopt the single woman who lived in the yellow building, or the one in the prefab house on the road to school? “She’s not that sort of single,” said Auntie Dobrila. “No one is going to adopt her. She was left alone because her husband died a few years ago. The woman went out of her mind, and people say that on the bedroom wall there is a big splotch of blood. Who knows where it came from? Maybe she killed him and then went crazy when he appeared to her in a dream, but the police didn’t pursue her; they just left her there like that, and now she barely walks, dragging herself along, not wearing underwear under her dress, and if you don’t believe me, lift it up sometime, and you’ll see.” Really? Was that possible? I wondered, but Srebra started laughing hysterically, and her laughter shook my head. She laughed so hard she had to pee, and we ran to the bathroom. Auntie Dobrila went home, and our mother scolded us all evening, telling us we were crazy and that we didn’t know how to appreciate what we had.

A couple of days later, Bogdan moved in with Auntie Stefka. Now we lived in the same building, almost neighbors. In the building next door, the twin single ladies were adopted by two Rom girls. They never went outside, and we never hung around with them—following the wishes of their “mothers,” they still went to their old school. Every morning, all four of them took a bus to a different neighborhood where the school the girls attended was located. Then their mothers continued on to work, and in the afternoon, they all came home together. At the time, we had such an intolerant attitude toward Roms that we simply didn’t want to be around them, not at school or outside in front of the building. “Gypsified” was the word grown-ups used when something was ugly, unclean, not how it should be, and we once heard our mother say on the phone to our aunt, “To tell you the truth, it would have been better if I had given birth to Gypsies rather than these two.” When she heard her say that, Srebra began to sob, shaking me, but I scolded her, even though I couldn’t look her in the eye: “What are you crying about? You know they don’t love us.” With something approaching envy we looked at the happy face of the single woman who lived in the building next to ours who had been adopted by a stout girl with mild developmental disorders. The girl wore glasses with thick black frames and walked with her feet pointing outward, limping with both legs. Her hands were fleshy, white like snow, and she always held her adopted mother’s arm, and the single woman, with a smile in her eyes and on her lips, supported her new daughter. There was something heavy, solemn, almost tragic in her gait; her whole being displayed a sense of concern. And that is how it was for years, until the most tragic moment in her life and in the life of her new and only daughter.

Most important, however, is that in March of 1985 we went on a three-day excursion to Ohrid. On the bus, Bogdan sat behind us, solving crosswords. There were ten of us to a room at the children’s resort. Srebra and I always had to share a bed, and the beds there were particularly narrow. On the first night, I dreamed that our mother was falling from the eighth floor of a building. The girls were sleeping. Srebra did not move when I opened my eyes in the horror of the night and the loneliness in my soul. At the moment in the dream that my mother fell, I felt I was also falling into an ever-greater emptiness, that I had broken something that could not be fixed; that my soul was broken. When I told Srebra the next day, she screamed at me in our reflection in the cupboard mirror: “Really, it seems like you want Mom to fall in real life. And then we’d have to figure out what to do.” I could barely wait for the three days to pass to go home so I could tell Roza what I’d dreamed. Roza always understood other people’s dreams: “That’s odd,” she said. “I also dreamed I fell from the eighth floor. But how can that be, when our building only has three floors? Forget it; it’s all nonsense.” I don’t know why I’ve never been able to forget that dream. Not so much the dream, in fact, as the emptiness into which our mother fell, and I along with her (and, whether she wanted to or not, Srebra). It haunts me in my sweaty hands, in the beating of my heart, in the pain in my head. “My head hurts, too, because of you,” Srebra would say angrily, because a reaction in one of us gave rise to the same in the other. If one of us laughed, the other laughed; if I was upset, so was Srebra; and when Srebra was hungry, I felt hungry as well. We did not know how to explain it any other way than the way our grandma put it: “Your blood mixes. That’s why.”

Roza suggested that we go to the movies, to a Bruce Lee film. We had never been to the movie theater before. We dressed nicely, begged our parents for money, and set off to the neighborhood theater, which was in an old building from before the earthquake that also housed the district registry department. There was nobody else there. The cashier covertly spit into her blouse to ward off the evil eye when she saw us, then called through the window, “They won’t show the film. You’re the only ones here!” We were terribly disappointed. I begged Srebra and Roza to at least go to the church, a two-minute walk from the theater. Srebra wanted nothing to do with it, but Roza agreed. “Why not?” she asked. “Maybe they’ll give us a communion wafer.” I hoped that as soon as I went in, all the anguish that had taken root after my dream about our mother’s fall might disappear, that everything in my soul would be as it had been before, and all memory of the fall would vanish and never return. Whether the priest caught something in my look behind my glasses, I cannot say. It was clear that he recognized us from the few times we came to church with our mother and aunt. I smiled at him. He gave me a thin chain with a cross. He only had one, he said, and Srebra and I should take turns. Srebra immediately said she didn’t need a cross, but Roza asked, “When will you have more? I’d like one, too.” The priest smiled and said he’d surely have them by Ascension Day. On the way home, while Roza walked in front of us deep in her own thoughts, Srebra whispered, “You think God created us and that’s why you want the cross. I don’t need one. I’m certain we’re descended from monkeys.” Roza turned and shouted, “C’mon! Don’t you two know how to do anything but fight all the time?” I wore that chain around my neck day and night. I didn’t take it off even when I bathed, huddled with Srebra in the beat-up old bathtub, or during radiation treatments for Srebra’s sinuses. I wore it to school, even though we weren’t supposed to wear religious symbols there. Even when we began wearing lighter clothing, I still wore my white turtleneck blouse that had ten buttons up the back so I could pull it up over my legs, and beneath the blouse, stuck to my skin, were my chain and cross. It was like a rope to save me from falling. I rescued myself with it when I felt something pulling me down toward an unclear abyss that I sensed almost physically—deep, dark, black.

One morning, we spent the first hour of the school day in front of the building, lined up in rows, listening to the director give a speech about the life and works of the national hero in honor of whom our school was named. There were many green-uniformed soldiers in the schoolyard standing around with their smooth faces and attractive eyes. The morning was very cold. It was the first of April, and we were celebrating our school’s namesake. Srebra and I were wearing espadrilles—black with decorative yellowish buttons. Our toes were so cold we stamped our feet the whole time, but the cold spread upward, throughout our bodies. We shook like branches, and it was more obvious than with the other students, because our heads shook in unison as if someone gave them a shake every five seconds. Even if one of us tried to stop, the other’s head would go on shaking. The director continued reading his speech. A soldier approached us from behind. His head touched our hair as he said, “Hold out a bit longer and I’ll take you somewhere.” Srebra and I were taken aback, but said nothing. Each of us sank into the cold and our own thoughts, which were definitely the same that day—thoughts of our mother, who, during the night, had felt sick again, just as she had throughout almost the whole year, and our father had taken her to the doctor yet again. That morning she hadn’t gone to work, and our father told our uncle to stay at home with her in case something happened. The pain in our toes was like the pain in our chests—sharp, unbearable, devastating. Finally, the director stopped talking. Since it was a holiday, they let us go home early. The soldier behind us said, “Come on. Let’s go someplace and drink something warm.” I liked the soldiers a lot. They all seemed good-looking to me. They infused me with trust. They conveyed something protective. Perhaps I would have agreed to go with him, but Srebra dragged me along the path and said we were going home, our mother was sick. The soldier tried to persuade us that she would get better. He said we could go home soon, that he was alone and wanted female company to pass his two hours of free time, and we were extremely nice girls, despite our conjoined heads. “That’s nothing,” he said. “I’ve seen people with two bodies and one head. You at least have hope that one day you’ll be separated, but for those with only one head and two bodies, there’s no such hope.” “He’s lying,” Srebra whispered to me while dragging me as hard as she could toward the road, and finally, we set off at a run, staggering left and right as if drunk, leaving the soldier alone by the school fence. Halfway home, we caught up with Roza, who was also hurrying home. “Do you know that last night, my sister Mara and I played the fortune-telling game? Mine came out the same as last summer.” “Well, of course! How else should it come out if you did everything the same as the last time?” Srebra laughed. “No,” said Roza. “This time I put the number 33 in the square so I’ll get married when I turn thirty-three, and everything still came out the same.” “Are you crazy?” Srebra shouted, and it wasn’t clear to me either why Roza wanted to get married when she was so old. “Well, that was the age Jesus was when he was resurrected,” she said. “I want us to be the same age on the most wonderful day in our lives.” Good Lord. It didn’t make sense that Roza would wait so long to get married, and more importantly, if her P would even wait that long. What if he wants to get married earlier? “I’ll explain it to him,” Roza said. “I’m going to Greece with my grandma and grandpa on April 15. Mara wants to come too. Grandma and Grandpa haven’t been for almost forty years! They’ve been told they can go for one day, and we want to go with them. Mom and Dad don’t want to let us. They say what’s the point of going for just one day, but Mara wants to see where Grandma and Grandpa lived before. We’ve never been—we always just go to Katerini—and I want to call Panait; it’s cheaper if you call from a village to a city within Greece.” Srebra and I were, I think, jealous of Roza, because, at least for one day, she would go abroad, to another country, unknown to us, even though it was so close, a country with which we shared a border. We arrived home. Mom was lying in the big room, half asleep. Our uncle said, “It’s a good thing you’re here. I have three hundred things to do, and I can’t sit here all day.” When it came time for lunch, Mom got up, fried some chitlins with eggs—my favorite—and chopped up a bit of garlic for the dipping sauce. She was feeling better. That afternoon, our father said, “Come on. Let’s go to the Hippodrome. Let’s get some fresh air.” It was the only time we ever went to the Hippodrome, our only family outing in the fresh air, unless you count the one trip we took to the city park in Skopje when our cousin Miki was at our house, and, to show that his aunt and uncle were good people, we all went to the park, where our parents bought him a candy apple on a stick, but nothing for us. While we walked around, I remember the feeling that washed over me: pride that we were walking in the park, even though everyone gave us a wide berth and talked about us, horror-stricken. But at the same time, it was unpleasant for me, the way it is when strangers pay too much attention, or when you think that someone does something because they have to, not because they want to. Still, in some way, that walk in the park, our one and only, was lovely. Before going to the Hippodrome, our mother put on a dress and nice shoes. She put on her gold necklace, too. We put on our espadrilles and, after a ten-minute drive, arrived at the Hippodrome. We got out of the car. It was a beautiful April afternoon, and it was no longer cold on our legs. We stood for twenty minutes beside the car, not knowing what to say to one another. We were embarrassed that we were there, and sad, and soon wanted to end the outing, get back into the Škoda, and go back to the safety of our home where Dad would sit in front of the television set, Mom would sit on the couch in the kitchen with her embroidery, and Srebra and I would sit at our table by the window with the book about Heidi. The light there had a forty-watt bulb. On the table, some crumbs from our lunch scratched our elbows. The wall clock counted the time covertly, with regular silent beats. It was a white wall clock with the inscription “YU Auto Repairs” that had been presented to our mother at work on March 8, International Women’s Day, after which the noisy old wooden clock disappeared under one of the beds in the “big” room, becoming a clock in suspended animation, entombed in an archive. On those April afternoons, we played with Roza every day somewhere inside the building, or we played pachisi on the steps (but then we’d also call Bogdan so the four of us could play), or dodgeball in the street out front, which Srebra and I would always lose, because we couldn’t coordinate our running. Or we simply walked through the neighborhood, and the early spring breeze caressed our bones. It carried to us the scent of love, but we knew nothing of that. We thought, however, that Roza might know, because she was in love with Panait, and he with her. No one was in love with me or Srebra, and we were not courageous enough to fall in love. Srebra really liked Enis, a young Turk in our class, while I preferred his brother, Orhan, who was in Roza’s class and occasionally came to our class during recess to sing the Croatian hit song “Oh, Marijana,” accompanying himself on the guitar. Neither Enis nor Orhan paid any attention to us. We sat at our desk with the chairs pushed together, and then Bogdan would come sheepishly over to us, stopping in front of the desk to ask us the name of the composer of the ninth symphony, or something similar, but neither of us had any idea how to solve crosswords, and we’d just shrug our shoulders, looking sullen or sympathetic. But it was like Bogdan didn’t notice. He circled around our desk, taking our pencils, comparing his eraser with ours. Now that he was living at Auntie Stefka’s (that’s what he called her even though she was his new mother), he had a proper set of school supplies, much better than ours—a pencil case with colored pencils, markers, a pencil, an eraser, a pencil sharpener—while we had only one small case with two pencils, two pens, one sharpener, and one eraser. “Look how stuck-up he’s acting,” Srebra said to me as we walked to school and saw him in front of us, alone, in clean pants, a nice jacket, his bag over his shoulder. I wanted to hurry and catch up with him, but Srebra pulled me back. She had no desire to walk with him. His presence always annoyed her, both when he had been poor and now that he was rich, and it was only because of Roza that she agreed to let him be part of our group when we played in front of the building. In our red orthopedic shoes with yellow-white plastic soles, me with the ugliest glasses in the world, the two of us in checkered skirts and long blouses fastened with belts around our waists, heads conjoined at the temples, surely we were a grotesque sight from which old women would shield their gaze, while children shouted, “retards” at us.

The day they took class photos in the courtyard, one class at a time, Srebra and I looked down when the shutter clicked. The atmosphere was light, playful, as if only the insects flying about had any weight. The cross on my chain sparkled in the sunlight. I touched it from time to time to see if it was still in place. As Srebra and I were walking home from school, a young Rom kid ran up to us and unexpectedly blocked the path, stretching his hand toward the chain, but without even thinking about it, Srebra and I pushed him away. He staggered, fell backward, then quickly stood and lunged again, but I had already hidden the chain under my blouse and was holding onto it with my hand. He had to give up, but still called us cunts, sluts, a two-headed dragon, scarecrows. He ran off toward the small houses in the Rom quarter, crammed off to the right side of our school. How we hated the Roms who lived there; how afraid we were of them. Now Srebra and I trembled as we hurried home. I was on the verge of tears, and Srebra was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. “They should build some sort of district, a camp, and gather all of them and put them there so we won’t need to see them anymore!” Srebra said, but I didn’t say anything, although at that moment, it seemed like a good solution. We were still in primary school! Where did we get such monstrous thoughts and wishes? Whose fault was it that we had those ideas in our conjoined heads? The school? Our family? Our upbringing? The state? Our own character? Grandma bought spindles and sieves from the Gypsies in the village, or she sold them bread and sheep’s milk cheese. Our classmate Juliana—with shiny long black hair, beautiful complexion, and deformed legs; first alphabetically in the attendance book—had low grades but a good soul and a beautiful voice. She transfixed the whole class on every bus excursion with a Serbian song that began something like, “I wander the streets…,” a song I’ve missed all my life. Juliana later became a member of a dance troupe, and saw the world many of our classmates never saw. The last time we saw her, at the fair in Skopje, she was selling blouses and skirts. We recognized her, but we didn’t say anything, I don’t know why. In her childhood, she had the most colorful orange-yellow-green fur coat. Another girl, Šenka, from the neighboring class, had lice more often than anyone else in the school. On Sundays, we went with Roza to school so we could watch Rom weddings from a distance, but more interesting still were the Rom circumcision rituals: a young boy perched on a horse cart decorated with red ribbons, scarves, and gold chains, seated on blankets of the most picturesque colors, and two horses slowly pulling the cart as young girls and boys sang, played, and danced around it in colorful clothing and jangly earrings, necklaces, and belts. The music drowned out the car horns; the father of the brave boy who had been circumcised walked alongside the cart with a bottle of beer, and every few seconds passed it to the child to drink. The boy was already woozy from the alcohol and surely from the pain between his legs as well, but everyone distracted him, entertained him, slapped him on the shoulder, on the ear, and he didn’t pass out while the procession wound its long way through the streets. After a while, we’d go home, embarrassed and horrified by the thought that his weenie had been cut, but too ashamed to ask anyone why it was done or how. And that was the sum total of our relationship with “The Gypsies,” unless we counted Auntie Verka’s Riki, with whom we never spoke, or the young Rom girls who adopted the unmarried twins in the building next door as their mothers but with whom we never played, even though they dressed twice as nicely as we did and were twice as clean, certainly bathing more regularly than our once-a-week Sunday bath.

At the beginning of April 1985, Greece was mentioned often on television. Mom said, “Well, they’re saying Aegean Macedonians will be able to enter Greece. It seems Papandreou will open the border, and they won’t require visas. Just imagine how many people are going to go. Every living Aegean Macedonian will go, from as far away as Australia and America.” “Roza’s going too,” said Srebra, “with her grandma and grandpa.” “Oh, that’s right, they’re Aegean, so they will come from Germany and then head down to Greece. They probably still have a house there; maybe some land. People left all sorts of things behind when they fled.” Neither Srebra nor I were clear on who fled, why, or from whom. At school our history teacher never explained it clearly. We only knew it was very significant, and the evening news didn’t open with the war between Iraq and Iran but with the agreement signed by Greece and Yugoslavia to open the border for one day so that people who had been child-refugees could visit their homes. What’s more, they wouldn’t need visas, which they had purportedly been unable to get precisely because they had been child-refugees. We weren’t sure how they could be child-refugees: Roza’s grandparents were old. They were going to come from Germany and continue on to Greece with Roza and her sister. It’s all Roza talked about. The afternoon her grandparents arrived in Skopje, Roza came to the front of our building and stopped resolutely in front of us. “Zlata,” she said, “can I ask you to do something for me?” “Yes,” I said, surprised by her tone. “Will you lend me your chain to wear in Greece? Just for a day. We’re leaving tomorrow at five in the morning. In the evening, when we get back, I’ll give it back to you.” I looked at her, surprised. Srebra yawned. “This isn’t like going on vacation. We’re traveling with our grandparents, who haven’t been there for almost forty years. I want to have something with us, something Macedonian,” she added. I wasn’t certain the chain the priest had given to me was Macedonian and not bought from the Bulgarian sellers of halvah, rose perfume, and pendants. Still, carried away by Roza’s enthusiasm, I took it off and handed it to her, “Just until tomorrow,” I told her, feeling its absence from around my neck. “Yes,” said Roza, and turning, shouted, “Ciao!” and went inside.

The next day, before lunch, Srebra and I were working on our math homework at our table in the kitchen, while Mom, who had come home from work, was cooking some ham for our dinner, when suddenly, loud cries came from the stairwell. “That drunk again,” Mom said, and we, too, thought Verka and Riki were fighting. But these cries weren’t angry, but cries of pain, screams the likes of which we had up until then only heard in films. We heard doors open, then someone knocked sharply on our door, and Srebra and I jumped up, tripping over each other’s legs as we ran to open it. In the hallway we saw the crazed faces of Auntie Dobrila and Auntie Mira, and from the floor below came loud groans. Our neighbors looked at us with ashen faces, and we, in shock, went to the railing that overlooked the floor below, and Auntie Magda, voice worn out from pain, moaned, “Aaaah, Roza.” The moment we heard that, Srebra and I literally couldn’t move. It was as if we had been turned to stone where we stood. Then our hearts began beating as hard as they could. I could hear the rapid beat of Srebra’s, and she could hear mine, and at the spot where our heads were joined it was like the roar of an ocean, a pain so entirely unexpected, a pain such that one could not imagine that such pain existed. But what roared most of all were the words we heard. We stood pressed against the railing, horrified, mute, and it was only due to our conjoined heads that one of us didn’t fall, keeling over the edge in madness, in the sharp sensation that sliced our bodies. Mom came and pulled us from the railing, then pushed us into the apartment, whispering as quietly as she could, “Come on, come on.” Then she stepped out alone. Srebra and I stood in the hall, right where our mother left us, glued to the wall, opposite the small cabinet with the mirror, petrified, speechless, without making the slightest sound, only our hearts beating loudly, uneven as the lines of an erratic EKG. We caught sight of our faces in the mirror: eyes wide, ears alert, foreheads creased, lips partially open. Our faces were not children’s faces, but the faces of old women. A person in pain is either the most beautiful or the ugliest on the planet. We were the ugliest. We heard a cacophony of voices. We recognized the voice of Uncle Kole, who was crying like a baby. Nearly everyone was crying and Srebra also began to cry, crying like she never had before. But I couldn’t cry. The eyes behind my glasses were dry, drier than they had ever been in my life. Srebra was shaking me with her crying, but I held myself against the wall and stared in the mirror at myself, at Srebra, and again at myself, unconscious of what or whom I was looking at and whether I was looking at anything at all or whether everything was merely an illusion, a nightmare that would pass. But it did not pass. After a while, our parents came in, our uncle right behind them. No one said anything. “God forgive her…no, there’s no need for forgiveness. She was a young girl,” Mom said at last. “But how could she have died from lightning?” asked our uncle. And that’s how we heard how Roza had died. We had been so frozen by the very thought that she had died, that she no longer existed, that we hadn’t thought about the cause. “She was wearing a small chain. Her grandmother and grandfather were at the spot where their house once stood. Roza and Mara were running around in the fields when it suddenly began to pour, and the children ducked under a tree to hide. But then the lightning came and a bolt struck the cross, killing her on the spot. Mara just fell down, disoriented but not hurt, though she’s in terrible shock.” I think my mother said all this in one breath while taking the roasted ham hock from the oven. The scent of cooked meat emerged from the oven and wafted through the kitchen and dining room. Our uncle stood between the two rooms, our father behind him in the dining room, Srebra and I supporting ourselves by holding onto the kitchen sink. Our legs had been cut from beneath us. My head spun. I felt our common vein pulsating in my temple, but only into me, as if it had shifted from its channel and coursed into my head alone; with her right hand, Srebra kept me from falling and pulling her down on the couch along with me. “Give them some sugar water,” our father said, and the next moment, we were sitting on the couch drinking sugar water from the same glass. “I gave the chain to Roza; I lent it to her; it was my cross, the one the priest gave me,” I managed to get out. Mom said, “Fine, so you will carry that on your soul your entire life,” quickly adding, “Come on, get up and eat, the ham will get cold.” I didn’t know if those who are suffering could eat, whether the body can even take in food when the soul is undergoing great torments. Can you reach for food when your conscience bores into your spirit? Can you eat lunch when you’ve lost someone you love, and the guilt is within you and no one else? Srebra and I dragged ourselves mechanically to our chair. On the table, the ham hock, almost blackened, stood in the small circular baking dish of gray aluminum. On the bottom, the fat had congealed into small black crumbs. We ate meat and bread on the day Roza died. I mechanically pulled off a small piece of meat. When I put it in my mouth with a bit of bread, I felt as if I were committing a sin—something inside me resisted. But the sin had already been committed; the meat was already traveling down my throat toward my stomach. Roza was dead, and we were eating meat. As if we were eating her flesh. That is the sensation I had, along with the memory of my grandmother once saying one shouldn’t eat meat when someone dies. Srebra also put bits of food mechanically into her mouth. The meal lasted two or three minutes, but it seemed like the longest of my life. Srebra and I felt as one that we had to go see Auntie Verka. We went quietly up the stairs. Though there was no longer anyone in the hallway, we heard sobbing from Roza’s apartment, interrupted by despairing cries of pain. We couldn’t bring ourselves to go in, even though we had made a tentative motion toward the door. I felt that I had to go in and tell Roza’s parents that I had killed her with my cross and chain, that had I not given it to her, she would be alive. But I lacked the strength, lacked the courage, and the tremendous pain in my chest suffocated me. We stood in front of the door for several seconds. Srebra seemed to be waiting for me to go in, but I suddenly turned and dragged her, stumbling, without knocking, into Auntie Verka’s apartment. She was sitting by the table in the living room. Alone, she stared at a point on the wooden table. Riki wasn’t home, but we didn’t even notice. Auntie Verka raised her head. The bags under her eyes were dark and more sunken. We sat on one chair, each with a hip on the seat. She said, “Children, you know, Roza can come back. It happens sometimes with people who have died. The first and second days they’re dead, but on the third they come back to life. The day after tomorrow, Roza will surely be alive. I’m not lying to you. There have been cases like that.” I will never forget the feeling her words provoked in me. Never. I grasped at her words as if at a straw, a real, actual straw with which I would save Roza. Roza was always so decisive, so brave. If she did not appear now among the living, when she had to, then when? My soul was filled with hope I would never feel again. It made perfect sense that Roza would come back to life on the third day. Just like Jesus. Better for Roza to be resurrected like Jesus than to marry at the age he was resurrected, I thought. And while Srebra looked at Auntie Verka as if at a ghost, I looked at her in that moment with all the hope that existed in the world. We went back upstairs to our apartment. All night, Srebra and I lay on our backs looking at the ceiling. We fell asleep at dawn. When we awoke, our first class at school had already begun. But we didn’t go to school. We went out on the balcony. There was hardly anyone outside. The warm April morning was unaware of the tragedy that shrouded our lives. Srebra and my conjoined heads seemed like only a minor misfortune. We were alive. But Roza was not and it was my fault. Suddenly, Srebra whispered, “Roza went by.” I hadn’t seen anything. Srebra whispered again: “She just went inside. I saw her. She came around the building, in red pants and a green tee shirt. Didn’t you see her?” It didn’t occur to me that she might be lying, making it up. But I was infinitely sad that I didn’t see her, and kept looking. Auntie Verka had said Roza would come back to life on the third day, but it was now only the second day. Anything seemed both probable and improbable. I dragged Srebra down to the front of the building. We went to the slope in front of our garage, where we had played the fortune-telling game last summer. Roza was supposed to get married to Panait at twenty-one or thirty-three; they’d live in Salonika and have one child. Oh, the irony! The irony! Roza died at fourteen, in a village near Salonika, a child herself. We set off from in front of the garage to a spot under Roza’s balcony. The balcony door was closed; everything was quiet. We stood on the slope, and children from the street slowly gathered. Bogdan came. He hadn’t gone to school either. His eyes were red, puffy from crying. He stopped next to me. It was as if he wanted to reach out and touch my shoulder, but he stopped. We were standing on the drive when Nena said in a muffled voice, “According to the almanac, people born in August die at four, fourteen, or forty-four.” I felt Srebra and I would also die at fourteen, in a year, because we, too, were born in August. But the small hope that Roza would come back to life smoldered within me. The residents of the apartments would go out onto their balconies, look around without saying a word, and then go back inside. Only Auntie Verka sat on her balcony, head resting on her hand, looking around absently, or perhaps at us, without calling out, as was her habit, without waving her hand. We children stood on the sloping drive, also without saying a word. We weren’t silent for just a few minutes, but for a long time, until the arrival of the police car, which parked on the street corner. Two police officers emerged, one younger, thinner, tall, the other older, stouter, with white hair. They walked past us down the street, and before going into our building, they both took off their caps. At that moment, I knew Roza was dead, and that she wouldn’t be coming back. I knew people took off their hats when someone died; my grandfather had told me. That’s how one pays respect to the dead. The policemen vanished up the stairs. We stood on the sloped drive in front of the building all day. From time to time, the door to Roza’s balcony opened, and some unknown people dressed in black stepped out. Toward evening, a black car pulled up. Two men took a white coffin out and carried it quickly inside. In the evening, our mother said that we were going to Roza’s parents’ apartment to convey our condolences. “I can’t,” said our uncle. He was packing. The next day, we were taking him back home to the village, because he no longer wished to study a foreign language, but wanted to go home and prepare to marry his girlfriend. Srebra and I wore pleated skirts of brown viscose and brown blouses. We didn’t have black clothes, so brown ones were the most appropriate. We went to Roza’s apartment. Her aunt and uncle stood in the dining room greeting everyone. First, we went into the small room. Roza’s father and sister, Mara, sat on the bed crying, heads on their knees. “We’ve lost Roza, Daddy, we’ve lost Roza,” Mara repeated. Her father cried uncontrollably, hunched over like a child, his face yellow as a lemon. Mara wept in fits. I wanted to stroke her head, but didn’t have the strength. Srebra gently pulled me into the other room. It was packed with people, everyone weeping aloud. At the end of the room, nearly flush against the wall where the balcony was, on a table, stood Roza’s white coffin. Inside, in a white wedding dress, lay Roza. Her face was covered with a veil. Her black curls poked out from under the veil. On her feet were white shoes with low heels. Her hands were lying on her chest—pale, limp, soft. She looked like a sleeping doll dressed in bridal clothes. Her toes pointed upward, and her white shoes cleaved the air with their luster. There are images that a person never forgets: if they were photographed, they wouldn’t be as real, as true, as they are embedded in our consciousness. Roza, dead, in a wedding gown, in a midsized white coffin—neither for children nor for grown-ups—in the big room with two foldout couches and furnished with a wall shelf unit similar to ours. Motionless, Srebra and I stood in front of her body. Why didn’t we bend down to kiss her? Why didn’t our mother push us toward the edge of the coffin to stroke her veil? In that moment of such intense sorrow, did our conjoined heads shatter the moment with their grotesqueness? Did they lessen the pain? I don’t know, but we said our farewells to Roza without a kiss. But my longing to kiss her, or at least touch her, broke my heart forever. We pushed our way out to the balcony, and stood looking down at the sloping drive. We reentered the room. We went up to Roza’s mother, who was held by two women to keep her from collapsing onto Roza’s body. I don’t know if she recognized us. I wanted to tell her that the chain was mine, that I had killed Roza. I wanted to beg her forgiveness, to offer her my life, to let her kill me, beat me, spit on me. But I had no voice. Nothing came out of my mouth, not a sound. Srebra said nothing. We left and stood for a long time outside in the night, looking up to Roza’s balcony. Early the next morning, at four o’clock, our mother shook us awake, whispering, “Get up, get up, come on, we’re going.” We left the apartment silently. Our steps were as quiet as if we were tiptoeing barefoot down the stairs. Our uncle carried the bags; our mother closed the door, and crossed herself. We got in the car and set off for the village. We were fleeing Roza’s funeral. For the three days we spent in the village, Srebra and I hung out in a room with iron beds, reciting from memory “Eyes,” Aco Šopov’s poem about the death of a female partisan, our homework assignment for Macedonian class. “Three days we carried you huddled up…” The blood in our temples pounded, and I couldn’t imagine the poet’s partisan. Instead, I saw Roza lying on a stretcher, my chain around her neck hanging over her right shoulder. The small cross swung back and forth, striking the stretcher with a barely audible thud. “Auntie Verka lied to us,” said Srebra. When we returned to Skopje, our mother brought us the evening newspaper. Inside was an obituary for Roza signed by her mother, father, and sister, alongside a small pale photograph. Our entryway was quiet. The residents moved almost silently. Not a sound came from Roza’s apartment. When Srebra and I came home from school, we hesitated on the stairs, but we didn’t have the courage to knock on her door. Every night I struggled with my conscience. I was certain that the next day, I would tell Roza’s parents I was guilty. But during the day, Srebra would unravel my nighttime resolve. “I don’t know how wise it is to tell them,” she said. She didn’t know, however, why it would be unwise to tell them. We didn’t go to Auntie Verka’s anymore, although she once called to us from her balcony, “Come, let me give you charms to protect you from evil.” We didn’t go. Deep inside, we were angry that she had lied to us about Roza coming back to life. One day after school, I made Srebra turn toward the church. A powerful force dragged me there; I had to go in to find the priest who had given me the cross. We didn’t have enough money for a single candle. The priest was walking through the courtyard. He stopped when he saw us. He remembered us immediately. No one who had seen us once in their lives failed to remember us, and perhaps we even appeared to many of them in their dreams, in nightmares along with other strange beings that only vaguely resembled people. The priest stopped, blessed us, and asked, “Why are you dropping by church now, after school, where they teach you that God doesn’t exist?” He laughed, pleased with his joke, then added, “Bravo, bravo! This is how it should be; you should come to church.” “Father,” I said with the last of my strength while Srebra shook her head, shaking mine along with it, “that chain with the cross you gave me—I lent it to Roza, the girl that was with us, and she was struck by lightning that hit the chain. She died.” The priest was alarmed. He had heard about the accident, but didn’t know that the chain that killed Roza was from here, from his church. He stared at me and Srebra so rudely, his mouth wide open, his belly big beneath his frock, gasping deeply. “God keep and protect her,” he whispered, frozen, powerless, flushed. After a while, he collected himself, and with a quick gait, he nearly leaped up the church’s stairs. He disappeared inside while we stood in the courtyard and waited for him; he soon reappeared, and from under his frock he took out a miniature wooden icon, handed it to me, and said, “Here. This is an icon of Zlata Meglenska, so she can pray for you, so you do not carry your friend on your soul. What you are given in church is not to be passed on to someone else. The Devil drove you to lend her the chain. But this icon, don’t give it to anyone, not for your life. Through it alone will you be delivered from the sin that lies on your soul.” I grasped from what he said that I really was guilty of Roza’s death. I took the icon, and Srebra and I looked at it, seeing for the first time what Saint Zlata Meglenska, for whom our godfather had named me, looked like. A strange-looking saint, with a long kerchief on her head, neither tied under her chin the way our grandmother wore it, nor wound and tied at the forehead, the way other women in the village did. A kerchief-veil as if from a folk costume. She also wore traditional clothes, with embroidery on the sleeves, around the collar, and on the blouse under her dress. Her right hand held a cross, nearly identical to the one I’d had. I tucked her in my pocket, and with rapid steps, Srebra and I set off. “At least she’s pretty,” said Srebra. “Who knows what Srebra Apostolova, whom our godfather apparently liked so much, looked like?”

From that day on, I kept the icon with me always. I only wore clothes with pockets, leaving all the rest to Srebra. At night, I put it under my pillow, and was disappointed that I couldn’t sleep on my side at least once to press my cheek to it and be merged with my protectress. I felt it would bring me closer to Roza. I still could not believe that Roza was truly dead. Unable to accept the truth, and therefore unable truly to mourn for her, I couldn’t shed tears. One morning, Srebra woke with a cry—I opened my eyes at the instant her head jerked mine upward and then downward toward our toes. Her two big toes were swollen, yellowish green, with pus oozing from under the nails. I immediately looked at my own, but there was nothing amiss. Srebra shouted while wiping at the pus, which flowed like blood, with the sheet. I had never seen anything like it. It was dreadful and Srebra’s pain unbearable. Mom and Dad were already up, getting ready for work. They came into the room and saw Srebra’s toes. Our mother said to our father, “Go and tell Goran that you’re not going to work. Tell them you have to go to the doctor.” Dad left and returned ten minutes later. He was boiling with anger. “This is unendurable. We go from one doctor to another.” Mom put on her shoes and left. Dad rubbed Srebra’s feet with rakija and tied them with a bandage, and after we got dressed, only I put shoes on, then we went down the stairs, Srebra walking barefoot on her heels. Dad brought the car right up to the door and somehow stuffed Srebra inside, while I, dragged along, plopped onto the seat beside her. When we got to the hospital, I gripped Srebra around the waist while Dad supported her on the other side until we got inside. The patients looked at us with mouths agape. People stood up from the benches in the corridor so Srebra and I could sit down. One woman said, without thinking, “Just when you thought you had seen everything…” Our father returned a short time later with an orderly, a gurney, and the doctor, who gaped in surprise when he saw us. The cot was too narrow for both of us to lie on, so we sat while the orderly pushed us to the operating room. There, they pulled over a small cabinet that was the same height as the bed, stretched Srebra’s legs onto it, gave her a local anesthetic, and pulled out her toenails, which evidently had abscessed cuticles. Srebra automatically turned her head to the wall, and the two of us saw a poster that read, “Tito gives blood. Give blood, too.” Below which was written the date: January 3, 1980. We stared at that poster, which apparently had hung on the wall of the operating room a full five years. Srebra moaned the whole time, even though the doctor told her to quit faking—it couldn’t hurt with such a powerful anesthetic. After a while, he said, “All done. You can go.” Dad supported Srebra, grasping her around the waist as firmly as he could, nearly carrying her while I attempted to keep up and prevent our heads from hurting at the spot where we were joined. An older woman opened the door for us. Somehow, we got ourselves into the car, and off we went. We went to the brewery so Dad could buy himself a crate of beer. Then we picked Mom up from work and drove home. She hurried ahead to unlock the door of the apartment, and our father, breathless and worn out, supported Srebra while I bobbed up and down next to her; several times our legs nearly tangled, and we would have fallen had I not been holding firmly to the banister Roza had slid down so many times. Dad cursed, “Screw you all.” Waiting for us at home was the first postcard we ever received, addressed to Srebra and me from our uncle, who was on a trip to Ohrid. For days on end we lay on the couch in the big room where our uncle had slept. Our mother was sick again, and she lay on the other couch, dressed in her robe, moaning. Srebra moaned as well. We barely said a word for hours. I read Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. Then Nana by Zola. And American Tragedy by Dreiser. It seemed to me that I understood everything, but nothing was clear. Srebra read Das Kapital. My novels and her Kapital knocked against each other. Occasionally, our pages overlapped. We slipped pages we didn’t want to read under the pages of whatever the other was reading, then glanced at sections of each other’s books. Mom stopped moaning, took a thick book with a red cover from a drawer in the side cupboard, and gave it to us. “Read this,” she said. It was a book written in Serbian, A Book for Every Woman—a housewife’s handbook. The book was full of all sorts of information. Srebra and I read it silently together; she read one page while I read the other. I thought about how, when I was grown and had a family, I, too, would divide the family budget into several blue envelopes as the author suggested, and on each would write what the funds were for, and that’s how I would take care of the money in my family. When our father returned from work, we’d all get up and go into the kitchen. Our mother would quickly fry something—liver with eggs, tomatoes with eggs, or spicy red sausages with eggs. Srebra walked by rocking back on her heels, as I walked slowly beside her. We ate at our table in the kitchen then returned to bed before our parents ate. In the evening, our father turned on the television, which was draped with a lace doily and sat in an opening of the wall unit. We watched the news, short advertisements developed by the Economic Propaganda Program, the cartoon Teddy Floppy Ear, boxing matches with Mate Parlov or Ace Rusevski, or soccer games, and then it was time for bed. Srebra and I would go to our room, to our shared bed, Srebra on her heels while I walked quietly beside her. I wanted my footsteps to be as silent as possible, so they couldn’t be heard and I could hear how a person’s steps echo when she walks alone. But Srebra walked on her heels, so her footsteps thudded dully on the floor.

Soon we were on school break, and Srebra had new nails, wavy and curved like talons. We wandered through the neighborhood for days. Without Roza, everything was empty and pointless. The shed where Bogdan used to live before he adopted Auntie Stefka had been knocked down, and a merry-go-round had been brought in from Luna Park and put on the empty lot. Two large speakers at the base of the merry-go-round blasted music until midnight. Over and over again the music of the Bosnian folk singer Šemsa Suljaković played. Srebra and I couldn’t ride the merry-go-round; there was no place wide enough for the two of us to sit. Watching the others spin, the voice of the singer penetrated our bodies with longing, a vague desire, but there was nothing for us to desire. Bogdan came over. He stood with us and silently watched the merry-go-round, which he, too, never rode, and from time to time he said, “Now Roza’s gone.” Srebra couldn’t stand it. She felt he was making himself important, as if he had been Roza’s best friend and wanted to tell us that we had forgotten her while he hadn’t. I wanted to talk about Roza, but the words always came up against an unbreachable dam in my throat. Whenever anyone mentioned her, I stuck my hand in my pocket and squeezed the small icon, my hand sweating and oily from the wood. If we saw Roza’s sister, we hid so she wouldn’t see us, and when we left the building, we first listened through our front door to determine whether anyone was on the stairs, perhaps Roza’s mother or father—to whom we had no idea what to say if we were to run into them. At the time, it seemed like Srebra felt the way I did, but perhaps I alone fled from confronting Roza’s family, and Srebra wasn’t thinking about it at all. We no longer walked along the main road that summer, writing down license plate numbers. We were already getting big, but if Roza had been alive, we still would have done it, because when we were with her, we felt young enough for that sort of silliness. We puttered around the apartment or outside, around the buildings, and one day, we nearly ran into a young guy on the stairs carrying over his shoulder a big bag filled with shoes. We realized right away that the shoes belonged to the people who lived in the apartments in our entryway who always left them in front of their doors day and night. We blocked his way and shouted, “Thief! Thief! Help!” Mičo immediately ran out of his apartment, and when he saw us holding the stranger, biting him, scratching him, he grabbed the bag and threw it to the floor. Soon everybody came running out of their apartments, except for Roza’s parents. “I need to pay for my girlfriend’s abortion,” the thief defended himself, crying like a small child. “Let me go, please, I don’t know where to find the abortion money.” I knew what the word meant, but I didn’t know that boyfriends paid for their girlfriends’ abortions. After a while, the residents let him go. Everyone took their shoes and went home, but the young man, tearful and frightened, slunk up to us and hissed, “That’s why your heads are stuck together.” I had no idea why he would say that, but that night, I slept badly again. Instead of putting the icon of Zlata Meglenska under my pillow, I pressed it with my hands to my belly. “At least now he’ll have a child,” a voice whispered to me, but it was my own voice, no one else’s. Srebra was snoring in her sleep while I squeezed the icon, exhausted. The next Saturday, our father took us to a village near Skopje so he could fix some woman’s window. We hung around in a yard that bordered a muddy stream. Butterflies flitted about; the scent of the flowers was intoxicating; one could sense a happiness in the atmosphere. We were too big to play, but too small to sit and make conversation. That’s what we thought, anyway. When it was time for lunch, the woman came out onto the balcony and called for us to come up. She brought out a baked bean casserole and fried fish. We ate lunch with our father and the woman, who had a sunken face. She said that the window was working properly and our father was a real master. The beans were the tastiest in the world. And what a wonderful combination: beans with the fried fish, which we only ate at home with fried potatoes, never with bean casserole. Our father smiled somewhat charmingly, almost with embarrassment. That was the first time we ate with him at the same table, with the unknown woman who was no relation of ours but had prepared a family-style meal for us.

That summer, a very lovely family moved into our building: two three-year-old blond boys, Zoki and Sašo, and their blond, long-legged mother, who stood at the ground-floor window for days on end, most likely not waiting for their father—a young, smiling, somewhat shy man, a policeman by profession, who had a mirror on the inside door of his garage—but for Nenad, a hefty young man with a full dark red moustache, black eyes, and curly hair, who wore baggy sweatpants, was younger than she was, and lived in the neighboring building, and had immediately set his eye on her…and she on him. That lovely family soon fell apart dreadfully: she took the children one night and ran away with them and Nenad to some unknown destination. Her husband killed himself with his service pistol. I was stunned by the events, but Srebra just kept repeating, “I knew it.” I couldn’t figure out the world of grown-ups; I couldn’t figure out the world of our parents or other families. The single women who adopted Bogdan, the girl with delayed development, the two Rom girls, seemed happy, and their new children even more so. Bogdan always smelled of baby soap, and we envied him that smell, because we always smelled unwashed, a smell whose meaning we discovered years later, by chance, on a walk over the Stone Bridge, where homeless people gathered. They never bathed, except in the Vardar River in the summer. Srebra and I had to wash our faces in the kitchen if there was warm water left in the small boiler after our mother had washed the dishes. We bathed only on Saturday or Sunday evening. After the water heater was turned on, our mother carefully monitored it, checking the water several times while barking at us, “OK, go get your clothes.” Our father would shout, “Hold on, wait a sec, it’s not hot yet,” but she’d just go on saying, “It is so. It’s full of hot water!” Srebra and I, huddled in the tub, washed ourselves with a barely flowing stream of water, always surprised anew by our naked bodies, the ampleness of our breasts, which had grown to dimensions we would never have dreamed of when we were younger. Each of us rinsed herself, passing the shower hose back and forth every ten seconds. Soon there’d be a knock at the door: “Come on! What are you doing? Have you drowned?” Mom would shout. If we wanted to wash during the week, we turned on the small boiler in the kitchen to heat the water, then placed the water in the white five-liter tub and carried it to the bathroom, where we let it cool in an old beat-up green pot. We hopped into the tub and took turns pouring water over ourselves with the small yogurt container. Then we’d shiver in small frayed towels, because we didn’t have bathrobes. Our mother had an orange bathrobe she never wore from her trousseau; she kept it in a bag with a bathing suit that Srebra and I secretly tried on when our parents were at work. We’d dress quickly, as quickly as we could, pulling our clothes up over our legs, and then, soothed by the smell of some generic soap or other, we’d go out on the balcony to dry our hair. In front of the building, residents from the apartments would be washing or drying their carpets. The heat was typical in Skopje. That year, for our vacation, we went to the town of Pretor, on Lake Prespa. The day before we left, Mom sent us to the store to buy peanuts and sunflower seeds for the road. In the store, we could only find peanuts, so we bought a small bag of salted peanuts and went to another store to look for sunflower seeds. We left the peanuts at the entrance, by the window, so as not to go in with something we had bought elsewhere. While we were paying for the sunflower seeds, we saw a neighborhood drunk take the bag, quickly open it, and start shaking the peanuts into his mouth. We were so flustered that we couldn’t say a word. Trembling with anger, we started after him, but he just chomped the last peanuts in his mouth. If Roza were with us, I thought, she surely would have yelled at him, and we would’ve found the courage to confront him. We saw Bogdan across the street. He waved at us. I waved back. The next day, we left for Pretor. One day, a group of brigadiers in blue uniforms, gold scarves around their necks, came into the camp where we were staying, and a blond boy, Ismet, three or four years older than us, appeared in front of our beach bungalow. He said he was from Kagne in Bosnia. Anyway, that’s what we thought he said, and for years, we looked for a place called Kagne on the map of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the back of our Geographic Atlas where there were maps of the former Yugoslav republics, with Montenegro last. We became obsessed with the town Kagne, especially later, during the war in Bosnia, when we were constantly upset by the thought that Ismet might have been killed. He was our joint crush; we didn’t let him kiss us, but he was the first boy who’d ever wanted to touch us, the boy in front of whom, even with our conjoined heads, Srebra and I wanted to be beautiful, though we didn’t know whether we were, dressed in brown tank tops under which our prematurely developed breasts were evident, and skirts with elastic waistbands and two palm trees and flounces that our mom had sewn from the bits of fabric our future aunt gave us from her parents’ store. Ismet said he liked both of us and wanted to come into our bungalow, but we got scared and didn’t let him. We waved to each other a lot. Srebra and I waved from the beach, where we lay on a military tent fly that our father had attached to a beach chair (which shone in the scorching heat with what seemed to be glistening beads of oil), and Ismet from the bus that was taking him home. The children of our family friends, who were also our friends, drank chocolate milk from Tetra Pak containers, but we were poorer than they were. We teased them, saying they were spoiled little mama’s boys. Even though we understood chocolate milk was a luxury we couldn’t allow ourselves, we envied them anyway and were certain that their parents Viki and Jovan loved Jovče and Drakče more than our parents loved us. But all those small displeasures were nothing compared with the event that marked our summer vacation in Pretor: bumping by chance into our uncle, our father’s brother. They hadn’t seen each other since the day our mother and father left his family’s home with us infants, driven out by the grandma and grandpa we had never seen. When our uncle saw his brother, he grew pale and green, and didn’t utter a word. Our father also said nothing. Our uncle and his wife disappeared into their camper, pulling a young girl who was evidently their daughter. The next day, there was no sign of them, although a trace of them remained with us, particularly with our father. Who knows what pain he felt, what fury? He didn’t say anything about it. Nobody said anything about it. Ever. Was he able to sleep that night? What was he thinking while lying on his bunk in our bungalow? Mom was in the bunk below him and she moaned all night, but Srebra and I lay in the big bed, trying not to let it squeak and reveal that we were awake, while, for the thousandth time, we pictured the faces of our would-have-been uncle, our would-have-been aunt, and our would-have-been cousin. We would never know that side of our father. What had come between us to keep us forever estranged from him? We felt uncomfortable that we were living at the same time, that we were contemporaries with our own father. With our mother, we at least argued. We acted as if nothing had happened. Other than that incident, the most important event, like on every vacation, was the purchase of toy trucks for our little cousins. We stood for a long time every evening in front of the stalls where tourists gathered, while Mom picked something out: toy trucks for her nephews, and for Grandma, a souvenir thermometer or decorative plate with a motif of the place where we were vacationing. No toys or souvenirs were bought for us. When we got home from vacation, we saw that the fish in the aquarium we bought just before going on vacation had died. Our uncle, Aunt Ivanka’s husband, was supposed to feed them. Mom also discovered that, in the cupboard where we kept the bedding, the small envelope under the afghan with their engagement rings was gone, and two rakija glasses made of thin green crystal with gold engraving were missing from the china cabinet. She and our father cursed our uncle all day. Finally, our father took the aquarium with the dead fish into the bathroom. We heard the toilet flush and then the apartment door opening. Later, we’d see the empty aquarium collecting dust on a garage shelf. Mom hand-washed all the clothes we had taken with us to Pretor, and when they dried, she packed them into several bags and suitcases, and we set off for our grandparent’s house in the village. Our uncle was supposed to get married at the end of August. Grandma who’d said she wanted to give her son a wedding in a kotel—Srebra and I laughed and corrected her: hotel—now expressed no such desire. She and Grandpa didn’t have any money. They’d spent it all on the foreign-language course our uncle took, and no one knew whether he had actually learned any English during those months. The wedding had to be held at home, upstairs and out in the courtyard. Srebra and I weren’t included in the wedding preparations. Our mother and Grandma chased us out of the house so they could bake dinner rolls, make Russian salad, and prepare steamed cookies. Srebra and I wandered around the village and ran around on the threshing floor, bumping into each other, recalling two summers prior, in our childhood, when, on this same threshing floor, we had played with a beat-up, blue-colored brass plate while Grandma and Grandpa threshed. Our family’s mule, Gjurče, was now old and worn out. The heat, the sharp hay, the two of us playing with that brass plate under the apple tree made us feel happy and safe, although, at the time, it was still not yet clear to us why we were the only ones with conjoined heads. We tried to play the game again, but it no longer held our interest. I recall my feeling of sadness, nostalgia, and a certain sorrowful pang that I’d grown up, that I’d outgrown the game. I felt a vacant place in my soul. Srebra said, “This is so stupid, as if I’d play with plates. I’m not a little kid.” That same feeling had flooded over me the previous year in Skopje, the last summer of Roza’s life, when, as in previous summers, we pretended to make winter preserves. Our parents were making preserves outside. Roza carried a platter of coffee to the grown-ups. It was the first coffee she’d made in her life. Everyone complimented her on how good it was. We waited for her to serve everyone so that we could play together, but as soon as we set up the dishes and pots for our preserve-making game, Roza suddenly stood and said, “I don’t want to. I’m too big for such games.” And I was flooded with emptiness and sadness, as if I had lost something valuable that would never return. That is how it was that summer in the village. Every game Srebra and I had once played together, whether we’d wanted to or not, was now distant, lost in time. In those moments of melancholy—though we hadn’t known the word then—something pulled us again and again to the house of a distant relative, our mother’s cousin, whom almost no one went to see, because he had a child, two years old already, who, people said, was retarded, adding: “God save and protect us. God forbid this from happening to us.” His wife was a tall woman from the next village with big green eyes and red cheeks—a very warmhearted woman. Although she was young, she acted more like a grown-up aunt, giving us money whenever she saw us. Srebra and I had been feeling guilty since the boy was born, and we happened to be in the village and were the first to go visit him. “Don’t stand behind the baby’s head,” the wife said to us when we saw the baby for the first time. But we did, and soon the child fell ill and became retarded. Srebra and I secretly blamed ourselves, because if you stand behind a baby rather than facing him, he rolls his eyes to see who’s there, and it scrambles his brain. For years, we cursed ourselves, thinking the baby’s mind had been affected by our behavior, until one day, years later, he died at the Bardovci Psychiatric Hospital. Our mother’s cousin came to our apartment in Skopje then, chilled to the bone, and he sat on the chair in the dining room closest to the television, watching a program about the Slovenian Communist Edvard Kardelj. Srebra and I sat on the small couch in the kitchen, ears pricked, listening to him talk to our father. He spent the night at our place, and the next day went to see his dead son for the last time. How did he feel? How could he talk about politics with our father, about work in the paper plant, about the town wiping out horticulture in the village? His son had died, paralyzed, with a diagnosis we never learned. And he never visited the grave. His wife didn’t even know where the grave was. They erased the child from their lives, and gave birth to other children, but did they forget him? He had a big head that fell to his shoulders and immobile arms and legs that were soft, as if they had no bones. And all of it was, apparently, due to a shot of penicillin. Srebra and I loved the child. Still, when we were in the village and had visited him we sometimes cried out in our sleep, and our mother or father woke us and scolded us, saying because he was disturbed, we were getting disturbed as well, and our heads were already messed up without that. The day we learned the boy had died, Mom told us, “Little Igor has gone,” and in her voice we heard relief. Was erasing the stigma more important than the life of the child? It was. But when he was alive, Igor was a part of our village life: we had conjoined heads and he, a big floppy one that fell every which way like a rag doll’s. His mother went from house to house with a woven basket, asking for eggshells. Everyone saved them for her, and she ground them with a bottle on the tabletop, as if rolling out cookie dough, and gave little Igor ground eggshells mixed with milk by the teaspoon, because she had heard that it could help children like him. She once gave us a spoonful mixed in cornelian cherry juice, saying that our heads could surely be separated if we ate eggshells. Our heads didn’t separate, nor did Igor survive. Yet life continued. When we went with our grandmother for a visit and a coffee with her oldest sister, Mirka, who lived in the upper part of the same village, Granny Mirka told us not to look into the well—“the devil’s down there and he’ll call you down to him”—but we looked anyway. Staring down into the well was sort of like a primitive black-and-white television, but when I told that to Srebra, she said the small television we had bought in Skopje for May Day, so we could watch Eurovision, was much better. During the summer, we didn’t bring it with us; Dad said there wasn’t anything interesting on. But we were bored. The children in the village didn’t want to play with the “weirdo girls from Skopje.” We could just barely hold on until our uncle’s wedding, after which we would return to Skopje. When our parents were with us in the village, Grandma didn’t have much time for us. Once she’d finished all her chores in the evening, it was too late for us to sit for hours in her lap and cuddle. During the day, we knocked around the village or strung tobacco, or, from time to time, went to Granny Mirka’s. She was nearly blind and was terribly attached to her daughters, especially Aunt Vaca, who lived in Skopje and sold needlepoint kits and tee shirts at fairs throughout Macedonia and Serbia. All the children in the whole extended family wore tee shirts with characters from the TV series Calimero that Aunt Vaca had given us when she saw us at a fair; our mother even sent us to the fair saying, “Go on, Aunt Vaca’s there; she’ll give you a shirt.” Aunt Vaca even made shirts with extra large openings that we could slip up over our bodies: red for me, white for Srebra. For years her husband quietly and humbly sold her tee shirts and needlepoint kits at markets and fairs, his wife’s excessive attachment to her mother filling his soul with bile. She spent the winter with them in Skopje, and sometimes stayed all spring, in the summer taking her daughter back to the village with her so she wouldn’t be alone. One day, the son-in-law took off, moving into their summer place in Bistra. He left everything behind and never returned to Skopje. At a wedding, Mirka screamed at our grandmother, “Why did you bring the children? So people can make fun of them?” Srebra and I wore yellow dresses with red dots and large zippers up the back. Our grandmother wasn’t ashamed of us. But when Mirka went half-blind, she wasn’t ashamed of us anymore either. On the contrary, she was happy when we visited her, and gave us the dark purple plums or white cherries that hung in clusters from the tree in her yard. Little by little, Srebra and I got up our courage, and even walked into town, to our aunt Milka’s or to one of our other relatives’. As if we didn’t care if someone laughed at us. We found it most interesting at Granny Vera’s—yet another of Grandma’s sisters—who lived near the arched bridge where the town suicides took place. She had a son who was a barber, the biggest drunk in town, which was just something noted by everyone who mentioned him, but no one ever did anything to get him sober. His wife, Elica, with her long black hair—quiet, calm, like a princess in a story—wore her bathrobe and joked around when we went to visit them. The barber was never at home. They had a daughter, our age. Just a few years later she would be raped by someone in the center of town as she was coming home at night from a birthday party, and then she got married in another town. One day she got fed up with her long curly hair and wanted to cut it, but her father-in-law and mother-in-law (who stood in the hallway door every morning to watch their daughter-in-law brush her hair) jumped in and told her it was only on account of her hair that they had accepted her as their daughter-in-law. Several months later, she visited her parents and grandmother. She took barber’s shears from her father’s drawer and cut her hair as short as possible. A few steps and she was on the bridge, and then she threw herself off. “Well, perhaps it was for the best,” wagged several evil tongues in town. “How could she have had a family if she spent her whole life thinking about the night she was raped? A young girl shouldn’t walk alone at night. It happened because her father drank and her mother, well, she never seemed to notice anything.”

Srebra and I stayed only a short time at Granny Vera’s, just a few minutes; everyone looked at us with kindness or with pity, but no one said anything, so we went running down the street to Milka’s—our favorite aunt. She and our uncle Kole rented the lower floor in the old white house that belonged to Jovan and Pavlina, who had been the godparents at their wedding, both teachers at the high school. The window frames were painted the same blue as the double front door. Our aunt and uncle had two rooms, in one they had a woodstove, a table, and couch; and in the other, two beds pushed together and a third against the wall. Our uncle’s civil defense uniform was spread out on the bed by the wall. When Srebra and I stayed there, we slept in their double bed, our aunt in the bed with the uniform, and our uncle on the couch in the living room. They didn’t have children for several years after their wedding, and when we were returning to Skopje and stopped in to say goodbye, our aunt came out to the car in her green dressing gown, gave us a big hug, and cried and cried. In movies young brides were in love and happy, but our aunt was sad. On the second floor of the house lived Grandpa Jovan and Grandma Pavlina, as Srebra and I called them, and we particularly liked Grandpa Jovan, because when he came to our grandmother’s house in the village, he always gave us money, and once, when we were little, he gave us twice as much, at least that’s what our grandfather—who understood about money—told us. In return, Srebra and I had to give our pacifiers to him, and on his way back to town on the bus, he threw them out the window into the little stream that flowed beside the road.

When we were at our aunt’s, Srebra and I had the most fun in Grandpa Jovan and Grandma Pavlina’s apartment, which they left unlocked when they weren’t home, because there was nothing to hide from our aunt and uncle. Our aunt and uncle never went upstairs to their place, but Srebra and I, very carefully, taking care in the hallway darkness not to trip over each other, and with not only our heads stuck together but our bodies as well, climbed the stairs and went into their bedroom with its wide bed covered with a red satin coverlet. Then, kneeling in front of the drawer and glass shelf in their nightstand, we each took a book and carried it down to our aunt’s and leafed through it on the couch in the room with the oven where something delicious-smelling was always being prepared. Why didn’t our aunt ever notice that we went upstairs to the landlords’ apartment and took things that didn’t belong to us? Sometimes we took the books with us to the village, and even to Skopje. Heart by De Amicis, Luka the Beggar by August Šenoa, Dubravka by Ivan Gundulić, all these books that belonged to people who never mentioned the fact that we were book thieves when we saw them. Nor did they say anything to reproach our aunt. Perhaps they didn’t notice the books were missing from the shelf. More often, however, we stole books from a tiny room on the landing, in which every inch was flooded with books as if they’d been poured from a sack onto the floor. We would open the small wooden door with extreme care, and then Srebra and I would take the books that spilled off the heap and across the threshold. Among them were old atlases, books on arithmetic and biology, novels by Dostoevsky, a blue-covered edition of Njegoš’s The Mountain Wreath, and many, many others. Every summer, we each returned to Skopje with five or six books from Grandpa Jovan and Grandma Pavlina’s library, but no one ever discovered this fact. Years later, after Grandpa Jovan died of sorrow over his daughter’s death from cancer, Grandma Pavlina in her old age began planting marijuana in the fields above the town, and not only planting it, but also selling it to the young people in the town. Until the day her former student, then a policeman, popped her in jail where, with nothing and no one to her name, she died from sadness. While they were renting, Aunt Milka and Uncle Kole built a new house, and they moved there and had two sons. No one spoke about Grandpa Jovan and Grandma Pavlina’s house anymore, but Srebra and I continued to dream about how it might have been: I always imagined it with the sign “Drugstore” on the blue double door that was always freshly painted, but Srebra told me that she pictured it with a sign saying “Self-Serve Market.” Srebra and I argued about what the sign might have said, and she added, “A ‘Drugstore’ sign is ridiculous. There was only one drugstore in town, and it was in a different place. How could that house have been a drugstore?” Drugstores are supposed to be the cleanest places in the world, but that house didn’t even have a bathtub or toilet. Still, our aunt and uncle’s rooms were sparkling clean, but completely wiped from our minds was where we went to the bathroom when we visited, where they bathed, or where our aunt washed the dishes. “What you’re saying is nonsense,” I said. “How could it have been a store when there wasn’t a salesclerk? We just took the books and didn’t pay anything for them.” Several hours later, Srebra added in a serious tone, “Didn’t you learn in school that that’s what Communism is? Take everything you need for free?” Srebra was right, but I hadn’t thought of that. I always thought someone would catch us stealing and, at some point, we would end up in an orphanage as punishment. Perhaps in some way that’s what I wanted. Our conjoined heads often awakened in us feelings of victimhood, but when no one pitied us, I thought that we could at least pity ourselves. Like our grandma pitied herself when our uncle, her son, found himself a good-for-nothing wife, and the day of the wedding had now arrived. So many preparations! Uncle Kole knew better than anyone how to chop vegetables for the salad, and so, for our uncle’s wedding, no one else could do the chopping; we all waited on him. He took a day off without pay to chop all the sacks of cabbage our mother and father had bought at the market in the city. He took a head of cabbage in his mountainous hands, placed it on the cutting board, and quickly and artfully cut it up. On the day of the wedding, he prepared a dressing of oil, vinegar, and salt and stirred it separately with each plate of cabbage. Our father was amazed that our uncle would do woman’s work like that. He was happy to carve the pig with an apple in its mouth. Srebra and I set the table with the dishes, forks, and napkins borrowed from the neighbors. Knives weren’t put on tables then, but we set out big platters of dinner rolls and pieces of pita stuffed with leek or spinach, plates of cheese, salad, and other appetizers. Srebra told me that she wanted to climb onto a chair in front of the hallway mirror so we could have a look at ourselves. We took a chair, placed it in front of the mirror, and climbed up, both of us holding onto the wall. We lifted our dresses up to look at our legs: we both had slightly crooked legs, but beautiful knees and ankles. We were disgusted by each other and ourselves. We were thirteen years old, still young, but with the bodies of maturing girls, me with glasses and she without, and hair that fell to our shoulders, intermingling at the inner sides of our heads. When we were ready to get down from the chair, Srebra knocked into the mirror with her elbow; it wobbled and fell. It broke. Our mother, who was at that moment carrying shot glasses filled with rakija, heard the crash. She set the glasses on the ground, came over, and struck each of us as hard as she could on our heads with her index finger and said, “I wish you’d bang your heads together. This is no life with you.” She gathered up the shards of glass, stuck the mirror frame under the bed in the bedroom, said nothing to the others about the mirror, and no one noticed it wasn’t there. The spot where our mother struck me hurt, as I’m sure it hurt Srebra. Seven years of bad luck in love, I thought, asking myself which of us would be cursed by the broken mirror: me, Srebra, or our uncle, since it broke on his wedding day. We sat at the table in the room that had been set up for children, and while all the other children gaped and nudged each other with their elbows, pointing at us, Srebra and I spoke with our cousin Verče and stole sips from the small glass of rakija we had grabbed from our mother, who, after smacking our heads, had brought the glasses into the room with the longest row of tables. We dug in, filling our stomachs with everything on the table, and when they struck up the dance in front of the house, and later in the village center, we took spots at the head of the dance, singing, shouting, dancing, kicking our legs to all sides. We were so loud and pushy that the villagers gathered around to watch us, rather than the bride and groom, crossing themselves and nudging each other. Our father cursed loudly, but Grandma told him to leave us alone; we were children, so let us enjoy ourselves—we only had one uncle. When the wedding was over and our aunt and uncle went to their room and closed the door, we stood in front of the door with Verče, calling out under our breath: “Three cheers for sex! Three cheers for sex!” And giggling as never before. That night, Srebra got her first period, and I puked. I vomited blood. Our mother had to get up. Instead of a sanitary pad, she gave Srebra several torn rags from our grandmother’s sewing machine, and she made me drink water with baking soda. It was one of the worst nights of our lives. Our father cursed all night, while our mother tried to calm him. “Don’t shout. The newlyweds are next door.” “Fuck your whole tribe,” our father repeated. “Fuck your whole gypsy tribe.” The next day, he fired up the car, and we quickly got in and set off. We skipped the traditional honeyed rakija, and Verče told us later that the women said there wasn’t any blood on our aunt and uncle’s sheet and, because of the shame, they not only burned the godmother’s underwear, as was the custom, but they also didn’t give her any new ones, so she had to go home without any. Verče, Srebra, and I giggled hysterically, thinking about our uncle’s godmother, twice as fat as our aunt, going home through town, probably on foot, with nothing under her skirt. Our mother could have just kicked herself that she missed the honeyed rakija at her brother’s wedding. When we got home we heard that Bogdan and his adopted mother had moved to her sister’s in England. “They got their asses in gear,” said Auntie Dobrila. “Just as soon as they got their passports. The child waved as he climbed into the taxi. You should have seen the suitcase he was carrying, a black leather case like olden times. Who knows what was inside?” Both Srebra and I thought of his crosswords, all the issues of Brain Twisters and clippings from the newspaper. We were pretty much convinced that was what Bogdan had taken with him to England. I squeezed the little icon in my pocket, jabbing my fingers into its soft wooden surface. Why was I so upset, but Srebra not at all? Why did Srebra say, “As if I care that he gets to go to England; we’re going too, someday. Doctors there will separate us.” I remembered that Srebra wanted to marry someone in London, some unknown person whose name began with a D. Bogdan was gone; Roza had died; Srebra and I were left as we’d been before: with the awareness of our misfortune growing along with our bodies, with the curves of our hips, and with the breasts that grew and began to ache when we ran up the stairs, one of us holding the railing, the other the wall. A distant relative was visiting and we thought he, like everyone else, noticed our growing breasts and stared at them. In an old Rosica children’s magazine that we had kept since nursery school there was a picture I liked of a many-tracked train set in a boy’s room. It gave me a feeling of home. Srebra said she wanted to buy a train set with tracks that completely covered the floor of our room one day. We became conscious more than ever of the smells our bodies excreted: the sweat that moistened the hair in our armpits; the grease that crystallized on the tops of our heads; the blood that flowed to our vaginas as if from a hidden well in our wombs. When I got my period, Mom also gave me cloths sewn from old underwear and our father’s undershirts. I had to make pads out of them, and over that I put on a pair of special underwear, of which there was a single pair for both Srebra and me. “Thank God your periods fall on different days, so we don’t need a second pair,” our mother said. The cloths quickly turned red from the blood. They soaked up the liquid blood, but the clots, pink and dark-red, stayed on top like snot, and, while Srebra covered her eyes with her hands, I changed the rags with ones that had been washed. I threw the dirty ones into a green pot in the bathtub, on top of which we kept a white plastic bowl with violets at the bottom. When Srebra next had her period, she’d use the same cloths, laundered, but with stains that couldn’t be removed. We were only able to change the rags once or twice a day, even if they were soaked with blood, because Mom said she had cut up all of the old clothes she had, and we should be careful not to run, because blood would flow more heavily. Srebra’s periods were heavier than mine, so she had to change the rags twice a day, and one time, as she threw the dirty one into the green pot, she screamed, “Cockroach!” My head hurt from her sudden tug. I yanked my hands from my eyes and peered into the pot, where a fat black cockroach sucked blood from Srebra’s pads. I was nauseated by the sight and began to cry. Our mother came into the bathroom, saw what was happening, and said, “Oh, big deal, a cockroach.” Later, we took a bath, but with water carried in a white tub from the boiler in the kitchen rather than water from the bathroom heater. We were filled with powerlessness, shame, and anger as we splashed ourselves with water with the yogurt container, and the towels we wiped ourselves with smelled of flour, onions, and mold. It was hardest to tolerate each other when we were naked, sitting in the bathtub, passing from hand to hand the greenish bar of soap that our parents also used, and pouring water over ourselves from the yogurt container, which we also passed back and forth. Our souls boiled with anger and helplessness and hatred toward each other, or perhaps shame in front of each other. “Wash yourselves well,” our mother said, “I am taking you somewhere.” It was September. We had turned thirteen. We had started the seventh grade, and were the most developed in our class, really, like mature women with breasts and hips. That first Friday in September, our father had gone on his first and last business trip to Mavrovo, to a hotel that was under construction and needed a glazier to finish off the work. Our mother took advantage of the occasion. She ironed our skirts, which had large openings in front through which one could see our white slips underneath, hemmed with silky trim. She handed us our blue tee shirts with palms on the chest and large neck holes so we could pull them over our legs without stretching them, and said, “We’re going somewhere special.” We were burning with curiosity, since our mother never organized any surprises, not nice ones, that is, and this seemed like it might be a nice surprise. We took the bus as far as the Engineers’ Club, and from there, walked to Roosevelt Street, where we turned onto a small street lined with beautiful old houses with gardens. In front of one of them, a white house with stairs leading up to the front door, Mom said, “This is the house your father grew up in. Ring the bell. I’ll meet you in two hours at the bend in the road. She turned and quickly set off. Srebra and I stood in the yard, frozen, confused. I had my hand tightly wrapped around the icon in my skirt pocket. Srebra was biting her nails. Her heart pounded in my left arm and mine in her right. We squeezed close together and barely made our way up the stairs, which led to a small porch with a door that was half glass, half metal. We rang the bell. An older man who looked a lot like our father opened the door. He stared at us, took a frantic step forward as if he might close the door, collected himself, and asked, “Yes?” “We’re Stanko’s daughters,” I said, rather loudly and decisively, feeling the tapping of my finger against the icon, and that tapping brought strength to my voice. Srebra just stared at him, uncontrollably, so intently that my face was also pulled forward. Our grandfather, our father’s father, whispered, “Come in,” and once inside, in the wide hallway, he grasped our heads, mine in one hand, Srebra’s in the other. It felt like he was deciding if he should kiss us, but he just held our heads in his hands, then let us go. He took us into the room where our grandmother, the uncle who, two months prior, had fled with his family from Pretor when he saw us there, his wife, and their young daughter, our cousin, were watching television. “Look who’s come to see us,” our grandfather stated, pretending to sound happy, but his trembling voice was filled with concern. The room filled with silence which was then cut by the girl’s shout, as she dragged her mother toward us: “Look at their heads! Look!” Our aunt, whom we had fleetingly seen in Pretor, was young and beautiful. She smiled sincerely and greeted us, and only then did our uncle and grandmother greet us. Our grandmother was very dark, thin, all skin and bones, with black hair that peeked out from under a brown headscarf tied in the front. She was identical to the aunt who had brought us the chocolate bar with rice, only much older. They made coffee, the first coffee of our lives. Our grandmother read our future in the grounds of our Turkish coffee; our grandfather asked whether we had a car, whether our father was still working as a glazier, and whether we had been to a doctor about our heads. Our uncle kept quiet, watching us. Grandmother kept repeating, “Oh, children, children.” No one asked about our mother. Nor did they ask how we had found their house, or who had brought us there. At one point, I wanted to tell my grandfather that he was an idiot for beating our mother, but the words stuck in my throat and refused to be spoken. Srebra kept hiking up her skirt then jerking it down toward her knees while answering their questions. The little girl ran around, pointing out objects she played with: an old wooden pestle with red embroidery around its handle, an orange juicer with a rusty sieve, a beat-up, three-legged wooden stool. I thought that perhaps our father had sat on that stool when he lived here. And perhaps our grandmother had strained tea through the strainer with the rusty bottom for him when he was sick. But nothing recalled that, years earlier, our father had lived here. In this house, which, our mother had said, our father built with his own hands when he was still a child, there was no history of him; his past did not exist. Srebra and I looked at the clock on the wall, and in the extremely tense atmosphere of quiet with spurts of words that cut the air with exaggerated weight, we wanted those two hours to pass quickly so we could leave, tear ourselves away from our might-have-been relatives, from this family that was not for us, and go back where we had come from, to our home, such as it was. As we were leaving, our grandfather gave us money, a thousand Yugoslav dinars, and our little cousin gave us a kiss, but the others said goodbye with just a handshake and a big smile. They did not say, “Come again.” Nor did our mother ever say we should go there again. Her goal had been accomplished: those grandparents, our aunt and our uncle, and our little cousin most of all, had become part of our thoughts, of our lives. We were aware of their existence, aware that there were people living in the center of the city, in the house that our father had built when he was a child, out of which our grandfather had driven Srebra and me when we were only a few weeks old, and these people, in some way, belonged to us, as we did to them. Before we met them, we had not considered them part of our lives, but now, now that we had met them and were certain that we did not want them to be part of our lives, they had become a part of it. And we had become a part of theirs. That was the most significant. They could no longer sleep peacefully, let alone live, without also thinking of us. That’s what our mom said. Years later, we heard that our grandfather died in great agony, suffering, on the brink of death for days, neither here nor there, neither in this world nor the next. As for our grandmother, she nearly died of hunger, locked in one of the basement rooms where our grandfather had mistreated our mother when they lived there, from where he had driven us. Our grandmother died sick, racked with pain, unaware of anything going on around her. Shame on our uncle’s family—they fed her bread and water and left her to die with our father’s name on her lips. Much too late, much too late. Not even after our grandfather’s death did she gather the courage to seek out her son, to see him. She died like a dog. They say a man dies in the manner in which he lived. The one who lived in inner agony would die in agony; the one who thought of life as a game would die playing; the one who suffered his whole life would die of illness; and the one who loved greatly would die of love.