take out a book, Srebra didn’t want to budge. How many arguments, pleas, bites, pinches, and stomps on each other’s feet came from any suggestion, any plan in our lives. If only we could be separated for an hour or two so we could each do what we wanted. But that was impossible. The two of us did, however, like to go to Verka’s. We were drawn to her—a single woman and heavy drinker who lived in one of the apartments in our entryway, directly opposite Roza’s apartment on the second floor, an unusual woman who both loved us and hated us. But we didn’t care. How old was Verka when we were children? When Srebra and I begged her for presents? When she brought us the cassette Songs about Tito from her trade union’s trip to Belgrade, along with a combed-wool doll that collected dust for years? When she gave me books by Mir-Jam, and Srebra the Fisher books? When we went to her place, and she sat on the couch while Uncle Blaško massaged her back? Even though the sight embarrassed me and disgusted Srebra, we still didn’t leave, sitting at the table and passing an empty container of cream back and forth, sliding it across the table. That’s how we learned that the salesclerk in the neighborhood’s only bookstore—where we bought all our books and notebooks for the first day of school—had cancer and that Auntie Verka was deathly afraid she would get sick too. She once showed us a photograph of the son who had repudiated her after helping her get an apartment designated for a single person in our building.
Auntie Verka would send us to get a bottle of rakija, or a jar of mayonnaise, or cigarettes. She divided the change down to the dinar, half for me, half for Srebra. For hours, she would sit on the balcony sipping rakija, smoking cigarettes, and occasionally cursing at someone on the street, hurling abuse at a tenant seated on their balcony, or just letting out the odd shout. Srebra and I were usually in her living room then, sitting by the window on the same wall as the balcony, watching her and quietly giggling, or counting the money she had given us. Then she either shooed us away for no particular reason, swearing at us or calling down curses on our heads, or we secretly slipped out of the apartment. We would leave the building through the glassless window at the back, stepping on each other’s feet, and head straight to the store for lollipops or chocolate. At times like that, Srebra and I loved each other normally, like sisters, without any tenderness; we didn’t hold hands or anything, but at least we didn’t fight, didn’t quarrel or tease each other.
Auntie Verka was one of the rare individuals in our joint life who brought us together. Perhaps that’s why, for our twelfth birthday, the only people we invited to our party were Roza, Verče, and Auntie Verka. How many arguments there were over one stupid birthday party! Our father didn’t make much of a fuss; he went to the garage, to his “atomic shelter” as I called it, after the band with that name. Our mother, on the other hand, passed through every phase of disapproval, bickering, and threatening; yet in the end, she threw up her hands, because with us, there could be no peace in the house. That was clear to her from the moment we were born—as worthless as conjoined bats. It wasn’t clear to her why she hadn’t given us to a children’s home, but she had succumbed to our father’s persuasion that if she brought us home, they’d find doctors who could separate us once we’d grown a bit and were strong enough for the operation. But he’d lied to her. Where could such doctors be found if there were any at all, and besides, there was no case like ours in the whole world. I don’t know if it was just Srebra and I that were unable to feel her love or if it was because, paradoxically, a child can’t feel motherly love until she’s grown up, until later, when she starts to analyze it. As always, we got through this fight with insults, nasty words, and spite, but in the end, we got our way: for the first time in our lives we would celebrate our birthday, against all opposition. Mom thought birthday parties were for the rich, particularly since we were born in the summer, when there was no school, and no one expected there to be a party. “Who will come to your party, God?” she asked. But on the day of our party, Mom made steamed cookies and a cake with strawberry pudding filling, sprinkled with ground walnuts. We went to the store and bought snacks and mint liqueur, and at home we made juice from sour cherry syrup. We arranged everything nicely on top of the white freezer in the big room where our parents slept. Soon Roza, Verka, and our cousin Verče arrived; Roza brought gifts—notebooks with thick red covers. Verka brought money tucked in both pockets of her skirt, and Verče came with money wrapped in a piece of white paper, just as our aunt had given it to her. We put on some music, Đorđe Balašević, the only cassette that was mine, and Srebra’s Zdravko Čolić tape. We nibbled on breadsticks while Auntie Verka went straight for the liqueur. Then we cut the cake and ate it without candles or ceremony, humming along to the songs on the tapes. Our parents didn’t sit in the room with us. Our father stayed in the garage the whole time, and Mom sat in the kitchen doing needlepoint, ears cocked to catch our voices intermingled with the music. Auntie Verka, who was drunk even in her dreams, could barely stand. She was sipping straight from the bottle, laughing, showing her yellow teeth among which two gold ones glittered. Roza was trying to make the atmosphere merrier by playing “one, two, three, you hit me” with Srebra and me. Verče’s hands twisted a snake fashioned from small black-and-white beads which stood on the wardrobe as a decoration, but aside from the music, there was an emptiness in the room that makes me shudder even today; that birthday was so sad that we never again even mentioned celebrating one. Instead, we suppressed the shared day of our birth, even though the resulting tension lasted the whole day and was worst of all when our parents returned from work without the least acknowledgment that it was our birthday. But Verka remembered that our birthday was in summer, and for several summers in a row she gave us a present, some old thing she had in her apartment—a small porcelain horse, a chicken made of lace, small knitted shoes that had decorated the knobs of her cupboards, a book by Tito, Marx, or Engels that she bought through her workplace until she was allowed to take early retirement due to chronic alcoholism, or money to buy lollipops or chocolate.
Mom always swore about her in the same way: “May her heart devour her,” she said, although it was never clear to us why she disliked her so much, even though no one else in our building liked her. Everybody closed their doors in her face, avoided meeting her on the stairs or outside, pretended to be deaf if she asked them something. There were even those who insulted her openly, shouting, “Worthless drunk! You stink and your apartment stinks. You’ll bring some disease in here! Idrizovo prison is the only place for you! Jesus, your son should never have found you an apartment; he should have just left you on the street! Why did you have to end up in our building?” All sorts of things like that. The men were particularly harsh, because it was to them that Verka most often turned for a cigarette or a sip of rakija or beer. It was only Uncle Blaško, who lived on the first floor, who didn’t argue with her. He didn’t smoke or drink; he just sat on the balcony, and whenever anyone walked by, he mumbled something resembling a greeting. At home, whenever we asked for something sweet, Mom always joked, “Something sweet like your sweet uncle Blaško.” As a matter of fact, I think Srebra and I asked for sweets just to hear that one kind sentence from our mother, to feel that she might love us. Uncle Blaško’s wife died young of stomach cancer, and on the day of her funeral, Srebra and I stood on our balcony and watched the hearse approach. On the corner, Blaško’s six-year-old son stood sadly in his blue suit and pale-blue shirt, his hair combed to the side. A small, lost child without his mother. No one held his hand; he stood alone and waited for the hearse to pull up in front of our building. His father was beating his chest and crying loudly. No one else was crying. All the grown-ups who lived in the apartment building climbed into their cars and set off behind the hearse carrying Milka’s coffin. In all the years before her death, Srebra and I had seen her only once, the day we had a car accident. Our aunt Ivanka had come over that day. She, too, had her troubles, because our cousin was in the hospital to have one of her ovaries removed, even though she was only ten years old. Aunt Ivanka lay all day on the small couch in the kitchen and cried, crushed from pain, grieving over little Verče’s fate, that she might never have even a single child with only one ovary. Our mother said to her, “You think that my two will ever have children? Who will take them with their heads like that?” Srebra and I just stood there, mute, beside the couch. We couldn’t figure out why Verče wouldn’t be able to have a child. We couldn’t remember what our biology teacher had said about how babies were conceived, and we said nothing—Srebra with her eyes downcast, I holding in my hands the little red toy telephone we had bought for when we visited our cousin in the hospital. In the stairwell, we met Roza, jumping up two stairs at a time as usual; she was