Read Online A Spare Life by Lidija Dimkovska - Free Book Online Page A

around; you don’t hang out with us anymore.” We stopped. Bogdan turned red, then got up his courage and said, “Well, I’m going home to pack.” “Where are you going?” she asked. “I’m moving in with Auntie Stefka,” he said. “How did that happen?” Roza asked. Srebra and I just stood there silently. Bogdan shrugged his shoulders, mumbled something, and then went into his house. We returned home, wondering about what he’d said. Bogdan was moving in with Auntie Stefka! Stefka was a single woman, like Auntie Verka, a decent person, quite young, our parents would say—though she seemed old to us, if still pretty, with long black hair that she wore in a bun—who lived in our building. There were also single women living in the building next door—twin sisters on one floor, and an older woman on another. It wasn’t clear to us why each entryway had an apartment for an unmarried woman, sometimes even two women, singles , as we called them, because that’s what we heard our parents call them. “My sister says Prime Minister Milka Planinc has decided that each entryway should have a single woman, and she gave them apartments so they, too, could have a life,” Roza explained on the way home. “A woman who doesn’t have a husband or doesn’t want to get married can send an application to Planinc, and she gives her an apartment, and that’s how she becomes a single,” and that seemed logical because we’d heard that Auntie Verka’s son had arranged for her to get the single-woman apartment in our entryway. “But why was Bogdan going to live with one of these single women?” That was not clear to Srebra. “You know, my parents said something about how children can now adopt a mother for themselves,” Roza recalled, adding, “older children, like Bogdan, whom no one wants to adopt.” It seemed pretty weird to me that a child, even an older one, could pick out a mother for himself. Somewhere deep inside me a thought crept in—which mother would we select if we did not have a mother? “Grandma,” was my internal reply, but Grandma was not a single woman, and among the singles we knew, we were only close to Auntie Verka,but she was a drunk, and thus not allowed to be adopted, and Riki was living with her. I knew there was a special home for children without parents, which is exactly what it was called: Home for Children without Parents. From time to time, our parents threatened to send Srebra and me there. They’d take us there and then we’d see, Lord only knows what, that that was a place for the likes of us. But no one ever mentioned that Bogdan should live in such a home, even though it was logical that a ten-year-old child, which was how old Bogdan was when he was left motherless, shouldn’t live alone. But Bogdan had been living alone for three whole years since his mother died. He ate in the school cafeteria, wore clothes the store clerk gave him, and when he had to go to the doctor or some other official place, our classroom teacher went with him. It had seemed to all of us that Bogdan didn’t want to leave his place. He spent hours there, solving crossword puzzles in Brain Twisters , to which he’d subscribed with the money that we had raised for him by collecting old paper. And now, suddenly, Bogdan was to move in with Stefka, the most entrancing, but also the saddest, single woman on the street, always in high heels with her hair in a bun that revealed a white face with large dark eyes. At home, we told our father straightaway. He didn’t say anything. He went down to the garage to kill the day he had taken off work to take us to the doctor, but when Mom got home, we also told her, and she turned to our father and said, “I told you. Didn’t they say on television that it had been decided? Each child whose mother and father died simply has to select a