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father muttered, “OK, OK, that’s enough,” then took a step back toward the divider between the kitchen and the dining room, stopping withone foot there, one here, arms crossed, ready to sit down on the chair in the dining room and turn on the television. Srebra and I were eating the Lenten leek pita along with cheese, even though it was a fasting day. We didn’t scarf down all the leek pie so there would be some left for our parents. When we finished, they sat down to eat, and we stood, leaning our elbows on the back of one of the dining-room chairs, staring at the television screen. This is how Christ was born in our house: quickly. I always thought of him as a premature baby lying in an incubator. Srebra and I went to our room, sat down on the floor, and turned on the yellow heater behind our backs. I asked her what she thought about God. She said that she did not think about him and that God didn’t exist, that we had evolved from monkeys; after all, weren’t the two of us absolute proof that man descended from monkeys? Surely some simian mistake had caused us to be born with conjoined heads, because if God were perfect, as they say, why hadn’t he made us normal and not like this, disfigured for our entire lives. I didn’t know what to say; Srebra was convinced that, while my God may have created other people, he certainly hadn’t created us; we were clearly descended from apes. I wanted to go to bed as soon as possible. I needed to scrunch down under the quilt and move my body as far away from Srebra’s as possible, as far away as our heads would allow, so I could be alone with my thoughts. I had one specific thought that helped me fall asleep on my most difficult nights: “my” house, the house I would have one day in a beautiful Skopje neighborhood, after Srebra and I had been separated and each of us was able to live as she wished. The house had two floors, with rooms and furniture that never changed in my imagination; for years, I always pictured it the same way, the rooms clearly laid out: tables, beds, pictures on the walls, dishes, everything. I would live in that house with my husband, who would be named Bobby—I really liked that name—a doctor, and he would have his office in the back part of the house. Our bedroom would be on the upper floor between the bathroom and the children’s room. I would sit for entire days in the armchair in my large library, reading books and writing novels. Since we would have lots of money, every month I would visit a poor family on the outskirts of the city and bring themeverything: food, clothing, medicine, toys for the children, anything they needed. And I pictured their house in detail as well, always the same, and I pictured them too, always the same, as if they really existed, as if we had known each other for years. What didn’t I imagine before falling asleep? I went deep inside that house of mine, until the sweetness of sleep overtook me.
    But that night, as soon as I fell asleep, Srebra elbowed me in the ribs to wake me up. “Mom’s sick! Hey, Mom’s sick,” she whispered. I opened my eyes in the dark and pricked up my ears to hear the voices coming from the dining room. “Let’s go,” said my father. Then my mother, in a tired voice, said, “Take my bag.” They left; they locked us in and left. Where? To which hospital and why? Srebra and I lay on our backs, silent. We swallowed the spit collecting in our throats. We lay there without saying a word, without moving, as if frozen, until an hour or two later when they returned. They went to bed quickly, got up at the usual time, five thirty, went to work, and we went to school a bit later. On our way home from school, we had the same thought: boil some water in the little pot with the red cover (the one that came with a packet of Vegeta seasoning, one of socialist Yugoslavia’s rare marketing successes), shake in the