The Ministry of Pain

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  Roaming through the city, I would pass through a number of olfactory zones, urine ceding to the mould that grazed my nostrils as I ran down a flight of stairs, the mould ceding to the rancid oil that wafted from the cheap seaside food concessions and lodged in my hair, the oil ceding to the human sweat that clung to me as I made my way through the crowds, the sweat ceding to the heavy, sticky aroma of hashish. The ever present physicality all around me had no power to arouse; it produced the same impression as the eccentric old man who did circus tricks on a tightrope in the middle of the Leidseplein stark naked. That naked superannuated human body twisting and turning on a rope was a grotesque example of the city’s incongruities.

  Detail after detail threw me off guard. I was constantly confronted with a certain dualism: everything seemed to go hand in hand; each plus had its minus. The absence of beauty took the classic forms of ugly civic sculptures, the iron fly lying on the Haarlemplein asphalt, the metal caterpillars crawling through the Leidseplein’s lawns, the miniature, rubber-ball-sized busts sticking up out of the wet grass in park after park. But beauty, too, was present, and it, too, took classic forms: museums, patrician houses, canals, reflections….

  Besides the first platitude I often heard another, namely that “Amsterdam is a city of human proportions.” For me it had the proportions of a child. Shop windows in the red-light district displaying live dolls for grown-ups, porno shops decked out to resemble toy shops, kindergarten-like coffee shops with plastic mushrooms “growing” at the entrance and Dam’s theme-park attractions. It’s not that this urban infantilism is subversive or derisive—it would appear to have no ulterior motive whatsoever; it’s just that it has turned Amsterdam into a kind of melancholy Disneyland. I often experienced a vague sense of shame as I walked through the city, playing its pornographic game and wondering whether I wasn’t the only one who perceived it as such.

  If Amsterdam’s famous curtainless windows expose the interiors behind them, the interiors behind them expose the absence of privacy. Thus the sacred right to privacy is paradoxically confirmed by its absence. The front verandas—scarcely big enough for a chair or two—represent another exhibition space of absence: when the weather is hot, residents sit out on the verandas like live exhibits watching other live exhibits, the street traffic, amble past. Amsterdam is a permanent stage, but if that is a characteristic it shares with all other cities on earth, it differs from them in the almost mechanical effort the inhabitants invest in performing on that stage, in making over their windows into display cases, in promenading their bodies on walks or bicycles. Like any tourist I was charmed at first by this Disneyland for grown-ups, but before long I found it repellent. Perhaps I projected my own nightmares onto the city and read meanings into it that were not there. The fact remains, however, that it was Amsterdam and no other city I had chosen for my screen.

  If Amsterdam was a stage, I had a double role: I was both audience and performer, watcher and watched. The water and sky and windowpanes layered and reflected one another, and stopping in front of a window that fairly forced me into voyeurism I would catch my own image melting into the interior, the picture on the TV screen, the owner staring at the screen from his armchair, the reflections of other passersby. If I passed a window in the red-light district, my reflection would cross the prostitute’s face like a shadow. Everything reflected everything, everything merged, the reflections of the houses swimming in the canals together with the windows mirroring the sky. The very thought of it made my head spin.

  Some of the front doors had mirrors sticking out on metal stalks, the purpose of which was to enable the inhabitants to see who was ringing without themselves being seen at the window. I often caught my reflection in those mirrors. I had the feeling I might slip through them into a parallel world, and I was frightened at the thought of seeing myself from inside, hidden behind the curtain, ringing the front doorbell.

  One day, passing a group of American tourists that had gathered round an old Kalverstraat organ grinder and hearing them gush over him with the word “cute,” I was reminded of its equivalent, leuk, in Dutch and realized that leukness was the key to the problem. Leukness was an antiseptic, a disinfectant that removed all spots, all bumps, put everything on an equal footing, made everything acceptable. Near my house there was a gay bar called the Quinn’s Head with a display of ten male dolls, ten Kens, in the window. It was a leuk display. Whenever I passed it, I thought of the live Barbies—young women from Moldavia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Belarus—the traffickers, traders in human flesh, bought up for export. I thought of the fresh East European flesh setting off on the long journey west. If it didn’t get bogged down in some Serbian or Bosnian backwoods, it would end up here. I thought of them and of the Eastern European Kens who had come to this Disneyland to entertain the grown-up male children here, to give them alien flesh in which to insert their male members. How leuk it all was. And what is leuk is beyond good and evil; it is amoral not immoral; it is simply take it or leave it.

  Early one morning I witnessed a scene that pierced me like a knife. The streets were still empty when the porcelain quiet of dawn was rent by a scream. I saw a woman coming toward me, her arms flailing, her fists clenched in a threat, her mouth emitting a mixture of words and moans. I glimpsed a mask that seemed to have merged with her face, a mask of pain. Her eyes were tearless, locked in a dull stare, her mouth twisted downward. She walked past without noticing me, though I was the only living being in sight. On she went, her fists in the air. She seemed to be rehearsing a list of insults gathered over a lifetime. Even though I could not understand them, they penetrated me to the quick. It was the combination of the vital shrieks and the dead, papier-mâché face that did me in.

  And when on one of my nervous train trips I got off at The Hague and went to visit Madurodam, I found myself in the very heart of the metaphor I had been seeking. Madurodam is a perfect mock-up of the Netherlands, a Dutch Disneyland. It had everything—the cities, the houses, the canals, the bridges, the windmills—and everything was “true to life”: the water ran, the bonsai were budding and the grass sprouting, the boats plied the waterways and the bridges raised to let them pass, the air was abuzz with helicopters. It had people, too: the drivers of miniature buses and trams, switchmen, conductors, pilots, pedestrians, doctors, shopkeepers, shop assistants, tourists, children, grown-ups, senior citizens, farmers, firemen. It had Schiphol with all its runways, planes, control towers, terminals, and passengers. It had the parliament in The Hague and the cathedral in Utrecht. It had the famous Alkmaar cheese market, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, Rotterdam’s Erasmus Bridge, the Groningen railway station, the Ameland lighthouse…. And suddenly I had an epiphany: I saw myself sitting on a bench in Vondel Park like a butterfly in an album or admiring a painting the size of a child’s fingernail in the Rijksmuseum. Amsterdam-Madurodam. Madurodam-Amsterdam. I suddenly realized that I lived in the largest doll’s house in the world. I refused to look out of the window. What would I see? Only the giant pupil in the giant eye of a child.

  Then I would alter my perspective and Amsterdam would again become “one of the most beautiful cities in the world,” a “desert rose.” I thought of desert winds ingesting indifferent desert sand, grinding it with their teeth, burnishing it with their burning tongue and spitting out a stone flower. On rainy days, when the sky came down so low it seemed to rest on the roofs, the stone rose had a dirty, ghastly cast to it. But the moment the sky lifted, the “rose” would fill with light and shine with a glow that left me breathless.

  For the most part I adjusted my pulse to the pulse of the city and went on with my life. I went to the market, bought fish, fruit, and vegetables and sampled the myriad varieties of Dutch cheese; I kept up with the latest films; I people-watched in cafés; I went to galleries and museums. And life seemed its normal, laid-back self again. I lived in the heart of Amsterdam, which, or so it sometimes seemed to me, pumped more cotton candy than blood. Though maybe my own heart was broken and my view disto
rted. Maybe the instinct of self-preservation was the glue that held my heart together and made me believe that everything was “normal.”

  CHAPTER 11

  We are Pioneers,

  Soldiers brave and true.

  Every day we sprout

  Like the grass anew.

  I kept thinking we had time to burn, but the first semester was over before I knew it. And since the end of the semester coincided with my birthday, I proposed that we all go out and celebrate the two together. I had a plane ticket to Zagreb, where I would spend a week before coming back to prepare for the second semester.

  The kids chose an old Dutch pub near the main railway station. One of them knew the owner. It was nearly empty: there were no more than three or four regulars at the bar, the local drunks.

  “Look,” said Darko, “we’ve got it to ourselves.”

  Meliha had brought a box of genuine Bosnian urmašice her mother had baked. Igor, Nevena, and Selim, all of whom worked at the “Ministry,” brought me artifacts they had gathered at work: Igor a pair of handcuffs concealed in a bouquet of yellow roses, Selim a leather collar with metal spikes, and Nevena a black whip wrapped in purple paper and a red ribbon.

  “Many happy returns of the day, Comrade Makarenko!” said Igor, kissing my hand. “Now you’ve got everything you need.”

  I asked him where in the world he’d dug up Makarenko, whose account of his work with Soviet juvenile delinquents, The Road to Life, or A Pedagogical Poem, had been long forgotten even in its country of origin.

  Johanneke had gone to the Bosnian delicatessen in Rotterdam to buy spicy Macedonian ajvar, chocolate napolitanka-filling, and a package of Minas coffee, all of which she then packed in a box labeled “FIRST-AID KIT FOR YUGONOSTALGITIS.” Ante gave me a rosemary plant, Ana a photocopy of the first postwar Yugoslav primer. I wondered what lengths she had gone to get that photocopy to Amsterdam.

  Mario, Boban, Darko, and Uroš came, too. Even Amra—the young mother, who almost never came to class—put in a brief appearance. Zole, the guy who had claimed he was living with a gay partner to keep from being thrown out of the country, looked in for a while, as did Laki, whom I had completely forgotten about.

  Ante had brought his accordion, and while the first mugs of beer were emptied and refilled with alarming alacrity, he started in on his prodigious repertory of partisan songs, urban folk songs, Bosnian love songs, Serbian and Macedonian kolo dances, Medjimurian ditties, Dalmatian glees, Slovenian polkas, with some Hungarian and Gypsy tunes thrown in for good measure. He knew all the old favorites: “Emina,” “Biljana Bleaches the Linen,” “What Jet Black Hair You Have, My Sweet,” “I Was a Rose,” “My Father Has Two Little Horses,” “The Girl from Bilea,” “From Vardar All the Way to Triglav”…Once the music had set their memories in motion, line led to line, chorus to chorus, and soon they were competing to see who could remember the most. It was like a crash course in the history of the Yugoslav popular song. We went through the Opatija Festivals year by year: Zdenka Vuckovi, Ivo Robi, Lola Novakovi, Lado Leskovar, Zvonko špiši, Djordje Marjanovi, Ljupka Dimitrovska…We took great pleasure in merely pronouncing the names as a group.

  “Remember when Lola Novakovi sang ‘You Never Came to Offer Me Your Hand,’ and all Yugoslavia cried along with her, because of course everybody knew who hadn’t come.”

  “I didn’t know. Who was it?”

  “Why, Cune Gojkovic, you idiot!”

  “But how do you know?” I asked, breaking in on them. “Most of you weren’t even born yet.”

  “We’ve got Yugogenes, Comrade, remember?” they replied in a raucous chorus. “They take care of it.”

  Ante kept feeding them songs, and they kept begging for more: “Good for you, Ante! Hey, Ante, how about…”

  They eventually got to Djordje Balaševi, whose bittersweet songs were calculated to reduce all former Yugos to hopeless melancholy, and moved on to the classics of Yugoslav rock: the Indexes, White Button, Azra. During one of Ante’s breaks we pieced together the wording of the Pioneer vow (“I solemnly promise to uphold the achievements of our homeland…”) and the Yugoslav national anthem (“Hark, fellow Slavs! The word of our forefathers lives as long as their sons’ hearts beat strong…”), which we recited in an updated rap rhythm. We made a list of all the composers of the commercialized pseudo–folk music so popular in the seventies and of the turbo-folk that succeeded it. We roared with laughter over the silliest of doggerel:

  Buy me a car, Papa. Oranges too.

  Or buy me a teddy bear straight from the zoo.

  Buy me a bunny, some sweets, or a ball.

  No, buy me everything. I want them all.

  And by the time we got to “The Bunny and the Brook,” we were in our second childhood, Nevena shedding a tear at the line “And now poor bunny weeps and weeps…” On we went to Yugoslav television, chronicling first the children’s programs Letter by Letter, Mendo and Slavica, Neven, The Smog Dwellers, then the first American series—Peyton Place, Dynasty, Dallas—the Polish Captain Klos and the Soviet Captain Shtirlits, the Czech series Hospital on the Outskirts. From there we moved back in time to Radmila Karaklaji, who could have been our mother or grandmother, and her “Zumba, Zumba, Salted Codfish.” We went through all the ethnic jokes: the Bosnian ones (about Meho and Mujo, Fata and Suljo) and the Vojvodina ones (about Lala) and the Slovenian ones (about Janez) and the Montenegrin and Dalmatian and Macedonian ones. We imitated the way Kosovo Albanians speak “our language” (“When I love I kiss, and when I don’t I kill”) and all kinds of regional accents. No one could finish a sentence without someone else jumping in. It was one long rat-tat-tat of quotations from life in Yugoslavia. I kept worrying that our plastic bag—the one with the red, white, and blue stripes—would burst and with it the newly established foundation for our imaginary museum of Yugoslav daily life.

  Nor did they steer clear of the war.

  “There’s something fundamentally fucking wrong with a language that instead of saying ‘The child is sleeping soundly’ or ‘sleeping deeply’ says ‘sleeping the sleep of the butchered.’”

  “That’s what brought the war on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you think your kid’s about to be butchered, you pack a gun and fire at the drop of a hat.”

  My kids didn’t know that I’d heard the same thing from any number of Yugoslav émigrés. They even cited it as their main reason for having left the country. (“Why did I go? Because in other languages children sleep the sleep of the just and in mine they sleep the sleep of the butchered.”)

  At that moment I felt a wave of compassion come over me; at that moment I felt sorry for them and loved everything about them—the way they looked, the things they said, the way they said them…. They were my kids. As my eyes traveled over them, I snapped Polaroid shots of their salient features: Selim’s unusually long, fine fingers and the nervous way he had of flapping his arms like wings; Meliha’s face when a smile spread across it like oil; the deep incisions between Ana’s eyebrows, a brand almost; Uroš’s restless, half-shut eyelids and whitish eyelashes; the ticlike twist Nevena gave to her head before she raised her eyes. I was the only one without a Polaroid: the place at the table set aside for me was empty, a void.

  The group temperature rose like beer froth. We must have been temporarily insane, the lot of us. We had no idea where we were. A Pioneer meeting? A Party rally? A school field trip? All of a sudden—from too much to drink or overexcitement or fatigue or some kind of group dynamics—Meliha burst into tears. Others followed suit or felt a lump in their throats. Something told me that we’d drunk the cup to the dregs and that from one second to the next the positive group dynamics could turn into something else.

  Which is what happened.

  Uroš, who had clearly had more to drink than the others, stood and called out, “Quiet, everybody. Quiet down. I’ve got something to say.”

  His face was pale, and trying to take a deep breath, he s
wayed slightly.

  In a land of peasants

  In the mountainous Balkans

  In a single day

  A martyr’s death came

  To a band of children.

  All had been born

  In the selfsame year.

  All had gone to the same school,

  All attended

  The same celebrations;

  All received

  The same vaccinations.

  And they died on the selfsame day.

  We listened without a word. Ante was playing the partisan song “Mount Konjuh.”

  And fifty-five minutes

  Before that fatal one

  The band of children

  Were at their desks

  Hard at work on a hard-to-solve problem:

  How far can a traveler go

  If he walks at a speed of…