A Spare Life Read Online Free Page A

fashioned from small black-and-white beads which stood on the wardrobe as a decoration, but aside from the music, there was an emptiness in the room that makes me shudder even today; that birthday was so sad that we never again even mentioned celebrating one. Instead, we suppressed the shared day of our birth, even though the resulting tension lasted the whole day and was worst of all when our parents returned from work without the least acknowledgment that it was our birthday. But Verka remembered that our birthday was in summer, and for several summers in a row she gave us a present, some old thing she had in her apartment—a small porcelain horse, a chicken made of lace, small knitted shoes that had decorated the knobs of her cupboards, a book by Tito, Marx, or Engels that she bought through her workplace until she was allowed to take early retirement due to chronic alcoholism, or money to buy lollipops or chocolate.
    Mom always swore about her in the same way: “May her heart devour her,” she said, although it was never clear to us why she disliked her so much, even though no one else in our building liked her. Everybody closed their doors in her face, avoided meeting her on the stairs or outside, pretended to be deaf if she asked them something. There were even those who insulted her openly, shouting, “Worthless drunk! You stink and your apartment stinks. You’ll bring some disease in here! Idrizovo prison is the only place for you! Jesus, your son should never have found you an apartment; he should have just left you on the street! Why did you have to end up in our building?” All sorts of things like that. The men were particularly harsh, because it was to them that Verka most often turned for a cigarette or a sip of rakija or beer. It was only Uncle BlaÅ¡ko, who lived on the first floor, who didn’t argue with her. He didn’t smoke or drink; he just sat on the balcony, and whenever anyone walked by, he mumbled something resembling a greeting. At home, whenever we asked for something sweet, Mom always joked, “Something sweet like your sweet uncle BlaÅ¡ko.” As a matter of fact, I think Srebra and I asked for sweets just to hear that one kind sentence from our mother, to feel that she might love us. Uncle BlaÅ¡ko’s wife died young of stomach cancer, and on the day of her funeral, Srebra and I stood on our balcony and watched the hearse approach. On the corner, BlaÅ¡ko’s six-year-old son stood sadly in his blue suit and pale-blue shirt, his hair combed to the side. A small, lost child without his mother. No one held his hand; he stood alone and waited for the hearse to pull up in front of our building. His father was beating his chest and crying loudly. No one else was crying. All the grown-ups who lived in the apartment building climbed into their cars and set off behind the hearse carrying Milka’s coffin. In all the years before her death, Srebra and I had seen her only once, the day we had a car accident. Our aunt Ivanka had come over that day. She, too, had her troubles, because our cousin was in the hospital to have one of her ovaries removed, even though she was only ten years old. Aunt Ivanka lay all day on the small couch in the kitchen and cried, crushed from pain, grieving over little Verče’s fate, that she might never have even a single child with only one ovary. Ourmother said to her, “You think that my two will ever have children? Who will take them with their heads like that?” Srebra and I just stood there, mute, beside the couch. We couldn’t figure out why Verče wouldn’t be able to have a child. We couldn’t remember what our biology teacher had said about how babies were conceived, and we said nothing—Srebra with her eyes downcast, I holding in my hands the little red toy telephone we had bought for when we visited our cousin in the hospital. In the stairwell, we met Roza, jumping up two stairs at a