of penicillin. Srebra and I loved the child. Still, when we were in the village and had visited him we sometimes cried out in our sleep, and our mother or father woke us and scolded us, saying because he was disturbed, we were getting disturbed as well, and our heads were already messed up without that. The day we learned the boy had died, Mom told us, “Little Igor has gone,” and in her voice we heard relief. Was erasing the stigma more important than the life of the child? It was. But when he was alive, Igor was a part of our village life: we had conjoined heads and he, a big floppy one that fell every which way like a rag doll’s. His mother went from house to house with a woven basket, asking for eggshells. Everyone saved them for her, and she ground them with a bottle on the tabletop, as if rolling out cookie dough, and gave little Igor ground eggshells mixed with milk by the teaspoon, because she had heard that it could help children like him. She once gave us a spoonful mixed in cornelian cherry juice, saying that our heads could surely be separated if we ate eggshells. Our heads didn’t separate, nor did Igor survive. Yet life continued. When we went with our grandmother for a visit and a coffee with her oldest sister, Mirka, who lived in the upper part of the same village, Granny Mirka told us not to look into the well—“the devil’s down there and he’ll call you down to him”—but we looked anyway. Staring down into the well was sort of like a primitive black-and-white television, but when I told that to Srebra, she said the small television we had bought in Skopje for May Day, so we could watch Eurovision, was much better. During the summer, we didn’t bring it with us; Dad said there wasn’t anything interesting on. But we were bored. The children in the village didn’t want to play with the “weirdo girls from Skopje.” We could just barely hold on until our uncle’s wedding, after which we would return to Skopje. When our parents were with us in the village, Grandma didn’t have much time for us. Once she’d finished all her chores in the evening, it was too late for us to sit for hours in her lap and cuddle. During the day, we knocked around the village or strung tobacco, or, from time to time, went to Granny Mirka’s. She was nearly blind and was terribly attached to her daughters, especially Aunt Vaca, who lived in Skopje and sold needlepoint kits and tee shirts at fairs throughout Macedonia and Serbia. All the children in the whole extended family wore tee shirts with characters from the TV series Calimero that Aunt Vaca had given us when she saw us at a fair; our mother even sent us to the fair saying, “Go on, Aunt Vaca’s there; she’ll give you a shirt.” Aunt Vaca even made shirts with extra large openings that we could slip up over our bodies: red for me, white for Srebra. For years her husband quietly and humbly sold her tee shirts and needlepoint kits at markets and fairs, his wife’s excessive attachment to her mother filling his soul with bile. She spent the winter with them in Skopje, and sometimes stayed all spring, in the summer taking her daughter back to the village with her so she wouldn’t be alone. One day, the son-in-law took off, moving into their summer place in Bistra. He left everything behind and never returned to Skopje. At a wedding, Mirka screamed at our grandmother, “Why did you bring the children? So people can make fun of them?” Srebra and I wore yellow dresses with red dots and large zippers up the back. Our grandmother wasn’t ashamed of us. But when Mirka went half-blind, she wasn’t ashamed of us anymore either. On the contrary, she was happy when we visited her, and gave us the dark purple plums or white cherries that hung in clusters from the tree in her yard. Little by little, Srebra and I got up our courage, and even walked into town, to our aunt Milka’s or to one of our other relatives’. As if we didn’t care if someone laughed at us. We found it most interesting at Granny Vera’s—yet another of Grandma’s sisters—who lived near the arched bridge where the town suicides took place. She had a son who was a barber, the biggest drunk in town, which was just something noted by everyone who mentioned him, but no one ever did anything to get him sober. His wife, Elica, with her long black hair—quiet, calm, like a princess in a story—wore her bathrobe and joked around when we went to visit them. The barber was never at home. They had a daughter, our age. Just a few years later she would be raped by someone in the center of town as she was coming home at night from a birthday party, and then she got married in another town. One day she got fed up with her long curly hair and wanted to cut it, but her father-in-law and mother-in-law (who stood in the hallway door every morning to watch their daughter-in-law brush her hair) jumped in and told her it was only on account of her hair that they had accepted her as their daughter-in-law. Several months later, she visited her parents and grandmother. She took barber’s shears from her father’s drawer and cut her hair as short as possible. A few steps and she was on the bridge, and then she threw herself off. “Well, perhaps it was for the best,” wagged several evil tongues in town. “How could she have had a family if she spent her whole life thinking about the night she was raped? A young girl shouldn’t walk alone at night. It happened because her father drank and her mother, well, she never seemed to notice anything.”
Srebra and I stayed only a short time at Granny Vera’s, just a few minutes; everyone looked at us with kindness or with pity, but no one said anything, so we went running down the street to Milka’s—our favorite aunt. She and our uncle Kole rented the lower floor in the old white house that belonged to Jovan and Pavlina, who had been the godparents at their wedding, both teachers at the high school. The window frames were painted the same blue as the double front door. Our aunt and uncle had two rooms, in one they had a woodstove, a table, and couch; and in the other, two beds pushed together and a third against the wall. Our uncle’s civil defense uniform was spread out on the bed by the wall. When Srebra and I stayed there, we slept in their double bed, our aunt in the bed with the uniform, and our uncle on the couch in the living room. They didn’t have children for several years after their wedding, and when we were returning to Skopje and stopped in to say goodbye, our aunt came out to the car in her green dressing gown, gave us a big hug, and cried and cried. In movies young brides were in love and happy, but our aunt was sad. On the second floor of the house lived Grandpa Jovan and Grandma Pavlina, as Srebra and I called them, and we particularly liked Grandpa Jovan, because when he came to our grandmother’s house in the village, he always gave us money, and once, when we were little, he gave us twice as much, at least that’s what our grandfather—who understood about money—told us. In return, Srebra and I had to give our pacifiers to him, and on his way back to town on the bus, he threw them out the window into the little stream that flowed beside the road.
When we were at our aunt’s, Srebra and I had the most fun in Grandpa Jovan and Grandma Pavlina’s apartment, which they left unlocked when they weren’t home, because there was nothing to hide from our aunt and uncle. Our aunt and uncle never went upstairs to their place, but Srebra and I, very carefully, taking care in the hallway darkness not to trip over each other, and with not only our heads stuck together but our bodies as well, climbed the stairs and went into their bedroom with its wide bed covered with a red satin coverlet. Then, kneeling in front of the drawer and glass shelf in their nightstand, we each took a book and carried it down to our aunt’s and leafed through it on the couch in the room with the oven where something delicious-smelling was always being prepared. Why didn’t our aunt ever notice that we went upstairs to the landlords’ apartment and took things that didn’t belong to us? Sometimes we took the books with us to the village, and even to Skopje. Heart by De Amicis, Luka the Beggar by August Šenoa, Dubravka by Ivan Gundulić, all these books that belonged to people who never mentioned the fact that we were book thieves when we saw them. Nor did they say anything to reproach our aunt. Perhaps they didn’t notice the books were missing from the shelf. More often, however, we stole books from a tiny room on the landing, in which every inch was flooded with books as if they’d been poured from a sack onto the floor. We would open the small wooden door with extreme care, and then Srebra and I would take the books that spilled off the heap and across the threshold. Among them were old atlases, books on arithmetic and biology, novels by Dostoevsky, a blue-covered edition of Njegoš’s The Mountain Wreath, and many, many others. Every summer, we each returned to Skopje with five or six books from Grandpa Jovan and Grandma Pavlina’s library, but no one ever discovered this fact. Years later, after Grandpa Jovan died of sorrow over his daughter’s death from cancer, Grandma Pavlina in her old age began planting marijuana in the fields above the town, and not only planting it, but also selling it to the young people in the town. Until the day her former student, then a policeman, popped her in jail where, with nothing and no one to her name, she died from sadness. While they were renting, Aunt Milka and Uncle Kole built a new house, and they moved there and had two sons. No one