the waist up, jumped into the water at the same time and poked around until one of the younger boys pulled the cross from the water. The priest called out, “Blessings upon you, Jovan! God bless you!” He patted the boy’s shoulder, which was turning blue, sprinkled him with basil, and presented him with a small grayish-black radio-cassette player. “Grandma, how come Grandpa didn’t come to jump in after the cross? Or Uncle?” I asked, but, walking along behind us, she said, “Oh, they’re not keen on such things.” Grandpa only went to church on Saint Nicholas Day, and our uncle was a young Communist. It was Epiphany, and the Blessing of Water, a celebration of Saint John the Baptist’s baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River, when God presented his beloved Son to the people while the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, flew above their heads. For years I asked myself, and once I asked Srebra: “Why in the form of a dove, and not some other bird?” Srebra said that monkeys loved to catch doves, and that is why the Holy Spirit appeared to them in the form of a dove. I didn’t believe her. But really, why in the form of a dove? And was it because of the Holy Spirit that Uncle Boro, who lived on our street in Skopje, kept a dovecote filled with such beautiful white doves? The only dove we ever had, which our uncle in Montenegro gave us, suffocated in our Škoda just as we pulled up in front of our building. That was an emptiness nothing could fill, a dove that was impossible to replace, not even by one from Uncle Boro’s dovecote. Was it the loss of my personal, private Holy Spirit? Two days before we were to go back to Skopje, our grandma said, “Your uncle is going with you. He’ll stay in Skopje till the summer; he’s taking a language course. Look after him. He’s the only uncle you’ve got. Let him eat whatever you’re eating. Give him whatever he wants, so his weenie doesn’t fall off. He’s a grown man, after all.” Our grandfather yelled, “Come on, stop it, don’t go prattling on, he’s not a child.” Our uncle spent so long in town saying goodbye to the girlfriend who was to become his wife that summer that he barely caught the bus we were on. Perhaps Grandma thought that if he weren’t with her for half a year, he would forget her. Did they really sell a cow so our uncle could study a language that he was never going to need, or was it to distance him from this girlfriend, whom they did not want as their daughter-in-law? We arrived in Skopje. Our father was waiting for us with the car at the station. First we dropped Verče off; then we went to our apartment. Our uncle asked whether our mother had returned from the hospital. “No,” answered our father. “They’re letting her go Friday.” Srebra and I said nothing. What awaited us at home was the little woodstove, its fire burned down, and a pot of beans our father had boiled. First Srebra and I ate with our uncle sitting perpendicular to us; then Dad ate by himself. Our uncle had to sleep in the big room, on the foldout couch by the door, in the room where our parents slept. Together, we somehow made up the bed. We’d have to wait for Mom to return from the hospital so she could empty a few things from the cupboard and give him space for his clothes. The next day, our uncle went to visit her. We did not. Dad said we shouldn’t go to the hospital; a hospital is no place for children. When our mother got back two days later, she brought dolls made from felt: one pale yellow, the other orange. The dolls were long and attached to wooden sticks. Someone had been selling them in the hospital. They were not for Srebra and me; they were just to have around the apartment. We put one in our room on the shelf; the other sat in the big room on top of the old television. After our mother put on her blue robe, she lay down on the couch and silently looked at us seated in our chair. What concerned us most was whether she would laugh as she had before. Her laugh was the only thing that eased our anxieties about being unloved children. When our mother laughed, it gave Srebra and me confidence; we grew more sure of ourselves. In those moments we heard her laugh—and she laughed loudly, almost hysterically—Srebra and I felt close to each other, and carried our misfortune more easily. Our father almost never laughed; he only let out a sound that was supposed to resemble laughter, a sort-of laugh released as an exhale, as if he were clearing his throat, a laugh he had second thoughts about. As it turned out, for a whole month after her return from the hospital, where they had removed a cyst from her ovary, Mom didn’t laugh in her usual fashion. It was not until she went to work again and was once again able to tell us who said what and who did what, in particular about “Comrade Director,” that she was able to laugh as she had before. One evening, before going to bed, our uncle, wrapped in a heavy wool blanket and shivering, accidentally broke one of the globes on the lamp that hung in the big room. Afraid of what our father would say, he opened his drawer (the top one was his our mother had decided), took out his pants, and got himself ready in case our father should happen to kick him out of the house. My heart was beating like crazy because I loved him and was worried and afraid for him. Srebra loved him too, but she argued with him, calling him an idiot whenever we played a pinching game and he pinched us too hard. Our father did get very angry, but he controlled himself and didn’t kick Uncle out, but that evening in front of the television, he muttered the same thing for hours: “As if people like that should study languages, the bastard; because of people like that the country will fall apart…” Our mother sobbed silently on the couch; Srebra and I watched the quiz show
Kviskoteka, but both our minds fled to the big room, where, scrunched down under a quilt and thick wool blanket, our uncle’s body trembled. What we loved most was when mother vacuumed and shooed Srebra, me, and our uncle into the hallway, where we sat until she was done. In the hallway, we played hopscotch on the brown carpet with its brightly colored lines. Srebra and I held each other tight under the arms and hopped each on one foot, while our uncle hopped on two. We laughed until our uncle turned completely red in the face, including all of his forehead, and then Srebra would toss at him: “You look like a monkey’s ass.” Something oppressed my spirit, though, something indefinite, but our uncle said, “And you look like a witch.” In the evening, Mom boiled some noodles, and we grated the cheese that was brought from the village. When our uncle wasn’t lying in bed, he sat in the dining room and watched television, silently, trying to be invisible. Mom always asked him if he wanted to eat, as if it were not quite clear, since, during the day, he ate in the student cafeteria, and for some reason all of us expected that he would never be hungry at home. I think we all secretly prayed that he would say no so there would be more for us. Also, Dad often yelled at him, like he did at us. Our uncle was nearly full grown, the only one in our family to finish university, and was now enrolled in a foreign-language course. He was a man on the verge of marriage, but our father treated him like a child. When our father insulted him because of some minor thing even Srebra felt sorry for him; I could hear her swallow the lump in her throat. I wished we had a caged lion on our balcony, so every time Dad screamed the cage would open and the lion would charge, frightening him. Those six months with our uncle in our home hardened Srebra and me. We became more decisive, more contrary. And our hope grew that one day our heads might be separated, because our uncle told us he had read in an English textbook that in London there were many talented doctors, who, many years ago, had separated two babies whose heads were joined. “I told you,” Srebra threw at me. “I knew it.” In Skopje, we didn’t know any doctors like that, although every doctor and nurse we met in the clinic hallways—eye clinics for me, and ear, nose, and throat for Srebra—stopped and approached us. They asked our father what had happened, how we had been born with conjoined heads, whether it hindered our development, whether we had one brain or were our brains conjoined. Always the same sophomoric questions. Srebra and I, first one then the other, would silently twirl our father’s car keys, while he answered the curious doctors and nurses: “Their brains are separate, but they share a vein; I don’t know, I don’t really understand it, but that’s what they told us. This one has sinus problems, and that one doesn’t see well. There is no one who can perform the operation. It is a very difficult operation.” And then we would go into the office of either an eye doctor or an ear, nose, and throat specialist. Sometimes at home, Srebra and I played patient and ophthalmologist. We would stand a ways back from the wall calendar. I couldn’t see the numbers and letters on the calendar, but Srebra could. We hadn’t known how to tell our mother and father that I didn’t see well, so we didn’t—it was discovered during the first routine school checkup. Srebra often called me, “blind idiot,” and in those moments, I was grateful to her. I thought Mom and Dad would ask why she was calling me blind, but they never asked, because all the ugly words spoken during a quarrel were understood merely as symbols, part of the war of words, not as expressions of reality. Later on, over the years, we would go to the eye doctor, and I would sit in the special chair for my examinations, and Srebra, attached, would sit in a normal chair, while
