Mom, our aunt Ivanka, Srebra, and I, as well as Aunt Milka, who was already sick and going to the doctor’s in the hospital where Verče was. We hadn’t driven for five minutes, when, turning onto the main street, our father hit another car coming from the opposite direction. The crash wasn’t a big one, but it was enough to frighten us more than we’d ever been frightened before. Our aunt and Milka got out of the car, still shaken, and ran to the bus stop to wait for a bus to the hospital. Although we could have simply gone home on foot, we had to stand and wait for the police. We didn’t get home for another hour. Dad was upset. He couldn’t believe something like this had happened to him. He kept looking at the car’s dented bumper. Mom simply went mute. She did not utter a single word. She was pale, and I wondered whether she might have a fainting spell, because those spells had lasted for years, when she’d suddenly feel dizzy, go pale, and then lose consciousness, all accompanied by the words, “I’m going to die.” Srebra would usually cry—she couldn’t keep her face puckered up in the frown she used to keep back tears—while I trembled, my body going cold as if it were thirty below. I trembled so much that I shook Srebra as well, and my hands became sweaty. But this time, she didn’t lose consciousness, and when the three of us got home, she mechanically poured dried beans into the red pot and began to pick through them, sitting in the kitchen on the couch with her eyes fixed on the pot—picking and picking over the beans. Srebra and I sat down by the small table on the wide chair our father had made for us a long time ago from some boards he got somewhere, with a cushioned seat. We just sat there, saying nothing, handing back and forth our only doll, its crying mechanism long since removed from its belly, naked, its head bald on top, with one arm that kept falling off. We passed it back and forth as if it were a real baby: slowly, gently, without a word. It was deathly quiet in the apartment. Suddenly, the front door opened, and our father came in with another man, a mechanic I supposed. They sat in the dining room, we didn’t move a muscle; Mom didn’t get up but continued picking at the beans. We heard our father ask the man whether he would like a glass of rakija. He must have nodded in agreement because we didn’t hear a response. Then Dad went into the big room where the glasses and rakija were kept. When he came back, Srebra and I peeked from the kitchen table through the opening between the kitchen and dining room, as Dad said to the man, “Here you go, old pal.” That was the first time in my life that I heard the word
pal, and it has remained in my memory, stitched in embroidered letters. I was thrilled with the word; it filled me with hope. They drank the rakija and went out again. We still hadn’t spoken. Srebra had to go to the bathroom, so we went, and while I sat on the trashcan holding my nose so Srebra’s excrement wouldn’t stink so much, she began to giggle, shaking my head also with her giggles. “He said ‘old pal’—that’s ridiculous! Dad doesn’t have any old pals, since he doesn’t even know anyone from where he came from. He’s talking nonsense.” I knew Srebra was right, but didn’t say anything. Our father hadn’t been in touch with his family for years. When he and our mother got married, they lived with his parents in the house that, our mother said, he built when he was still a child, lugging the cement and mortar himself. Our aunt and uncle were little then and played hide-and-seek while he worked excruciatingly hard, but they’re the ones living there now. Put simply, his mother and father treated the newlyweds very badly. They were unhappy that their son had married a village girl; while our father was at work, our pregnant mother stayed home, in rooms with small barred windows in the basement of the house. Grandpa would insult her, chase her outdoors, and then call her back inside. Several times, he even hit her with a broom. Grandma acted as if she didn’t see anything. Our mother cried every day, and maybe that’s why we were born with conjoined heads, with this inoperable physical deformity. When our grandparents saw what kind of children their daughter-in-law had produced, they just threw us out onto the street. Dad managed to take his only coat along with a pink coatrack that had a mirror and a shelf for hats, which stands in our hallway to this day. With us—infants just a few days old—the coatrack, and their bags, they hopped on the first bus that came along and begged the driver to take them with all their baggage. The coatrack’s mirror banged against the handrail throughout its journey on the bus, and cracked down the middle. Finally, we reached the last stop, at the other end of the city. We got off the bus, and the driver took pity on my parents and helped with the luggage. They asked the first woman they met whether she knew of a room for rent nearby. The woman, Stefka, lived in a small house at the edge of the neighborhood. She was a widow whose son had gone off to Germany, so she happened to have an empty room. Stefka picked up Srebra and me, thinking we were normal twins, and would have pulled our heads off had our mother not explained that we were born with joined heads, God save and preserve us. Granny Stefka gave us a small room in her house anyway; she found a woven basket for Srebra and me, and we stayed there for three whole years, until our parents were able to buy an apartment on credit two bus stops away. Our father never forgave his parents for what they did that day, and they literally forbade their other son and daughter, and all the other members of the extended family, to have any sort of ties with him. Our father was left with no family, no loving touch of a parent’s hand. Our aunt and uncle felt no compassion for their older brother, erasing him from their lives. One day, though, when Srebra and I were six years old, a young woman came to our house. The darkest brunette we had ever seen sat in the big room on the couch where our mom and dad slept. She picked up the belly-shaped hot-water bottle that was lying on the bed. Srebra and I had won it in a school lottery and christened it Hermes; we played with it, rocking and hugging it before bed, when we filled it with hot water from the small green pot on the oil stove. But it was our parents who slept with it. The young woman turned the water bottle over, looking at it from all sides, then put it down and took from her handbag two chocolate bars with crisped rice—the biggest ones we had ever seen—and gave them to Srebra and me. “This is your aunt,” our father said with a shaky voice, his hands trembling like slender branches. We just stared at this aunt of ours. She sat there awhile and cried a bit, without uttering a single word; then she stood and left. We ate the chocolate bars with crisped rice over the course of a whole month, square by square. Nobody ever mentioned the visit again. After that, our father’s hands never stopped trembling, and he was so nervous that he shouted at every little thing. In fact, his moods changed every five minutes: He’d be polite and gentle with us, calling us his little chicks. He would buy us chocolate bars with pictures of animals on the wrappers, but then he would shout at us: “Get lost!”; “You voracious asses, you have devoured the world!”; or “Beasts, I’m going to take my belt to you!” One day, when we were in the dining room making models of traffic lights and signs for a school assignment, he got totally fed up and began reeling through his repertoire of insults. I tugged on Srebra with all my strength, because I couldn’t stand the torrent of words dirtying his mouth. Srebra cried out in pain. We went out onto the balcony, and below, Lazarus Day singers were strolling by with a bear. The air was wintry and melancholic; the large room was cold. In the dining room, Dad glued the models together as he shouted, “You have devoured the world!” Saint Lazarus was nowhere to be seen, but the bear was walking on its hind legs. And on that day, Srebra and I once again ate sole, flour-dusted and fried—that whole winter we ate sole—I liked the shape of the fish, like an inflated heart. Srebra poked the body with her fork, making the form of a cross, and then ate it with her hands. Our mother and father ate boiled ham that came from the five-kilo tin fried with eggs, but the pieces of processed ham didn’t stick, they just lay there beside the eggs in the pan. Our father had bought both the fish and the ham through his work, along with a large plastic container of plum jam. He would drink some of the red wine he kept in the basement and his anger would fade away. I could hardly wait for the electricity to go out, which usually happened in the afternoon, due to rationing. Then all four of us would squish together on the small couch in the kitchen, Srebra and I would ask Mom and Dad common expressions in French, and they would dredge up something from their school days, or make something up and we’d all laugh, while around us there was total darkness, and it wasn’t unpleasant to sit next to one another, huddled up, not only for me and Srebra, but for them, too, for our parents. It wasn’t unpleasant to love one another and be happy. Those afternoons without electricity were beautiful in their illusion of family happiness. But when the lights flashed back on (I always imagined a man sitting in a large room filled with on/off switches who alone determined when the lights would go on) and we could see one another, we all got up right away. Srebra and I, as if on command, jumped to our feet. We’d busy ourselves with something we could
