The Ministry of Pain

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  Only at such times, lying awake on the bed in my Amsterdam burrow, was I able to gain a clear picture of myself. I picture myself pulling on my jeans, throwing a jacket over my pajama top, and sailing out of the basement. I attempt a deep breath, but the air is tepid and as sticky as cotton candy. A numbing subtropical wind whisks litter along the street. Two plastic bags caught on the branches of a nearby tree make a snapping noise and glow dully in the dark like messages from another world.

  I see a compatriot of mine, a short, squat woman with a sprightly gait. She has a tall, gray-haired woman in tow. The older woman is walking with the aid of crutches. “Get a move on, Mama,” the younger woman commands in a voice that penetrates my eardrum like a needle. All “our people” know this woman. “She’s a genius,” they say. Sometimes she sports a veritable troop of fictive offshoots, sometimes a fictive eight-and-a-half-month stomach, sometimes today’s fictive cripple of a fictive mother, but she is always accompanied by a glowering man who follows her like a shadow, his hands thrust deeply into the pockets of his short jacket. They claim she can steal anything “our people” care to buy: clothing, jewelry, VCRs…. “Let’s go, Mama,” she grunts. “Get a move on.”

  A drunk young Englishwoman pulls my sleeve and asks, “Got a match?”

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “Fuck you!” she says back and totters away.

  I am standing in front of a tattoo studio. The studio is closed, but the TV in the display window is showing a documentary. “I began getting myself tattooed to learn what pain means,” says a young Japanese man, turning to expose a richly tattooed back to the camera. “Each of these patterns is a memento of pain.” Another young Japanese man covered with tattoos nods vigorously and says, “No pain, no gain!”

  The thick, black water in the canal round the corner shimmers ominously. A white swan emerges abruptly out of the darkness and freezes ghostlike. Just then the TV set in the display window shuts off and the screen goes blank. I keep standing there for a while. The plastic bags in the branches are still snapping like children’s kites. The subtropical wind licks my face. Sweat trickles down my back. “And out goes Y-O-U” Then I scamper back to my hole like a mouse.

  CHAPTER 8

  We have come to the end of our primer. We have learned all our letters. We can read print and we can read script. Now we can read all sorts of nice children’s books. Now we can read everything. We know how to write, too. We know how to write everything we see. Now we can read and write by ourselves. The more we know, the better we are.

  —First-Year Primer

  And then came the exam. There they were—all four of them: Johanneke, Meliha, Ana, and Igor—in the corridor outside my door. Johanneke came in first. I asked her several questions, all of which she answered correctly. I gave her an A. She had worked much harder than the rest and proved a discreet observer of the goings-on. Only now did I realize I’d never had a serious conversation with her. We had adopted her, and she was “ours.” That had apparently sufficed.

  “I hope you’ll stay on,” she said.

  “I may,” I said, trying to sound cheerful.

  I stood, walked to the door with her, and held out my hand. She looked uneasy.

  “Good luck,” I said like a fool, realizing that I needed it more than she did.

  The moment Meliha entered, I knew I couldn’t go on with my role.

  “Forget about the exam, Meliha,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t bring myself to quiz you,” I said honestly. “Exam or no exam, you deserve an A.”

  “Now you tell me! And here I crammed all night, just like when I was a student. It was great, by the way. Really!…So you’ll be back next year?”

  “I may be.”

  “Well, if you are,” she said cheerfully, “I’ll be back, too.”

  We talked a little about her parents, her plans, the status of her studies….

  “I don’t know what to do,” she suddenly blurted out. “I’m in love!”

  “Who is it?”

  “A Daer!”

  So we talked a little about her Daer. A great guy. And wild about Bosnia. Works for an NGO. Violence prevention, something like that. Spends more time in Sarajevo than here. Knows the language. Maybe she’ll end up going there with him. Who’d have thought it would take a Daer to make her want to go home. “And then there’s…well…My dad—he’s going downhill. All he can say is, ‘Life’s one big joke.’ He’s like a parrot. You ask him how he wants his eggs, fried or scrambled, and he says, ‘Life’s one big joke.’ Though it may be I should take some lessons from the guy.”

  She stood. I followed suit, and we shook hands. She was on the point of opening the door when she paused and a shadow drew across her face. It made her look ten years older.

  “What’s the matter, Meliha?”

  “Nothing. Sometimes I think I’m going mad. I’ll be walking along, and suddenly I have to stop and pick up the pieces, the pieces of myself. My arms, my legs, and phew! there’s my crazy head. You don’t know how glad I am to find them. So anyway I glue them together and they hold for a while. I think that’s it for good, and then I’m in pieces again. And again I pick them up and put myself together like a jigsaw puzzle until the next time….

  She opened the door and added, “Now my face is all wet, and my Daer’s downstairs waiting for me.” Then she forced a smile over her face and slipped out.

  Ana was next.

  “I want you to know I didn’t come for the exam,” she said, entering the room.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s no point. I’m not going on.”

  “Why the sudden decision?”

  “I’m going back to Belgrade,” she said.

  “Hold on. Back up a little. What’s made you decide to go back?”

  “Geert has always preferred Belgrade, and this place is getting on my nerves.”

  “You won’t miss anything?”

  “No.”

  “But you’ve spent several years here, haven’t you?”

  “They could have been anywhere.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to give you a grade?”

  She didn’t seem to hear the question.

  “I only came to say good-bye,” she said, then added impulsively, “Are you on your own?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Living in a foreign country—it’s much harder when you’re on your own.”

  “That depends,” I said. I was not eager to pursue the conversation.

  “You know…,” she said, “what happened would have happened no matter what.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You didn’t realize it, but you were the last reason for us to get together. Things would have fallen apart without you.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because that’s how it goes. At first we were in an up mood: we got a kick out of life. Life was a blast, a never-ending party. And then one morning we woke up to find a clearing all around us.”

  “A clearing? What do you mean by ‘a clearing’?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose what I mean is the awful feeling that there’s no one behind you and no one in front of you.”

  “But you’ve got Geert.”

  “The Dutch are much better on foreign soil than on their own.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “They take swimmingly to living abroad, but they’re like fish out of water when they’re at home.”

  “What do you expect to find when you’re ‘at home’?”

  “One horror after another.”

  “And what would you have here?”

  “The absence of horrors.”

  “For many that’s enough of a reason to stay.”

  “Though Holland is tough, too, in its way,” she said calmly.

  Then she took an envelope out of her bag and put it on my desk.

  “What’s that?”

  “
The key to the flat.”

  “Whose flat?”

  “We don’t need it anymore, and you may be staying.”

  “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

  “But it may turn out that you will.”

  “Is it your flat?”

  “No, Geert’s. Government subsidized. All you have to pay is the gas and electricity, and they come to almost nothing. Oh, I should tell you: it’s not in the center of things. The address and telephone number and everything else you need are in the envelope. The furniture’s pretty old, but you can chuck it. You can make all the changes you like. Geert and I are leaving in a week. Let me know when you decide. Go and have a look at it. Leave the key in the box if it doesn’t appeal to you.”

  I was surprised at Ana and for a split second jealous of her. She seemed to have a certain knowledge I lacked. I stared at the envelope for a while after she left, then stuck it into my bag. Ana’s key had briefly opened the door that was holding back all my fears.

  That left Igor, but I couldn’t bring myself to move. I kept thinking about Ana and Meliha and the lives they’d been leading, lives I’d known nothing—but nothing—about.

  Igor’s paper lay in front of me, and I leafed through it absentmindedly though I’d read it before. As the basis for the paper on the theme of “return” in Croatian literature Igor had chosen a completely unexpected work, the fairy tale “How Potjeh Sought the Truth” by the classic children’s writer Ivana Brli-Mažurani.

  In a clearing in an old beech forest there lived old man Vjest and his three grandsons. One day the god Svaroži, whom Igor calls “the Slav Superman,” appears to the three brothers. And when he had spoken, Svaroži gave a wave of his cloak and lifted Ljutiša, Marun, and Potjeh onto its skirt. And he gave another wave of the cloak and it took to twisting. And the brothers on its skirt took to twisting with it, to twisting and turning and turning and twisting, and all of a sudden the world started passing before them. First they saw all the treasures and the fields and the estates and the riches that were then in the world. Then, twisting and turning and turning and twisting, they saw all the armies and the spears and the javelins and the generals and the spoils that were then in the world. And then, twisting and turning and turning and twisting even more, they suddenly saw all the stars, all the stars and the moon and the Seven Sisters and the wind and all the clouds. And these visions did greatly perplex the brothers, and still the cloak fluttered and rustled and swished like a skirt of gold. But then they found themselves back in the clearing, did Ljutiša, Marun, and Potjeh, with the golden lad Svaroži facing them as before. And thus did he speak: “This is what you shall do. You shall remain here in the clearing; nor shall you leave your grandfather until he has left you; you shall not go into the world for good or for ill until you have returned him his love.”

  When Grandfather asks his grandchildren what they saw in the world and what advice they received from the god Svaroži, Potjeh cannot remember—Igor uses the English word blackout—so he leaves his home for the forest to seek his lost memory and Svaroži’s advice. There he is set upon by wood demons, whom Igor calls Lex Luthor’s adjutants….

  I beckoned to Igor. He came in and sat down. I saw my own reflection in his face. It was like looking into a mirror. He seemed to have recorded every word I’d said during the second semester and had now switched on the tape. He began spitting back at me the dry, academic list of names and dates I’d crammed into the four of them, and he made precious little pretense at concealing his scorn for me. I interrupted him.

  “I was a bit perplexed by your paper,” I said.

  “It’s on a perplexing work.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What’s the important truth Potjeh can’t seem to remember? Svaroži’s message? All Svaroži told him was to stay at home. As simple as ABC.”

  “So?”

  “So Svaroži appears to Potjeh one more time and tells him the same thing: go home. But what happens now that his memory has returned? He dies. ‘A quick wash and back I fly to my dear grandfather,’ he says, leans over a well, falls in, and drowns.”

  “Well, what do you make of it?”

  “Given the rules of the ‘there’s-no-place-like-home’ genre, they should all live happily ever after. Fairy-tale heroes find wisdom, riches, and princesses on their travels; they don’t fall into wells. Something must have got into Mažuranic to keep her from giving the fairy tale its conventional ending.”

  “But Potjeh ends up in Svarožic’s court.”

  “Mažuranic puts Potjeh in heaven, which is death plus a happy ending, but it’s a cop-out of an ending, because we’re all guaranteed heaven or hell in one way or another. So from a technical standpoint the work is pure crap; from a psychoanalytic standpoint, though, it’s pure genius.”

  “Why?”

  “The message is clear: ‘exile’ equals defeat—Potjeh wanders through the woods in a total fog; he has amnesia—and the return home equals the return of memory. But it equals death as well: no sooner does Potjeh’s memory return than he falls into a well. So the only triumph of human freedom resides in the ironic split second of our departure in this, that, or some third direction. For the sake of that inner truth Mazuranic strayed from the genre and wrote a ‘bad’ fairy tale.”

  He looked up at me, his dark, slightly crossed eyes weighing my soul.

  He had defeated me: he had shown me something I would never have seen by myself. The work could support any number of interpretations, but Igor’s reading struck me as both valid and terrifying. What if everything he said was true? What if return is in fact death—symbolic or real—and exile defeat, and the moment of departure the only true moment of freedom we are granted? And if it is true, what do we do with it? And who are “we” anyway? Aren’t we all smashed to bits and forced to wander the earth picking up the pieces like Meliha, putting them together like a jigsaw puzzle, gluing them together with our saliva?

  “What’s the matter, Comrade? I mean Professor Luci,” he said with a tinge of mockery, as if reading my mind.

  That jerked me back into my role. The talk we’d just had was a step toward reconciliation. I’d held my hand out first, but now I pulled it back.

  “Thank you, Igor. That will be enough. I’ll be handing in the grades today. Come back tomorrow or the next day and the secretary will tell you what you got.”

  The moment I said it, I hated myself more than I ever had in my life.

  He shrugged, picked up his backpack, and made for the door. But then he turned and said, “Just a footnote, Professor. In literature it’s always the men who go out into the world. Go out, come back, and shed their ‘prodigal tears.’ Where are the women?”

  I didn’t respond. I squinted in his direction, deaf and dumb. I could barely make out his features. I dug my stumps into the ground and turned the color of my surroundings. I felt the Proteus anguinus, the human fish that had got stuck in the process of metamorphosis, stirring somewhere inside me: gills breathing, blood flowing through the thinnest of veins, a minuscule heart beating all but inaudibly. Help me, beat the heart. Touch me and I shall turn into a beautiful maiden; leave me and I shall be prisoner of my darkness forever.

  Once Igor had left, I settled down to grading the students. I decided to pass Nevena, Selim, Mario, Darko, Boban, and Amra, and gave Meliha, Johanneke, and Ana A’s. But what to do with Igor?

  I don’t know why I did what I did. I was like Brlic-Mazuranic, who didn’t know why she had tampered with a genre that had proved its worth many times over. Something had gone wrong, something inside her; something had prevented her from ending that tale in the prescribed manner, the manner in which she had effortlessly ended so many others. All I know is that I was unable to control the impulse to turn my tale in the wrong direction, and when after a long period of vacillation I finally gave him an F—together with a brief, guileful explanation for it—I felt physical revulsion combined with a feeling of shame and shame combined with a feeling of relie
f.

  Now all I had to do was take the grades to Anneke, give her back my office key, and see Cees. I looked around the room. I was in a clearing. There was a wasteland behind me and nothing in front of me but the key in the envelope at the bottom of my bag.

  But then I opened the desk drawer to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything, and saw a piece of paper folded in two. It was an anonymous note that had been placed in my box in the departmental office a few months earlier. I had dropped it into the drawer and completely forgotten about it, and I now read it as if I’d never seen it before.

  Yugobitch

  Fuck you. When I think of the people who died trying to brake out of the Commie shithouse, & you go spreading that brotherhood & unity shit. No more of your Yugoslavia crap, you hear?! Death to the people & freedom to Fashism!

  Captain Leši

  P.S. Up yours.

  Not a single word in the note gave away its author’s identity as a Serb, Croat, or Bosnian. It would have thwarted the most assiduous linguistic inspector. I realized that with all the practice I’d accumulated lately I’d willy-nilly become an expert in the field of hate texts. And yet how hard it would be to elucidate the contents of the text to, say, a Dutchman. How could I convey the use of assonance in the inventive coinage Jugokuja, “Yugobitch,” or the resonance of the stock phrase “brotherhood and unity”? How could I explain what lay behind the slogan “Death to the people and freedom to Fascism!” or the reference to the fictional Yugoslav hero from the early fifties, Captain Leši?