Free A Spare Life by Lidija Dimkovska Page A

have to figure out what to do.” I could barely wait for the three days to pass to go home so I could tell Roza what I’d dreamed. Roza always understood other people’s dreams: “That’s odd,” she said. “I also dreamed I fell from the eighth floor. But how can that be, when our building only has three floors? Forget it; it’s all nonsense.” I don’t know why I’ve never been able to forget that dream. Not so much the dream, in fact, as the emptiness into which our mother fell, and I along with her (and, whether she wanted to or not, Srebra). It haunts me in my sweaty hands, in the beating of my heart, in the pain in my head. “My head hurts, too, because of you,” Srebra would say angrily, because a reaction in one of us gave rise to the same in the other. If one of us laughed, the other laughed; if I was upset, so was Srebra; and when Srebra was hungry, I felt hungry as well. We did not know how to explain it any other way than the way our grandma put it: “Your blood mixes. That’s why.”
    Roza suggested that we go to the movies, to a Bruce Lee film. We had never been to the movie theater before. We dressed nicely, begged our parents for money, and set off to the neighborhood theater, which was in an old building from before the earthquake that also housed the district registry department. There was nobody else there. The cashier covertly spit into her blouse to ward off the evil eye when she saw us, then called through the window, “They won’t show the film. You’re the only ones here!” We were terribly disappointed. I begged Srebra and Roza to at least go to the church, a two-minute walk from the theater. Srebra wanted nothing to do with it, but Roza agreed. “Why not?” she asked. “Maybe they’ll give us a communion wafer.” I hoped that as soon as I went in, all the anguish that had taken root after my dream about our mother’s fall might disappear, that everything in my soul would be as it had been before, and all memory of the fall would vanish and never return. Whether the priest caught something in my look behind my glasses, I cannot say. It was clear that he recognized us from the few times we came to church with our mother and aunt. I smiled at him. He gave me a thin chain with a cross. He only had one, he said, and Srebra and I should take turns. Srebra immediately said she didn’t need a cross, but Roza asked, “When will you have more? I’d like one, too.” The priest smiled and said he’d surely have them by Ascension Day. On the way home, while Roza walked in front of us deep in her own thoughts, Srebra whispered, “You think God created us and that’s why you want the cross. I don’t need one. I’m certain we’re descended from monkeys.” Roza turned and shouted, “C’mon! Don’t you two know how to do anything but fight all the time?” I wore that chain around my neck day and night. I didn’t take it off even when I bathed, huddled with Srebra in the beat-up old bathtub, or during radiation treatments for Srebra’s sinuses. I wore it to school, even though we weren’t supposed to wear religious symbols there. Even when we began wearing lighter clothing, I still wore my white turtleneck blouse that had ten buttons up the back so I could pull it up over my legs, and beneath the blouse, stuck to my skin, were my chain and cross. It was like a rope to save me from falling. I rescued myself with it when I felt something pulling medown toward an unclear abyss that I sensed almost physically—deep, dark, black.
    One morning, we spent the first hour of the school day in front of the building, lined up in rows, listening to the director give a speech about the life and works of the national hero in honor of whom our school was named. There were many green-uniformed soldiers in the schoolyard standing around with their smooth faces