The Ministry of Pain

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  Darkness is everywhere, darkness enfolds me.

  The blackest of mists encircle the earth….

  Well, this weather report goes on for a while, but then he makes his point, which really hit home.

  I cannot stand to live in this place;

  I cannot live amidst snow, hail and ice.

  Lord, give me wings, that I may die,

  That I may back to my homeland fly,

  That I may feast my eyes once more

  On sun-drenched Struga and Ohrid’s fair shore.

  And when I got to the end, when I got to the lines that go:

  There shall I pipe my heart’s last good-bye,

  And when the sun sets, there shall I die.

  I burst into tears, for Christ’s sake. There I am, spouting Macedonian like a son of the soil—and bawling to beat the band. I thought I’d gone off the deep end. So anyway, I translate it for my Mieke, the tears still streaming down my cheeks, and you know what she says? Mooi! Well, when I heard that Dutch mooi, I smacked her one hard, and then she fucking burst into tears. I could have kicked myself, of course. I don’t know what got into me. Something in that mooi made me crack. I don’t get it. The word does mean “beautiful,” after all. Maybe it was the grass. Maybe the grass had something tear-jerking about it.

  DARKO: MY MOTHER HOLDS HANDS WITH TITO

  This isn’t a memory of my own; it comes from my mother. Like all the kids in her school she belonged to the Pioneers, and once, because she was at the top of her class, she was chosen to attend Tito’s birthday celebration. It was the custom to send the best Pioneers to the celebration, Mother told us, and when the photographer came in to take the traditional “Tito and the Pioneers” picture, she rushed over to Tito and grabbed his hand. I’ve seen the picture. She is leaning against him, pressing her hand in his, and he has a Cuban cigar in his free hand. When the photography session was over, Tito tried to take his hand away, but Mother wouldn’t let him. She stuck to him like glue. He gave another tug, but her fingers had turned into live tongs. People started getting uneasy. One of the security guards had to come and unfasten her. She let out an unearthly howl.

  “I don’t know what got into me,” she told me “or where I got the strength.”

  I once saw Tito in the flesh. It was at the Zagreb Trade Fair. Mother and I happened to be in the crowd lining the street as he passed by with his entourage. He looked smaller than in the photographs and film clips. He looked old and feeble, like a mummy. And when a sunbeam suddenly lit up the top of his head, it jumped out at me, all speckled with liver spots and covered over with strands of dyed hair turned orange.

  “Come on,” my mother said, tugging me by the hand, and took me for ice cream. She ordered so many scoops I couldn’t eat a quarter of them. I don’t know what got into her.

  MARIO: TRAINS WITH NO TIMETABLES

  Looking back, I have the impression that everything in the former Yugoslavia had some connection to trains. String together all the significant and insignificant trains in our lives and you get a history of the country that is parallel to—and no less valid than—the official one.

  1. What united Yugoslavia more than the slogan “brotherhood and unity” were its Austro-Hungarian tracks and stations. I get a lump in my throat each time I see the stations’ yellow facades, the geraniums in their flower boxes. The very sight of them means home.

  2. The first train in my life appeared in the children’s book Train in the Snow by Mate Lovrak. The first event in the history of Yugomythology—and in the history of the Yugoslav cinema—was Veljko Bulaji’s Train with No Timetable. It is about the exodus of a group of people, by train, from the rocky Dinaric Alps to Yugoslavia’s “breadbasket,” the rich, fertile Baranja (or was it Baka) region in the north. In the course of the journey they fall in love, they fight, they have ideological debates, a child is born, a man dies. Train with No Timetable begat a spate of train episodes in the Yugoslav cinema, all the way to the cruel love scene in the filthy WC in Emir Kusturica’s When Father Was Away on Business. Incidentally, it was with Kusturica that the Yugoslav cinema breathed its last.

  3. Railway tracks were an icon of the fifties, the time of the youth shock-worker movement, international and domestic. The younger generation was assigned construction of two important stretches: Brko-Banovii (Brko-Banovii is our aim/By summer’s end we’ll make good our claim) and šamac-Sarajevo. For a time youth brigades were a hot item in movies made for domestic consumption. The Extra Girl starring Milena Dravi is of many.

  4. Once the tracks were built, we couldn’t get enough of the trains: we took trains on school outings; we took trains to the seaside; we took trains to the army. All trains had “JDŽ” painted on them in Latin and Cyrillic letters. Many people came into contact with foreign languages for the first time on trains: “Do not lean out of the window” was engraved on small brass plates under the windows with a translation into French, German, and Russian. It became a catchword in books and movies and had its moment in the sun in the refrain of the popular song “The White Button” (Take the train, Selma, but don’t lean out of the window…. ) There was a framed photograph of some Yugoslav town or tourist attraction over every seat. My favorite was Makarska-by-Biokovo because of the “by.” The tastiest sandwiches we ever ate we ate on the train. The juiciest roast chicken we ever ate we ate on the train. The most important invention of the day was the thermos bottle, the most memorable sight, engraved in the memory of millions of Yugoslavs, was the sight of the Adriatic as it emerged on the horizon after a long absence. Everyone taking the train to the Adriatic played the same game: the first one to sight the sea would cry “Waaater!” and get five dinars. Or whatever the going rate was….

  5. The sixties and seventies were characterized by “Gastarbeiter trains,” the preferred means of transport for the Yugoslav, Greek, and Turkish workforce making its way to and from the West until it began acquiring cars. The hunger in an anonymous Yugo on the train trip home comes out clearly in the Gastarbeiter ditty:

  Pull your pants down, love, it’s no holds barred.

  All the way from Frankfurt I’ve been hard.

  6. The icon of Yugoslav consumerism of the eighties was the train to Trieste. It was a train loaded with black market goods: jeans, coffee, rice, olive oil, T-shirts, briefs, panties—you name it. The peak of the Trieste shopping spree coincided with Tito’s death. Tito died at the age of eighty-eight, and one of the ways the event was marked was by a flurry of agricultural activity: one community planted “eighty-eight roses for Comrade Tito,” another “eighty-eight birches for Comrade Tito,” and so on. Hence the Gypsy joke: A customs official on the train from Trieste asks a Gypsy, “What have you got in those sacks?” The Gypsy responds without missing a beat, “Eighty-eight Levi’s for Comrade Tito.”

  7. The last Yugoslav train was “the blue train” that carried Tito’s body along the Ljubljana-Zagreb-Belgrade line to be buried in Belgrade’s House of Flowers. Hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavs flanking the tracks paid homage to “the greatest son of the Yugoslav peoples and nationalities.” And the years of Yugoslav “brotherhood and unity” were immortalized in powerful lines like:

  In the railway tunnel, in the dark.

  Our five-pointed red star makes its mark.

  8. The breakup of Yugoslavia and the war it engendered trace their origins to the historic day when the Krajina Serbs in Croatia blocked the Zagreb–Split line with boulders and put an end to train service for several years.

  9. The Zagreb–Split line was reopened several years ago. It took the train, baptized “the Freedom Train,” an entire day to make the trip, which was broadcast live on Croatian TV. The reason the Freedom Train took so long was that the Croatian prime minister got off at every whistle-stop to make a speech. Meanwhile the Serbs we chased out of the Krajina made their way to Serbia on foot, by bus or car, by tractor or horse-drawn cart, by anything but the train.

  10. Last but not least, one of the best arguments that Ser
bian and Croatian are different languages and that the war was accordingly a historical necessity is likewise train-related, namely, that the very word for train differs in the two, the Croats calling it vlak, the Serbs voz.

  IGOR: HORROR AND HORTICULTURE

  (Comments on Yugoslav poetry by my friend Mikac after looking through the New Anthology of Yugoslav Poetry [Zagreb, 1966] I lent him)

  They’re all there: Serbs, Croats, Macedonians, Slovenes. There aren’t any Bosniosi or Montenegrins or, rather, there are, but they don’t have their own sections. The biggest eye-opener for me was reading the Slovenes in Slovenian and the Macedonians in Macedonian. Sans translation.

  Okay, I said to myself, let’s see what the old folks at home were reading before you were a twinkle in their eye. So out comes the calculator—you know, like in the marketplace, Dolac, say: What are your eggs going for today, love?—and do the arithmetic. Out of the 173 poets in the anthology, 56 are Serb, 62 Croat, 40 Slovene, and 16 Macedonian. Okay. Cool. So then I count up the females. The Serbs have 1, the Croats 3, the Slovenes 2. That makes 167 guys and 6 gals. And of those 6, 1 was so browbeaten she wrote under a male pseudonym. Another thing I picked up along the way is that our poets are so name-conscious they prefer three to two, like those partisan heroes they name schools after, so you see a name like Jure Franievi-Ploar or Milenko Brkovi Crni and you can’t tell who is the man of the pen and who the man of the sword. The same holds for the current crop of wannabe Nazis: they’re heavy into triple names, too. They really get off on them, the longer the better. Which makes me wonder if they’re not trying to make up for an anatomical defect, you know, down where a centimeter or two can make a world of difference. Oh, and something else. Our poets have a thing about dedicating poems to one another. Know what I mean? Like one guy chatting up another. Need I say more?

  Anyway, on we go. And surprise, surprise! Circa fifty percent of their output is about mama or the mamaland. Which kind of turns mamaland into mama. And vice versa. Whereupon they boo-hoo-hoo over both. Fucking unreadable, let me tell you. Oh, and then circa ten percent is made up of these horror stories, I mean literally, graves and tombs and that shit. Man, it really traumatized me. I mean, our poets are a bunch of fucking ghouls, always digging up some enemy or other. One of them marks out his territory (“This is the ground where my dead are sown”) and then picks up his shovel (“I summon you, my shades”). You fucking body snatcher, I think. You’d put the fear of God into Stephen King, you would. And just as I’m getting over it, what do I see but

  O mirrors of horror! Show scenes without gallows or noose! “Blood! Blood!” screams my blood in this land of Croatians ill used.

  Shit!

  But onward. To the ten percent belonging to what I would call the megalomaniac or me-me-me poems, poems where the guys talk one-on-one with the stars, the universe, like “If man you be, walk tall beneath the sky”—that shit. Poems where every man’s a fucking superman.

  Okay. Fine. Next category: the twenty percent that sing the beauties of nature, you know, the seasons, rainfall, crap like that. You’d think they were a bunch of—what was the name of that Serbian weatherman?—right, a bunch of Kamenko Katies. Our freaks are into flora a lot more than fauna. True, I did find one poem about a calf, but I didn’t get it till the end. At first I thought it was about this hot little number—the language was nice and sexy—and then in the middle of it all comes this line about dung…. But to get back to the flora. There were all kinds of poems about fucking trees—aspens, willows, poplars, oaks. After all the horror stuff I was surprised our guys had a thing for flowers—lilies of the valley, pansies, roses, cyclamen. I didn’t think horror and horticulture went together. Though one guy had something about bloody cyclamen.

  How much does that make altogether? Ninety percent? Okay. So then I went through them with a fine-tooth comb on the lookout for sex. Well, you could’ve knocked me over with a feather: our guys don’t care shit about sex. It jumps right out at you. No calculator necessary. Believe me, the only time they can write about a woman is when she’s dead and buried. It’s like they can hardly wait for the gal to bite the dust so they can write a poem about her. The sadder the better. Like the Dalmatians, for Christ’s sake. You know the poem:

  I saw you last night. In my dreams. Sad. Dead.

  In the fated hall midst an idyll of flowers.

  On a lofty bier midst the throes of the candles.

  Of course you do. We had to learn it in school. Well, the same necrophiliac wrote:

  I know not what thou art: art thou woman or hyena?

  Shit! Did that guy get my goat! I mean, what’s the point if you can’t even tell a woman when you see one. And then there was the guy who couldn’t find a place to bury his broad (“Where can I bury you, O my love, now that you’re gone?”) and the guy—the more I read, the more they pissed me off—who was away for so long that by the time he got back his girl had kicked the bucket:

  But when I arrived,

  I found you no more.

  What did he come back for, the shithead? And then there was another one we had in school, remember?

  Love may yet come, befall us yet, I say,

  But do I wish it or wish it away?

  That always made my blood boil. Your problem ain’t whether you want to, pal; it’s whether you can! So pack up your wares and get a move on. I’m not buying.

  They’re a bunch of sickos, our poets. And not only the ones in the anthology. There hasn’t been a sound mind among them in the past two hundred years or however long they’ve been at it. Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians—it makes no difference. Old farts all. You don’t need a calculator to tell you that.

  UROš: I WISH I WERE A NIGHTINGALE

  During our second year in elementary school the teacher assigned us a composition about Tito. Tito had had a leg cut off, she told us, and was recovering from the operation. It would make him happy if we wrote something nice. I wrote I wished I were a nightingale so I could fly to Comrade Tito’s hospital bed every morning and wake him with my song. The teacher praised me to the skies and read my composition to the class. My classmates made fun of me. They called me the nightingale. “Hey, here comes the nightingale,” they would shout with a guffaw. When my family heard about the composition, they made fun of me, too, especially my old man. Then, not long afterward, Tito died, and my old man cried and the whole family sat in front of the TV for the three days of the funeral and cried. The thing that impressed them most was all the foreign dignitaries attending the funeral. “All those famous people,” my old lady said. They had a good time pointing out the announcers’ mispronunciations of the statesmen’s and celebrities’ names. But when I said that Margaret Thatcher’s name is Thatcher, not Tratcher, my old man said, “That’s enough out of you, Nightingale. Go and get me a bottle of beer from the fridge. And, mind you, don’t drop it from your beak!” Which got a big laugh out of everybody.

  Yugoslavia was a terrible place. Everybody lied. They still lie of course, but now each lie is divided in five, one per country.

  CHAPTER 10

  I think it best to state straightaway that the northern Netherlands have always made me feel a certain Angst, which I write with the capital letter the German requires, as if in the early doctrine of the Naturphilosophen it were one of the basic elements, like Fire and Water, of which life on earth is constituted. The capital letter gives one the feeling one has been placed in a black box from which there is no easy escape.

  Cees Nooteboom

  Amsterdam is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Overused a platitude as it is, I would have no hesitation putting my name to it, and with nary a blush at its banality, were it not for what it leaves out: a sensation, an almost physical sensation of absence about the city, a sensation that occasionally pursued me and whose source I was unable to pinpoint.