us with the glasses right where it hurt the most. Srebra, keeping her lips firmly pressed so as not to inhale the doctor’s bad breath, covered first one eye with her palm then the other, silently guessing the letters and numbers on the chart. Then she would whisper them to me when I couldn’t get them. The doctor appeared not to notice her whispering, or, perhaps because of it, he prescribed thicker and thicker lenses, which stuck out of the black frames, the cheapest ones possible, which my father selected. Every trip to the doctor was followed by complaints: “This is becoming intolerable. All we do is go to doctors’ offices. Screw the two of you. You voracious beasts! You just know everything. You think you’re just smarter than everyone. You’ve devoured me.” Srebra wouldn’t put up with it for long, saying, “Who else is there to take us to the doctor? You’re our father.” That would make him even angrier, and he would swear all over again. I felt terrible that we exhausted him with our ailments. I was embarrassed that he had to take us to the doctor’s, take vacation days from work, get up at night to make tea when we were sick, rub skin cream on our behinds when Srebra and I, in a gust of cold wind, backed into the gas stove, and when he had to give Srebra nose drops every eight hours, which he usually gave to me as well, just in case. It was as if we were someone else’s children hanging around the house, not knowing what to do in their world, with insufficient light for my eyes and insufficient heat on winter nights for Srebra’s sinuses. Her nose ran in torrents. To wipe it, she needed two or three handkerchiefs a day, which our mother hand-washed and dried on the top of the gas stove before returning them to her. Only radiation of the sinuses would help—a ten-day treatment in the clinic by the Bit Pazar. But when they saw us, the clinic staff did not know what to do. They would have to cover my eyes with the red cloth, too. They bound our heads with one long cloth, wrapping it around twice, over my glasses. They pointed a red-hot lamp at Srebra’s face. We had to close our eyes and stay like that for twenty minutes. But I peeked stealthily at the red lamp with one eye. My glasses were pressing on my nose and I quickly got bored with the red of the lamp, so I lifted the cloth a bit more, and, through the other eye, a view through the window unfolded. Outside, I saw the red city buses raising dust, and on the grass by the side of the road sat Albanian men with white felt caps on their heads and Albanian women wearing raincoats and headscarves, while children ran everywhere. Where does their desire come from to sit wherever there is grass on the slope by the road with its constant flow of traffic and spewing gas fumes? Did they feel like Americans or tourists in Central Park sprawled out under the trees with a sandwich or can of soda in their hands? The veiled women and old men with felt caps spread along the road breaking bread and nibbling onions. There was freedom in their sprawled figures that didn’t apply to us. We sat on chairs without backs, side by side in a clinic by the Bit Pazar, in front of a red lamp, eye to eye with the glow. It would be lovely if we, too, could lie on the grass by the road, look at the sky, and eat sunflower seeds. I thought how pleasant it would be to sit on the grass with Roza, who would surely dream up all kinds of new games and funny sayings, or with Auntie Verka—how many interesting things would happen between her and the Albanians on the grass, how many arguments, but then again, maybe not, because Auntie Verka, unlike us Macedonians, liked Albanians and Roms and drunks and whores. She didn’t like ordinary people,
provincials, as she called them. That’s why she picked a Rom as her lover, a guy named Riki—“The Gypsy,” we all called him—who moved in with her, with his big belly and huge behind. They sang and drank together in the apartment. They fought or cried out in pleasure. It was never as loud in our building as those two years when Riki lived with Verka. During that period, Srebra and I did not dare go to her place, and she no longer sent us on little errands to the store. After the radiation treatment for Srebra’s sinuses, we discovered when we got home that there was no power in any of the apartments, because Riki had cut it off. He was angry that no one ever said “Good morning” to him. Curses, howls, everyone shouting—he, Auntie Verka, all the apartment residents. Someone called the police. Two older policemen came into the building and grabbed him, and at the bottom steps they kicked him, beat him with their truncheons, and swore at him. Along with our dad, we barely got past them. Roza was sitting on the railing of the upper stairs, eyes wide. “This is a madhouse,” she said as we went by her. “C’mon, let’s go somewhere,” she whispered, and we needed to get out of there so badly that, without saying anything to Dad, we sneaked past the gathered residents and ran outside. We headed automatically toward the store. Roza said she wanted to buy some snacks. As we left the store, we ran into Bogdan, who was going home to his small shed attached to the back of the store. “Hey, Bogdan, what are you up to?” Roza said, “You’re never around; you don’t hang out with us anymore.” We stopped. Bogdan turned red, then got up his courage and said, “Well, I’m going home to pack.” “Where are you going?” she asked. “I’m moving in with Auntie Stefka,” he said. “How did that happen?” Roza asked. Srebra and I just stood there silently. Bogdan shrugged his shoulders, mumbled something, and then went into his house. We returned home, wondering about what he’d said. Bogdan was moving in with Auntie Stefka! Stefka was a single woman, like Auntie Verka, a decent person, quite young, our parents would say—though she seemed old to us, if still pretty, with long black hair that she wore in a bun—who lived in our building. There were also single women living in the building next door—twin sisters on one floor, and an older woman on another. It wasn’t clear to us why each entryway had an apartment for an unmarried woman, sometimes even two women,
singles, as we called them, because that’s what we heard our parents call them. “My sister says Prime Minister Milka Planinc has decided that each entryway should have a single woman, and she gave them apartments so they, too, could have a life,” Roza explained on the way home. “A woman who doesn’t have a husband or doesn’t want to get married can send an application to Planinc, and she gives her an apartment, and that’s how she becomes a single,” and that seemed logical because we’d heard that Auntie Verka’s son had arranged for her to get the single-woman apartment in our entryway. “But why was Bogdan going to live with one of these single women?” That was not clear to Srebra. “You know, my parents said something about how children can now adopt a mother for themselves,” Roza recalled, adding, “older children, like Bogdan, whom no one wants to adopt.” It seemed pretty weird to me that a child, even an older one, could pick out a mother for himself. Somewhere deep inside me a thought crept in—which mother would we select if we did not have a mother? “Grandma,” was my internal reply, but Grandma was not a
single woman, and among the singles we knew, we were only close to Auntie Verka, but she was a drunk, and thus not allowed to be adopted, and Riki was living with her. I knew there was a special home for children without parents, which is exactly what it was called: Home for Children without Parents. From time to time, our parents threatened to send Srebra and me there. They’d take us there and then we’d see, Lord only knows what, that that was a place for the likes of us. But no one ever mentioned that Bogdan should live in such a home, even though it was logical that a ten-year-old child, which was how old Bogdan was when he was left motherless, shouldn’t live alone. But Bogdan had been living alone for three whole years since his mother died. He ate in the school cafeteria, wore clothes the store clerk gave him, and when he had to go to the doctor or some other official place, our classroom teacher went with him. It had seemed to all of us that Bogdan didn’t want to leave his place. He spent hours there, solving crossword puzzles in
Brain Twisters, to which he’d subscribed with the money that we had raised for him by collecting old paper. And now, suddenly, Bogdan was to move in with Stefka, the most entrancing, but also the saddest, single woman on the street, always in high heels with her hair in a bun that revealed a white face with large dark eyes. At home, we told our father straightaway. He didn’t say anything. He went down to the garage to kill the day he had taken off work to take us to the doctor, but when Mom got home, we also told her, and she turned to our father and said, “I told you. Didn’t they say on television that it had been decided? Each child whose mother and father died simply has to select a new mother and adopt her. Good Lord, save and protect us, instead of grown-ups adopting children, now children adopt parents. A new law in Belgrade, that’s what they said, because there were many single women, and since the state pays for their apartments, they can at least look after a child.” That afternoon, Auntie Dobrila came for coffee. She always came when she needed tweezers to pluck the three hairs that grew near her mouth; she had no tweezers at home, so she used ours, which had been bought at a fair. All us females sat in the kitchen, Srebra and me on our chair, Auntie Dobrila
