The Ministry of Pain

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  “Maybe I’m the one who pulled the trigger,” I said.

  “What trigger?” he shot back at me.

  “I mean, maybe I’m the one to blame for Uroš’s death. He sent me a signal, and I failed to decode it.”

  “That’s a load of crap!” said Igor. “You’ve got to stop romanticizing Uroš’s death. What’s the point? Does it make you feel any better? Heaven only knows why he killed himself. Maybe he went off his rocker. Maybe he got tired of the journey and jumped the train. Maybe it was just his way of saying good-bye, ta-ta, tot ziens, adieu, and fuck you one and all…. Tell me, why am I the one you picked to bug with all this?”

  “Because there’s no one else for me to bug.”

  “Pull yourself together, will you? Those tears are going to ruin your hot chocolate.”

  “I’ll stop. I promise I will.”

  “I wish I knew what movie I’ve fallen into. The movie of the week? Or maybe it’s a Danielle Steele novel.”

  I wiped away my tears.

  “There’s a good girl! I was afraid you were turning into a—squid.”

  I laughed, and the laughter gave momentary relief.

  “Tell me a little about yourself,” I said cautiously.

  “What do you want to hear?”

  “About your life. Are your parents still alive? Where do you live? Who with? Have you got a girl? Who are your friends?”

  “You and your stupid questionnaires! Well, I know what you’re after, and you don’t need to worry. For one thing, I’d never kill myself for a crook like the one we saw in the courtroom. But even more important, I’m not the suicide type. I’m a player. I’m sharp as a tack.”

  We didn’t talk much in the train on our way back to Amsterdam. We were each very much self-absorbed: Igor was reading a Dutch newspaper; I had unwrapped the paperweight and was running a hand over the oval glass, thinking of the pictures Mother had put in the china cabinet. They did not include a picture of my father. I didn’t remember my father. I couldn’t. I was three when he killed himself. Mother refused to talk about him. She had burned her bridges and was not about to reconstruct them for me. Not only did I know nothing about him; I didn’t have his name: she had further erased his traces by giving me hers. No wonder there was no trace of him in her china cabinet rogues’ gallery. She was absolutely certain she had “saved” me by excluding my father from my biography. Saved me from what—only she could say. She had done everything she could to fill in all cracks I might pass through, remove all threads I might grab hold of. She managed a goodly part of my past, occupying my father’s place as well as her own.

  The invisible pearl in my ear was empty. I peered at its turbid surface in search of a magic picture. I could not tell whether the scene in the picture, which would emerge from a deep, dense darkness into my memory, had actually taken place or whether the man in the picture was my father, but he could have been. I am three. A man is giving me a piggyback ride, and I am holding on to his hair. The man is holding on to my shoes as if they were the ends of a scarf around his neck. We are walking through deep snow. It is twilight. There is a magic glitter to everything. Suddenly the man shifts his hand to my shoulders and collapses into the snow in slow motion. I am deliriously happy….

  “You’re scratching your ear,” Igor said, looking up from his newspaper.

  “I am?”

  “A penny for your thoughts.”

  “Oh, I don’t know…I’m not thinking anything, really.”

  At the station we went our separate ways. I turned to see his tall frame, slightly stooped under the backpack, hands in pockets. In the dark, from the back, speckled with tiny snowflakes, he looked more robust, more of an adult.

  “See you in class on Monday,” I called out.

  He did not turn or reply; he simply raised one arm slowly to show he had heard.

  CHAPTER 5

  Eventually Ines and Cees did invite me over. Truth to tell, Ines and I had never been particularly close. The whole Amsterdam thing had come about pretty much by chance. A mutual Berlin friend happened to be in Amsterdam and happened to run across Ines, and while they were chatting about who was where and doing what he gave Ines my address. She and I had studied awhile together and double-dated awhile together. She had her Vladek; I had my Goran. She and Vladek had known each other since their school days and got married as undergraduates. They disappeared from Zagreb the moment they graduated. Rumor had it they’d gone to Amsterdam. Vladek had earned his way through the university dealing in Croatian naive artists, in Italy mostly. He had now opened a gallery in Amsterdam.

  I had hoped Ines would have me over as soon as I arrived in Amsterdam. I had phoned her several times with proposals that we meet, but she always had a polite excuse: she was so busy, she had to be with the children, but “we’ll get together, just the two of us, and have one of our good old gab fests, okay?” I tried to recall whether we’d ever spent any time together without Goran and Vladek.

  Ines was a typical Zagreb product. She was attractive and took inordinate care of herself: she had her cosmetician (“You really ought to go to her. You won’t recognize yourself!”), her hairdresser, her dentist, her dressmaker. She bought all her clothes in London (“Trieste is for peasants!”). Everyone she knew was hers, from the woman in the visa office (“Vikica got us our visas in five minutes!”), the bevy of doctors and the pedicure to the butchers and cleaning women (“Milkica is top-notch. She’s great at windows and nobody can beat her at the ironing board. Whenever you need her, just say the word”). Her intimacy with the world around her, her ability to subject it completely to her will, her absolute at-homeness with her crowd—it the butter, she the knife—her utter lack of concern for anyone who did not think as she did, the authority and efficiency with which, as if engaged in a high-salaried position, she lived the “adult life” while still an undergraduate—all this put me off, yet beguiled me as well. She had that “Zagreb girl” quality about her: a femininity one inherits from one’s mother or acquires with entry into the privileged class and a coy way of talking—a slightly nasal voice combined with high-pitched shs and chs, a tendency to stress the final syllable, and an ingratiating intonation designed to show she was on the side of whomever she happened to be talking to. But much as the voice oozed compassion and understanding, it made no commitments.

  I wasn’t all that eager to see her, but it rankled a bit that during what was now the months I’d spent in Amsterdam she hadn’t once phoned. I put on makeup for the first time in ages, donned earrings and high heels. Walking down Bloemstraat looking for her house, I felt somewhat abashed at my desire to go all out for her. I wanted her to see me at my best and was using the costume to disguise the true state of affairs.

  Ines hadn’t changed a bit. She offered me her cheek at the door, took me by the arm, and led me into the house, babbling all the while (“Tanjicaaaa! Spin round so I can have a good look at you! Why, you look simply marvelous! Like a girl of fifteen! And that dress! Did you get it here? I still pop over to London whenever I need something. You should see Cees fume! ‘What makes you think you can’t find one here!’ he says. Well, you can’t. Oh, they do their best for a pitifully short stretch along the P.C. Hooftstraat, but as department stores go, Bijenkorf is barely a cut above our NaMa…. God! Remember NaMa? Why, any girl from Virovitica dresses better than your average Dutchwoman. You’ve noticed it, too. I’m sure you have.”)

  Anyone would have thought that Ines and I were old friends coming together after a long separation, and her nonstop jabber had me believing it, too. I felt I’d fallen down on the job, neglected the friendship.

  Ines gave me a tour of the house before we sat down to eat. First she showed me the children’s rooms. (“The children are with Cees’s mother. Piet has just turned seven, and Marijke is three. Here’s a picture of them. Piet and Marica, as I call her.”) The house was spacious and furnished simply, though the walls were covered with paintings by Croatian naive artists (“I wanted something
to remind me of home,” she said, noticing my look. “And something to show the Dutch that we weren’t beggars; know what I mean?”). My eyes lit upon the masters of Croatian modernism on the bookshelves: the collected works of Krleža, Ujevi, Matoš (“I do so like to read an Ujevi poem before I go to sleep. Don’t you? Though you read oodles more than me, I’m sure. You can’t imagine how those children wear me out!”). The curtains on the kitchen windows were made of Slovenian lace, and on the windowsill there was a small wooden shelf housing a gingerbread heart. It was there she put the box of Kraš chocolates in the shape of a Croatian passport, my house gift to her.

  “And did he just disappear?” she asked me coyly in the kitchen.

  “Who?”

  “Why, Goran, of course.”

  “He didn’t disappear. He’s in Japan.”

  “Are you in touch?”

  “No.”

  “Who would have guessed it! The model couple! To think it happened to you!”

  “Well, it did.”

  “Serves you right for getting mixed up with a ‘Miloševi,’” she said jokingly.

  I didn’t respond. I was surprised she had remembered Goran was officially classified as a Serb.

  “Hey, don’t get your back up! I was only joking. I can see right through you, old girl. You locked him in your heart. He said you’d never part. But he’s now fancy-free. And you have lost the key.”

  I couldn’t help smiling at the lines of the old scrapbook ditty, and suddenly the tension was gone.

  “If you’d married a Croat the way I did, you’d have had an easier time getting over him,” she said. “You’d be on your second marriage by now.”

  “Missed my chance.”

  “Vladek went off the deep end the moment we got to Amsterdam. He got into grass and stuff. I mean really into it.” She pronounced the word “grass” as if it were a euphemism and whispered it as if our parents might be listening in.

  “Where’s Vladek now?”

  “Not even the police know. But I don’t care. He’s not my problem anymore…. Well, let’s have something to eat.”

  Cees spoke a pretty decent Croatian. (“See what I’ve made of him? Done a pretty good job, haven’t I? Though it was really his mother-in-law, wasn’t it, Cees? Oh, and by the way, how’s your family doing? I don’t even know who you’ve still got back home….”) Ines kept the chatter up the whole time I was there. The perfect hostess, she put out her best silver (“I put it out for you, to remind you of the way we used to live: it comes from my grandmother”), “our” wine and “our” olive oil (“We go home every summer. We’ve got a sweet little place on Korula. You’ll have to come and see it some time. And we come back laden down like Gypsies with wine and olive oil and prosciutto, everything you can imagine. Cees just loves it there. The kids, too. It means a lot to me for the kids to speak Croatian. And to Mama, too, of course. Mama spends a full two months every year with the kids”). On and on she went about the seashore, the kids, her mother, Cees’s mother, the Dutch. I hardly got a word in edgewise.

  In other circumstances I might have been bored, but that evening I found the conversation relaxing. The coy nasal babble was like a balm. For the first time in ages life seemed “normal” to me. Time itself seemed to come together, its stitches healed. I was on firm ground at last, basking in the pleasant warmth of Ines’s words. For a second I thought we were all in Zagreb. True, we were a bit older and we had Cees with us rather than Vladek, but Goran would be right back. He’d just run out for another bottle of wine….

  “You must try my poppy-seed cake. I made it just for you. Thank God for the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Otherwise we wouldn’t know what real pastry is, if you know what I mean. I had to bring the poppy seed from Zagreb, too. You can’t find it here anymore, not even from the—what shall I call them?—the Turks.” She clearly expected me to get her mildly racist reference and to approve it with a wink.

  “‘Bureks, baklava, and poppy-seed noodles,’” I sang.

  “You and your Yugonostalgia,” she grumbled. I was taken aback by the remark. She made it sound as though I were the one who hadn’t stopped going on about the country.

  Over coffee Ines switched to the plural.

  “We’re glad we were able to help you. It’s so rare people can help one another. And you were up there with the best of them, so I said to Cees, I said, Tanja’s the one to invite. We’ve heard a lot about your students. About that boy, too. Dreadful!”

  Again I was taken aback. I sensed the prattle was leading somewhere.

  “That boy’s name was Uroš,” I said.

  “Every generation has its suicide,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We had one when we were at the university, remember? What was his name?”

  “Nenad.”

  “Right. Went off to India, came back and did himself in. His father was a general. It was drug related, I think. God! Remember all the people who made the pilgrimage to India? But you and me, we never fell for all that chakra and mantra stuff, right?”

  “Have you found out anything about that student?” Cees asked, cutting off Ines, for which I was grateful.

  I told him everything I knew.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” he said, “but I’ve had some complaints from the students about you.”

  His words were a punch in the solar plexus.

  “What kind of complaints?”

  “Students have a right to complain if they feel an instructor isn’t doing his job, and we are obliged to take their complaints seriously. The upshot of it is the students aren’t happy with the way you’ve been teaching your class.”

  “That can’t be true,” I managed to say.

  “I’m afraid it is.”

  “What have they complained about?”

  “They say they don’t do anything connected with the field. They say it’s a waste of time.”

  “They say that?”

  “They say you have no clear-cut program and your classes are chaotic. Not only do they sit around with you in cafés; you require them to.”

  “Who says that?”

  “I’m not at liberty to tell you,” Cees said evenly.

  “You can’t tell me they’ve all complained!”

  Cees made no response.

  Ines tried to console me. She said I was blind; I refused to see that things had changed. People here in the Netherlands didn’t side with either camp, but they could see that “one and one make two,” couldn’t they? She said I was too bighearted and had got too close to the students. And “you know the old saying: sleep with a baby, wake up wet.” That “wake up wet” and the way she said it made me feel all but a physical revulsion for her. She told me that a proposal had been made to the Dutch Ministry of Education, a proposal Cees himself had drafted, to separate Croatian and Serbian at all Dutch universities, a move, after all, “long overdue, dictated as it was by a political reality of long standing.” If Cees’s proposal was accepted, then starting next autumn Amsterdam would teach Croatian language and literature and Groningen would teach Serbian, which made sense, since Groningen already had Bulgarian. Which meant there was a good chance I’d get a full-time job come September. No, they had no other candidate in mind, absolutely no one. She couldn’t do it because of the children and anyway there was a rule that man and wife could not work in the same department, especially if one was head of the department. Besides, she’d never quite put the finishing touches on her dissertation. She said I should think about myself; I wasn’t getting any younger, and I certainly wasn’t thinking of going back to Zagreb, was I? I’d never get a job there. I knew what “our people” were like. Once you leave, you’re gone forever. And they’re right in their way. “You fall between two stools, no matter how big a rump you’ve got.” Yes, rump. That was the word she used, and again I felt that revulsion for her. Cees was all for me, but Cees was not alone. The students were much, much more sensitive to “national lines” than
I had realized. She was amazed I could be so naive, so blind to the way things were, to “political reality.” And then there was the matter of that poor Serb, the one who’d done himself in, yes, right, Uroš. Look at the dreadful things that dogged those kids even after they thought they’d escaped it all….

  “We didn’t invite you here to give group therapy sessions,” Cees said.

  “I don’t give group therapy sessions! You know how different their educational levels are. I had to base the class on something they could all relate to. They’ve had everything taken from them, don’t you see? How can I force Renaissance comedy on people who’ve escaped a living hell?”

  “Haven’t you had everything taken from you?” she cackled. “Of course you have. And thank God Yugoslavia is no more!”

  “You haven’t got the training for it, and you’re not being paid for it. We have experts for that kind of thing in this country. They’re called psychotherapists. Your job is to do what we asked you here to do. And what we’re paying you to do.”

  “Listen to Cees, dear. He’s got your best interests at heart.”

  “You gave them all inappropriately high grades. Everyone in the Department noticed it. You can’t tell me they were all so outstanding.”

  “They were,” I mumbled.

  “That’s just like you. Tanja of the big heart! She always was bighearted, Cees. I remember her once ripping off a brooch and giving it to me when I complimented her on it.”

  I didn’t remember anything of the sort. I wondered whether she had made it up or I had forgotten it.

  “Well, now—you see that bribing them with high grades doesn’t work. Your students insist on a curriculum. I think you’ve underestimated them. They’re serious about their studies, and I’m glad of it.”

  “Listen to Cees, dear. He knows what he’s talking about.” She was being coy again. She might have been talking to a child.