The Ministry of Pain

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  “I wasn’t bribing them! How you can fail to see that they’re convalescents! We’re all convalescents! And I have no doubt that what I did with them is more important than any academic curriculum.” But even as I spoke, I knew I was speaking into a void.

  Cees shrugged his shoulders.

  “If they thought it was more important, why did they complain about the lack of a curriculum?”

  As far as Cees was concerned, my position was nothing but a weak excuse for having failed to do my academic duty. Something welled up in my throat, and I burst into convulsive sobs. I felt betrayed on all sides: I had been betrayed by my students, and I had betrayed myself by bawling in the presence of Cees and Ines. I could not believe, I simply could not believe that one of my students had gone and tattled to Cees about what we had done in class. Or had there been more than one? Cees had used the plural. Could the whole class have gone to see him? I felt ashamed, abandoned, bitter, and furious. I no longer knew why I was crying, yet I couldn’t stop my tears. And I was so panicked that, strange as it may seem, instead of wanting to make the quickest exit I wanted nothing more than to curl up on their couch and stay there until morning. The thought of returning to my basement flat filled me with despair.

  In a genuine desire to be of assistance Ines rushed to the phone to call a taxi, which she saw as an ambulance. (“I won’t have you traipsing from tram to tram in your condition!”) When the taxi came, Cees held out his hand.

  “I hope I’ve made myself clear,” he said awkwardly. “See you next week at the Department.”

  Ines offered me her cheek.

  “Everything will be just fine,” she cooed. “Believe me, Tanjica. Just do as Cees says. You know we love you and want nothing but the best for you.”

  As I was going out of the door, she thrust a small package into my hand.

  “I’ve sliced you a piece of poppy-seed cake. You can have it for breakfast tomorrow morning.”

  As the taxi pulled away, she threw me a kiss and disappeared into the house.

  The next morning I noticed a long scratch on the back of my left hand. The skin was red, the scrape having gone quite deep. I was frightened at first, unaware of how it had got there. But then I vaguely remembered having sat for a while in my armchair and run my hand back and forth over the radiator ribs. I wondered how long it had taken to inflict such a wound on myself.

  CHAPTER 6

  I paused in front of the door. A mere two weeks earlier I would have rushed in, full of enthusiasm; now I seemed to lack the strength to cross the threshold. I took a deep breath, gripped my briefcase like a shield, and went in.

  “Hey there, Comrade! How was Zagreb?”

  “Bring us the chocolate you promised?”

  “Glad you’re back. We’ve been looking forward to it.”

  The loud greeting, clearly sincere, threw me off balance. I didn’t know what to say. I waited for it to die down, then distributed the syllabus I had made up over the weekend. It consisted of a list of the lectures I would be giving until the end of the semester. Each was accompanied by a date and a brief summary of the topic to be covered. Next I distributed a list of required reading, which came to approximately two hundred pages a week. I told them I would be sticking religiously to the schedule and they would be expected to have read the texts by the time I lectured on them. I announced that there would be two papers and a final oral examination. I said I would no longer tolerate poor attendance: a poor attendance record would be reflected in the final grade.

  “What’s going on here?” Meliha called out, laughing. “New regime in power?”

  I chose to ignore the remark.

  “How can we read all these books if the library’s got only one copy of each?” Mario protested as his eyes ran down the reading list.

  “You’ll have to share them among yourselves or photocopy them,” I said. I’d spent a good part of the weekend in the departmental library photocopying the first books on the list myself.

  “Has the library even got all the books on the reading list?” Selim asked.

  “All the books on the reading list are in the library. Otherwise I wouldn’t have included them.”

  I gave a copy of the syllabus to Cees as well.

  “Two hundred pages a week? Isn’t that overdoing it a bit?”

  “Not at all. American students read as many as four hundred a week. Besides, that’s what you asked for, isn’t it?” The fact about the American students, which I’d read somewhere, seemed to have the desired effect. Cees’s only answer was a shrug of the shoulders.

  The lectures were devoted to a brief comparative survey of the histories of Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, and Macedonian literature, which amounted to a strenuous jog through a field full of facts, names and dates, though I’d left some time at the end of the semester for a thematic analysis of several Croatian novels.

  The disbelief stuck to their faces for a while. They tried to put my behavior down to a whim and forgave me, hoping the whim was only temporary and the next time things would go back to how they had been. For my part I kept studying their faces, searching for the one who had denounced me. At times I thought it might be Meliha, then Nevena, or Igor, or Boban…I went through hell trying to work out if it was only one of them or if two had worked together. I pictured Meliha and Igor delivering regular reports on class activities to Cees. Or Selim rushing to Cees to tell him the crazy things going on, the resurrection of a country that its own citizens had destroyed in the name of historical necessity. Though could it have been Johanneke? Or Ana?

  I would leave immediately after the lecture was over. I never went to my office. I did everything I could to discourage contact. Gradually the disbelief on their faces turned to puzzlement and finally to disappointment. Yet they would still come up after class, waiting for me to invite them for coffee. Meliha tried once, then Nevena.

  “Hey, Comrade. You up for a kopje koffie? Our treat.”

  “Thanks, but I’m very busy at the moment,” I said both times.

  I could see them absorbed in conversation in the café opposite the Department. A joint meeting of the chiefs of staff. I knew they were talking about me. “The bitch. Luci has turned into a real bitch.” I imagined one of them, the informant, sitting there tight-lipped and frowning. I tried to guess who would be first to stop coming to class. Igor? Ante? Nevena?

  Only once did I lose a grip on myself. I had required them to memorize Ujevi’s “Everyday Lament.” I had asked them to be able to recite it from beginning to end and from end to beginning. It was a silly trick I’d picked up from a much-hated professor of Croatian poetry who delighted in torturing us with like assignments. I remember swearing to myself at the time that I would never inflict anything like that on my future students.

  Nevena refused to learn the poem in either direction. I asked her to read it aloud. She made an awful muddle of it. I then asked her to read it backward. She just stood there, at a loss. It was a painful, humiliating scene. Finally Igor came to the rescue by standing and reeling it off beautifully.

  “Thank you, Igor,” I said. “And, Nevena, you may come back once you’ve mastered the poem.”

  Nevena packed up her things and, hissing “Bitch!” through her teeth, stomped out of the classroom. I think I heard her burst into tears as she slammed the door behind her. Sorry as I felt for her, it was too late. I had no idea how to escape the role I had assigned myself.

  I could sense their dissatisfaction grow. I could sense it every time I entered the classroom, sense it almost physically, like a change in the temperature. At times it seemed to fill the room, fill it so full that I was afraid it would shatter the windows. Yet they said not a word. I kept wondering when they would reach the breaking point and rebel or at least whether any of them would finally confront me and ask why I was behaving as I was. But they said not a word. Only Igor appeared unaffected by it all. He looked straight at me, as if seeing into my soul, and would occasionally put on his earphones,
which he never removed from around his neck.

  “Turn off your Walkman, Igor. This is a classroom, not a rock concert.”

  “I don’t use a Walkman at rock concerts.”

  “How can you hear what I’m saying when you…”

  “Don’t worry. I hear you better with the Walkman on.”

  “We’ll see about that,” I said. “At the exam.”

  It was terribly trying. I kept mouthing things that weren’t my own and hated myself for it. If I persevered, it was because I couldn’t rid myself of the thought that one of them had gone to Cees and told him everything that had gone on during the first semester.

  And yet the routine of the new regime gradually wore down my animosity until at one point I began taking a certain pleasure in giving “real” lectures. The students reacted accordingly. Meliha assumed the role of the diligent student, Igor never missed a class, Ana took down everything I said, and Johanneke showed such enthusiasm that for a while I suspected her of being the one who had denounced me to Cees. But by then the class had shrunk to them and only them: Nevena never returned, and one by one Mario, Selim, Boban, and Darko stopped coming.

  We got through the historical survey without much trouble. Our race through the periods and schools, the authors and titles had a kind of anesthetic effect. I left the theme of “return” for the end. None of them knew whether they wanted to remain or return, but they all felt they were living here “only temporarily” and they concentrated their energy on getting their “papers.” Once they had their papers, they thought, they would be able to make up their minds. The “motherland” still glittered somewhere inside them as a possible Exit sign.

  So here I was, packing my students’ refugee suitcases again. It was the same thing I’d done during the first semester with one difference: this time the suitcase contained no contraband. I was familiarizing them with their own literary family, their forebears. The examples I selected amounted to a kind of biography of fictional heroes. Often the narrative began in the third person and ended in the first in the form of the protagonist’s diary or letters to a friend. And although the protagonists were “homegrown,” they all—especially their Croatian variants—bore a distinct family resemblance to young Werther and Childe Harold, to say nothing of the Russian characters dubbed “superfluous men” by the critics, characters like Griboedov’s Chatsky, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Lermontov’s Pechorin, Turgenev’s Rudin and Lavretsky and Kirsanov and Bazarov, Goncharov’s Oblomov, Chekhov’s Ivanov, and Olesha’s Kavalerov, all of whom crawled around the other Slavic literatures like so many crabs. So much for the male line. The female line consisted principally of three types: the young and beautiful patriot, whom the hero generally abandons; the femme fatale, who taunts the hero but likewise inspires him; and the silent martyr, who faithfully accompanies the hero to the end of his days.

  I was amazed at the regularity with which the protagonists’ common features returned. I felt I was reading genetics rather than literature. It was like discovering something one had always been vaguely aware of but never considered important, like finding a mole at the same spot on one’s skin as on the skin of one’s parents or children or grandchildren. I often felt I was reading installments of a soap opera that had dragged on for more than a century (though I would never have admitted it in public).

  We read two novels by K. š. Gjalski, Janko Borislavi and Radmilovi, both of whose protagonists have gone mad by the end of their lives; we read Vjenceslav Novak’s Two Worlds and Tito Dorci and M. C. Nehajev’s Escape, all three of whose protagonists commit suicide; we read Krleža’s much acclaimed Return of Filip Latinowicz, which like the others deals with the theme of exile. And while the protagonists in all the works feel isolated abroad, it is their inability to adjust to the return home that triggers their tragic deaths.

  “But what would really grab us,” said Meliha, “is a novel about the Gastarbeiter, about our fathers and grandfathers who trudged off to Germany and Sweden and France and Holland and slaved away for years only to come back and pour their hard-earned nest eggs into huge houses—something solid to leave behind, to make them die happy—that then stood empty like memorials to the utopia of carefree retirement, like pyramids, like tombs. Because the war came and everything went up in smoke.”

  “Maybe,” said Ana uneasily, “but is that really our story?”

  “You bet it is, sister, if your parents spent half their lives in Germany and you’re living abroad without a penny to your name. Ask my friend Alda. She’ll tell you. Her parents retired after thirty years. Put every penny they’d saved into a bank in Sarajevo. Thought they’d build a house and settle down. And where are they now? Back in Cologne! That’s how it is with us: every generation starts with nothing and ends with nothing. My grandmother and grandfather—and my parents after them—they had to start from scratch after the Second World War, and this new war put them right back where they’d started from. And now here I am, starting from scratch, with nothing, zilch, zero.”

  Nobody said a word. Meliha’s zero was dangling above our heads like a noose.

  Anthropologists studying migration have taken over the term “sleeper” from popular spy novels. Sleepers are emigrants who make “normal” lives for themselves in their new environment: they learn its language, adapt to its ways, seem fully integrated—and suddenly they have an epiphany. The fantasy of a “return to the motherland” takes over with such a vengeance that it makes them into robots. They sell everything they have acquired and move back. And when they realize the mistake they have made (as most do) they go back to the land where they had “slept” for twenty or however many years, forced to relive (as they would on a psychiatrist’s couch) the years of adjustment until—twice broken, yet twice restored—they make peace with their lot. Many live a parallel life: they project the image of their motherland on the neutral walls of the land where they are living “only temporarily” and experience the projected image as their “real” life.

  My students were far from being “sleepers,” nor could they ever dream of becoming them. They belonged neither here nor there. They were busy building castles in the air and peering down to decide which place suited them better. Of course I was up there with them. I too belonged neither here nor there. The only difference was that I couldn’t bear to look down. I had vertigo.

  CHAPTER 7

  I couldn’t quite pinpoint what had brought it on. There were times when I found myself stopping in the middle of the street because I’d forgotten where I was going. I’d just stand there like a child afraid to be thrown out of a game if he moves a muscle. “And out goes Y-O-U!” Maybe the confusion came from the fact that it didn’t really matter where I was going, that I could just as easily have been standing on a street in another city, that my very presence in the city was a matter of chance, that, when all was said and done, everything was a matter of chance. Many of us had ended up in places we’d never dreamed of seeing no less inhabiting. And it would happen from one day to the next. It was like going to sleep in one life and waking up in another.

  Sometimes my sleep was interrupted by an oppressive but nondescript pain, a painless pain. I would get out of bed and make my way to the bathroom, switch on the light, let the water run for a while and take a series of small gulps, trying to quench a thirst I seemed to have had for ages. Then I’d lean my forehead against the mirror of the medicine cabinet and watch the mist of my breath spread gently over the surface.

  “O my wound, O my soul. The autumn has come, O my wound. Woe is me, O my wound, my festering wound…” Wounds are intimates in my country; they are our sons and daughters, our sweethearts. Wounds are love; love is pain. Goran and I once heard a turbo-folk rendition of “O My Wound” blaring out over a Berlin street. The street vendor showed us a cheap cassette with Ach, meine Wunde on the cover. As Goran handed over the money, he said to me with a smile, “Our wounds are our hottest export.”

  “O Germany, O stranger. I gave you my lover, I gave you
my brother,” they wail, as they have wailed, keened, and howled for decades over migrant workers, refugees, émigrés, exiles, Gastarbeiter, adventurers, conmen, crooks, deserters…“O Australia, O stranger,” “O America, O stranger,” “O Canada, O stranger.”

  I could never understand the point of the cheap, patriotic video clips—half travel commercial, half political campaign—of swarthy, mustachioed men recently back from stints abroad expounding on the magnetic pull of the motherland. With crammed suitcase in each hand and gold chains and crosses on their hairy chests, they tramp the hills and vales leading to their native villages, where mustachioed crones in black await them by sooty hearths. “My Moootherland! My naaative soil!” my musical compatriots bellow, gazing into the beautiful distance, which is usually the sole beautiful thing they have to gaze into. Maybe all émigrés are character actors condemned to endless soaps; maybe the very genre of exile keeps them from transforming what they do and how they feel.

  Whenever I found myself in the subgenre of émigré insomnia, I would wrack my brains over how things would be were they not as they are. Hoping to make a warm spot for myself, I would shuffle together everyone I know as if they were packs of cards. I would think of Goran cuddling up to his Hito. They have an orderly way of sleeping, nestled together like spoons. He groans; she awakens. Anything wrong? she asks. The groaning ceases; the breathing goes back to normal; Hito goes back to sleep. I would think of Goran’s mother going to the kitchen for a glass of milk. She takes a cookie out of the canister with “Danish Cookies” written on it, then changes her mind and takes out another two. And one more. She dips them in the milk, then pushes them all the way down with one finger, then eats them with a spoon. The sweet mush calms her nerves. “I don’t understand it. I can’t stop eating,” she laments. “Especially at night.” I would think of myself curled up in the bed in Mother’s “guest room” and hear the shuffle of slippers, the scrape of a door, and the tinkle of urine in the toilet bowl: my mother is urinating in the toilet next to my room. The room swells like a sound box with the noise. Then it stops and she shuffles back to bed. And as she falls asleep, she decorates her past like an Easter egg. Deliberately. Complacently.