between the kitchen and the dining room, stopping with one foot there, one here, arms crossed, ready to sit down on the chair in the dining room and turn on the television. Srebra and I were eating the Lenten leek pita along with cheese, even though it was a fasting day. We didn’t scarf down all the leek pie so there would be some left for our parents. When we finished, they sat down to eat, and we stood, leaning our elbows on the back of one of the dining-room chairs, staring at the television screen. This is how Christ was born in our house: quickly. I always thought of him as a premature baby lying in an incubator. Srebra and I went to our room, sat down on the floor, and turned on the yellow heater behind our backs. I asked her what she thought about God. She said that she did not think about him and that God didn’t exist, that we had evolved from monkeys; after all, weren’t the two of us absolute proof that man descended from monkeys? Surely some simian mistake had caused us to be born with conjoined heads, because if God were perfect, as they say, why hadn’t he made us normal and not like this, disfigured for our entire lives. I didn’t know what to say; Srebra was convinced that, while my God may have created other people, he certainly hadn’t created us; we were clearly descended from apes. I wanted to go to bed as soon as possible. I needed to scrunch down under the quilt and move my body as far away from Srebra’s as possible, as far away as our heads would allow, so I could be alone with my thoughts. I had one specific thought that helped me fall asleep on my most difficult nights: “my” house, the house I would have one day in a beautiful Skopje neighborhood, after Srebra and I had been separated and each of us was able to live as she wished. The house had two floors, with rooms and furniture that never changed in my imagination; for years, I always pictured it the same way, the rooms clearly laid out: tables, beds, pictures on the walls, dishes, everything. I would live in that house with my husband, who would be named Bobby—I really liked that name—a doctor, and he would have his office in the back part of the house. Our bedroom would be on the upper floor between the bathroom and the children’s room. I would sit for entire days in the armchair in my large library, reading books and writing novels. Since we would have lots of money, every month I would visit a poor family on the outskirts of the city and bring them everything: food, clothing, medicine, toys for the children, anything they needed. And I pictured their house in detail as well, always the same, and I pictured them too, always the same, as if they really existed, as if we had known each other for years. What didn’t I imagine before falling asleep? I went deep inside that house of mine, until the sweetness of sleep overtook me.
But that night, as soon as I fell asleep, Srebra elbowed me in the ribs to wake me up. “Mom’s sick! Hey, Mom’s sick,” she whispered. I opened my eyes in the dark and pricked up my ears to hear the voices coming from the dining room. “Let’s go,” said my father. Then my mother, in a tired voice, said, “Take my bag.” They left; they locked us in and left. Where? To which hospital and why? Srebra and I lay on our backs, silent. We swallowed the spit collecting in our throats. We lay there without saying a word, without moving, as if frozen, until an hour or two later when they returned. They went to bed quickly, got up at the usual time, five thirty, went to work, and we went to school a bit later. On our way home from school, we had the same thought: boil some water in the little pot with the red cover (the one that came with a packet of Vegeta seasoning, one of socialist Yugoslavia’s rare marketing successes), shake in the chicken soup packet, add noodles, boil it, pour it into small deep china bowls, chop up some stale white bread, and then deliver this pleasure to our stomachs, which, during the day, only ever had a roll spread with margarine, ajvar, or a small cheese-filled bun for a snack. We’d slurp up that soup as if it were human warmth while Mom, pale, distracted, or sick lay on the couch in the kitchen and watched us silently, absently, or worked mechanically on her needlepoint, pushing the needle through the small openings. Our father would be rustling down below in the garage. Srebra and I sat on our chair, and all our sadness, shock, and concern floated in the chicken soup with the crumbled stale bread, which, homeopathically transformed into a transitory feeling of security and happiness, caressing our souls like the soft warm blanket we didn’t have in our childhood because we were covered with heavy quilts, or roughly woven covers, scratchy shag wool throws, or small tattered blankets that smelled of dust and decay. That soup from a packet, served with boiled beans, was one of our favorite, but also one of the most unavoidable, meals of our primary-school years. As we slurped our soup greedily, we glanced, either surreptitiously or openly, under the couch on which our mother was lying, where, ducking our heads, we had hidden the small first aid booklet, and during moments of our mother’s dizzy spells, when we were not sure what was happening to her, we madly turned the pages with trembling hands, hearts in our throats. Although we tried to remember how to do artificial respiration and revive a person, nothing stayed in our heads, and we never really learned how to give first aid. When our mother got up to use the bathroom, Srebra and I, as if on command, would sneak into the pantry, open the refrigerator and, one after another, quickly take swigs from the blueberry juice that was purchased only when our mother was sick—on those days when she wore her blue robe with its yellow-green flowers. That’s how we knew for sure she was sick, and we felt a tightness in our chests, and in the spot where our heads were conjoined it felt like the striking of a wall clock. Her robe covered her body almost to her feet, protecting it with cotton, and announcing to her surroundings that her body underneath was weak, vulnerable, and sick. On the days Mom wore her blue robe, she was drowned in a world of her own. She had the unhappiest face in the world, and never smiled. What was it: depression, nerves, or some other illness? Or was it only tremendous pain? Reliving the memories of her first year of marriage when her father-in-law beat her with a broom and she was pregnant with us, and then nursing babies with conjoined heads? All the torments, all the human evils that had injured this poor typist? Whenever she felt she was at death’s door—we knew that by the whispered sentence, “I’m going to die”—our dad would start the car and take her to the doctor. When she felt like that he would shut us into the big room so we wouldn’t see it if she died. And outside, the hit song “Julie” echoed, filling the air with lightheartedness and sadness at the same time. One day, several years later, when we returned from school, our mother was sitting on the balcony doing “The Gypsy” needlepoint pattern and crying. At moments like that, neither Srebra nor I knew what to say, what to do. We stood, leaning on the balcony and turned toward her, silently, our hair hanging loose, intermingled, our two heads with one head of hair reflected in the window of the balcony door. All at once, our mother stood up, left everything behind, and went out. We saw her from the balcony as she hurried, nearly at a run, down the street that led to the store. She returned with a bar of chocolate. She opened it and ate it herself, without offering us a single small square. That day, Srebra and I ate beans without meat again, but she ate chocolate, in silence. Then her sickness went away. Surely, the fortune-tellers and seers to whom she went also had a share in it. One of them had “foretold” that the thermometer from Ohrid in the kitchen behind the door had mercury in it and was making my mother’s blood pressure drop, so it had to be changed. And that she had to drink English ivy tea. Black magic? Several times, we found rags burned black and sooty in front of our door. Who had left them there and why? Did something from that ominous magic touch us? Srebra told me, “Magic does not touch those who are descended from monkeys, it touches those who are descended from God.” I felt faint with fear.
But that January in 1985, I just wanted the days to pass until winter break when we’d travel alone with our cousin Verče on one of the Proletariat bus company buses to the village and directly into the embrace of our grandmother. The fire blazed in the only warm room in the house; while Srebra and I sat in our grandma’s lap, Verče had already found something to amuse herself—she had pulled a lead pellet from her pocket and was sticking it into the woodstove with tongs to see if it would melt. “Tomorrow we will go into town,” our grandmother said. “We’ll see the girl your uncle wants to marry. But don’t tell your mother, she’d yell at me, asking why I took you along and brought shame to us in front of the in-laws.” “We won’t tell her,” said Srebra, but I had a gigantic lump in my throat. We could hardly wait. Grandma, Verče, Srebra, and I went to the house of the girl our uncle, our mother’s brother, was in love with so we could have a look at her. She and her sister were standing at the window—the chosen one was a brunette, her sister a blond—like a picture of angels and divine brides in heaven, although the only thing that our prospective aunt-to-be had of that image was the plump body of a woman in a baroque painting of