A Spare Life. Lidija Dimkovska

and pouring water over ourselves from the yogurt container, which we also passed back and forth. Our souls boiled with anger and helplessness and hatred toward each other, or perhaps shame in front of each other. “Wash yourselves well,” our mother said, “I am taking you somewhere.” It was September. We had turned thirteen. We had started the seventh grade, and were the most developed in our class, really, like mature women with breasts and hips. That first Friday in September, our father had gone on his first and last business trip to Mavrovo, to a hotel that was under construction and needed a glazier to finish off the work. Our mother took advantage of the occasion. She ironed our skirts, which had large openings in front through which one could see our white slips underneath, hemmed with silky trim. She handed us our blue tee shirts with palms on the chest and large neck holes so we could pull them over our legs without stretching them, and said, “We’re going somewhere special.” We were burning with curiosity, since our mother never organized any surprises, not nice ones, that is, and this seemed like it might be a nice surprise. We took the bus as far as the Engineers’ Club, and from there, walked to Roosevelt Street, where we turned onto a small street lined with beautiful old houses with gardens. In front of one of them, a white house with stairs leading up to the front door, Mom said, “This is the house your father grew up in. Ring the bell. I’ll meet you in two hours at the bend in the road. She turned and quickly set off. Srebra and I stood in the yard, frozen, confused. I had my hand tightly wrapped around the icon in my skirt pocket. Srebra was biting her nails. Her heart pounded in my left arm and mine in her right. We squeezed close together and barely made our way up the stairs, which led to a small porch with a door that was half glass, half metal. We rang the bell. An older man who looked a lot like our father opened the door. He stared at us, took a frantic step forward as if he might close the door, collected himself, and asked, “Yes?” “We’re Stanko’s daughters,” I said, rather loudly and decisively, feeling the tapping of my finger against the icon, and that tapping brought strength to my voice. Srebra just stared at him, uncontrollably, so intently that my face was also pulled forward. Our grandfather, our father’s father, whispered, “Come in,” and once inside, in the wide hallway, he grasped our heads, mine in one hand, Srebra’s in the other. It felt like he was deciding if he should kiss us, but he just held our heads in his hands, then let us go. He took us into the room where our grandmother, the uncle who, two months prior, had fled with his family from Pretor when he saw us there, his wife, and their young daughter, our cousin, were watching television. “Look who’s come to see us,” our grandfather stated, pretending to sound happy, but his trembling voice was filled with concern. The room filled with silence which was then cut by the girl’s shout, as she dragged her mother toward us: “Look at their heads! Look!” Our aunt, whom we had fleetingly seen in Pretor, was young and beautiful. She smiled sincerely and greeted us, and only then did our uncle and grandmother greet us. Our grandmother was very dark, thin, all skin and bones, with black hair that peeked out from under a brown headscarf tied in the front. She was identical to the aunt who had brought us the chocolate bar with rice, only much older. They made coffee, the first coffee of our lives. Our grandmother read our future in the grounds of our Turkish coffee; our grandfather asked whether we had a car, whether our father was still working as a glazier, and whether we had been to a doctor about our heads. Our uncle kept quiet, watching us. Grandmother kept repeating, “Oh, children, children.” No one asked about our mother. Nor did they ask how we had found their house, or who had brought us there. At one point, I wanted to tell my grandfather that he was an idiot for beating our mother, but the words stuck in my throat and refused to be spoken. Srebra kept hiking up her skirt then jerking it down toward her knees while answering their questions. The little girl ran around, pointing out objects she played with: an old wooden pestle with red embroidery around its handle, an orange juicer with a rusty sieve, a beat-up, three-legged wooden stool. I thought that perhaps our father had sat on that stool when he lived here. And perhaps our grandmother had strained tea through the strainer with the rusty bottom for him when he was sick. But nothing recalled that, years earlier, our father had lived here. In this house, which, our mother had said, our father built with his own hands when he was still a child, there was no history of him; his past did not exist. Srebra and I looked at the clock on the wall, and in the extremely tense atmosphere of quiet with spurts of words that cut the air with exaggerated weight, we wanted those two hours to pass quickly so we could leave, tear ourselves away from our might-have-been relatives, from this family that was not for us, and go back where we had come from, to our home, such as it was. As we were leaving, our grandfather gave us money, a thousand Yugoslav dinars, and our little cousin gave us a kiss, but the others said goodbye with just a handshake and a big smile. They did not say, “Come again.” Nor did our mother ever say we should go there again. Her goal had been accomplished: those grandparents, our aunt and our uncle, and our little cousin most of all, had become part of our thoughts, of our lives. We were aware of their existence, aware that there were people living in the center of the city, in the house that our father had built when he was a child, out of which our grandfather had driven Srebra and me when we were only a few weeks old, and these people, in some way, belonged to us, as we did to them. Before we met them, we had not considered them part of our lives, but now, now that we had met them and were certain that we did not want them to be part of our lives, they had become a part of it. And we had become a part of theirs. That was the most significant. They could no longer sleep peacefully, let alone live, without also thinking of us. That’s what our mom said. Years later, we heard that our grandfather died in great agony, suffering, on the brink of death for days, neither here nor there, neither in this world nor the next. As for our grandmother, she nearly died of hunger, locked in one of the basement rooms where our grandfather had mistreated our mother when they lived there, from where he had driven us. Our grandmother died sick, racked with pain, unaware of anything going on around her. Shame on our uncle’s family—they fed her bread and water and left her to die with our father’s name on her lips. Much too late, much too late. Not even after our grandfather’s death did she gather the courage to seek out her son, to see him. She died like a dog. They say a man dies in the manner in which he lived. The one who lived in inner agony would die in agony; the one who thought of life as a game would die playing; the one who suffered his whole life would die of illness; and the one who loved greatly would die of love.

       1986–1991