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