finally, her father smiled as broadly as possible. He stood behind Srebra and me and hugged the two of us, placing his hands on our breasts. He ran his hands across them, as if by accident, while we stood, stunned, looking at the tapestry hanging on the wall. His wife went out to bring some juice; Verče sat in front of the television set; our grandmother settled down next to her and looked around. When our prospective aunt appeared, her father let his hands drop from our breasts. Our cheeks burned with shame. “Were they born like this, or did it happen to them afterward?” the mother asked our grandma, pointing to us as she served the juice. “That’s how they were born; it’s fate,” our grandma said. “What’s your sign?” asked our potential aunt. “Your uncle and I have compatible horoscopes, both our signs and rising signs.” “You have beautiful, beautiful granddaughters, even if they are like that,” her father laughed again. He had a leering expression, white teeth with a few gold ones interspersed. Later, as we were waiting for our grandmother to put on her shoes, he passed Verče in the hallway and grabbed hold of her by the breasts, too, as if by accident, while helping her put on her coat. Verče was twelve years old and as flat as a board, but we were a year older and almost unnaturally mature, our nipples obvious under our blouses. And in all our future meetings, at the engagement party, at the wedding, at every family event connected with our uncle and aunt, her father always greeted us warmly with his firm grip, immediately throwing his arms around our necks and literally taking hold of our breasts. Srebra and I would freeze, red with embarrassment. We hated him and we hated ourselves, while his wife, smile in place, chatted on about nothing. They were the owners of a fabric store called Makedonka. On occasion, our aunt gave us a meter or two of some material or other—I remember one that was a dirty white color, with a brown and orange palm tree in the middle, or maybe two palms: our aunt sewed us skirts with elastic waistbands and a flounce. They didn’t look great on us because of the elastic waistbands. We usually wore them with light brown tank tops that stretched enough so, like all our tops, we could pull them up from our feet.
From the very beginning, our grandmother did not like our uncle’s choice. For a daughter-in-law she had wanted a nurse, someone hardworking and as cute as pie, with long hair, a fair complexion, smiling, beautiful, and blond. The woman our uncle had selected was the diametric opposite of Grandma’s ideal. Our uncle cried behind the house when our grandmother told him she was not the girl for him, then took off somewhere. Our aunt cried sorrowfully, “My poor little brother. He’s the only one with any education, and now look…” she sobbed, then set off after him. Srebra thought it was funny, but I cut off her laughter with a sharp pinch to the hip. Verče suggested we take a walk through the village. No sooner had we set out than we met Vida, our grandma and grandpa’s neighbor. Granny Vida was most interested in whether our father had settled things with his family. She always asked when we saw her, and Srebra and I always said we didn’t know anything about it, that the topic was not mentioned in front of us. “So what about you? Are you looking for a cure, or do you plan to stay like this?” Granny Vida asked. Srebra and I did not know anything about that either, because Srebra and I didn’t know where to find a cure, and it always seemed to us that our mother and father weren’t looking, and that we’d continue on with conjoined heads to the end of our lives, old maids, scorned by everyone. Perhaps we’d end up like our neighbor Verka. Deep down, our grandma also seemed to think we’d be old maids, because she frequently told us about an old maid in the village. “She gets her paycheck, eats, and drinks; she’s like a buffalo. What does she need a husband for? A wife with a husband doesn’t eat or drink; she just slogs along looking after children, who then bring home lazy, unwashed daughters-in-law.” Another old maid in the village was Slavica, the agent who interrogated our grandfather that winter, though about what no one told us. Thin, tall, bony, with dark skin and hair, a gold tooth, and eyes that blazed with malice and power, she was the queen of Yugoslav Communism in the village, a member of UDBA—the secret police—dressed in a long leather coat. Who made those leather coats the UDBA agents wore? For years, even after the breakup of Yugoslavia, they wore them over their business suits. Every time Slavica showed up at the house, Grandpa, as if on command, threw a heavy wool jacket over his shoulders, and with peasant opanci on his feet, grimy from working in the animal stalls, went off somewhere with the agent. When he returned, he didn’t want to eat dinner or sit with us in the room with the woodstove, but lay down in his room, where he pulled the quilt and heavy woolen blankets over his head and trembled like a branch. Several years later, they found him, beaten, not far from the vineyard. He spent several days in the hospital and then came to Skopje. Srebra and I were alone. We had just returned from a book fair we had gone to with our school and were at Auntie Dobrila’s; she made leather slippers at home on an industrial sewing machine. We sat on the couch and watched her. She was not bothered by our appearance nor was she ashamed of us. She jokingly referred to us as the “ass and underpants” as if we chose to be together all the time rather than being forced to. Our grandfather arrived at our apartment and rang the bell over and over until it finally occurred to him to ask Auntie Dobrila where we were. We unlocked the door to our place and let him in. He came in and sat on the couch in the kitchen. He was confused, anxious, his head bandaged. This was not our grandfather from the village; he was like some other person. We didn’t know what to talk about. We left him there and went back to Auntie Dobrila’s. We returned after our mother and father came home from work. We read the court decision aloud several times, but still didn’t understand whether our grandfather had been charged, or had brought charges against someone else. The next day, he left on the first bus, and we went to the Prohor Pčinski Monastery with Roza’s class—her teacher taught history—for Roza had begged for us to be taken along to see the monastery where the Antifascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia had met. Srebra and I sat in the front seats of the bus, across from Roza, and all three of us looked straight ahead, through the bus’s windshield, while the radio played the Serbian pop song “Those Green Eyes Were Mine.” Our grandfather never came to Skopje again, and we never went to Prohor Pčinski again. Nor did he allow our grandmother to come to Skopje more than once every two or three years. It made him angry that she sat on the balcony where everyone could see her. Was he jealous? Or did he think that it wasn’t her place, a villager, to be out on the balcony? Or was he afraid that, in his absence, our grandmother would seek out her first love, a man named Kole, whom she had loved for seven years before she married our grandfather? She hadn’t known how to write, so her sister, Mirka, had written letters for her, which she sent to him baked in loaves of bread. He appeared to her in a dream just before he died, and now that he was dead, she was more sorry than ever before that she hadn’t married him and sat in a city garden in Skopje enjoying herself, rather than being tormented by village chores. Unrealized love, a life of pain. Her stomach ached until the end of her life. Every evening she licked sugar in place of morphine.
That winter vacation, after we met our prospective aunt, our Aunt Milka told us that our father had telephoned from work to tell her that our mother was in the hospital. “She was feeling sick to her stomach,” our aunt said. “It’s a good thing it’s vacation and you’re here, or who would have taken care of you?” That evening, while Srebra and I were sleeping with Verče in the bed in the room with the woodstove, our grandma lying at our feet like a dog, I began to run a fever. When she noticed that I was sick, Srebra got really angry. We hated each other most when one of us was ill, because the other one also had to lie there as if she, too, were sick, and, more often than not, would get sick herself. And now, of all times, while white snowflakes blew outside and Verče had already asked Grandfather where the sled was, I got sick. I was burning with fever and almost delirious as I drank yogurt our uncle brought from town especially for me. Srebra covered her nose and mouth with a handkerchief so she would not get sick too. Verče kicked about the room, turning the cassette player on and off. Finally, she put on a Riblja Čorba tape and left the room, and all day, between dreaming and waking, I listened to songs from their album Buvlja pijaca. Srebra looked at the ceiling with her mouth and nose covered, fists clenched. At such moments, she hated me more than anything in the world. I hated her too, because I felt her hatred. Our mother was far away; we didn’t even know which hospital she was in. Most of all, we were afraid she would die. I quickly recovered, and before the end of vacation, Grandma took us to the village center. We stood on the path near the village school and looked downhill toward the small river, where, when she was younger, our grandmother had washed clothes with the other women from the village.