A Spare Life by Lidija Dimkovska Page A

our shoulders, looking sullen or sympathetic. But it was like Bogdan didn’t notice. He circled around our desk, taking our pencils, comparing his eraser with ours. Now that he was living at Auntie Stefka’s (that’s what he called her even though she was his new mother), he had a proper set of school supplies, much better than ours—a pencil case with colored pencils, markers, a pencil, an eraser, a pencil sharpener—while we had only one small case with two pencils, two pens, one sharpener, and one eraser. “Look how stuck-up he’s acting,” Srebra said to me as we walked to school and saw him in front of us, alone, in clean pants, a nice jacket, his bag over his shoulder. I wanted to hurry and catch up with him, but Srebra pulled me back. She had no desire to walk with him. His presence always annoyed her, both when he had been poor and now that he was rich, and it was only because of Roza that she agreed to let him be part of our group when we played in front of the building. In our red orthopedic shoes with yellow-white plastic soles, me with the ugliest glasses in the world, the two of us in checkered skirts and long blouses fastened with belts around our waists, heads conjoined at the temples, surely we were a grotesque sight from which old women would shield their gaze, while children shouted, “retards” at us.
    The day they took class photos in the courtyard, one class at a time, Srebra and I looked down when the shutter clicked. The atmosphere was light, playful, as if only the insects flying about had any weight. The cross on my chain sparkled in the sunlight. I touched it from time to time to see if it was still in place. As Srebra and I were walking home from school, a young Rom kid ran up to us and unexpectedly blocked the path, stretching his hand toward the chain, but without even thinking about it, Srebra and I pushed him away. He staggered, fell backward, then quickly stood and lunged again, but I had already hidden the chain under my blouse and was holding onto it with my hand. He had to give up, but still called us cunts, sluts, a two-headed dragon, scarecrows. He ran off toward the small houses in the Rom quarter, crammed off to the right side of our school. How we hated the Roms who lived there; how afraid we were of them. Now Srebra and I trembled as we hurried home. I was on the verge of tears, and Srebra was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. “They should build some sort of district, a camp, and gather all of them and put them there so we won’t need to see them anymore!” Srebra said, but I didn’t say anything, although at that moment, it seemed like a good solution. We were still in primary school! Where did we get such monstrous thoughts and wishes? Whose fault was it that we had those ideas in our conjoined heads? The school? Our family? Our upbringing? The state? Our own character? Grandma bought spindles and sieves from the Gypsies in the village, or she sold them bread and sheep’s milk cheese. Our classmate Juliana—with shiny long black hair, beautiful complexion, and deformed legs; first alphabetically in the attendance book—had low grades but a good soul and a beautiful voice. She transfixed the whole class on every bus excursion with a Serbian song that began something like, “I wander the streets…,” a song I’ve missed all my life. Juliana later became a member of a dance troupe, and saw the world many of our classmates never saw. The last time we saw her, at the fair in Skopje, she was selling blouses and skirts. We recognized her, but we didn’t say anything, I don’t know why. In her childhood, she had the most colorful orange-yellow-green fur coat. Another girl, Å enka, from the neighboring class, had licemore often than anyone else in the school. On Sundays, we went with Roza to school so we could watch Rom weddings from a distance, but more interesting still were the Rom circumcision