The Ministry of Pain

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  Wandering through the city, I was sometimes overcome by a sudden, almost uncontrollable impulse traceable to an innocent detail. Crushed on a tram next to a bare, smooth, male muscle, I would feel an urge to press my lips to that golden region of alien skin. Or confronting an earring in the ear of a man squeezed in next to me, I would itch to tear it off with my teeth. The force of these unexpected attacks terrified me, yet gave me a feeling of release. Release from what? I couldn’t say.

  My internal city map took shape of its own accord. Images would come and go, take hold for a while or dissipate like sand. It was like making my way through a mist or a dream. I drew my internal map on the finest of tracing paper, but the moment I separated it from the real map I saw to my surprise that it was blank. It had nothing on it. Not a thing. I’d be moved by a line advancing in high spirits, and all at once it would stop and break off. Sometimes my internal map looked like a clumsy children’s drawing. A city that in fact looked like a snail, a shell, a spiderweb, a labyrinth, a piece of lace, a novel full of mysterious tributaries, would, on my internal map, turn into a series of blanks, gaps, snippets, and dead ends. My internal map was the outcome of an amnesiac’s attempt to plot his coordinates, of a flâneur’s attempt to leave his tracks on the sand. My map was a dreamer’s guide. Virtually nothing on it coincided with reality.

  But there was one thing I knew for certain. No matter where I went, my students provided the direction. They were my internal center, my public square, my main street, my jugular. I mean that literally.

  CHAPTER 6

  Thus we see that life was preserved here, but at a price dearer than the value of life itself, for the strength to defend and maintain it was borrowed from the coming generations, which were thus born into debt and servitude. What survived in the struggle was the sheer instinct to defend life, while life itself lost so much that precious little more than the name itself remained. What has lasted and lives on is stunted or warped; what comes into the world and survives is poisoned in the bud and sick at heart. The thoughts and words of the people are unfinished, cut off as they are at the root.

  Ivo Andri

  I told them they had nothing to worry about: they would all get high grades. I told them I realized that most of them were studying servo-kroatisch for practical reasons so I had no intention of being a pain in the neck.

  “I’m here as a guest lecturer for two semesters only. It would make no sense on my part to play ‘teacher,’ so you too are absolved of playacting.”

  “Then what are we going to do?” someone asked.

  “Nothing,” I said

  “Nothing?” they asked, tittering.

  “Oh, we’ll keep busy somehow,” I said.

  I felt their eyes on me. They were obviously intrigued.

  “Well, I can’t come to class anyway,” a young woman said. “I’ve got a baby.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  “Thanks,” the young woman said, and, picking up her things, she left the room.

  The others laughed and looked back at me, wondering what was to come. It was Meliha who took care of that.

  “The first thing they did when we came was to put us in refugee camps and—you know the ways of the Daer folk by now—give us psychiatrists. Well, our psychiatrist turned out to be one of ‘ours’, a refugee like us. And you know what she told us? ‘Do me a favor, will you, everybody? Find a little crazy streak in you. Think up a trauma or two if need be. I don’t want to lose my job….’”

  We all laughed. The ball was rolling.

  I was naturally well aware of the absurdity of my situation: I was to teach a subject that officially no longer existed. What we once called jugoslavistika at the university—that is, Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin, and Macedonian literature—had disappeared as a discipline together with its country of origin. Besides, the students I was assigned had no particular interest in literature; they were interested in their Dutch papers. I was hired to teach the literature of a country (or the literatures of countries) from which my students had fled or been expelled. The house was in ruins, and it was my job to clear a path through the rubble.

  My main tool, I decided, would be language: “our” language, servo-kroatisch. But the language that had been spoken in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Montenegro had now, like the country in which it had been spoken, been divided into discrete units; it had become three official languages: Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian. True, Croatian and Serbian had enjoyed a certain official autonomy even in Yugoslav times, but there was something new: the erection of checkpoints to highlight the differences between them. I was not much concerned with the “new” languages and had no interest in dividing them up according to the fifty or so words that distinguished them. What concerned me more was a certain rigidity in the language as such, a rigidity that made my students unwilling and unable to use it: their questionable mother tongue was being taken over by a half-baked English and, more recently, half-baked Dutch.

  I told them I firmly believed that Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian were variants of a single language. “A language is a dialect backed by an army. Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian are backed by paramilitary forces. You’re not going to let semiliterate criminals advise you in matters linguistic, are you?” But I was also aware that I belonged to the last generation whose primary and secondary school literature textbooks had been speckled with readings in Slovenian, Macedonian, Serbian, and Croatian, duly printed in the Roman or Cyrillic alphabet, and that the fact of the very existence of such textbooks would soon be forgotten.

  But things weren’t quite so simple. My students knew all too well that I wasn’t speaking metaphorically when I brought in the military; they knew that “our” languages were backed by actual troops, the “our” languages were used to curse, humiliate, kill, rape, and expel. They were languages that had gone to war in the belief that they were incompatible, perhaps precisely because they were inseparable.

  The papers abounded in language columns. The butcher, the baker, everyone was an instant linguist. The war gave rise to “differential dictionaries.” Serbs, who had for the most part converted to the Roman alphabet, started going back to Cyrillic; Croats, eager to make Croatia as Croatian as possible, introduced a few awkward constructions borrowed from the Russian and a few even more awkward lexical items in circulation during World War II. It was a divorce full of sound and fury. Language was a weapon, after all: it branded, it betrayed, it separated and united. Croats would eat their kruh, while Serbs would eat their hleb, Bosnians their hljeb: the word for bread in the three languages was different. Smrt, the word for death, was the same.

  Not that the language as it was before the divorce—Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian or Croatian and Serbian—represented a better, more acceptable linguistic construct that the war had then destroyed. No, it, too, had performed a political function; it, too, had been backed by an army; it, too, had been manipulated, polluted by a heavily ideologized Yugospeak. But the history of melding the linguistic variants into a single construct involved a much longer and more meaningful process than the overnight divorce, just as the history of building bridges and roads involved a much longer and more meaningful process than their overnight destruction.

  Boban told us of a recurrent dream of his. He was looking for a street in Zagreb, but was afraid to ask for directions, because people would hear that he was from Belgrade.

  “And what if they did?” I asked.

  “Then they’d know I’m a Serb. They might spit at me or send me away.”

  “So what?”

  “Then I’d never find the street I was after.”

  “Who were you looking for?”

  “A girlfriend of mine. Maja was her name.”

  Somebody sniggered.

  “Where did she live, your Maja?”

  “You turn right off Moša Pijade. One of those streets.”

  “Mosa Pijade has a new name,” I said.

  “What is it?”


  “Medvešak.”

  “Oh, thanks,” he said seriously, as if he would be using the information that night.

  “Could Maja’s street possibly have been Novakova?” I asked.

  “That’s it!” he cried, his face beaming with relief. “Novakova!”

  “Good thing you didn’t dream about Bosnia, man,” said Selim. “If our guys got their hands on you, you’d sweat bullets.”

  The room was still. Selim had tossed a mine into it.

  “From now on you will keep all such comments to yourself, Selim. I will not have the classroom turned into a battlefield.”

  Selim couldn’t stand Boban’s Serbianisms, that was plain: when Boban talked in class, Selim would roll his eyes, take loud breaths, and cough into his hand, and when Selim talked in class he went heavier on the Bosnianisms—I was sure of it—than he did “on the outside.”

  Nevena was completely different. Her speech was characterized by a sort of linguistic schizophrenia: she stuttered and used all kinds of regionalisms and accents indiscriminately; she’d start a sentence in a South Serbian dialect, move on to an imitation of Zagreb speech, launch into the Bosnian drawl, and finally make such capricious use of the tonal system that she sounded like an autistic child. She later explained to me that her Serbian father and Croatian mother had constantly been at each other’s throats and separated at long last just before the war broke out. We all had our ethnic burdens to bear. Nevena had moved in with her grandmother in Bosnia and made her way from there to Amsterdam as a refugee.

  “I feel more comfortable in Dutch,” she told me, as if Dutch were a sleeping bag.

  Uroš mumbled so much of the time we could hardly understand him. His speech was also marked by an inordinate number of diminutives. Like the servants in nineteenth-century Russian novels he seemed to be using them to placate the people around him. It was as if he were afraid the person he was talking to was going to punch him in the nose and the nice little diminutives would shield him. The rest of the class made fun of Uroš’s diminutives as they did of the tendency of the Dutch to use them. Talking in class became such a trial to Uroš that I mostly left him alone.

  Igor spoke fluent Dutch. Dutch meant freedom to him; his mother tongue had become a burden.

  “When I speak ‘our language,’ I feel like a character in a provincial play, if you know what I mean,” he said. The “if you know what I mean” was in English. He always peppered “our language” with Anglicisms: it made it more tolerable for him.

  “All ‘our’ languages are trying to establish their own literary norm, but the only variant that sounds natural is the impure, bastardized variant. Or a dialect. When I hear Dalmatians talk Croatian, I think, ‘Hey, that’s cool.’ When I hear officials talk Croatian, I think airs and graces and rape. There’s something unnatural about the lot of them—Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian…. Look, I’m a rocker, a musician. I’ve got a hell of an ear. I know what I’m talking about.”

  The version of “our language” Igor was talking about, standard Croatian, had grown even stuffier since he’d left. Not a day went by without some mention of the language in the media. The pressure to change was enormous. Some took to the newspeak with amazing docility; others shied away in horror. Some saw it as the only way to affirm their loyalty; others saw it as the very nightmare they were experiencing. Stiff, dry platitudes made life easy, made long stories short. Platitudes were a coded language: they depersonalized the speaker, put a shield around him. Platitudes were a language about something that couldn’t be put into language anyway. There seemed to be only two options: to keep an honest silence or to speak and thereby lie.

  The young took spontaneous shelter in dialects, which they had once despised as “bumpkinese,” or retreated into more personal speech, the parlance of their playmates or schoolmates, for instance. These were their temporary refuges from the official language that had come with the war, spreading everywhere, polluting everything. They were like the secret languages we use as children to keep grown-ups from understanding us. I-ay ust-may el-tay u-yay um-say ing-thay.

  Language was our common trauma, and it could take the most perverted of shapes. I am haunted by the case of a Bosnian woman who is said to have memorized the story of her rape and repeated it whenever prompted to do so. Then rape as a form of warfare became international news, and she turned out to be the only victim capable of giving a coherent account of it. Soon she was in great demand by foreign journalists and women’s organizations, one of which invited her to America. There she traveled from city to city, spinning the tale of her humiliation and eventually even memorizing an English version of it. On and on she went—reciting a story by now several times removed from its content—like the keeners peasants hire to lament the deceased at funerals. Reeling off the painful tale like a machine was her way of deadening the pain.

  I often wondered whether my Croatian, too, wasn’t starting to sound dry and colorless. There were times I felt like a student of Croatian as a foreign language. I would catch myself saying something so formulaic, so cold that my mouth might have been filled with ice cubes.

  “Remember the samurai in those Japanese movies we used to watch?” Boban said one day. “Samurai don’t talk; they make faces and roll their eyes. I was always afraid they’d burst from those words they couldn’t spit out. Well, we’re like them, the samurai. We turn bright red, our eyes pop, the veins in our temples swell to bursting, and no words come out. So out comes the sword.”

  The class broke into a round of applause.

  “Well, well, well!” said Igor. “Didn’t know you had it in you! You beat Miloševi in eloquence hands down!”

  “Right on!” cried Meliha. “And I’m a Sarajevo samurai.”

  I could always count on Meliha. We never got enough of her stories about Sarajevo—the fear, the dark, the humiliation, the madness, the hatred, the living and the dead…. Meliha was a master of detail, even when describing the impenetrable darkness in the shelters during an alarm. And the stories she told. Of a woman who had gone mad when a grenade blew up her child, and spent hours rubbing her cheeks against the stucco facade of her house until her face was one live wound; of her own life before the war and the refugee camp where she was first interned and the fine old Dutchman who paid her to keep him company; of her mother, who was learning Dutch by taking care of a neighbor’s three-year-old, and was using the child’s babble to ease her way into a world without pain, to erase the recent past she so longed to forget.

  We hung on her every word. No one else was willing to open up the way she was. Some were still too scared, others too ashamed; some were stymied by the guilt of not having experienced the war, others by the horror of the experience.

  In the end, the hue and cry back home over the “national substance” of language was both a pack of lies and the gospel truth; in the end, my students had an easier time saying what they had to say in languages not their own—English and Dutch—even though their command of both left much to be desired. The mother tongue—the “tongue of the clan,” the language that, as the Croatian poet’s ecstatic verse would have it,

  Rustles, rings, resounds, and rumbles

  Thunders, roars, reverberates—

  the mother tongue had suddenly appeared to them in an entirely new light. From here the “substance” was more like linguistic anemia, verbal exhaustion, a tic, a stammer, a curse, an oath, or just plain phrasemongering.

  “Hey, everybody!” Meliha burst out one day. “Fuck language! Let’s just talk!”

  And suddenly the ball was rolling again.

  CHAPTER 7

  At the Department I felt somewhat of a stowaway. I made several attempts at setting up an appointment with Cees Draaisma, the chair and my “host,” and he always said, “Yes, definitely. It’s just that I’m terribly busy at the moment. If there are any practical matters that need seeing to, Dunja will help you, I’m sure.”

  Dunja, the secretary of the Department, was Dutch. She was married to a
Russian. Her real name was Anneke. Anneke looked like a large, listless seal. Surrounded by dusty plants, she basked in her aquarium of an office, occasionally gracing visitors with a blank gaze. Nothing could get a rise out of her: she would answer any question I might have with a reluctant “yes” or “no” or play deaf.

  “We were going to have a talk about my course,” I said to Draaisma several times by way of reminder.

  “Slavs are natural-born teachers,” he would say in the voice of a football coach.

  I couldn’t tell whether the remark was meant in jest or in praise.

  “Ines sends her regards. As soon as she tidies up the back-to-school mess, we’ll have you to dinner, okay?”

  Draaisma was only confirming what I’d heard from Ines each time I phoned her. (“You’ve got to come and see us. But not till the dust settles. You’ve no idea what a bother children are. I can’t even get to the hairdresser. Now you, you’ve got it made. I tell you what. You run round to all the museums and then we’ll have you over.”)

  The fifth floor, where the Department was, consisted of a long dark corridor and fifteen closed doors. From time to time I saw a colleague slipping into his room and paying me no heed. Anneke kept the door to the departmental office closed, and it often sported a Back Soon sign. I finally stopped trying to see Draaisma. The only living being I saw with any regularity was the plump Russian lecturer. She would be sitting at her desk behind a half-open door, moving her lips as if eating an invisible sandwich or reading something to herself.