The Ministry of Pain

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  And so forth.

  It was a painful scene. Desanka Maksimovi’s “A Bloody Tale” was known by heart to generations of schoolchildren in the former Yugoslavia. It figured in all textbooks and anthologies and was recited at “official events,” celebrations and school assemblies. The incident it treats actually occurred: the Germans did in fact execute an entire class in Kragujevac in 1941. But overexposure had cost the poem its potency, and in time it turned into a parody of itself. People had simply grown sick and tired of it. While Uroš droned on, I recalled some TV footage of the ninety-year-old poetess in a hat with a brim three times larger than her head. She was sitting in a first-row seat listening to a warmongering speech by Slobodan Miloševi, beaming and nodding like a grotesque mascot or mechanical dog.

  A handful of the selfsame dreams

  And selfsame secrets—

  Secrets of love and love of country—

  Rested deep in their pockets,

  And all of them thought they had

  All the time in the world

  To run beneath the firmament

  And solve the world’s problems…

  The path taken by the innocent poem had begun with a historical event: the death of a group of children during a war. Once the event was embedded in the poem, the poem was embedded in the school program. By the time fifty years had passed, what was meant to be an antiwar poem had turned into its opposite: the smile the poetess gave the nation’s leader represented symbolic support of the war he was waging and everything it implied. Here in the Amsterdam pub the lines trickled from the mouth of the young refugee like a repulsive drool. It couldn’t have been more painful, more wrong. Uroš had missed the mark. Fatally. If we listened without a peep, it was not because we were shocked by the poem or Uroš’s performance; it was because we were shocked by Uroš’s himself. Uroš had pricked the balloon that was holding us together, and our collective nostalgia whooshed out and disappeared. The magic of the moment had turned to alarm.

  Row after row of children

  Joined hands and left the classroom,

  Going from their last lesson

  To the firing squad meekly,

  As if death had no meaning.

  Having recited the final line, he collapsed into his chair. No one said a word. The only sound in the room was Ante’s soft accompaniment. Uroš pulled a twenty-five-guilder banknote out of his pocket, spat on it, and slapped it onto Ante’s forehead. The accordion fell silent. Uroš brought his hand down hard on the cup in front of him, breaking it to pieces. Then he slammed his head against the table.

  As he raised it, I saw thin jets of blood trickling down his face. I heard a shriek coming from Nevena or Ana or Meliha. I saw Mario and Igor lifting him from the table and dragging him to the men’s room. I was numb. I felt completely cut off. I could hear what people were saying, but their voices sounded infinitely distant.

  “That was like in the Petrovi movie I Even Met Happy Gypsies.”

  “With Uroš in the role of Bekim Fehmiu.”

  “Fehmi.”

  “Since when are you an expert on Shiptar names?”

  “Since when do you call Albanians Shiptars?”

  “Why do ‘our people’ always end up like this? Why do we make a bloody mess out of everything?”

  After a while the guys came back. Uroš looked fairly together. Igor and Mario had done a good job: they had washed the blood from his face, bandaged it up with some help from the owner, and wound somebody’s scarf round his hand.

  “Sorry if I…,” Uroš mumbled on the way out.

  By now the voices sounded normal again, but I didn’t respond. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Hey there, Comrade. You okay? You’re as pale as a ghost.” It was Igor.

  I nodded and asked for a glass of water. The waiter appeared. We paid. I put the presents into my bag. We left the pub in silence.

  We came out into a thick fog. You could barely see your hand before your face.

  “Christ! A pea-souper!”

  My only response was a few deep breaths.

  The students looked at me, bouncing up and down to keep warm, then began to disperse.

  “I have the feeling I’m in one of those Carpenter movies,” Mario cried out through the fog.

  “Look, don’t get all upset over Uroš,” said Meliha by way of consolation. “Balkan bashes have Balkan endings.”

  “I’m okay,” I muttered. “See you in two weeks.”

  “Going to Zagreb for the holidays?” Nevena asked.

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Have a good trip!” she said, kissing me on the cheek. “Bring back some of that good Zagreb chocolate.”

  One by one they disappeared into the fog. Before long only Igor and I were left. I was grateful when Igor offered to see me home. He took the bag with the gifts, and I took his arm and leaned against him. I still felt weak.

  The fog was as thick as cotton candy. The pain I had felt during the Uroš incident was giving way to the pleasure of Amsterdam and its childlike charm.

  “Fog becomes Amsterdam, don’t you think?” Igor whispered.

  “How come you’re whispering?”

  “It’s the fog,” he said, flustered.

  I looked at him. I found it touching he was flustered. The fog was exciting. Like a child’s fantasy about vanishing into thin air. Now you see me, now you don’t. It was tempting and scary at the same time. Like the invisibility hat in the Russian fairy tale.

  “What is it?” he said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “What a child you are!”

  “You’re the child! I bet you have no idea where you are.”

  “Remind me.”

  “In Macondo.”

  “Why Macondo?”

  “Remember how everyone suddenly stopped sleeping and totally lost their memories? So they had to paste labels on things to know what to call them and directions to know how to use them. And remember how Arcadio Buendía invented a memory machine?”

  Everything around us seemed to stand still. There were no more sharp edges. Everything was soft—sounds, voices, lights. Everything was quiet, lying low, holding its breath. We practically had to feel our way through the fog. Everything was unreal.

  “No, I don’t remember.”

  “Remember who saved them?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Melquiades the Gypsy, who came back from the dead and brought them sugar water in little bottles.”

  “Coca-Cola?”

  I saw a man with dark, glittering, slightly slanting eyes staring out of the fog at me. His large lips were moist and swollen, his body taut as a string. He seemed to be trembling.

  A picture seeming to emerge from a forgotten past flashed through my mind. I saw myself unbuttoning Igor’s coat warm with moisture and letting my head fall on his chest, then standing on tiptoe and chewing his upper lip until it bled, lifting it with my tongue, gliding the top of my tongue along the smooth enamel of his teeth…

  “Good night,” I panted, and slipped into the entrance.

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 1

  “I’ll pick you up at the airport,” she said. “Don’t bother,” I said. “I’ll take a cab.” But when I stepped off the plane, I felt a twinge of disappointment: her face wasn’t there. A foreign country is a country where nobody meets you at the airport, I thought. I was surprised at my own sensitivity: it was so childish. I hadn’t had time to don my armor.

  I had vowed to suppress all “émigré emotions.” I knew the standard list of complaints: Nobody asks how we are; they just go on about their own problems (Mario), “we” being the ones who had left the country, “they” being the ones who had stayed behind. “They” lived “there” we, “here.” They know best. They jump in the minute we open our mouths. They’ve got an opinion about everything. Why must they have an opinion about everything? (Darko). To hear them, they know Amsterdam better
than we do, not that they’ve ever been here! (Ante). They’re always whining about how bad things are for them and trying to make me feel guilty for having left (Ana). Whenever I go back, I feel I’m attending my own funeral (Nevena). And I feel like a punching bag. I ache all over! (Boban). I used to play Santa Claus. I’d go loaded down with presents. It made me feel good. Things are different now (Johanneke). I don’t know what it’s like. I haven’t gone back and have no desire to (Selim). I haven’t been, either. I’m afraid of the face-to-face thing (Meliha).

  The door to Mother’s flat was ajar. I was moved by her thoughtfulness: she was on pins and needles, afraid of missing the doorbell or of having misplaced the key, needing to look for it and then run to the door, which she might have trouble opening: you never knew when it would get stuck….

  She flung herself into my arms like a child. (“Heavens! You’re a wraith! Where do you live? Bangladesh? No, you live in a country that supplies the world with tomatoes. Which taste awful, by the way.”) She sat me down at the kitchen table and started chattering about the dishes she had to offer (“No, no, I’ll put it on a plate for you, no need to get up”), whether I wanted salt or a little more of this or that….

  She looked shorter and more frail than the last time I saw her. She had more wrinkles and was losing hair on top. Just seeing the top of her head through the now sparse gray hair aroused a painful tenderness in me. Heavens, how she’d aged!

  Mother had an inborn gift of turning people into her “batmen.” She’d done it to everyone around her—me, her menfolk, her friends—and no one uttered a word of protest. I was forever a small, quiet page in her court, or at least that is how I perceived myself. She would shower me with a cooey confetti of pet names—I was her “bumblebee,” her “apple dumpling,” her “froggy-woggy,” her “missy fishy”—but she had never allotted me much time. She had kept an eye on me, that was all: she didn’t care about me; she took care of me. Though she had often left me in the care of others—students, housewife neighbors, day-care “aunties.” I was always enrolled in “after-school activities” and would wait patiently for her to fetch me. Once she “forgot” to fetch me from a hospital where I had undergone a minor operation. I remember sitting on my bed the whole night, fully clothed, outwardly stalwart, yet inwardly terrified: I might never see her again. She showed up the next morning. She refused to let me “dramatize” such “twaddle,” and I eventually grew accustomed to it and to making do without her. I was “Mama’s independent little froggy-woggy.” She had worked hard. She was an economist and ended up heading a bank. She had also run back and forth between several steady lovers and two husbands. And through it all I was “Mama’s little gold-star pupil” and “Mama’s only treasure.”

  Now she was carrying on with forced gaiety about the neighbors, to whom she’d never given a second thought, about relatives, of whom she’d never spoken before, and about people I’d never heard of. This long, detailed report was her way of filling the void and hiding the fact that she had fewer and fewer friends; it was her way of warding off the fear of death, of avoiding a genuine confrontation with me, of alleviating the pain of my arrival, which was after all the beginning of an imminent departure, of erasing the time that had elapsed since my last visit, in sum, a way of “setting things right.”

  “Remember Mr. šari on the second floor? He died recently.”

  “What of?”

  “A stroke.”

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  “And the Boževies on the eighth floor—they lost their son.”

  “What happened?”

  “Car accident. You won’t recognize Mrs. Boževi. She’s aged twenty years. Turned gray overnight. But listen to me. I’m only telling you the sad things. I’ve got some good news, too.”

  She was testing me, measuring my compassion level. Would it be satisfactory or would she have to scold me? (“You take no interest in our neighbors,” as if she thought of them all the time.) This concern for feelings had come with old age: she used to make fun of people who paraded their emotions.

  She stood, left the room for a moment, and returned with a notebook in her hand. With the eagerness of a child who has a new toy to show the world, she handed me her “diary.” It seemed to be mostly numbers.

  “What is it?”

  “My diary.”

  “Your what?”

  “My sugar diary. I’ve got diabetes. I have to monitor my sugar level daily.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “So-so. But I give myself insulin injections.”

  “Why?”

  “The doctor says it’s better to start early with small doses than to wait until you need large ones.”

  She talked about the malady so intimately and with such understanding and concern that she made it sound like a pet dog or cat. She pointed a pudgy finger at various dates, explaining why the sugar level had jumped there and was normal at other times.

  “I’ll show you how I measure it,” she said, and added quickly. “How long are you staying?”

  “A week.”

  “You’re going to be very busy,” she said, pursing her lips.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve got to get a new ID, for one thing. There’s a new system. The lines are horrendous. People wait a whole day. I almost fainted. And then you have to see a lawyer about your flat. And get a new health card. There’s a new system for that, too. They keep changing things.”

  Yes, the nonstop chatter was a sign that she had learned to mask her fear, vague as it was, with words.

  When she opened the drawer in the dresser to let me see what the new IDs looked like, I noticed a Berlin picture of Goran and me in the place where she kept the family photographs.

  “You should pay a visit to Goran’s parents,” she said, following my glance. “Marko’s not doing well.”

  We cleared the table and did the dishes. Then I unpacked and gave her the present I’d brought, a warm housecoat and slippers. Putting the housecoat away in the wardrobe, she showed me the clothes she had bought since I’d last seen her.

  “I’ve acquired quite a few new things, not that I have anywhere to show them off.” She sighed. “This one I’ve worn only once, on my birthday.”

  Then we watched a Brazilian soap opera, Mother trying in vain to clue me in on the plot. Sitting glued to the screen hour after hour, obsessed with the fates of Marisol and Cassandra or whatever their names were—that, like the chatter, was a strategy of self-defense. Mother had three television sets—one in the bedroom, one in the living room, and one in the room she styled as “the guest room.” This total submersion into the world of cheap soaps, this TV hysteria, TV stupor, this categorical refusal to confront reality had come with the war, when reality sneaked into households in the form of skimpy subtitles, skimpier even than Marisol or Cassandra’s actual lines. That was all the space it was allowed. Soaps were the foam you sprayed on fear to put it out, a foam you applied twice daily, preferably in the company of friends. Mother watched with two neighbors, Vanda and Mrs. Buden. For them the Brazilian anesthetic had become an addiction.

  Mother, who had once cringed at the thought of intimacy with her neighbors, could not now stop talking about them, and the ways she referred to them enabled me to establish where they stood on her emotional ladder. If she called them “Mr.” or “Mrs.” (“Mrs. Franceti on the fifth floor says Croatian Oil has been sold to the Americans”), she had a good relationship with them. If she called them “my neighbor” (“My neighbor Vanda can’t wait to see you”), they were close. If she used their surname alone (“Markovi on the third floor is drunk all the time”), she was less than fond of them. She had gradually made a family of the people she had on hand. (“No great shakes, perhaps, but beggars can’t be choosers. Not at my age. And should anything happen to me, they’ll be here, whereas you…”) It was the gravest accusation she could have leveled at me: her parents were long gone; her brother had died ten years before, her husband at the war�
�s outset; then I left to get away from her.

  She made believe she no longer had opinions, she who had once had an opinion about everything, and whereas she had never paid much attention to other people’s opinions she now seemed to dote on them (“Mrs. Feri says that Amsterdam is smaller than Zagreb”). It was all an act, of course. It was as if she were sitting in an invisible wheelchair demanding respect for her invalid status and granting her favor to all who complied.

  “Vanda will be coming at five,” she said. “You might want to shower and change.”

  I dutifully trotted off to the bathroom to shower and change.

  While the three of us drank our coffee, Mother gave Vanda a vivid report of my life in Amsterdam.

  “Tanjica says Amsterdam is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Well, I recently saw a TV documentary and you know it’s more beautiful even than Venice.”

  Tanjica says this, Tanjica says that. It was as much a way of getting through to me as it was of making small talk with Vanda.

  After Vanda left I took a tour of the flat. I praised the new bathroom cabinet and pointed out she should do something about the yellow stain on the bathroom ceiling. She perked up. It came from a leak in the Ivies’ bathroom, but they were in no hurry to get it fixed. That’s the way people were, wasn’t it now. Causing damage and then denying they had anything to do with it.

  “I’ll take care of it,” I said.

  She nearly blushed with excitement. You’d have thought my offer was an offer of marriage. I was going to take things in hand, do what needed to be done, care for her. (“Tanjica’s come and taken over, thank God. Thanks anyway, but Tanjica will take care of it.”)