A Spare Life Read online

  Two Lines Press

  Originally published as: Резервен живот

  © 2012 by Лидија Димковска

  Translation © 2016 by Christina E. Kramer

  Published by Two Lines Press

  582 Market Street, Suite 700, San Francisco, CA 94104

  www.twolinespress.com

  ISBN 978-1-931883-57-3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016938372

  Cover design by Gabriele Wilson

  Cover photo by Lisa Johansson/Millennium Images, UK

  Typeset by Sloane | Samuel

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Excerpts from A Spare Life were first published in Tin House and the Chicago Review

  This project is published with financial support from the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Macedonia, and is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Contents

  1984

  1985

  1986–1991

  1991–1995

  1996

  1997–2000

  2001

  2002–2005

  2012

  1984

  That June afternoon on the outskirts of Skopje, in front of our apartment building, Srebra, Roza, and I were playing a new game: fortune-telling. On the steaming cement of the lane that sloped down to the residents’ garages, we drew squares with white chalk and wrote the age at which we hoped to get married inside them. We would attract the attention of every passerby and, sitting on their balconies or standing by the apartment building’s open windows, even the neighbors who knew us well would stare at us, because my sister and I were twins—conjoined twins—our heads fused at the temple right above my left ear and her right ear. We were born like that, to our misfortune and our parents’ great shame. We both had long thick chestnut-brown hair that concealed the place where we were joined, or at least we thought so. At first glance, it appeared as if we were squatting and leaning our heads together, our bodies free the full length down. We were dressed in light strapless summer tube dresses. I was in a green dress with little yellow flowers, and my sister was in a red one with blue and white dots.

  At the age of twelve, the only thing my sister Srebra and I, Zlata, were ashamed of was our names. Why would any parents name their children Srebra and Zlata—silver and gold—let alone children already marked by conjoined heads as freaks of nature in their community? These were the names of old women, cleaning ladies, or women who sold potatoes in front of the bakery. Whenever we complained to her about our names, our mother silenced us with the justification: “That’s what your godfather wanted: Zlata after Saint Zlata Meglenska, and Srebra after a woman named Srebra Apostolova who killed two Turkish beys in Lerin.”

  “That’s stupid,” is what we always said; it was one of the few things we agreed on. Our godfather never once set foot in our house after the christening; it was as if the earth had swallowed him up. In fact, he took off for Australia to earn a living and erased us from his consciousness forever.

  “Zlata’s a birdbrain and Srebra’s a turd brain!” children called after us, taunting us in the street; with the exception of Roza and occasionally Bogdan, no one ever played with us. Some parents, to shield their kids from nightmares, forbade them to associate with us freaks, but other kids fled from us of their own free will and threw rocks at us from a distance, shouting, “retards!”

  Roza was the only one who didn’t have a problem with our physical deformity. She lived on the second floor of our building; she was a year older than us, and had thick, curly black hair and dark skin; she was a little on the short side, but was sturdy. There are children so delicate, with skinny legs, pale faces, and small hazel eyes, like us, that you’d think the wind would blow them away, and then there are those that look muscular, healthy, like they’d be heavy in one’s arms, with strong hands, like Roza. She was so strong-willed and adamant that we always agreed to her proposals.

  That day was no different from any other; she suggested that we draw squares, inscribe in them the age at which we wished to get married, then, above the squares, the initials of three boys we liked (potential husbands), and below the squares, the numbers one to three (how many children we might have); on the left, letters to designate how much money our husbands would have: P for poor, R for rich, and M for multimillionaire, and then on the right, the first letters of three cities in which we would like to live. My square and Srebra’s were close to each other; Roza drew hers a little way off. Then each of us counted the characters around the edge as many times as indicated by the number in the middle of the square, circling the letter or number we landed on, and then continuing around (skipping any circled characters) until we had calculated out our circles. Here is a sketch of what the lives we imagined for ourselves looked like:

  Roza was to get married in eight years, which seemed a long way off, when she turned twenty-one, as her mother had been, and she’d marry a boy whose name began with P. Yes, it was nice that she would end up with Panait from the Greek village of Katerini, where she went on vacation every summer with her family to stay in an old house near the cathedral that had apartments for rent. Panait lived in the house next door with a garden; he was a nice boy who had learned a few Macedonian words on account of his love for Roza, enough for shy communication in addition to glances, hide-and-seek, and swimming together in the sea.

  “Sure, we’ll be poor!” she exclaimed, because that was what her counting had given her: Panait would be poor, they’d have one child, and would live in Salonika, the city Panait loved more than any other in the world because he’d been born there. He had been premature, but his life had been saved, so once a year, he and his parents went on a pilgrimage to the Church of Saint Demetrius to give thanks to the saint. “Only one child,” Roza said sadly, because she had imagined one day, when she was grown and happily married to Panait, she would have a house full of children, or at least two, like her and her sister, who was three years older.

  For Srebra, who wished to get married at twenty-three, it worked out that she would marry a boy whose name began with D (she had had no particular name in mind; she had just scribbled it off the top of her head just to have three boys’ names); D would be rich, and they were to have two children (“Good for you!” Roza exclaimed), and live in a city whose name began with L.

  “London!” I cried, and in my surprise, tugged on her head as I jerked my own. “Why London? You don’t even know what it looks like! And it’s really far away! I don’t want to live in London! How will you live there if I don’t live there, too? You only think about yourself!”

  Even from my earliest childhood I had felt Srebra was always thinking only of herself and couldn’t care less that we were joined at the head and couldn’t possibly lead separate lives, but only a single one, shared, as if we were one person in two half-fused bodies. We had to do everything together: eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, go to school, go out, go in, everything. Even when we were little, if she needed to pee during the night, she threw off the comforter and jumped out of bed, which meant she, with no consideration at all, tugged at me, jolting me awake and forcing me to my feet even though I was still in a haze between the dreamworld and reality. The pain was so intense in the spot where we were conjoined that I’d scream in horror, while Srebra, teeth clenched, was already running to the bathroom, dragging me with her. Once there, while one of us sat on the toilet, the other had to sit too, which meant plopping down on the blue plastic trashcan that we moved to the left or right of the toilet depending on which of us was on the seat. Into that trashcan we threw away the paper—which was not scented toilet paper, but typewriter paper my mother would sneak from her office and then tear into quarters so we could wipe ourselve
s after doing our business—and also kitchen waste, leftovers, all manner of garbage.

  I was often cruel, too, yanking her suddenly in some unexpected direction, but I was more aware that our heads were joined, that we should be careful, every minute, how we moved so as to not hurt ourselves, because the pain in our temples where we were joined was unbearable whenever one of us made a sudden unanticipated movement. Srebra was also aware that we were two in one, but only physically, whenever her head started to ache, not psychologically; she would dream up great plans for her life, and simply took no account of my desires or of our joint capabilities. She was certain that one day, when we were grown and had a lot of money, we’d be able to pay for an operation that could separate us. She believed it so intensely that when our heads were still conjoined, she was making plans as if we’d already been separated.

  It was like that with the fortune-telling game, too, when she said in an absolutely calm voice, “I’ve told you a hundred times I want to live in London, and you didn’t write it down. Look, you put down the letter S. That can only be Skopje, but I’m not staying here, not for anything in the world! In London they will surely be able to separate us. They have those kinds of doctors.”

  My eyes were already welling up with tears. I pinched her with my left hand on her right elbow as hard as I could. Srebra raised her left arm over her head and smacked me on the head as hard as she could. Those blows on the head would hurt for days. Mom once said to her, “If you continue on like this, one day you’re going to punch a hole in her brain and then what troubles we’d have!” And, as always, our father added, “You voracious creatures, you’ve devoured the world!”

  Although our heads were not merely joined but also shared a vein by which our blood mixed—in moments of excitement, anxiety, or other extreme situations we felt each other’s hearts beating in our temples—we thought differently; our brains were not conjoined. I still don’t know whether this was a lucky or an unlucky circumstance of our lives.

  That’s why, whenever Srebra hit me on the head, she hissed, “Don’t you dare tattle!” But this time, she didn’t manage to say anything, because I started to cry so desperately that Roza immediately bent over us to wipe my tears away with her hand.

  “Come on, Zlata, don’t. Look how nicely things are going to turn out for you. Your husband will be a multimillionaire and you’re going to have one child, and with all those millions, you’re sure to find a doctor to separate your heads.” I was crying and kneeling down, stock-still, sensing that in Srebra’s mind she was already leaving for London, alone, without me, and I was nowhere. I felt I was not there, that I did not exist.

  “Hey, you guys, what kind of game is this?” Bogdan called out just then, having quietly drawn near. Up until then, he had been sitting a little way off from us on the concrete wall above the driveway, leaning on the door, stealing glances at what we were doing while seemingly engrossed in solving—in his head, without a pencil—a crossword puzzle torn from a newspaper.

  “You stay out of this,” Srebra shouted at him. I didn’t say anything. I was swallowing the mucus that had collected in my throat from the tears, and Roza just shrugged her shoulders.

  “All you think about is marriage. You have nothing better to do,” Bogdan called out, and then exclaimed in surprise, “Hey look, the letter B! That’s not me, is it?”

  Just at that moment, before my face turned red, a flowerpot with a cactus in it fell from one of the balconies and shattered on our fortune-telling squares. We could hear curses and shouts of indignation. The dirt scattered all over the squares we had drawn; my square was the only one now even barely visible. My fortune said I would get married a year before Srebra to a boy whose name began with B, that he’d be a multimillionaire, we’d live in Skopje, and have one child. That was not Bogdan, because Bogdan was the poorest boy we knew, and I couldn’t imagine him being a multimillionaire. I thought only poor girls could become multimillionaires when they grew up and that boys were either poor or rich all their lives.

  We raised our heads. On the second floor balcony stood a single woman named Verka who shouted in a voice husky from cigarettes and alcohol, “You killed my mother! You! No one else! But you’ll die, too!”

  Auntie Mira, from the balcony above, tried to calm her down. “Now Verka, if you throw flowerpots like that, you’ll hit the children. Go on, get back inside.”

  At that moment, our father appeared on our balcony in his white undershirt and shouted, “Wait till I come down and get you, you old drunk!” Then he turned to us and called in an equally sharp voice, “Go around to the back of the building. Your mother dropped a towel. Go and get it.”

  Verka went in, Roza ran home, and Srebra and I staggered—as always when we walked—to the rear of the building. There, just under the second row of balconies, we saw the towel hanging on a branch of the plum tree we had planted with Roza two years before as a symbol of our friendship. The little tree had already grown quite a bit; it reached almost to Uncle Sotir’s window. We caught hold of the towel, and instead of going back around the building and entering through the main entrance, we climbed in through the basement window. The glass had been removed years ago, probably deliberately, so tenants wouldn’t have to walk all the way around to get to the back of the building where they made winter preserves, or to the garages, illegally built from odds and ends, so that now, instead of green shrubs and grass, all we saw from our windows were garages: one made with a tarp, another from corrugated iron, a third with concrete, another out of boards.

  Bogdan had followed us as far as the window; then he simply said, “Ciao,” and climbed the nearby linden tree.

  “Aren’t you going home?” I managed to call out after him as Srebra pulled the two of us through the window, but he didn’t reply. There was nothing to say; for a year now there had been no one waiting for him at home. We all knew that, but we pretended we didn’t, ever since the day his mother was buried and our class went with our teacher to express our condolences. Before that, Bogdan and his mother had lived next to the Slavija supermarket in a small single-room shack with a toilet attached to its back wall. His mother cleaned the stairs in several apartment buildings, including ours. He didn’t have a father. Although he was quite poor, he was always carefully dressed, washed, and combed. His mother, who had grown old and ugly before her time, talked constantly about Bogdan: she wanted nothing else but for him to finish his education, become somebody and something. Bogdan lived up to her expectations, both in school and out; he read everything he could lay his hands on, and he loved crosswords. Tugging at their sleeves, he begged the men who read newspapers on the benches or on the balconies to give him the page with the crossword puzzle. More often than not, he didn’t have a pencil, so he’d solve them in his head, concentrating to remember the solutions he’d already figured out. The children who didn’t know where Bogdan lived had no idea just how poor he was, or that he’d been starving ever since his mother was diagnosed with throat cancer.

  We learned all this less than a month after his mother’s death from his homework essay “When You Hit Rock Bottom.” That morning, the principal came into our classroom with our teacher, and while we were still trembling from the shock of the principal’s sudden appearance, our teacher asked, “Who doesn’t want to read his or her homework aloud?” Confused by the question, even though we would all rather not have read our homework aloud, no one had the courage to raise a hand. Only Bogdan did. “Ah, there’s someone who doesn’t want to. That’s why he’s going to have to,” she said, and both she and the principal laughed out loud. Bogdan had no choice; he stood up and began to read in a trembling voice:

  Before she got sick, my mother bought a little pig and a little rabbit. Soon after that, she went into the hospital. It was winter and we had no heat. During the day I wandered around the streets after school, at night I huddled under three comforters. Every day I went back to the school at night to steal some of the dried flowers from the foot of the memori
al to our school patron so I could take them to the pig. My mother came back from the hospital just before Christmas. She couldn’t speak. She just lay there watching—first me, then the pig, then the rabbit, one by one. By Christmas our pig weighed twenty-five kilos, but its brother that lived at the neighbors’ weighed two hundred kilos. The neighbors slaughtered our pig along with theirs and made us three sausages and some ham from it. Not long after that, my mother went back to the hospital. All winter, until March, I nibbled bits of sausages and ham. I was thrifty; I wanted to save for the future. In the spring, the last sausage began to get moldy, but I still tore off little pieces and rubbed the mold off; that’s what I lived on until July. The rabbit got thinner and thinner. One day I decided to pluck its fur and sell it for bread money. While I was plucking it, I pulled off a chunk of pink meat. It started to bleed. The fur hardly weighed a hundred grams. The rabbit was all skin and bones, a living skeleton. I killed it before it starved to death. I cooked it and ate it. My mother came home and died. I survived. Things can’t get worse than that.

  Everyone in the classroom was speechless. Behind my glasses my eyes filled with tears. From the way the skin connecting our heads pulled tight, I knew that Srebra’s face was puckered up the way it did whenever she felt tears coming. The teacher and the principal muttered something to each other, then the school bell rang, and we all ran out of the classroom.

  Srebra’s steps and mine were never fully in sync; either I dragged her along or she dragged me. That’s how it had been ever since we learned to walk: she wanted to walk fast, I still wanted to crawl. If it hadn’t been for Granny Stefka’s patience, we might never have learned to walk. She’d crouch on the floor holding me up at the same height as Srebra, who wanted to walk, and she’d drag herself silently along with me in tow, so that Srebra would not be stopped in her attempts to walk. When I wanted to crawl, Granny Stefka would pretend to be a cat and get Srebra to crawl all the way to a piece of black cloth that she had set down by the door, playing the part of a mouse. All of us crawling together, Srebra and I with our joined heads and Granny Stefka with her fat belly dragging along the floor.