it with the sign “Drugstore” on the blue double door that was always freshly painted, but Srebra told me that she pictured it with a sign saying “Self-Serve Market.” Srebra and I argued about what the sign might have said, and she added, “A ‘Drugstore’ sign is ridiculous. There was only one drugstore in town, and it was in a different place. How could that house have been a drugstore?” Drugstores are supposed to be the cleanest places in the world, but that house didn’t even have a bathtub or toilet. Still, our aunt and uncle’s rooms were sparkling clean, but completely wiped from our minds was where we went to the bathroom when we visited, where they bathed, or where our aunt washed the dishes. “What you’re saying is nonsense,” I said. “How could it have been a store when there wasn’t a salesclerk? We just took the books and didn’t pay anything for them.” Several hours later, Srebra added in a serious tone, “Didn’t you learn in school that that’s what Communism is? Take everything you need for free?” Srebra was right, but I hadn’t thought of that. I always thought someone would catch us stealing and, at some point, we would end up in an orphanage as punishment. Perhaps in some way that’s what I wanted. Our conjoined heads often awakened in us feelings of victimhood, but when no one pitied us, I thought that we could at least pity ourselves. Like our grandma pitied herself when our uncle, her son, found himself a good-for-nothing wife, and the day of the wedding had now arrived. So many preparations! Uncle Kole knew better than anyone how to chop vegetables for the salad, and so, for our uncle’s wedding, no one else could do the chopping; we all waited on him. He took a day off without pay to chop all the sacks of cabbage our mother and father had bought at the market in the city. He took a head of cabbage in his mountainous hands, placed it on the cutting board, and quickly and artfully cut it up. On the day of the wedding, he prepared a dressing of oil, vinegar, and salt and stirred it separately with each plate of cabbage. Our father was amazed that our uncle would do woman’s work like that. He was happy to carve the pig with an apple in its mouth. Srebra and I set the table with the dishes, forks, and napkins borrowed from the neighbors. Knives weren’t put on tables then, but we set out big platters of dinner rolls and pieces of pita stuffed with leek or spinach, plates of cheese, salad, and other appetizers. Srebra told me that she wanted to climb onto a chair in front of the hallway mirror so we could have a look at ourselves. We took a chair, placed it in front of the mirror, and climbed up, both of us holding onto the wall. We lifted our dresses up to look at our legs: we both had slightly crooked legs, but beautiful knees and ankles. We were disgusted by each other and ourselves. We were thirteen years old, still young, but with the bodies of maturing girls, me with glasses and she without, and hair that fell to our shoulders, intermingling at the inner sides of our heads. When we were ready to get down from the chair, Srebra knocked into the mirror with her elbow; it wobbled and fell. It broke. Our mother, who was at that moment carrying shot glasses filled with rakija, heard the crash. She set the glasses on the ground, came over, and struck each of us as hard as she could on our heads with her index finger and said, “I wish you’d bang your heads together. This is no life with you.” She gathered up the shards of glass, stuck the mirror frame under the bed in the bedroom, said nothing to the others about the mirror, and no one noticed it wasn’t there. The spot where our mother struck me hurt, as I’m sure it hurt Srebra. Seven years of bad luck in love, I thought, asking myself which of us would be cursed by the broken mirror: me, Srebra, or our uncle, since it broke on his wedding day. We sat at the table in the room that had been set up for children, and while all the other children gaped and nudged each other with their elbows, pointing at us, Srebra and I spoke with our cousin Verče and stole sips from the small glass of rakija we had grabbed from our mother, who, after smacking our heads, had brought the glasses into the room with the longest row of tables. We dug in, filling our stomachs with everything on the table, and when they struck up the dance in front of the house, and later in the village center, we took spots at the head of the dance, singing, shouting, dancing, kicking our legs to all sides. We were so loud and pushy that the villagers gathered around to watch us, rather than the bride and groom, crossing themselves and nudging each other. Our father cursed loudly, but Grandma told him to leave us alone; we were children, so let us enjoy ourselves—we only had one uncle. When the wedding was over and our aunt and uncle went to their room and closed the door, we stood in front of the door with Verče, calling out under our breath: “Three cheers for sex! Three cheers for sex!” And giggling as never before. That night, Srebra got her first period, and I puked. I vomited blood. Our mother had to get up. Instead of a sanitary pad, she gave Srebra several torn rags from our grandmother’s sewing machine, and she made me drink water with baking soda. It was one of the worst nights of our lives. Our father cursed all night, while our mother tried to calm him. “Don’t shout. The newlyweds are next door.” “Fuck your whole tribe,” our father repeated. “Fuck your whole gypsy tribe.” The next day, he fired up the car, and we quickly got in and set off. We skipped the traditional honeyed rakija, and Verče told us later that the women said there wasn’t any blood on our aunt and uncle’s sheet and, because of the shame, they not only burned the godmother’s underwear, as was the custom, but they also didn’t give her any new ones, so she had to go home without any. Verče, Srebra, and I giggled hysterically, thinking about our uncle’s godmother, twice as fat as our aunt, going home through town, probably on foot, with nothing under her skirt. Our mother could have just kicked herself that she missed the honeyed rakija at her brother’s wedding. When we got home we heard that Bogdan and his adopted mother had moved to her sister’s in England. “They got their asses in gear,” said Auntie Dobrila. “Just as soon as they got their passports. The child waved as he climbed into the taxi. You should have seen the suitcase he was carrying, a black leather case like olden times. Who knows what was inside?” Both Srebra and I thought of his crosswords, all the issues of
Brain Twisters and clippings from the newspaper. We were pretty much convinced that was what Bogdan had taken with him to England. I squeezed the little icon in my pocket, jabbing my fingers into its soft wooden surface. Why was I so upset, but Srebra not at all? Why did Srebra say, “As if I care that he gets to go to England; we’re going too, someday. Doctors there will separate us.” I remembered that Srebra wanted to marry someone in London, some unknown person whose name began with a
D. Bogdan was gone; Roza had died; Srebra and I were left as we’d been before: with the awareness of our misfortune growing along with our bodies, with the curves of our hips, and with the breasts that grew and began to ache when we ran up the stairs, one of us holding the railing, the other the wall. A distant relative was visiting and we thought he, like everyone else, noticed our growing breasts and stared at them. In an old
Rosica children’s magazine that we had kept since nursery school there was a picture I liked of a many-tracked train set in a boy’s room. It gave me a feeling of home. Srebra said she wanted to buy a train set with tracks that completely covered the floor of our room one day. We became conscious more than ever of the smells our bodies excreted: the sweat that moistened the hair in our armpits; the grease that crystallized on the tops of our heads; the blood that flowed to our vaginas as if from a hidden well in our wombs. When I got my period, Mom also gave me cloths sewn from old underwear and our father’s undershirts. I had to make pads out of them, and over that I put on a pair of special underwear, of which there was a single pair for both Srebra and me. “Thank God your periods fall on different days, so we don’t need a second pair,” our mother said. The cloths quickly turned red from the blood. They soaked up the liquid blood, but the clots, pink and dark-red, stayed on top like snot, and, while Srebra covered her eyes with her hands, I changed the rags with ones that had been washed. I threw the dirty ones into a green pot in the bathtub, on top of which we kept a white plastic bowl with violets at the bottom. When Srebra next had her period, she’d use the same cloths, laundered, but with stains that couldn’t be removed. We were only able to change the rags once or twice a day, even if they were soaked with blood, because Mom said she had cut up all of the old clothes she had, and we should be careful not to run, because blood would flow more heavily. Srebra’s periods were heavier than mine, so she had to change the rags twice a day, and one time, as she threw the dirty one into the green pot, she screamed, “Cockroach!” My head hurt from her sudden tug. I yanked my hands from my eyes and peered into the pot, where a fat black cockroach sucked blood from Srebra’s pads. I was nauseated by the sight and began to cry. Our mother came into the bathroom, saw what was happening, and said, “Oh, big deal, a cockroach.” Later, we took a bath, but with water carried in a white tub from the boiler in the kitchen rather than water from the bathroom
