The Ministry of Pain

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  “Everything was so good at first, wasn’t it?” he said, picking up the two pairs of handcuffs.

  “Yes…” I said cautiously.

  “By the way, Comrade, have you ever tried these on?”

  “What for?”

  “Oh, out of curiosity. Didn’t you even wonder how they open?”

  “No.”

  “And I thought scholars were supposed to be inquisitive,” he said.

  The sneer in his voice made me blush, and again I was on the verge of tears.

  Igor came up to me and took the cup out of my hands. He put it down on the tray.

  “What do you say we give it a whirl?” he said, taking my hand and placing his lips on my wrist. They were cold and dry.

  Then he lifted the wrist and skillfully handcuffed it to one arm of the chair.

  “There,” he said sweetly. “Now you’re my slave.”

  “What kind of joke is this?” I said, mouthing words that didn’t sound like mine.

  Igor drew his chair up closer and took my free hand. “That was quick, wasn’t it? Bet you were impressed. I practiced for hours.”

  I pulled my hand away. “Come on now. Take this thing off, will you? You shouldn’t have any trouble after all that practice.” I was doing my best to smile.

  He took back my free hand, put it up to his cheek, and gave it a few strokes.

  “Ah, Professor,” he said, “you’ve got a nineteenth-century hand.”

  “A what?”

  “Your hand is like the descriptions of hands in nineteenth-century novels: a dainty white hand.”

  He put my hand in his and turned it over like a glove.

  “Only you bite your nails. Like a little girl.” Then out of the blue he buried his head in my lap and said, “Help a poor student, won’t you?”

  I tensed up, wrenched my hand free, and started stroking his hair. For a while he stayed where he was, but then raised his head, took my hand, and, giving the palm a lick, snapped the other pair of handcuffs around my wrist and the other arm of the chair.

  “There,” he said, satisfied. “Now you’re mine, all mine.”

  “Let’s stop this stupid game, shall we?” I said, blushing again.

  “So you still hope it’s a game,” he said ironically.

  “Enough of your antics, Igor. If you think you’re getting back at me, bringing me to justice…”

  “Justice! You don’t have a clue, Comrade. I don’t give a damn about justice.”

  “The reason I failed you is that I was certain you’d denounced me to Cees Draaisma.”

  “Me?!”

  “After the first semester somebody complained to Cees that we hadn’t done a thing in class, that it was a big waste of time, and that I forced you to go to cafés with me.

  “You don’t say!” he said in English, his scoffing language.

  I had the feeling he wasn’t the least bit surprised.

  “Cees told me all about it.”

  “And you really think it was me?”

  “Well, it was one of you. You or somebody else.”

  “So what?”

  “So what! You lied about me, you informed against me, you didn’t have the nerve to tell me to my face what was bothering you; no, you ran to Cees and told him behind my back!”

  “So you decided to get back at us.”

  “I wasn’t getting back at you. I was doing my job.”

  “But what if nobody did complain? What if Draaisma dreamed the whole thing up?”

  “Why would he do a thing like that?”

  “For the fun of it. Or to show how easy it was for him to manipulate you, manipulate all of us.”

  “I don’t think so. It had the ring of truth, what he said. He seemed to have reports on each and every class.”

  “Know what I think, Comrade? I don’t think Cees is the problem, and I don’t think we’re the problem; I think the problem is you. You were itching for it to happen. Even if we had complained, you could have ignored it, forgotten it. Or you could have dealt with it. We’re all in this together, after all. You could have forgiven us. You could have pitied us shitheads. You could have talked it over with us. You had all kinds of options. See? And the one you chose was to wage an angry little war against the class.”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t understand.”

  “Tell me, why did you give me an F?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. It was the most honest response I could come up with.

  “You know perfectly well, you fucking bitch,” he said calmly, touching my knee, “only you’re embarrassed to admit it.”

  “Don’t you dare use that language with me! And remove these handcuffs immediately or I’ll call the police.”

  “You’re pathetic, Comrade.”

  “Pathetic?”

  “How do you propose to dial the number?”

  He had me there.

  “What do want from me anyway?”

  “You sound like you get your lines from some B movie. What do I want from you? I don’t know what I want from you the way you don’t know why you gave me an F. Let’s just say I want to make you squirm a little. I want to hear what you sound like when you sound the alarm. I want to hear what’s really going on.”

  “What’s really going on?”

  “Oh, I read you like a book. I know how scared you are. But there’s something keeping you from taking off that Teacher mask of yours. I feel like I’m at a fucking course in fucking territorial defense.”

  “I’ve had enough of this. I’m going to scream.” I couldn’t believe how stupid I sounded.

  “Scream and I’ll give you such a slap…”

  “You wouldn’t dare,” I said.

  “Wanna bet?”

  Before I could open my mouth, he slapped my face, slapped it hard. All the breath went out of me.

  “You’re out of your mind!” I managed to come out with.

  “And you?”

  “How dare you!” I said, catching my breath.

  “I’m a daring kind of guy. And now that I’ve slapped off your mask, you can drop the airs and graces bit.”

  “Look, Igor, all I have to do is dial the office and report a grade change.”

  “You’re being pathetic again, Comrade. I’m an A student. One F doesn’t mean a thing.”

  He had me there. I had no means of defending myself. Nor the will to do so. I took a deep breath and said guardedly, “Forgive me, Igor. Forgive me. Please.”

  “I can’t seem to get it out of you,” he said calmly.

  “Get what out of me?”

  “What needs to be said.”

  “You can’t and you won’t, because I haven’t got it! I’ve been trying for months now!”

  I was trembling with fury. Once more I heard myself sounding like a student in a Croatian for foreigners course. I tried jerking my hand free, but yelped with pain.

  Igor took in my protest as if watching a bad stage production. Then he dug a hand into his pocket and pulled out a roll of adhesive tape.

  “Where do you keep your scissors?”

  “On the shelf,” I said through my tears.

  Igor snipped off a piece of tape and placed it over my mouth with the skill of a pro.

  “There! Now you’ve got what you were after: a movie of the week. You’re a proud one, you are. You’ve got a high opinion of yourself: you know you’re up shit creek, but you’re sure you’ve got a paddle, you’re sure you’ve got status, assets: a man (though he’s run off to Japan), a flat (though it has strangers living in it), a library (though the books are yours no more), a Ph.D. (though a lot of good it does you). In some far-off corner of your brain you’re sure life will go back to the way it was before. The life you’re living now is just an outing, a little outing you thought you’d go on. All you have to do is snap your fingers and—hey, presto!—everything will be back to normal. Am I right? And even though you’ve spent months counting feet through the window, even though you’ve seen B movie
s galore, you’ve never pictured yourself in another scenario: standing in a shop window in the red-light district luring clients to your mini-room, mini-basin, and mini-towel, or humoring gaga geezers like Meliha, or scrubbing toilets like Selim.

  “Has it ever occurred to you that your students might be better than you, better people? Well, has it? You’re no insensitive lout, Comrade. Something of the sort may have occurred to you. But has it occurred to you that your students might know more than you? Except they’ve been schooled in humiliation and don’t throw their weight around. Experience has taught them that things are relative. And things are relative. Until yesterday distances were measured in centimeters: you could be hit by a grenade. Sure you felt sorry for the people who suffered, who actually were hit. But—not that you’d ever admit it to yourself—somewhere in the recesses of your brain you think a grenade chooses where it lands. And if it does, there must be some fucking reason for it. Something keeps you from making connections, from grasping that your being our teacher is only a matter of chance. It could just as easily have been the other way round: you could have been sitting with us and, say, Meliha could have been the teacher. That grenade—it reduces us all to shit, human shit, but you seem to think you’re a little less shitty than the rest of us and you’ve raised your momentary feeling of superiority into a law of nature.

  “Tell me, has it occurred to you that all that time you may have been torturing us? Has it occurred to you that the students you forced to remember were yearning to forget? That they made up memories to indulge you the way the Papuans made up cannibalistic myths to indulge the anthropologists? Your students aren’t like you. They love this country. Flat, wet, nondescript as it is, Holland has one unique feature: it’s a country of forgetting, a country without pain. People turn into amphibians here. Of their own accord. They turn the color of sand; they blend in and die out. Like fucking amphibians. That’s all they care about: dying out. The Dutch lowlands are one big blotter: it sucks up everything—memories, pain, all that crap….”

  Igor paused. He seemed tired. He took down the šenoa again from the shelf and leafed through it absentmindedly.

  Suddenly I felt tears running down my cheeks. I couldn’t make out what had caused them. Humiliation? Self-pity? The tragic nature of the situation I found myself in? Or its comic nature? Christ! I thought. I feel closer to this man at this moment than I’ve felt to anyone in my life, and I have no way of letting him know. And I wasn’t referring to the fact that my lips were sealed with tape; they would have been just as sealed without it.

  Igor must have read my mind. Turning to face me, he read out the following passage: “‘The barometer of your heart is falling, and your eyes are brimming with tears.’”

  I was on the other side. We were separated by an invisible wall of ice. Could he also tell that I had only one desire at that point, namely, to knock my head against that wall? I needed help. There was something wrong with my heart, but I was unable to determine how serious it was. I desperately needed a refuge, a warm lap to curl up in, somewhere to wait for the pain to pass, somewhere to come to, to return to myself.

  “Pray tell, Professor,” he said, theatrically tossing the book to the floor, “what am I to do with you? A minor literature like ours doesn’t rate an opposition party. No, no, don’t worry. I’m just sorry for you. You’re a teacher of minor literatures, small literatures, and even they have shrunken as of late. But you go on dragging them behind you wherever you go. Time is passing, it’s too late to change fields, you can’t very well toss them out, can you? So what do you do? You save what you can. It’s all gone to hell, boys and girls, but let’s pick up the pieces, let’s go through the rubble and play archaeology.

  “Have you given any thought to what went to hell? Piles of books in Croatian and Serbian, in Slovenian and Macedonian, in languages nobody needs and about what? Teaching the ‘people’, the ‘folk’ to read. Real literature doesn’t teach people to read; it assumes they can read. The year Madame Bovary came out, Zagreb was a village of 16,675 inhabitants. Sixteen thousand six hundred and seventy-five! By the time our local assholes picked up their pens, all the European giants—Goethe, Stendhal, Balzac, Gogol, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Maupassant—were in place. The year Crime and Punishment came out, eighty percent of Croatians were illiterate.

  “So get real, Comrade. Have a look around you. Your classroom is empty. Your students have passed you by. They’ve gone out into the world—they’ve got their own value systems; they read all kinds of languages (if they read, that is, and if reading means anything anymore)—while you’re still back in the age that knew “no more glorious task than spreading light, culture, and knowledge among the people.” The heart beating in your breast is the heart that beat in šenoa’s village schoolmistress Branka over a hundred years ago. What else do you know? You haven’t even learned fucking Dutch! Just that puts you a giant step behind your students.

  “And that memory game you forced on us! In a few years all that nostalgia crap is going to be a big moneymaker. The Slovenes were the first to cash in on it: they’ve got a CD with Tito’s speeches on the market. Mark my words. Yugonostalgia will be coming out of our ears. And if you want to know what I remember most about our former homeland, what I remember is that the local motherfuckers wanted to put me in uniform and pack me off to war! To safeguard the achievements of their fucking country. What fucking country? The whole kit and caboodle was mine. You know the song: ‘From Vardar in the South to the Triglav in the North…’”

  Igor was falling to pieces—contradicting himself and gasping for breath—but so was I, and I saw no way of putting myself back together.

  “I had no one to stand up for me. Nobody. I’d be a corpse today if I hadn’t escaped. You didn’t stand up for me, either. But we didn’t need your fucking grades. Or your fucking literature for that matter. What we needed was a reasonable human being to put things in place. At first you seemed on the right track, you hemmed and hawed and wrung your hands. But you capitulated soon enough. You stopped halfway. Your course was about a culture that had totally compromised itself, and you neglected to mention that fact. Besides, you talked exclusively about the past: when you lectured on Andri, you neglected to mention that the current cohort of culture butchers have chopped him in three and there’s now a Croatian and a Bosnian and a Serbian Andri when you lectured on literary history, you neglected to mention that the Sarajevo University Library was bombed out of existence and that even now books are being tossed into bonfires and dumps. There you have the real literary history of the Yugonation. Arson. You didn’t lecture on the statistics and topography of destruction. No, you stuck to your syllabus. You didn’t stand up for what you believed, not even here, where you are free to say what you please. You totally discredited yourself.

  “At first, like I said, you seemed to get it. You said we were all sick and you were sick, too. But then you got scared and decided to save your skin. Like the only thing that mattered was your field, because that’s what you were paid to teach. But what a miserable little field it is and how full of shit. Still, you thought if you were a good girl they’d give you the job for good and you’d be on cloud nine. How wrong you were. You hadn’t counted on Draaisma, another pitiful character. But he’s got one advantage over you: he’s Dutch, he’s defending his home turf, and he’s worked like hell to get it. He’s as superfluous as you and he knows it, but unlike you, he’s got power. So he gave the job to people he has control over—his wife—or can outsmart—Laki.

  “I pity you, Comrade. Grab the first Daer you can get your hands on. Because this country, it’s okay. It won’t let you down. And one more thing. You’re a lucky bitch. You’re lucky I’m telling you all this. Because one of three things happens when you’ve been through what all of us have been through: you become a better person, you become a worse person, or, like Uroš, you put a bullet through your brain.”

  Igor broke off abruptly, and the room filled with a balmlike silence. H
is eyes were still on me.

  “Well, I’ll be damned! You’re enjoying all this! You’re a wild little beastie, you are.” He ran a finger over my features, as if penning a message: “My sweet little Croatian teacher, sweet little Serbian teacher, sweet little Bosnian teacher….”

  I held my breath.

  “What am I to do with you, Teacher? Tell me. You’ve withdrawn. You’re hiding. You’re a tortoise, under your shell. No one can get to you. You’re peering out of an invisible burka.”

  Again he broke off. He put his hand in his pocket and took out a razor blade. I froze. He bent over me, grabbed my right hand, pressed it palm down into the chair arm, and made a slow, careful incision in the wrist. It was short and shallow. Then he made a second and a third.

  I felt no pain, but tears streamed down my cheeks. Through the tears I could see thin spurts of blood running along my hand. The bloody slits in my wrist looked like a natural bracelet.

  “Something to remember me by. Your watch on the left wrist and on the right—Igor, the teacher’s pet…. Well, I’ll be off. And by the way, the number of the police is one one two.”

  He picked up his backpack from the floor and headed for the door. But then he turned back and with a quick flick of the wrist pulled the tape off my mouth. I yelped.

  “Shhh!” he said soothingly, placing his hand on my lips. Then he took his hand away, bent down, and gave me a delicate, childlike kiss, his lips gathering up my tears on the way. “You have another chance now to say your piece, Professor.”

  I stubbornly held my tongue.

  Looking me straight in the eye, he said in a calm voice that was nearly a whisper, “What if I was the asshole who went and complained to Draaisma? I could have been. I hated your self-possession, your self-righteous feeling of indignation, your simulated uncertainties, your halfhearted participation in our lives. Yes, it could easily have been me. Because I too have turned terminator. The Schwarzenegger jaw—we all have it. Murderers, crooks, innocents, victims, survivors, refugees, the old folks at home and the new folks here—we’ve changed. The lot of us. It’s the war that did it, that fucked us up. Nobody comes out of a war unscathed. Nobody who’s sane. And you looked so shiny and bright. Like a porcelain teacup. Of course I wanted to break you, smash you, knock something out of you. A shred of sympathy, a flicker of compassion, anything….”