The Ministry of Pain

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  We watched the news, and she filled me in on everything television-related: the new anchorwoman, the master of ceremonies on the new quiz show, the new series.

  “You’re totally out of it!” she said. “You might as well have been gone a hundred years.” This was no accusation, however; it was an excuse for a long conversation. And she was right. I was totally out of it. At least life on the TV screen looked totally different.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she suddenly sighed. “Everything’s so expensive. I’ve got a pretty good pension, and even I have to worry about making ends meet. I may eventually have to sell the cottage.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You mean you wouldn’t mind?” she asked.

  She was testing me again.

  “I can’t say I wouldn’t mind,” I said, “but go ahead if you think it’s called for.”

  “But it’s yours!”

  “No, it’s yours,” I said.

  “It just sat there all summer. I thought you and Goran would be coming back eventually and would want a place at the seaside, a place where we could spend our summers together. But it makes no sense now. I hate to think of it just sitting there.”

  She was embroidering the story a bit. Goran and I had used the Cres cottage only rarely. It was her projection of the family idyll. She had spent the summers there with her husband until he had had a heart attack—at the cottage, as it happened—and from then on she had pretty much stayed away. So it did in fact just sit there.

  After a bit more chatter—television again and high prices—she said she was tired, and off she went to bed. She was asleep in no time, like a child. I turned off the TV, turned out the light, and went to my room, the “guest room.”

  Draping one of her woolen scarves over my shoulders, I went out onto the balcony and stared into the darkness. I thought of how little there was left of me in the place. A few pictures, some clothes—that was it. Not that I felt pained at the thought. Why should I have expected there to be more? There had been little enough while we were living together: she took up all the space; I was always in a corner somewhere.

  Now I was present in frozen, carefully selected fragments. She held absolute sway over her realm, arranging and rearranging its contents as if life were an installation with photographs. The reason she’d held on to the picture of Goran and me was that it kept our relationship going, and as director of the family soap she refused to recognize our separation.

  Yes, I’d come “home.” I chewed on the concept like an old piece of gum, trying to extract the last bit of flavor from it. “Home” was no longer “home.” Mother was all that was left. Not only was Goran gone, our friends were gone, too. Many had moved to far-flung parts of the world, and the ones who had stayed behind were friends no more. It was none of their doing or mine. It had just happened.

  Looking over at buildings that seemed to be looking back at their reflection in a mirror, I tried to make my mind a blank. I enjoyed sinking into the darkness. Then I went to bed, dragging Mother’s scarf behind me. I fell asleep cradling it in my arms like a teddy bear.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Once I’d left, I could never quite get it together,” said Meliha. “I’m never sure what time it is, know what I mean?”

  Time for them was divided into before and after, and while they could reconstruct the before-the-war period with no difficulty, the after-the-war period, which included the war itself, was pure chaos. The simplest question was enough to trip them up.

  “You mean when did I leave the country?”

  That’s the way they put it, reducing it to the lowest common denominator.

  “Right.”

  “Well, I didn’t come straight here.”

  This is what happened first. Or that. First they did that and went there, and then they came here, to the Netherlands. Exile narratives were dateless. Dates came more easily in Dutch because Dutch officials were forever asking, “When did you first arrive in the Netherlands?” Yet much as they learned to shoot back the answer, the content behind it evaded them. After the war was a mythic time in which it made no difference whether a hundred or two hundred or three hundred years had passed. Too many things had happened in the brief after-the-war period, and their mental clocks went haywire under the strain. Everything had gone haywire; everything had cracked, broken asunder. Place as well as time had divided into before and after, their lives into here and there. They were suddenly without witnesses, parents, family, friends, without even the daily acquaintances with whom we constantly reconstitute our lives, and lacking these tried-and-true mediators, they were thrown back on themselves.

  The feeling I got upon entering the room was that by sheer force of will they had held back the hands of the clock. They had lured me into their capsule to delay the thought of death. But death was all around them, their invisible subtenant. The very air reeked of it.

  Papa was wearing pajamas and a wrinkled, unbelted bathrobe. A tube stuck out of the open fly—a catheter. I was startled by the lack of self-control it signaled. I could scarcely recognize him: he was thin and unshaven, his complexion was sallow, he had dark circles under his eyes. Mama was in better shape: she was wearing an attractive blouse and had some lipstick on. I was touched by her effort to show me that she at least still had things under control.

  I called them Mama and Papa. Olga and Marko had been teachers. They had had Goran late in life. Papa graduated from a teachers’ training college just before the war broke out and had joined the partisans. After the war he had been given a high post in the Croatian Ministry of Education. In forty-eight he made a political slip of the tongue and, like so many others, was sent to Goli otok, Naked Island, where he spent three years at hard labor. After his release he was assigned to an elementary school in a small provincial town. It wasn’t until Goran entered the university that they were able to move to Zagreb.

  Papa had always been laconic and reserved: he had learned to keep his mouth shut on Goli otok. Mention of the labor camp and its atrocities was banned until the seventies, and even then not much was said. So basically Papa had kept his mouth shut all his life. He was a good listener, though, and asked the right questions. He was less than demonstrative in his love for Goran; he seemed to have left that side of things to Mama. I think he loved me, too, after a fashion.

  And suddenly you couldn’t get a word in edgewise. He talked nonstop, not only asking questions but answering them, too.

  “I hear you’re teaching. Have you got many students? I’ve been trying to calculate the number of pupils I had during my thirty years as a teacher. The number Olga had, too. I can’t tell you how much time we’ve put in on it, and believe it or not we never get anywhere. So I said to Olga, Olga, I said, we’ve got a mathematician in the family, haven’t we? Write and ask him to do the calculations.”

  “Put it out of your mind now,” Mama said. Then she turned to me and gave me a tug. “Come and give me a hand in the kitchen, will you, Tanja?”

  “Now you see what it’s like,” she whispered.

  I made no response.

  “Talk, talk, talk. Never any letup. I’ve stopped listening.”

  “What’s the catheter for?”

  “Don’t ask. It just has to be…. Fetch the biscuits from the pantry, will you?”

  I was touched by her willingness to share her secrets with me. I opened the doors of the cupboard she dignified with the name of pantry. I was surprised to find the title page of a magazine ineptly taped to the door. It was a picture of Tito in his marshal’s uniform. I always thought Mama and Papa hated Tito, even if they’d put nothing of the sort into words. Papa had spent four years with Tito’s partisans only to land a year later, and for no reason whatever, in the worst of the country’s labor camps. And now Papa’s “hangman” was lolling in domestic bliss amid their modest reserves of rice, flour, onions, and potatoes. They’d decided to rehabilitate him. In Mama’s pantry. Clearly they preferred the Tito years to the current situation, though
they didn’t dare say so out loud, just as there had been many things they didn’t dare say during the Tito years.

  “When did the logorrhea start?” I asked, taking down the tin box with pictures of shortbread on it.

  “I can’t say, really. It came on gradually. But in the end I couldn’t help noticing. He talks to the walls when I’m not in the room. He just keeps talking. I can’t take it anymore. I really can’t. I’ve heard it all a thousand times. I even think I hear him muttering in his sleep.” She bit her lip and added, “I can’t wait for it to end.”

  “What about Goran? Does he know what’s going on? How is he anyway?”

  “You can read his letters if you like.”

  “No. What’s the point?”

  She left the room for a moment and reappeared with a snapshot in her hand.

  “I shouldn’t show you this, but maybe you’re better off knowing.”

  She handed me the picture. It was of Goran and a Japanese woman.

  “Pretty,” I said.

  “Her name is Hito,” she said with relief. “Papa and I call her Tito. It’s our little joke. Looks nice, doesn’t she?”

  Glancing down at the picture again, I felt a twinge of jealousy.

  Mama sighed.

  “Life goes on, Tanja. Oh, not for us. We’ve had our day. But you children, you deserve a better deal…. Your mother tells me you’re doing well in Amsterdam.”

  “Pretty well.”

  “You were always at the top of your class.”

  I had the feeling she meant to say something else—that she was “on my side”—but couldn’t find the words for it.

  “Goran took it hard when you refused to go with him.”

  “I know.”

  “Time heals all wounds, fortunately.”

  Papa appeared at the door.

  “What secrets are you two telling in here? I don’t like to be left alone. And what’s that ‘Time heals all wounds’ stuff? You women, you pick something up and parrot it all over the place. Time doesn’t heal wounds; it makes them.”

  “You’ve been reading too many novels,” Mama said, as if speaking to a child.

  We went back into the living room and had some coffee. Mama opened the box of shortbread. The shortbread had been made in the former Yugoslavia and was so old it had lost all semblance of flavor.

  Papa kept up his patter. From time to time Mama waved an arm in the air, as if chasing away flies. Then she got up and turned on the TV. Papa started grumbling that she hadn’t been listening to him, she never listened to him, all she cared about was that idiotic box. Mama turned down the sound. She was watching a soap opera with subtitles. She didn’t need the sound.

  Glancing round the room, I had the feeling things had shrunk. Even Mama and Papa seemed smaller. Everything looked older, too; everything looked as gray and shabby as the dusty rubber plant in the corner.

  Papa’s words inundated the room, settling accounts, justifying actions, raging, grousing. The words had an almost physical reality. They came with old age, the lack of bladder control. He was unaware they were spurting out of him.

  I don’t know how much time went by, but at one point I stood as if waking from a dream.

  “Time to go,” I said. “Mother’s making dinner for me.”

  They didn’t try to stop me.

  “Well, now you know what our life is like,” Mama said by way of apology.

  “What’s so wrong with it!” Papa barked. “We live better than people in a lot of places. And if things hadn’t happened the way they did, we’d be living better than the Americans.”

  Breathing heavily, he went and pulled out three notebooks from under the table the TV set was standing on. They were large—stationery format—and hand-bound.

  “Here,” he said, “have a look at these. My scribblings.”

  I gave them each a kiss at the door. Papa was clearly uncomfortable. For all his attempts at a smile the corners of his mouth turned down. The expression made him look like an abandoned child doing his best to overcome the slight. It must have been the expression I was wearing when I arrived at the airport.

  CHAPTER 3

  I watched her pricking her finger with the needle and sucking out a drop of blood through a miniature dropper, then sticking the dropper with her trembling hand into the opening of a tiny instrument, following the numbers on the display and entering them carefully into her sugar diary: such and such a date, such and such a time, such and such a sugar content. I watched her cast a worried glance at the clock and open the fridge, take out the makings for breakfast, and lay everything out neatly on the table: two plates, two cups, two spoons, two napkins.

  “You make the coffee. I’ve had to cut it out. On account of the sugar.”

  I poured some Nescafé into cold milk.

  “Warm up the milk. Aren’t you going to eat anything?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Well, I’ve got to. Regular meals at regular times. That’s the way it is with diabetes.” She sighed.

  I watched her crumble the bread with her fingers, the way children do. Another of her new habits.

  “You’re observing me,” she blurted out suddenly. “I feel like a guinea pig.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve been observing us since the day you arrived,” she said, switching to the plural.

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  She picked up a moist scrap of bread and began kneading it into a ball. I felt a lump in my throat. I was going to cry. And then she would, too.

  “It makes me feel you’re blaming me for something. You think I’m the reason Goran left you.”

  I must not let myself be caught in this trap, I kept repeating to myself. I must not let myself be caught in this trap.

  “After breakfast we’ll pack and call a cab,” I said as calmly as I could. I noticed that I, too, had switched to the plural.

  “Amsterdam is in the same time zone as Zagreb, isn’t it?” she asked, moving into attack mode.

  “Of course it is. You know that.”

  “So it’s half past eight there, too?”

  “Right, only in Dutch you don’t say ‘half past,’ you say…”

  “I don’t know why, but I thought it was one hour earlier there.”

  “No. It’s the same time.”

  “Well, you should know.” She sighed and added, “I can’t say I like thinking of you there.”

  “Why?”

  “Those canals, I bet they stink.”

  “Not at all.”

  “But the water is stagnant. It’s got to stink.”

  “Oddly enough it doesn’t.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it never stops raining and the canals have rats swimming in them.”

  “What gives you that idea?”

  “I saw it on television,” she lied.

  “I haven’t seen a single rat.”

  “You never see anything. Your head’s always in the clouds.”

  It was heartbreaking, I thought. The need to give offense as I was about to leave. I was abandoning her, and she had to find a way to punish me. At one time this kind of thing would have driven me to tears, but I’d learned to protect myself. Now it was like water off a duck’s back.

  “I’m going to pack,” I said, getting up and heading for my room.

  She followed.

  “Want to take anything as a keepsake?”

  “What, for instance?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got some homemade plum preserves.”

  “You made plum preserves?”

  “No, Mrs. Buden. And I can’t eat them. On account of the sugar.”

  “Then I’ll take them,” I said to make her happy.

  She brought out a glass jar in a plastic bag.

  “Heavens, will you ever learn how to pack?” she said, smoothing out the clothes in my bag. “Wrap it up in a blouse or something so it
doesn’t break. Is there anything else? Any of your things?”

  “I don’t need anything, Mother,” I said, zipping up the bag. I glanced at my watch and saw there was plenty of time. “Why don’t you give my things away. Maybe Vanda can use them.”

  Whenever I go back, I feel I’m attending my own funeral (Nevena).

  She intentionally ignored what I had said.

  I mixed another coffee for myself.

  “How can you drink that Nescafé cold?” she asked. “Let me warm it up for you.”

  “I like it cold.”

  “You always did have a mind of your own…. Why haven’t you phoned for the taxi?”

  “There’s plenty of time.”

  “It takes them ages to get here.”

  “There’s plenty of time.”

  She looked over at me, then lowered her eyes. We were both searching desperately for neutral ground.

  “Let me take your blood pressure,” she offered. “I bet you never have it taken.”

  “Good idea,” I said, though the blow was so stunning I could scarcely breathe.

  Whenever I go back, I feel like a punching bag. I ache all over (Boban).

  She brought out a plastic pouch and carefully removed the blood pressure monitor. She wound the cuff round her left arm and pressed the button with her free hand. She watched the numbers flash past to the buzzing of the machine. It was over in a minute. “Your blood pressure is normal,” she said, slightly distracted but serene.

  She raised her eyes, starting as they met mine.

  “I was just testing it,” she hastened to say, like a child caught lying. “I wanted to see if it was working. Now give me your arm.”

  I gave her my arm. Her fingers, thick with age, took hold of it and wrapped the cuff around my upper arm. The monitor was in her lap. She gripped it in both hands. Then she pressed the button and three eights appeared on the display. When they disappeared, she carefully pressed “start.” We said not a word. I felt a swelling in my arm. We listened to the humming of the machine and followed the rise and fall of the numbers on the display. As the numbers came to rest, I had a sudden desire to remain in that position, just as I was, forever.