A Spare Life by Lidija Dimkovska Read Free Book Online Page B

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 seeher. 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