A Spare Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

his mother and father treated the newlyweds very badly. They were unhappy that their son had married a village girl; while our father was at work, our pregnant mother stayed home, in rooms with small barred windows in the basement of the house. Grandpa would insult her, chase her outdoors, and then call her back inside. Several times, he even hit her with a broom. Grandma acted as if she didn’t see anything. Our mother cried every day, and maybe that’s why wewere born with conjoined heads, with this inoperable physical deformity. When our grandparents saw what kind of children their daughter-in-law had produced, they just threw us out onto the street. Dad managed to take his only coat along with a pink coatrack that had a mirror and a shelf for hats, which stands in our hallway to this day. With us—infants just a few days old—the coatrack, and their bags, they hopped on the first bus that came along and begged the driver to take them with all their baggage. The coatrack’s mirror banged against the handrail throughout its journey on the bus, and cracked down the middle. Finally, we reached the last stop, at the other end of the city. We got off the bus, and the driver took pity on my parents and helped with the luggage. They asked the first woman they met whether she knew of a room for rent nearby. The woman, Stefka, lived in a small house at the edge of the neighborhood. She was a widow whose son had gone off to Germany, so she happened to have an empty room. Stefka picked up Srebra and me, thinking we were normal twins, and would have pulled our heads off had our mother not explained that we were born with joined heads, God save and preserve us. Granny Stefka gave us a small room in her house anyway; she found a woven basket for Srebra and me, and we stayed there for three whole years, until our parents were able to buy an apartment on credit two bus stops away. Our father never forgave his parents for what they did that day, and they literally forbade their other son and daughter, and all the other members of the extended family, to have any sort of ties with him. Our father was left with no family, no loving touch of a parent’s hand. Our aunt and uncle felt no compassion for their older brother, erasing him from their lives. One day, though, when Srebra and I were six years old, a young woman came to our house. The darkest brunette we had ever seen sat in the big room on the couch where our mom and dad slept. She picked up the belly-shaped hot-water bottle that was lying on the bed. Srebra and I had won it in a school lottery and christened it Hermes; we played with it, rocking and hugging it before bed, when we filled it with hot water from the small green pot on the oil stove. But it was our parents who slept with it. The young woman turned the water bottle over, looking at it from all sides, then put it down and tookfrom her handbag two chocolate bars with crisped rice—the biggest ones we had ever seen—and gave them to Srebra and me. “This is your aunt,” our father said with a shaky voice, his hands trembling like slender branches. We just stared at this aunt of ours. She sat there awhile and cried a bit, without uttering a single word; then she stood and left. We ate the chocolate bars with crisped rice over the course of a whole month, square by square. Nobody ever mentioned the visit again. After that, our father’s hands never stopped trembling, and he was so nervous that he shouted at every little thing. In fact, his moods changed every five minutes: He’d be polite and gentle with us, calling us his little chicks. He would buy us chocolate bars with pictures of animals on the wrappers, but then he would shout at us: “Get lost!”; “You voracious asses, you have devoured the world!”; or “Beasts, I’m going to take my belt to you!” One day, when we were in the dining room making models of traffic lights and signs for a school