Free A Spare Life by Lidija Dimkovska

curious which other children would adopt which other singles: Who would adopt the sister-singles, twins but not Siamese like us? Who would adopt the single woman who lived in the yellow building, or the one in the prefab house on the road to school? “She’s not that sort of single,” said Auntie Dobrila. “No one is going to adopt her. She was left alone because her husband died a few years ago. The woman went out of her mind, and people say that on the bedroom wall there is a big splotch of blood. Who knows where it came from? Maybe she killed him and then went crazy when he appeared to her in a dream, but the police didn’t pursue her; they just left her there like that, and now she barely walks, dragging herself along, not wearing underwear under her dress, and if you don’t believe me, lift it up sometime, and you’ll see.” Really? Was that possible? I wondered, but Srebra started laughing hysterically, and her laughter shook my head. She laughed so hard she had to pee, and we ran to the bathroom. Auntie Dobrila went home, and our mother scolded us all evening, telling us we were crazy and that we didn’t know how to appreciate what we had.
    A couple of days later, Bogdan moved in with Auntie Stefka. Now we lived in the same building, almost neighbors. In the building next door, the twin single ladies were adopted by two Rom girls. They never went outside, and we never hung around with them—following the wishes of their “mothers,” they still went to their old school. Every morning, all four of them took a bus to a different neighborhood where the school the girls attended was located. Then their mothers continued on to work, and in the afternoon, they all came home together. At the time, we had such an intolerant attitude toward Roms that we simply didn’t want to be around them, not at school or outside in front of the building. “Gypsified” was the word grown-ups used when something was ugly, unclean, not how it should be, and we once heard our mother say on the phone to our aunt, “To tell you the truth, it would have been better if I had given birth to Gypsies rather than these two.” When she heard her say that, Srebra began to sob, shaking me, but I scolded her, even though I couldn’t look her in the eye: “What are you crying about? You know they don’t love us.” With something approaching envy we looked at the happy face of the single woman who lived in the building next to ours who had been adopted by a stout girl with mild developmental disorders. The girl wore glasses with thick black frames and walked with her feet pointing outward, limping with both legs. Her hands were fleshy, white like snow, and she always held her adopted mother’s arm, and the single woman, with a smile in her eyes and on her lips, supported her new daughter. There was something heavy, solemn, almost tragic in her gait; her whole being displayed a sense of concern. And that is how it was for years, until the most tragic moment in her life and in the life of her new and only daughter.
    Most important, however, is that in March of 1985 we went on a three-day excursion to Ohrid. On the bus, Bogdan sat behind us, solving crosswords. There were ten of us to a room at the children’s resort. Srebra and I always had to share a bed, and the beds there were particularly narrow. On the first night, I dreamed that our mother was falling from the eighth floor of a building. The girls were sleeping. Srebra did not move when I opened my eyes in the horror of the night and the loneliness in my soul. At the moment in the dream that my mother fell, I felt I was also falling into an ever-greater emptiness, that I had broken something that could not be fixed; that my soul was broken. When I told Srebra the next day, she screamed at me in our reflection in the cupboard mirror: “Really, it seems like you want Mom to fall in real life. And then we’d