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?”