A Spare Life by Lidija Dimkovska Page B

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, morecontrary. 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 the doctor with questionable personal hygiene would breathe in my face and fit glasses, often missing the opening for glasses between our joined spot and my ear, poking us with the glasses right where it hurt the most. Srebra, keeping her lips firmly pressed so as not to inhale the doctor’s bad breath, covered first one eye with her palm then the other, silently guessing theletters and numbers on the chart. Then she would whisper them to me when I couldn’t get them. The doctor appeared not to notice her whispering, or, perhaps because of it, he prescribed thicker and thicker lenses, which stuck out of the black frames, the cheapest ones possible, which my father selected. Every trip to the doctor was followed by complaints: “This is becoming intolerable. All we do is go to doctors’ offices. Screw the two of you. You voracious beasts! You just know everything. You think you’re just smarter than everyone. You’ve devoured me.” Srebra wouldn’t put up with it for long, saying, “Who else is there to take us to the doctor? You’re our father.” That would make him even angrier, and he would swear all over again. I felt terrible that we exhausted him with our ailments. I was embarrassed that he had to take us to the doctor’s, take vacation days from work, get up at night to make tea when we were sick, rub skin cream on our behinds when Srebra and I, in a gust of cold wind, backed into the gas stove, and when he had to give Srebra nose drops every eight hours, which he usually gave to me as well, just in case. It was as if we were someone else’s