A Spare Life Read Online Free PDF

assignment, he got totally fed up and began reeling through his repertoire of insults. I tugged on Srebra with all my strength, because I couldn’t stand the torrent of words dirtying his mouth. Srebra cried out in pain. We went out onto the balcony, and below, Lazarus Day singers were strolling by with a bear. The air was wintry and melancholic; the large room was cold. In the dining room, Dad glued the models together as he shouted, “You have devoured the world!” Saint Lazarus was nowhere to be seen, but the bear was walking on its hind legs. And on that day, Srebra and I once again ate sole, flour-dusted and fried—that whole winter we ate sole—I liked the shape of the fish, like an inflated heart. Srebra poked the body with her fork, making the form of a cross, and then ate it with her hands. Our mother and father ate boiled ham that came from the five-kilo tin fried with eggs, but the pieces of processed ham didn’t stick, they just lay there beside the eggs in the pan. Our father had bought both the fish and the ham through his work, along with a large plastic container of plum jam. He would drink some of the red wine he kept in the basement and his anger would fade away. I could hardly wait for the electricity to go out, which usually happened in the afternoon, due to rationing. Then all four of us would squish together on the small couch in the kitchen, Srebra and Iwould ask Mom and Dad common expressions in French, and they would dredge up something from their school days, or make something up and we’d all laugh, while around us there was total darkness, and it wasn’t unpleasant to sit next to one another, huddled up, not only for me and Srebra, but for them, too, for our parents. It wasn’t unpleasant to love one another and be happy. Those afternoons without electricity were beautiful in their illusion of family happiness. But when the lights flashed back on (I always imagined a man sitting in a large room filled with on/off switches who alone determined when the lights would go on) and we could see one another, we all got up right away. Srebra and I, as if on command, jumped to our feet. We’d busy ourselves with something we could do in the same place, or argued, or simply sat and watched television in absolute silence, each of us already closed into herself, already alienated, loathing one another again.
    That New Year’s Eve, as usual, our father decorated the holiday tree while Srebra and I crouched down and watched him put up the ornaments, wind the frayed red garland around the tree, and place a few puffs of cotton here and there on the green branches. The tree was small, a half meter tall, with just a few meager decorations. He decorated it himself so we wouldn’t break the ornaments. There were only six of them, each different. Then he picked up the tree and brought it into the large room, their room. He set it on the small table in the middle of the room, and our mother immediately placed a bowl of Russian salad with mayonnaise to its left and a plate holding a cake filled with pink strawberry pudding sprinkled with ground walnuts to its right. And so the New Year’s Eve atmosphere was created, though not in the dining room, where we sat on hard wooden seats around the table to watch television, nor in our room, where Srebra and I slept on a foldout couch, with Mom’s sewing machine in the middle of the room covered with an embroidered sheet on which stood a vase filled with plastic flowers. No, there was no New Year’s Eve festivity there, only in our parents’ cold room, in which Srebra and I spent just a few minutes a day, just long enough to have a look at the tree and nibble a bit of the cake.
    While they ate lunch at the small table in the kitchen—our father seated in our large chair and our mother perpendicular to him—Srebra and I, who had already eaten, stood in the dining room listening to a Serbian song playing on the