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