The Ministry of Pain

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  CHAPTER 4

  Our language, our souls’ only treasure,

  We stuffed in the suitcase

  Next to the family album,

  And off we went to tilt at the windmills

  Beating the chilly Dutch air.

  Ferida Durakovi

  The first thing I required of them was to write out the answers to a few questions. I asked them what they expected to get out of the course, whether, given that Yugoslavia no longer existed, they thought the literatures of the country should be treated separately or as a unit, which writers and works they admired, and so on. Then I had them compose thumbnail autobiographies. In English.

  “Why English?”

  “To make it easier on you,” I said.

  And I meant it. I was afraid (though I was wrong) that using “our language” would lead them to adopt a confessional mode, and that I didn’t want. Not yet.

  “Whatever,” somebody mumbled.

  “Well, do as you like.”

  “You want our full names?”

  “The first name will do.”

  “What do you want us to put into it?”

  “Whatever comes to mind.”

  “We did this in elementary school,” grumbled somebody else.

  I read them at home. I was touched by how naive their responses were. (“Literature is a painting of the mind, a song of the soul.”) The writers and works they listed as their favorites were disappointingly predictable. Hermann Hesse, of course, represented by several novels: Siddhartha, Magister Ludi, Steppenwolf. Then Meša Selimovi (the students, who read literature for its “powerful message about life,” rightly or wrongly thought of Selimovi as Hesse’s Yugoslav counterpart) and his classic Death and the Dervish. I am certain they could all reel off two passages from the book, one that encouraged them to bolt from their provincial existence (“Man is not made of wood; his greatest tragedy is to be tied down”) and another that infused them with the sweet nihilism of the provinces (“For death is as nonsensical as life”). Another popular item was The Zoo Station Kids, a cult teenage book their generation identified with. There was also the inevitable Bukowski, who had wowed several generations with his rebellious outsider status. They called him “cool,” “hip,” “in” he represented “what literature is all about,” “literature with balls.”

  Their responses called up a long-forgotten image of Yugoslav provincial towns: the sole bookshop, which sold more stationery than books; the sole cinema, where they saw—once if not twice—every new film; the few smoke-filled cafés, where they gathered regularly; the korzo, that Mediterranean institution of public square cruising, sniffing out one another like puppy dogs. Their taste had been formed by lackluster provincial towns like Bjelovar and Vitez and Bela Palanka plus a dollop of Castañeda, who had come their way along with their first joint, a little third-hand Buddhism, a little New Age fashion, a little vegetarianism, a little Bukowski, a lot of rock, a little required reading (just enough to keep the prof at bay), loads of comic strips (read under the school desk), loads of movies and bits of English, which derived more from the movies than from their English teachers. It was a bittersweet patchwork, one that kindled a desire to make a run for it, take the first opportunity to head for Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo—or beyond.

  In the end, what my little exercise demonstrated was that they couldn’t care less about literature. It bored them. Even if they’d had a literary education—Meliha had a degree in Yugoslav lit from the University of Sarajevo—the war had altered more than their priorities; it had altered their taste:

  My taste began to change the moment the war began [Meliha wrote]. By now I can scarcely recognize myself. Things I despised before the war, ridiculed as sickeningly sweet, I now shed tears over. I can’t tear myself away from old movies that end with justice triumphant. They may be about cowboys or Robin Hood or Cinderella or Walter Defends Sarajevo. I might as well have forgotten everything I learned at the university. I put down any book that doesn’t pull on my heartstrings. I have no patience with artistic folderol and the swagger of literary devices or irony—the very things I used to set great store by. Now I go for simplicity, for plot stripped to parable. My favorite genre is the fairy tale. I love the romanticism of justice, valor, kindness, and sincerity. I love literary heroes who are brave when ordinary people are cowardly, strong when ordinary people are weak, noble and good when ordinary people are mean and ignominious. I admit that the war has infantilized my taste: I weep when I read my old children’s books—The Strange Adventures of Hlapi the Apprentice, The Pál Street Boys, The Train in the Snow. And if anyone had told me I’d go wild over tales of partisan exploits in BosniaČthe stuff of Branko opi, say—I’d have thought he was off his rocker.

  Most of them answered the question about whether Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian literatures should be treated as a unit in the affirmative. (“Of course it should. We speak the same language, don’t we? But then why not go all the way and include the Slovenes and Macedonians and Albanians. The more the merrier,” wrote Mario.)

  When it came to the thumbnail autobiographies, they all wrote two or three sentences in stilted English (“I was born in 1969 in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where I lived all my life…” “I was born in 1974 in Zagreb of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father…” “I was born in 1972 in Zvornik. My father was a Serb, my mother a Muslim…” “I was born in Leskovac in 1972….”) The more I read, the clearer it became that writing in a foreign language had provided an excuse for being dry and brief. I myself wouldn’t have been able to squeeze out much more than that I was born in 1962 in Zagreb in the former Yugoslavia, so I was all the more gratified by Igor’s “Shit. I don’t have any biography,” and burst out laughing.

  My own biography struck me as empty as my empty apartment, and I didn’t know whether somebody had removed the furniture when I wasn’t looking or whether it had always been like that. Confronting the recent past was pure torture, looking into an unknown future—discomforting. (What future anyway? The future there? The future here? Or a future awaiting you somewhere else?) That’s why we found the standard thumbnail autobiography so tough a genre. Even the most basic questions gave me pause. Where was I born? In Yugoslavia? In the former Yugoslavia? In Croatia? Shit! Do I have any biography?

  I was also a bit nonplussed by their dates of birth: their mental development lagged far behind their age in years. Maybe exile was a kind of regression. At their age they might well have been gainfully employed and bringing up children, yet here they were, hiding behind school desks. The state of exile had brought all kinds of deeply suppressed childish fears to the surface. Suddenly the sight and touch of Mother were no more. It was like a nightmare. We would be in the street, in the market, on the beach, and, whether through our fault or hers, our hands would disengage and Mother would vanish into thin air. Suddenly we faced a world that seemed terrifyingly large and hostile. Gigantic shoes advanced menacingly toward us as we made our way through a jungle of human legs, our panic growing…

  I often had the impression of seeing a kind of hologram of that fear in the shadows flitting over my students’ faces. “In emigration you are prematurely old and eternally young—at the same time,” Ana once said, and therein, to my mind, lay a profound truth.

  In response to the question about what they expected to get out of the course, Uroš wrote, “To come to,” which, given the way he used it, seemed to mean not only “recover from a shock,” “regain consciousness,” “come back to life” but also “come back to oneself,” as if it presupposed a space and an individual floundering in that space and searching for the road home. I was first unnerved, then frightened by Uroš’s response. Was I prepared to deal with that kind of need?

  CHAPTER 5

  The lay of Holland’s land is horizontal;

  It tapers off, when all is said and done,

  Into the sea, the which, when all is said

  And done, is also Holland…. In Holland

  One cannot mountain-cl
imb or die of thirst,

  Let alone leave behind a clear-cut trace

  By leaving home astride one’s bicycle

  Or yet by setting sail. Our memories

  Are but another Holland. And no dyke

  Can hold them back. Which means that I’ve

  Been living here in Holland a lot longer

  Than all the local waves that roll on with

  No landing. Like these lines.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Occasionally, when confronting my own image in the bathroom mirror, I felt a fleeting desire to know where I actually was. I had never asked questions like that as long as Goran and I were together; I had never asked questions at all: there seemed to be no time for it. Suddenly I had time to spare, and it made me very anxious. It was as if there were too much time and too little me. More and more often I was overcome by an unpleasant sensation, a numbness I’d never known before. I kept examining myself, the way one examines one’s mouth with one’s tongue, hoping to get my feeling back, but the self-induced anesthesia was powerful and refused to yield. I had no idea where it had come from or when it had come on.

  Very soon after I moved in, the flat started making me nervous. The poky, windowless bathroom with its shower, white tiles, and concrete floor had a nightmarish feel to it; it was like a quotation from an old black-and-white movie. I kept trying to spruce it up; I bought little gewgaws—a nice soap-dish, an expensive towel with a hand-embroidered lace border; I redid the lighting. The new lights revealed thin accumulations of dirt in the indentations between the tiles, and one night I spent hours removing the dirt with an old toothbrush in a headstrong attempt at transfiguring the looscape by brute strength. The wall of the tiny hallway was painted a gray-green halfway up from the floor and divided from the other half by an ugly green line. The floor was covered with black linoleum, which gave the flat the aura of a hospital or penitentiary. I did everything I could—I bought a vase, a lamp, a black-and-white poster of the skyline of New York—but their presence merely pointed up the anxiety of absence. The absence of what? I had no answer. I wondered whether another space would have made me feel better. I wasn’t too sure. At night, wound round with darkness and a woolen blanket, I would sit at the window in my armchair and stare out through the bars on the qui vive for noises and voices, for a pair of shoes or a cat darting past. The space was definitely not me. But then again I wasn’t me, either.

  My angst in the basement flat grew with tropic alacrity, like a passionflower, a passiebloem, the creeper that decorated house walls and garden gates in many parts of town. I kept finding myself grabbing my bag, flinging a coat over my shoulders and racing out of the place, not knowing where I was off to.

  The city, which was like a snail, a shell, a spider’s web, a piece of fine lace, a novel with an unusually circular plot and hence no end, never ceased to baffle me. I was constantly getting lost and had the greatest trouble remembering street names, to say nothing of where the streets themselves started and stopped. It was like drowning in a glass of water. I had the feeling I might well—if like Alice I should lose my footing and fall into a hole—end up in a third or fourth parallel world, because Amsterdam itself was my own parallel world. I experienced it as a dream, which meant it resonated with my reality. I tried to puzzle it out just as I tried to interpret my dreams.

  The most fascinating thing about it was the sand. I would stand next to a house that was being demolished and watch the rotten beams coming down and the water spurting up out of the invisible depths through an ugly hole in the sand. I would watch workers repairing the Amsterdam cobblestones, prizing them up out of and setting them back into the sand. Sand provided the city with a metaphorical as well as literal foundation and provoked an almost physical reaction in me: I constantly felt it in my mouth, hair, and nostrils.

  I couldn’t get over the number of signs and signals—“fingerprints”—by which the inhabitants of the city made it clear that they belonged. I thought the signals childlike and consequently touching, like the breadcrumbs Hansel and Gretel sprinkle behind them to guide their way home. Every one of them—the figurines of cats climbing the fronts of old houses, the flags hanging out of the windows, the posters and even family photos, especially of newborn babes, inscriptions and slogans, tiny sculptures, toys, teddy bears, African masks, Indonesian vajang dolls, models of ships, miniature replicas of typical Amsterdam houses—had one and only one message: “I live here. Look! I live here.” I had the feeling that all the “still lifes,” the ikebanas, the “installations”—even the simple window decoration of a cheap Ikea vase housing an inspired two-guilder Xeno “shipwreck”—bore witness to the inhabitants’ subconscious fear of evanescence. The doll’s houses embedded in doll’s houses, the infantile urban exhibitionism, the imprints left willfully in the sand—on some level they all resonated with my own angst, whose name and source I was unable to put my finger on.

  I lived very close to the railway station and found myself increasingly drawn to the main hall, where I would stand staring at the timetable, as if the display of arrivals and departures could provide the key to my angst. Once, on an impulse, I took a train to The Hague, walked through the city, and returned a few hours later. From then on, I made a habit of taking trains to places not particularly meaningful to me. I would go north, to Groningen and Leeuwarden, or south to Rotterdam, Nijmegen and Eindhoven, east to Enschede; I would go to the nearby cities of Haarlem, Leiden, and Utrecht; I would go to places simply because the sound of their names appealed to me: Apeldoorn and Amersfoort; Breda, Tilburg and Hoorn; Hengelo and Almelo; or Lelystad, whose name reminded me of a lullaby. The Netherlands was poignantly small. Often I simply got out, walked up and down the platform, and took the next train back to Amsterdam. The journey alone calmed my nerves. I would gaze out of the window, my mind blank, the Dutch lowlands tempering my angst. I took pleasure in the absolute, undisturbed constant of the horizontal in motion. I also came to appreciate the signs and would read out their words flashing past in the rhythm of a children’s counting rhyme: Sony, Praxis, Vodafone; Nikon, Enco, JVC; Randstad, Philips, Shell; Dobbe, Ninders, Ben…And just as we seem to fancy people more for their faults than for their virtues, so I gradually developed a sympathy for that landscape of absence, the straight, light green line of the horizon, the cold nocturnal vistas with their full moons and flocks of large white geese shining in the dark, or the frozen shadows of cows idling in the road like friendly ghosts.

  In the trains and stations I mastered the language of loneliness. I, the aimless wanderer, soon discovered I was not alone. Standing on the platform, I would turn to a fellow traveler, who could see the computerized timetable as well as I, and ask, “Excuse me, but the next train is going to Rotterdam, isn’t it?”

  “Sorry, I couldn’t say.”

  “And where are you going?”

  “Me? Rotterdam.”

  I would watch the people in the trains, listen in on their conversations even though I didn’t understand the language, sniff their smells. I would project their faces onto a computer screen and scroll down, registering one detail after the other, the chance images taking hold for longer or shorter periods of time, and I often had the feeling that someone other than myself had opened the door to them.

  The image of a young girl sitting opposite me in a train. There is a tiny speaker in her ear. It is attached to a wire. The wire ends up in a half-open handbag with an Esprit label on it. The train is packed, but the girl is oblivious to her surroundings: she is talking loudly, staring expressionless at a point straight ahead of her. On and on she talks, her voice strident, like a machine, and she sits bolt upright, her bag in her lap, afraid perhaps it will fall and break. The handles of the bag are upright, too, and nearly reach her mouth, which gives the impression that the words are pouring out of her mouth into the bag. When the conversation is over, she removes the plug from her ear, takes the mobile phone out of the bag, turns it off, sticks it into the invisible sand of words that has ju
st poured out of her, and zips up the bag.

  The image of a dark-skinned young man poring over a textbook of Dutch for foreigners and chewing on the eraser of a pencil as if it were a gumdrop. He lays the book down in his lap for a moment, turns toward the window, mumbles a few words to himself, fixing them in his mind, then goes back to the book.

  The image of a young Chinese couple chewing gum in synchronized motion, their faces gray and mouselike. She is wearing a thin, open, none-too-clean blouse with no bra, her small breasts showing through. He, still chewing, puts his arm around her, slips his hand into the blouse, and tugs with lazy satisfaction at a breast as if adjusting the nipple of a bottle. She too goes on chewing and blinks her pupilless eyes.

  The image of a tired Moroccan madonna with a boy child in her lap. He is no more than two. He has thick black hair, parted on the side like a grown-up’s. His face has the terrifying absence of all children’s faces, the kind seen in icons and early paintings.

  During one of my trips the train came to a sudden halt. The train coming in the opposite direction had stopped, too. The seat corresponding to mine in the other train was occupied by a man holding a sheet of music with one hand and conducting with the other. He was completely absorbed in the music inside him and conducted with brief, delicate, restrained strokes of the hand. I was spellbound. His face was illuminated with exaltation from within. The external world did not exist: he was surrounded by the silent music as by an impenetrable capsule; nothing could touch him. But then the trains started up, his and mine, and the man’s face disappeared. I felt a twinge, as if I’d been watching myself in the glass, as if I’d seen myself but couldn’t hear myself. I felt my own reflection had gone off in the opposite direction.