A Spare Life Read Online Free Page B

time as usual; she was returning from the store. “Hey, nice telephone,” she called to us. I don’t know how we all fit into the Škoda, but we piled in—Dad, Mom, our aunt Ivanka, Srebra, and I, as well as Aunt Milka, who was already sick and going to the doctor’s in the hospital where Verče was. We hadn’t driven for five minutes, when, turning onto the main street, our father hit another car coming from the opposite direction. The crash wasn’t a big one, but it was enough to frighten us more than we’d ever been frightened before. Our aunt and Milka got out of the car, still shaken, and ran to the bus stop to wait for a bus to the hospital. Although we could have simply gone home on foot, we had to stand and wait for the police. We didn’t get home for another hour. Dad was upset. He couldn’t believe something like this had happened to him. He kept looking at the car’s dented bumper. Mom simply went mute. She did not utter a single word. She was pale, and I wondered whether she might have a fainting spell, because those spells had lasted for years, when she’d suddenly feel dizzy, go pale, and then lose consciousness, all accompanied by the words, “I’m going to die.” Srebra would usually cry—she couldn’t keep her face puckered up in the frown she used to keep back tears—while I trembled, my body going cold as if it were thirty below. I trembled so much that I shook Srebra as well, and my hands became sweaty. But this time, she didn’t lose consciousness, and when the three of us got home, she mechanically poured dried beans into the red pot and began to pick through them, sitting in the kitchen on the couch with her eyes fixed on the pot—picking and picking over the beans. Srebra and I sat down by the small table on the wide chair our father had made for us a long time ago from some boards he got somewhere,with a cushioned seat. We just sat there, saying nothing, handing back and forth our only doll, its crying mechanism long since removed from its belly, naked, its head bald on top, with one arm that kept falling off. We passed it back and forth as if it were a real baby: slowly, gently, without a word. It was deathly quiet in the apartment. Suddenly, the front door opened, and our father came in with another man, a mechanic I supposed. They sat in the dining room, we didn’t move a muscle; Mom didn’t get up but continued picking at the beans. We heard our father ask the man whether he would like a glass of rakija. He must have nodded in agreement because we didn’t hear a response. Then Dad went into the big room where the glasses and rakija were kept. When he came back, Srebra and I peeked from the kitchen table through the opening between the kitchen and dining room, as Dad said to the man, “Here you go, old pal.” That was the first time in my life that I heard the word pal , and it has remained in my memory, stitched in embroidered letters. I was thrilled with the word; it filled me with hope. They drank the rakija and went out again. We still hadn’t spoken. Srebra had to go to the bathroom, so we went, and while I sat on the trashcan holding my nose so Srebra’s excrement wouldn’t stink so much, she began to giggle, shaking my head also with her giggles. “He said ‘old pal’—that’s ridiculous! Dad doesn’t have any old pals, since he doesn’t even know anyone from where he came from. He’s talking nonsense.” I knew Srebra was right, but didn’t say anything. Our father hadn’t been in touch with his family for years. When he and our mother got married, they lived with his parents in the house that, our mother said, he built when he was still a child, lugging the cement and mortar himself. Our aunt and uncle were little then and played hide-and-seek while he worked excruciatingly hard, but they’re the ones living there now. Put simply,