The Ministry of Pain

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  “Zdravstvuite,” she would say shyly if our eyes met.

  Only once did a colleague knock on my door.

  “May I come in?” he asked.

  “Please do,” I said.

  “So you’re our new colleague.”

  “You might say so.”

  The man held out his hand.

  “Glad to meet you. My name is Wim. Wim Hoeks. I teach Czech. Czech language and literature. Last door on the left.”

  I liked him immediately.

  “I wonder why Cees hasn’t introduced you to anybody.”

  “Oh, it’s probably because I’m here for only two semesters.”

  “So what? It would only have been right.”

  “I suppose it’s academic etiquette here.”

  “Well, we Dutch do take our time. It’s a few years before we invite anyone home. Privacy is a great excuse for all kinds of things, including this inexcusable rudeness. ‘It’s not that we’re unwilling; we just don’t want to impose.’”

  “Really?”

  “Welcome to the most hypocritical country on earth!” he said. “Now tell me, how are things going?”

  “Fine.”

  “And what are you teaching?”

  “For the time being I’m just getting to know the students.”

  “Miroslav Krleza is a great writer,” he said.

  “Your Czechs are no sluggards, either.”

  “What about the weather? Foreigners always beef about our weather.”

  “Well, it’s not the Caribbean, but…”

  “Aren’t you bored?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because this is the most boring country on earth!”

  “Isn’t that a bit contradictory?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How can a country be both hypocritical and boring?”

  “Only Holland has that distinction.”

  “And I thought East Europeans were the masters of self-deprecation.”

  “No, that’s another of our distinctions. Only don’t let us fool you. We don’t mean it. We actually have the highest opinion of ourselves. It’s colonial arrogance. We’ve let the colonies go, but held on to the arrogance. You’ll see…”

  He glanced at his watch, stood up, and said, “Look, come and see me whenever you feel like it. We can go somewhere for coffee. Last door on the left, the smallest office on our floor. Yours is a lot bigger. You’re from the former Yugoslavia. You’re higher on the scale than us Czechs.”

  “In what sense?”

  “You’ve got nationalism, war, post-Communism. And we’re up to our necks in it all at the Hague.”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “And what a wonderful country it was! Dubrovnik is the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen! I’ll never understand how it happened.”

  “You don’t think I do.”

  “Of course not…. But when you stick a knife in somebody’s stomach, you raise such a racket that the whole world knows. We do it on the q.t. We don’t want people to know, and even our victims are grateful…. But we’ll talk again. Glad to have met you.”

  He started off, then turned back at the door.

  “That island off the Dalmatian coast foreigners can never pronounce….”

  “Krk.”

  “Right. Does the name mean ‘neck’?”

  “Neck? No. ‘Neck’ is vrat. Why do you ask?”

  “Because that’s what it means in Czech. And Czechs like to torture foreigners with the sentence Str prst skrz krk.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “‘Stick your finger through your neck,’” he laughed, giving a demonstration on himself. Then, with a wave, he turned again and strode down the corridor.

  The fifth floor was always so deserted that I gave up feeling like a stowaway. I also gave up asking the secretary questions and knocking at Draaisma’s door. I did, however, pop in on Wim three times. His office was in fact smaller than mine. Each time he told me he happened to be very busy, and each time he pressed a signed offprint of an article he had written into my hand—by way of consolation, I presume. The first was about Karel Capek’s Letters from Holland, the second about misogyny in Kundera’s novels, the third about “linguistic hedonism” in the prose of Bohumil Hrabal.

  We never did go out for coffee. My only “live” contact at the Department remained the plump Russian lecturer, the one with the invisible sandwich in her hand. Whenever I walked past her office, she would swallow the invisible morsel and utter her timid “Zdravstvuite.”

  All things considered, the Department made a depressing impression on me, which impression was only heightened by the suspicion that the local Slavists were typical of West European Slavists. West European Slavists were wont to enter the field for emotional reasons: they had fallen in love with one of those exotic East bloc types. Or they would cement their choice of field after the fact with a politically, culturally, professionally, sentimentally correct marriage. There was another factor involved: the field made them absolute lords over minor, out-of-the-way, language-and-literature fiefdoms into which no one had ventured theretofore, which made the probability of their competence being adequately evaluated statistically insignificant. Though I should have been the last to condemn them, given that I owed my position to the fact that I happened to know Ines, who happened to have married Draaisma, who happened to be chair of the Department.

  CHAPTER 8

  ANA: THE PLASTIC BAG WITH THE RED, WHITE, AND BLUE STRIPES

  It was just a plastic carry-all. What made it special was that it had red, white, and blue stripes. It was the cheapest piece of hand luggage on earth, a proletarian swipe at Vuitton. It zipped open and shut, but the zip always broke after a few days. When I was a child, I used to wrack my brains over how they managed to get the cherries or other fillings into chocolates without a hole or a seam. Now I wrack my brains over another childish question: who designed the plastic bag with the red, white, and blue stripes and sent it out into the world in a million copies?

  The plastic bag with the red, white, and blue stripes looked like a parody of the Yugoslav flag (Red, white, and blue! We shall e’er be true!) minus the red star. The first time I ever saw one, I think, was at a flea market. The Poles would bring their cheap Nivea cream, linen dish towels, camping tents, inflatable mattresses, that kind of thing. If I had asked the Poles, I am sure they would have said they got them from the Czechs. The Czechs would have said, No, we don’t make them; we got them from the Hungarians. No, the Hungarians would have said; we got them from the Romanians. No, they’re not ours, the Romanians would have said; they’re Gypsy-made.

  In any case, the plastic bag with the red, white, and blue stripes made its way across East-Central Europe all the way to Russia and perhaps even farther—to India, China, America, all over the world. It is the poor man’s luggage, the luggage of petty thieves and black marketeers, of weekend wheeler-dealers, of the flea-market-and-launderette crowd, of refugees and the homeless. Oh, the jeans, the T-shirts, the coffee that traveled in those bags from Trieste to Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria…. The leather jackets and handbags and gloves leaving Istanbul and oddments leaving the Budapest Chinese market for Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia, Serbia, you name it. The plastic bags with the red, white, and blue stripes were nomads, they were refugees, they were homeless, but they were survivors, too: they rode trains with no ticket and crossed borders with no passport.

  When I ran across one in a Turkish shop here in Amsterdam, I snapped it up for two guilders. Then I folded it in two and set it aside for safe keeping the way my mother set aside ordinary white plastic bags “because you never know when they might come in handy.” I was aware that by purchasing one of the bags I had performed a rite of self-initiation: I had joined the largest clan on earth, a clan for which the plastic bag with the red, white, and blue stripes was colors, seal, and coat of arms rolled into one. The only thing I couldn’t work out was who had unstuck the red star?<
br />
  Our game derived from Ana’s symbolic bag.

  “The first thing to do is what ‘our people’ used to do,” said Meliha. “Tie it up with string so nothing falls out.” You’d have thought she was describing a hedonistic ritual.

  “I must say I was ashamed of ‘our people’ whenever I saw them picking up those wrecks from the luggage carousel at the airport,” said Darko.

  “It bugged me, too,” said Igor. “It made me think, ‘Look at the hicks I’ve got to travel with.’ But now I think it’s cool.”

  “How come?” I asked.

  “You know who has the most expensive luggage in the world?”

  “Madonna?”

  “Nope. The Russians. The top whores and top mafiosi. That’s what turned me on to the Gypsy look: the plastic bag tied up like a tramp’s boot, the gold tooth…. And how right you were about the missing star, Ana. We’re proletarians all! The only thing is, Papa Marx is dead and buried.”

  “Right on!” cried Meliha. “And turning over in his grave at this very moment.”

  It was with a certain diffidence that I’d proposed it as a class project—or game, really: a catalog of everyday life in Yugoslavia. Ana was the first to contribute. She brought her composition about the “Gypsy bag” to the very next class. I then suggested that we use her virtual Gypsy bag to store all the items for our “Yugonostalgic” museum.

  “What museum?” they asked.

  “Oh, it will be virtual, too. Everything you remember and consider important. The country is no more. Why not salvage what you don’t want to forget?”

  “I remember the rally they held on Tito’s birthday,” said Boban. “We watched it every year on TV.”

  “But we all remember that, man,” said Meliha. “Give us something personal.”

  “My first bike. One of those squat ones we called ‘ponies,’ said Mario. “Does that count?”

  “You bet!”

  “Just like a man: a phallic symbol,” said Meliha in jest. “What about food? Bureks and baklava.”

  “Bureks, baklava, and poppy-seed noodles.”

  They all perked up at the reference to Balaševis song.

  “If noodles count, anything counts,” said Nevena.

  “Anything that makes you happy,” I said.

  “Or sad?” asked Selim, his eyes lowering.

  “Or sad,” I said. “Why not.”

  “What about Omarska?”

  The room was suddenly still. I flinched.

  “Do you want to talk about it, Selim?”

  “What’s there to say? It’s the only virtual exhibit I’ve got. The Serbs slit my dad’s throat there.”

  Selim had tossed in another of his mines. I can’t say I didn’t expect it: I’d been picking my way through a minefield from the start. We all had our war memories, and losses like Selim’s were immeasurable. Selim and Meliha had experienced the war firsthand and in all its intensity. Uroš and Nevena refused to talk about it though they, too, were from Bosnia. Mario, Boban, and Igor had left the country to avoid mobilization and seemed thus to have avoided the virus of nationalist insanity—Boban Serbian nationalism, Mario and Igor the Croatian variant. Johanneke had followed the events from Holland. Ana, who arrived in Amsterdam with her Dutch husband before the war, had kept up with it in the Croatian, Serbian, and Dutch media, but made periodic trips not only to Belgrade but to Zagreb, where she had close relatives. Compared with theirs, my experience of the war was infinitesimal.

  I realized I would have to find some common ground, because they differed in more than their war experiences; they differed in their interests. While Meliha had a degree in Yugoslav literature from Sarajevo, Uroš had only a provincial Bosnian secondary education and was just now entering the university. Mario had been studying sociology at Zagreb University. Ana had enrolled in the English Department at Belgrade University, but dropped out almost immediately. Nevena had done two years of economics. Ante had graduated from the teachers’ training college at Osijek. Boban had made it through the second year of law school. Darko had graduated in hotel administration at Opatija. Selim had just enrolled in the Sarajevo Mathematics Department when the war broke out. As for Igor, he was something of a drifter: he once mentioned having done some psychology, but also told me he’d spent two years at the Zagreb Academy of Theater and Film in the program for theater directors. I never pushed him about his past; it didn’t seem that important anymore.

  As for the common ground, I could sense their inner fragmentation, their rage, their stifled protest. We had all of us been violated in one way or another. The list of things we had been deprived of was long and gruesome: we had been deprived of the country we had been born in and the right to a normal life; we had been deprived of our language; we had experienced humiliation, fear, and helplessness; we had learned what it means to be reduced to a number, a blood group, a pack. Some—Selim, for instance—had lost close friends and relatives. Their lot was the hardest to bear. And now we were all in one way or another convalescents.

  Amidst such lunacy I had to find a territory that belonged equally to us all and would hurt us all as little as possible. And the only thing that could be, I thought, was our common past. Because another thing we all had been deprived of was our right to remember. With the disappearance of the country came the feeling that the life lived in it must be erased. The politicians who came to power were not satisfied with power alone; they wanted their new countries to be populated by zombies, people with no memory. They pilloried their Yugoslav past and encouraged people to renounce their former lives and forget them. Literature, movies, pop music, jokes, television, newspapers, consumer goods, languages, people—we were supposed to forget them all. A lot of it ended up at the dump in the form of film stock and photographs, books and manuals, documents and monuments—“Yugonostalgia,” the remembrance of life in that ex-country, became another name for political subversion.

  The breakup of the country, the war, the repression of memory, the “phantom limb syndrome,” the general schizophrenia, and then exile—these, I was certain, were the reasons for my students’ emotional and linguistic problems. We were all in chaos. None of us was sure who or what we were, to say nothing of who or what we wanted to be. At home my students resented being typecast as Yugonostalgiacs, that is, dinosaurs, but they felt little affinity with the prepacked retrofuture of the newly minted states. And here in Holland they were stigmatized as “the beneficiaries of political asylum,” “refugees,” or “foreigners,” as “children of post-Communism,” “the fallout of Balkanization,” or “savages.” The country we came from was our common trauma.

  I realized I was walking a tightrope: stimulating the memory was as much a manipulation of the past as banning it. The authorities in our former country had pressed the delete button, I the restore button; they were erasing the Yugoslav past, blaming Yugoslavia for every misfortune, including the war, I reviving that past in the form of the everyday minutiae that had made up our lives, operating a volunteer lost-and-found service, if you will. And even though they were manipulating millions of people and I only these few, we were both obfuscating reality. I wondered whether by evoking endearing images of a common past I wouldn’t obscure the bloody images of the recent war, whether by reminding them of how Kiki sweets tasted I wouldn’t obliterate the case of the Belgrade boy stabbed to death by his coevals just because he was an Albanian, whether by urging them to “reflect on” Mirko and Slavko, the Yugopartisans of the popular comic strip, I wouldn’t be postponing their confrontation with the countless episodes of sadism perpetrated by Yugowarriors, drunk and crazed with momentary power, against their compatriots; or whether by calling up the popular refrain That’s what happens, my fair maiden, once you’ve known a Bosnian’s kiss I wouldn’t be dulling the impact of the countless deaths in Bosnia, that of Selim’s father, for instance. The lists of atrocities knew no end, and here I was, pushing them into the background with cheery catalogs of everyday trifles that no longer even
existed.

  On the other hand, it was all intertwined; you couldn’t have one without the other. Death chewed on Kikis. People killed and were killed, looted and were looted, raped and were raped to the sound of cheap, popular refrains. Soldiers were hit by bullets as they dragged color TVs, the new booty, to the trenches. Death went hand in hand with day-to-day detritus. A detail like Kikis could recur in an infinite number of variations—the image, say, of a girl hit by a sniper, the blood trickling from her lips sweetened by the Kiki she had been chewing. The evil was as banal as the everyday artifact and had no special status.

  I did not see how we could come to grips with our past if we did not first make our peace with it. So as our common ground I chose something we all felt close to—the homely terrain of the day-to-day life we had shared in Yugoslavia.

  Gradually our red-white-and-blue-striped bag filled up. There was a little of everything: the now dead world of Yugoslav primary and secondary schools, the idols of Yugoslav pop culture, all manner of Yugogoods—food, drink, apparel, and the like—and Yugodesign, ideological slogans, celebrities, athletes, events, Yugoslav socialist myths and legends, television series, comic strips, newspapers, films…

  Boban had unearthed a cache of Yugoslav films on video, so we had lots to watch. They proved a most viable testimony to the existence of a Yugoslav life. Reading that life from our posthumous perspective, we discovered detail after detail that presaged the future, prognostications that came true.