The Ministry of Pain

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  “You’re normal,” she said, removing the cuff. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  That was our farewell hug and kiss. The blood pressure monitor was a visible substitute for something invisible, a bloody umbilical chord, all fresh and shiny like a metal string. Our blood pressure was normal, our heartbeat even. At that moment we had told each other everything we had to say.

  I called the cab. It came immediately. She saw me to the elevator. I kissed her on the cheek. I took a deep breath, inhaled the fragrance of her skin, and entered the elevator without releasing it.

  “Love you!” suddenly wafted in to me. In English. She must have picked up the phrase and intonation from the American movies she watched on television. I was touched: she had never before used those words to me, never told me I love you. And now that melodious American “love you” in a cracked voice, perhaps, but brimming with everything she wanted to say and didn’t know how. It went straight to the solar plexus. I imploded.

  Through the narrow, diver’s-mask window in the elevator door I could see her touching her cheek with her hand. She could only have been brushing away a tear. As I pressed the button, I could hear her shuffling off in her slippers.

  “Love you…” I thought I was singing back to her, but what came out of my lips was rather more like a whimper.

  CHAPTER 4

  I bought a few boxes of the requisite chocolates at the airport duty-free shop. The well-known Kraš brand came in a box embossed with the Croatian coat of arms and designed to resemble the new Croatian passport.

  After takeoff I felt a vague sense of relief. Leafing through the in-flight magazine, I stared blankly at the list of destinations, then dipped into articles on Istrian truffles, the beauties of Korcula, the meteoric career of pianist Ivo Pogoreli, and the latest successes of tennis champ Goran Ivaniševi.

  I’d accomplished nothing during my seven days in Zagreb. I hadn’t obtained a new ID; I hadn’t contacted a lawyer. Of course, the flat was a lost cause: there were thousands of similar cases. Besides, I was not particularly fond of the things we’d left behind. True, I missed the books, Goran’s and mine, but even if the current tenant had agreed to give them back I wouldn’t have had room for them.

  I had, however, persuaded the tenants living in the flat above Mother’s to find a handyman to take care of the ugly yellow stain on her bathroom ceiling. I had also left Mother some money for similar emergencies and bought a new tap for the sink.

  During my seven days in Zagreb I had watched seven episodes of the Brazilian soap opera. I learned who was who in the extended family of characters. At least one of Mother’s three television sets was on from the moment she got out of bed.

  “It gives me the feeling I’m not alone,” she said by way of self-justification.

  “Why not try reading?”

  “I can’t. It makes my eyes hurt.”

  “Get new glasses.”

  “I did, but it didn’t help. It’s like I had sand in my eyes.”

  I’d made no phone calls: I had no one to call. I’d skimmed through the numbers in my old address book, and once I even picked up the receiver and dialed the number of a former friend, but before anyone could answer I put the receiver down. I was relieved.

  I’d thought about Mother. About how she defended her turf. What mattered most to her was that the stain be taken care of, the tap stop dripping, the curtains be clean, and life take its normal course. But she was a fighter, too, and she had found an enemy: sugar. She refused to recognize any other: she was too weak now; she would have lost the battle. So she had staked out her territory, and there she reigned supreme.

  The picture of Goran and me was in the china cabinet in Mother’s living room. Seeing it there had made me realize how close her “exhibit” was to the ones I saw in the living rooms of émigrés. Émigré souvenir exhibits did not express nostalgia for a former life or the native country; on the contrary, it expressed lack of same. All the gingerbread hearts, peasant-shoe ashtrays, miniature Dalmatian or Montenegrin caps, handmade embroideries and lace, leather drinking gourds, and Adriatic shells were so many minuscule shrines, Lilliputian graves marking the end of a way of life, an unequivocal choice and a willingness to accept the losses that choice entailed.

  Whether I had accepted them I couldn’t say. What I can say is that throughout the week I spent there I was constantly ill at ease. Not so much when I was with Mother as when I was outside, in the street. I wandered the streets of Zagreb with an invisible slap on my face, viewing things slightly askance, like a rabbit, and hugging the facades of the buildings for safety’s sake. Everything looked run-down and gray, now mine, now alien, now former.

  I never told Mother I’d tried to get a new ID. The thing was, I couldn’t find the office. Even though I’d been to the building several times before, even though I knew the area intimately, even though I have a good sense of direction, I couldn’t find the place. When I asked for directions, people pointed to the left and to the right, but I still couldn’t find it. I kept circling the narrowly circumscribed space—two or three streets at most—untilpanic suddenly overflowed my inner spaces and I burst into tears. The refugee trauma, the equivalent of the sudden disappearance of the mother from a child’s field of vision, had surfaced where I’d least expected: “at home.” The fact that I’d managed to get lost in an area I knew like the back of my hand filled me with horror.

  I recounted the incident to the passenger sitting next to me on the plane. He was from Zagreb and maybe a few years my senior, an architect by trade. He had left Zagreb in 1991. He was on his way back to America, where he had found work with a firm and settled down.

  “I thought I was out of my mind.”

  “How come? You had every reason to get lost,” he said. “So many street names have changed.”

  “But the streets are the same.”

  “Not if they have new names,” he said.

  “Still, I can’t believe it happened.”

  “A minor blackout. Too many changes in too short a time.”

  “But how could I get lost in my own city?”

  “What if Zagreb is no longer your city.”

  “Zagreb will always be my city,” I said stubbornly, hearing how ridiculous it sounded.

  “Next time take the trouble to learn the new street names and everything will be just fine. The sooner you forget the old ones, the better.”

  “You think that’s easy?”

  “Not in the least. I can see how upset you are about it. I used to be, too. But I got over it. Or rather it took care of itself. Because they’ve written us off. Me, you, all of us who’ve left. All right, we’re dysfunctional, but we don’t count. We’re a negligible minority. Look, you’ve been home now. Did you get the impression that people are particularly disturbed by the events of the past ten years?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “People were relieved in ’ninety-one. Life in the old Yuga had been tough on a lot of people, dog eat dog. There was always some damn goal you had to work toward: the radiant future or this or that reform. And those cursed neighbors poking around to see whether your hens were laying more eggs than theirs. So a lot of people breathed a sigh of relief when the old Yuga broke up: they could pick their noses, scratch their asses, put their legs up on the table, turn their music on full blast, or just sit and stare at the box. The Croats kicked out the Serbs, the Serbs kicked out the Croats and beat up the Albanians. And the poor Bosnians—well, they’ve been written off like us émigrés. By both Croats and Serbs. True, the place is riddled with criminals now, and the criminals are making fools out of the lot of them, but they still think they’re better off than before: the criminals are their own at least, and nobody’s setting impossible standards. They should be grateful to Miloševi: he pulled the plug on Yugoslavia, after all. Nobody else had the nerve. And everybody was dying for it.”

  “But what about the aftermath? The responsibility for it all.”

  “What concern
is it of yours?” And what good are questions like that? Look, in a year or two nobody will remember Vukovar. Or Sarajevo for that matter. Not even the people who live there. So don’t get all hot and bothered. It’s not worth it, believe me.”

  “But I do.”

  “Tell me, have you ever met any of the émigrés who left after World War Two? Or even the ones who left after the crackdown on the nationalists in ’71? Well, I have. I’ve got an uncle in America, and he introduced me to them. It was like meeting ghosts. They’d go on and on about things that hadn’t the slightest relevance to our lives. It was their perception of time that did it. You change more than your space when you leave; you change your time, your inner time. Time in Zagreb is moving much faster now than your inner time. You’re stuck back in your own time frame. I bet you think the war took place yesterday.”

  “But it did!” I said heatedly. “And it isn’t over yet.”

  “Well, it is for the people who stayed behind! Your ‘yesterday’ is their ancient history. Remember the émigrés who rushed back from Canada, Australia, Western Europe, and South America after Croatia declared its independence? Croats tried and true. The crooks and legionnaires and hitmen and losers who responded to Tudjman’s clarion call.”

  “Exhibits from a provincial museum.”

  “Precisely. Well, in a few years we may look like them to the people who stayed behind. So the thing to do is forget, forget everything.”

  “Then who will remember?”

  “Why do you think people invent symbolic surrogates? To get others to suffer and remember for them.”

  “I don’t know if I…”

  “Well, let me tell you. Our story is not an easy one to tell. Even numbers tell different stories to different people. What we experience as a deluge, others experience as a shower: a few hundred thousand killed, a million or two displaced, a fire here, a bomb there, a bit of plundering…. Mere bagatelles! More people lost their lives in the floods in India this year.”

  “You must be mad!”

  “People have no bent for misfortune, believe me. They can’t identify with mass disaster. Not for long, at least, and not even if the disaster is their own. That’s why they’ve come up with the surrogate solution.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “More people know that Elvis Presley is no longer with us than that the Sarajevo Library is no longer with us. Or the Muslim victims of Srebrenica. Disaster puts people off.”

  “It’s horrible what you’re saying.”

  “You ain’t heard nothing yet. Once I get going, you’ll be itching to ditch me…”

  He was interrupted by a stewardess announcing the descent into Amsterdam.

  “Saved by the bell,” he said with a cordial smile.

  I feel more comfortable in Dutch, said Nevena, as if Dutch were a sleeping bag.

  “I feel more comfortable in the air,” I said.

  My fellow passenger overlooked the remark, as if finding it slightly off-color.

  Visibility was perfect—the air clear, the sky blue, the sun shining brightly. The land beneath us was like a matzoh, divided into thin, regular segments. The Netherlands. Malevich’s White Square in tens of thousands of cheap reproductions. All at once I realized I had not one single picture of Zagreb in my head. I tried hard to conjure something up, but all I could muster was a series of fuzzy and, oddly enough, black-and-white images. My subconscious had for some reason whisked my Zagreb files back to the precolor era.

  “Tell me,” I said, turning abruptly to my neighbor, “is that Varteks shop still in Republic Square?”

  “You mean Governor Jelai Square.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Hmm. I don’t know.”

  “Nor do I. I was there yesterday and I can’t remember whether I saw it.”

  “I’ve never bought anything there,” he said. “How come it bothers you so much?”

  “It just does,” I said.

  PART 3

  CHAPTER 1

  A hand grenade fell smack in between

  The little boy and his pa. What a scene!

  Of the poor little lad precious little was left,

  And Papa was of both arms bereft.

  They tried to stuff the lad in a bag,

  But were soon cursing God in despair.

  Because no more of him could they snag

  Than a shoe and a tuft of hair.

  The day after I got back to Amsterdam I paid a visit to the Department. Classes didn’t begin for a week, but I thought it best to check in.

  “I hear one of your students has killed himself,” the secretary said in a voice she might have used to inform me of a change in the teaching schedule.

  “What are you talking about?” I managed to come out with.

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “Which student?”

  “How should I know?”

  I could have strangled her.

  “Who told you?”

  “Another student of yours. Just now.”

  I rushed downstairs and over to the café, where I found Nevena and Igor. From the expressions on their faces I could tell there was something wrong.

  Yes, they’d heard that Uroš had killed himself. No, they didn’t know how it had happened. They’d heard that Uroš’s brother had come to Amsterdam to take care of things. Oh, and that Uroš’s father was suspected of war crimes and was currently under interrogation at the Hague Tribunal. No, they’d had no idea, no idea about his father. Uroš was so reserved.

  I had noticed that, too. And like me they had never seen him outside class.

  “It was the shame of it, Comrade,” Igor said simply.

  The war had brought a rash of suicides in its wake.

  Mama told me the story of a soldier back from the front—a boy, less than twenty—who had paid a visit to his former school. He apparently spent the whole day in the schoolyard, plying the kids with sweets and showing them what a hand grenade looks like. The next morning his remains were scattered all over the place. Parts of the body had landed in a tree and were still stuck to the branches. He had blown himself up a few hours before classes began. The staff didn’t know—how could they?—so the kids came trooping in on the bloody remains.

  Yes, a whole rash of suicides. Quiet, peaceful, unobtrusive suicides, because there was too much misfortune and death in the air for people to have much compassion for them. Suicide is a luxury in wartime, compassion in short supply.

  They had various ways of doing the deed: they would drink themselves to death—that was the cheapest way—or take an overdose (as a result of the war the borders were wide open, and drugs fairly flowed in), or simply “die of a broken heart,” the euphemism for the untreated heart attacks and strokes that spread like wildfire during the war. Other diseases left untreated could likewise come under the rubric of suicide. Then there was the case of the student daughter of a Serbian general war-criminal who took her own life out of shame. Or of the elderly Belgrade woman who slipped and fell just as a bus pulled up before a waiting crowd. The crowd stampeded onto the bus, trampling the body beneath their feet. No one thought to help. The doctors managed to patch the woman up, but soon after they sent her home she threw herself out of a fourth-floor window. Shame again.

  There were suicides among people who had escaped the war, too. We heard all kinds of stories in Berlin. About a Bosnian woman who had hanged herself in a psychiatric hospital the day before she was to be released. About a Bosnian refugee who had hanged himself in a refugee asylum after smothering his wife and two-year-old with a pillow. Here in Amsterdam a Croatian woman at one of the asylum centers had turned on the gas and then burned herself to death. They did it out of humiliation, despair, fear, loneliness, and shame. Quiet, anonymous deaths, the lot of them, war victims, though absent from the statistics of the war dead.

  We learned the details from Darko, who showed up at the café before long. Darko was the only one who had maintained a more or less personal relationsh
ip with Uroš. He told us that Uroš had shot himself in the temple with a revolver. He’d had no trouble getting hold of the weapon: all he had to do was make contact with Yugoslav mafia circles. Amsterdam was awash with Yugo weapons: the police were constantly running across discarded grenades in the parks. Two children had recently perished after stepping on one.

  Uroš had given his flat a thorough cleaning before pulling the trigger. He threw away everything he owned—books, clothes, everything, including what he had been wearing just before the fatal shot. He left behind only a black plastic bag. On the bag he had stuck a Post-it with his brother’s name and address in neat block letters. He had killed himself on Saturday or Sunday, when his landlady was out of town. She had found him on Monday evening and immediately notified the police. He was lying in the middle of the room stark naked. His body had risen to the occasion: except for a few drops of blood and urine, it was pristine. It was flanked by seven cardboard children’s suitcases, the kind sold at Blokker’s. Each one had the same contents: an unused toothbrush, a pad, a well-sharpened pencil, and a yarmulke.

  “Was Uroš Jewish?” Nevena asked.

  “Not that I know of,” said Darko. “His father was a Bosnian Serb. That you all know.”

  The setting of Uroš’s death as described by Darko seemed infantile, yet at the same time cold as a knife. The children’s cardboard suitcases were the baggage Uroš felt necessary for his journey: yarmulke, toothbrush, and pad and pencil seven times over. They were likewise Uroš’s will in hieroglyphs for anyone who wished to decipher it.