winter and we had no heat. During the day I wandered around the streets after school, at night I huddled under three comforters. Every day I went back to the school at night to steal some of the dried flowers from the foot of the memorial to our school patron so I could take them to the pig. My mother came back from the hospital just before Christmas. She couldn’t speak. She just lay there watching—first me, then the pig, then the rabbit, one by one. By Christmas our pig weighed twenty-five kilos, but its brother that lived at the neighbors’ weighed two hundred kilos. The neighbors slaughtered our pig along with theirs and made us three sausages and some ham from it. Not long after that, my mother went back to the hospital. All winter, until March, I nibbled bits of sausages and ham. I was thrifty; I wanted to save for the future. In the spring, the last sausage began to get moldy, but I still tore off little pieces and rubbed the mold off; that’s what I lived on until July. The rabbit got thinner and thinner. One day I decided to pluck its fur and sell it for bread money. While I was plucking it, I pulled off a chunk of pink meat. It started to bleed. The fur hardly weighed a hundred grams. The rabbit was all skin and bones, a living skeleton. I killed it before it starved to death. I cooked it and ate it. My mother came home and died. I survived. Things can’t get worse than that.
Everyone in the classroom was speechless. Behind my glasses my eyes filled with tears. From the way the skin connecting our heads pulled tight, I knew that Srebra’s face was puckered up the way it did whenever she felt tears coming. The teacher and the principal muttered something to each other, then the school bell rang, and we all ran out of the classroom.
Srebra’s steps and mine were never fully in sync; either I dragged her along or she dragged me. That’s how it had been ever since we learned to walk: she wanted to walk fast, I still wanted to crawl. If it hadn’t been for Granny Stefka’s patience, we might never have learned to walk. She’d crouch on the floor holding me up at the same height as Srebra, who wanted to walk, and she’d drag herself silently along with me in tow, so that Srebra would not be stopped in her attempts to walk. When I wanted to crawl, Granny Stefka would pretend to be a cat and get Srebra to crawl all the way to a piece of black cloth that she had set down by the door, playing the part of a mouse. All of us crawling together, Srebra and I with our joined heads and Granny Stefka with her fat belly dragging along the floor.
The day after the incident with Bogdan’s homework was a Saturday, and we went out to gather used paper, going from apartment to apartment, from house to house, even carrying paper out of basements. At the end of the day, the custodian and the principal weighed the paper we had collected on a balance scale, calculated what it would sell for, and, before sending it off, handed Bogdan a money-filled blue envelope—our balm for his wounds. After that, no one ever asked how he lived, what he did with the money, or whether he had anything to eat. Later, we found out that he had given the money to the salesclerk at the grocery store next to his shack for a subscription to the crossword puzzle magazine Brain Twisters, and now a copy of the magazine accompanied him wherever he went. Whenever we saw him doing crossword puzzles—face flushed, eyes sparkling—he looked a little crazy to Srebra and me. We hardly ever said a word to him if Roza wasn’t with us. Srebra used a somewhat mocking tone, but I felt my words turn to stone in my chest; I couldn’t get out a sentence from beginning to end. I was blocked as if in front of a stranger who didn’t know my language: you stare at them, and don’t know what to say to get them to understand you. Roza had no problem communicating with anyone; she spoke to everybody she met. She was the most outgoing girl on our street and wasn’t inhibited with children or adults. Because of Roza, Bogdan felt welcome in our company, but he was never pushy; he didn’t look for any special attention, didn’t count on any of us. One day, Roza lost an earring behind the building. We looked for it in the tall grass between the garages, near the transformer under the apricot tree that produced delicious orange fruit in the summer—with me dragging Srebra while she dragged me. Srebra stretched her hand into the thorns by the fence separating the backyard of our building from the house of the “brothers”—as our parents called the men who lived opposite us—and pulled out the earring. Next to the transformer there was a large clump of grass called “lucky stalks.” We each plucked a stem, made a wish, then pulled off all the little stems—you were supposed to be left with just the central spike. If we managed to keep the top from tearing off, we hid the lucky stalk, burying it somewhere to make a wish come true. I couldn’t hide mine without Srebra seeing me, nor could she hide hers without my seeing, even though the unwritten rule was for the other to close her eyes. I was sure that our wishes would never come true and that only Roza could hope for some pleasant surprises in the future. That’s why we gave in to her will, her ideas, and her ever-changing suggestions for new adventures. Every clever or dumb thing we did until two in the afternoon when our parents returned from work and her sister came home from high school we did at Roza’s. In the small cupboard in their dining room next to the coffee cups and wine glasses there were two kaleidoscopes, Roza’s red one and her sister’s blue one. Srebra and I took them without asking permission. I picked the red one, Srebra the blue one, and while Roza rustled about the kitchen, we peered inside at the amazing designs. When I think about it, I don’t believe that I ever again held a kaleidoscope in my hands for as long as I did at Roza’s. Only once, in a small toy store in Covent Garden, in London, did I come across a similar red kaleidoscope, but when I stared into it, there was nothing like the checkered, angular, or cubic designs in Roza’s kaleidoscope, but rather, rounded ones, with soft transitions in color. It seemed a traitor to the true meaning of a kaleidoscope. While Srebra and I each peered at the sharp colors and figures, one nearly touching the other, Roza came into the dining room holding an odd-looking plastic water pitcher shaped like a bunch of grapes; around its mouth she had tied a thin rope about two or three meters long. “Come on! Let’s water the grass,” she said, which meant that Srebra and I should go downstairs, behind the building, under her balcony, and from the balcony she would lower the bunch of grapes with the string, we would grasp it, and then we would water the chokecherry tree that brought springtime into the gloom cast by the garages behind the building each year. We’d also water the other flowers growing in the grass under Auntie Elica’s, Roza’s, and Auntie Dobrila’s balconies. This was the only patch of ground, these few square meters of nature in the midst of the urban chaos behind our building, upon which no garage had sprung up. After we had used up all the water, Roza hoisted the pitcher up to the balcony, refilled it, then lowered it again, and thus we watered every bit of ground, including, finally, the hedge that grew around the green space. Then Roza would come down, having already made plans for a new game.
She decided to teach us to ride a bicycle. That had always seemed impossible to us, to our father in particular, who kept, next to his black bike in the garage, an old red Pony bicycle that he had picked up somewhere; it had an old black saddle, a chain guard painted orange, and no rear bike rack. Whenever we went down to his garage to get chalk so we could draw, we always looked at the red Pony with a vague, questioning feeling of how we might possibly ride together—where Srebra would sit, where I’d sit. And he would call out right away, “Bikes aren’t for you; if you fell off, we’d be stuck trying to sort everything out.” Roza disagreed. She urged us to go home, get the key to the garage, and take out the bike while she got hers from their garage, then we’d follow her instructions on how to ride. So, of course, that’s exactly what we did. First, Roza adjusted the seats of both bikes so they were the same height. Then she told Srebra to sit on the Pony and me to sit on her bike, placing them precisely side by side. We had to cross our arms so my left hand was on Srebra’s right handlebar, and her right hand was on my left handlebar. “Look in front of you, not down at the ground,” instructed Roza, and she pushed, holding onto both seats. We rode two meters, and then smacked into an old Lada parked at the curb. We held ourselves up against the windows, and fortunately, didn’t hit our heads on anything. But a small dent was visible on the front door on the driver’s side, and both bikes’ handlebars were bent. When our fathers came home from work, we confessed what we had done. Other than shouts, threats to send us to an orphanage, and curses, Srebra and I weren’t punished. We never asked Roza whether she was punished for doing something she shouldn’t have. On the days Roza didn’t come outside in the afternoon, Srebra and I, not knowing what to do with ourselves, usually went to Auntie Verka’s. If we weren’t with Roza, we rarely wanted to play together or go to the same place. It was a constant problem both for us and for our parents that we never wanted the