I was often cruel, too, yanking her suddenly in some unexpected direction, but I was more aware that our heads were joined, that we should be careful, every minute, how we moved so as to not hurt ourselves, because the pain in our temples where we were joined was unbearable whenever one of us made a sudden unanticipated movement. Srebra was also aware that we were two in one, but only physically, whenever her head started to ache, not psychologically; she would dream up great plans for her life, and simply took no account of my desires or of our joint capabilities. She was certain that one day, when we were grown and had a lot of money, we’d be able to pay for an operation that could separate us. She believed it so intensely that when our heads were still conjoined, she was making plans as if we’d already been separated.
It was like that with the fortune-telling game, too, when she said in an absolutely calm voice, “I’ve told you a hundred times I want to live in London, and you didn’t write it down. Look, you put down the letter S. That can only be Skopje, but I’m not staying here, not for anything in the world! In London they will surely be able to separate us. They have those kinds of doctors.”
My eyes were already welling up with tears. I pinched her with my left hand on her right elbow as hard as I could. Srebra raised her left arm over her head and smacked me on the head as hard as she could. Those blows on the head would hurt for days. Mom once said to her, “If you continue on like this, one day you’re going to punch a hole in her brain and then what troubles we’d have!” And, as always, our father added, “You voracious creatures, you’ve devoured the world!”
Although our heads were not merely joined but also shared a vein by which our blood mixed—in moments of excitement, anxiety, or other extreme situations we felt each other’s hearts beating in our temples—we thought differently; our brains were not conjoined. I still don’t know whether this was a lucky or an unlucky circumstance of our lives.
That’s why, whenever Srebra hit me on the head, she hissed, “Don’t you dare tattle!” But this time, she didn’t manage to say anything, because I started to cry so desperately that Roza immediately bent over us to wipe my tears away with her hand.
“Come on, Zlata, don’t. Look how nicely things are going to turn out for you. Your husband will be a multimillionaire and you’re going to have one child, and with all those millions, you’re sure to find a doctor to separate your heads.” I was crying and kneeling down, stock-still, sensing that in Srebra’s mind she was already leaving for London, alone, without me, and I was nowhere. I felt I was not there, that I did not exist.
“Hey, you guys, what kind of game is this?” Bogdan called out just then, having quietly drawn near. Up until then, he had been sitting a little way off from us on the concrete wall above the driveway, leaning on the door, stealing glances at what we were doing while seemingly engrossed in solving—in his head, without a pencil—a crossword puzzle torn from a newspaper.
“You stay out of this,” Srebra shouted at him. I didn’t say anything. I was swallowing the mucus that had collected in my throat from the tears, and Roza just shrugged her shoulders.
“All you think about is marriage. You have nothing better to do,” Bogdan called out, and then exclaimed in surprise, “Hey look, the letter B! That’s not me, is it?”
Just at that moment, before my face turned red, a flowerpot with a cactus in it fell from one of the balconies and shattered on our fortune-telling squares. We could hear curses and shouts of indignation. The dirt scattered all over the squares we had drawn; my square was the only one now even barely visible. My fortune said I would get married a year before Srebra to a boy whose name began with B, that he’d be a multimillionaire, we’d live in Skopje, and have one child. That was not Bogdan, because Bogdan was the poorest boy we knew, and I couldn’t imagine him being a multimillionaire. I thought only poor girls could become multimillionaires when they grew up and that boys were either poor or rich all their lives.
We raised our heads. On the second floor balcony stood a single woman named Verka who shouted in a voice husky from cigarettes and alcohol, “You killed my mother! You! No one else! But you’ll die, too!”
Auntie Mira, from the balcony above, tried to calm her down. “Now Verka, if you throw flowerpots like that, you’ll hit the children. Go on, get back inside.”
At that moment, our father appeared on our balcony in his white undershirt and shouted, “Wait till I come down and get you, you old drunk!” Then he turned to us and called in an equally sharp voice, “Go around to the back of the building. Your mother dropped a towel. Go and get it.”
Verka went in, Roza ran home, and Srebra and I staggered—as always when we walked—to the rear of the building. There, just under the second row of balconies, we saw the towel hanging on a branch of the plum tree we had planted with Roza two years before as a symbol of our friendship. The little tree had already grown quite a bit; it reached almost to Uncle Sotir’s window. We caught hold of the towel, and instead of going back around the building and entering through the main entrance, we climbed in through the basement window. The glass had been removed years ago, probably deliberately, so tenants wouldn’t have to walk all the way around to get to the back of the building where they made winter preserves, or to the garages, illegally built from odds and ends, so that now, instead of green shrubs and grass, all we saw from our windows were garages: one made with a tarp, another from corrugated iron, a third with concrete, another out of boards.
Bogdan had followed us as far as the window; then he simply said, “Ciao,” and climbed the nearby linden tree.
“Aren’t you going home?” I managed to call out after him as Srebra pulled the two of us through the window, but he didn’t reply. There was nothing to say; for a year now there had been no one waiting for him at home. We all knew that, but we pretended we didn’t, ever since the day his mother was buried and our class went with our teacher to express our condolences. Before that, Bogdan and his mother had lived next to the Slavija supermarket in a small single-room shack with a toilet attached to its back wall. His mother cleaned the stairs in several apartment buildings, including ours. He didn’t have a father. Although he was quite poor, he was always carefully dressed, washed, and combed. His mother, who had grown old and ugly before her time, talked constantly about Bogdan: she wanted nothing else but for him to finish his education, become somebody and something. Bogdan lived up to her expectations, both in school and out; he read everything he could lay his hands on, and he loved crosswords. Tugging at their sleeves, he begged the men who read newspapers on the benches or on the balconies to give him the page with the crossword puzzle. More often than not, he didn’t have a pencil, so he’d solve them in his head, concentrating to remember the solutions he’d already figured out. The children who didn’t know where Bogdan lived had no idea just how poor he was, or that he’d been starving ever since his mother was diagnosed with throat cancer.
We learned all this less than a month after his mother’s death from his homework essay “When You Hit Rock Bottom.” That morning, the principal came into our classroom with our teacher, and while we were still trembling from the shock of the principal’s sudden appearance, our teacher asked, “Who doesn’t want to read his or her homework aloud?” Confused by the question, even though we would all rather not have read our homework aloud, no one had the courage to raise a hand. Only Bogdan did. “Ah, there’s someone who doesn’t want to. That’s why he’s going to have to,” she said, and both she and the principal laughed out loud. Bogdan had no choice; he stood up and began to read in a trembling voice:
Before