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
