The Ministry of Pain (5 page)

“Right on!” cried Meliha. “And I’m a Sarajevo samurai.”

I could always count on Meliha. We never got enough of her stories about Sarajevo—the fear, the dark, the humiliation, the madness, the hatred, the living and the dead…. Meliha was a master of detail, even when describing the impenetrable darkness in the shelters during an alarm. And the stories she told. Of a woman who had gone mad when a grenade blew up her child, and spent hours rubbing her cheeks against the stucco facade of her house until her face was one live wound; of her own life before the war and the refugee camp where she was first interned and the fine old Dutchman who paid her to keep him company; of her mother, who was learning Dutch by taking care of a neighbor’s three-year-old, and was using the child’s babble to ease her way into a world without pain, to erase the recent past she so longed to forget.

We hung on her every word. No one else was willing to open up the way she was. Some were still too scared, others too ashamed; some were stymied by the guilt of not having experienced the war, others by the horror of the experience.

In the end, the hue and cry back home over the “national substance” of language was both a pack of lies and the gospel truth; in the end, my students had an easier time saying what they had to say in languages not their own—English and Dutch—even though their command of both left much to be desired. The
mother tongue—the “tongue of the clan,” the language that, as the Croatian poet’s ecstatic verse would have it,

the mother tongue had suddenly appeared to them in an entirely new light. From here the “substance” was more like linguistic anemia, verbal exhaustion, a tic, a stammer, a curse, an oath, or just plain phrasemongering.

“Hey, everybody!” Meliha burst out one day. “Fuck language! Let’s just talk!”

And suddenly the ball was rolling again.

At the Department
I felt somewhat of a stowaway. I made several attempts at setting up an appointment with Cees Draaisma, the chair and my “host,” and he always said, “Yes, definitely. It’s just that I’m terribly busy at the moment. If there are any practical matters that need seeing to, Dunja will help you, I’m sure.”

Dunja, the secretary of the Department, was Dutch. She was married to a Russian. Her real name was Anneke. Anneke looked like a large, listless seal. Surrounded by dusty plants, she basked in her aquarium of an office, occasionally gracing visitors with a blank gaze. Nothing could get a rise out of her: she would answer any question I might have with a reluctant “yes” or “no” or play deaf.

“We were going to have a talk about my course,” I said to Draaisma several times by way of reminder.

“Slavs are natural-born teachers,” he would say in the voice of a football coach.

I couldn’t tell whether the remark was meant in jest or in praise.

“Ines sends her regards. As soon as she tidies up the back-to-school mess, we’ll have you to dinner, okay?”

Draaisma was only confirming what I’d heard from Ines each time I phoned her. (“You’ve got to come and see us. But not till the dust settles. You’ve no idea what a bother children are. I can’t even get to the hairdresser. Now you, you’ve got it made. I tell you what. You run round to all the museums and then we’ll have you over.”)

The fifth floor, where the Department was, consisted of a long dark corridor and fifteen closed doors. From time to time I saw a colleague slipping into his room and paying me no heed. Anneke kept the door to the departmental office closed, and it often sported a Back Soon sign. I finally stopped trying to see Draaisma. The only living being I saw with any regularity was the plump Russian lecturer. She would be sitting at her desk behind a half-open door, moving her lips as if eating an invisible sandwich or reading something to herself.

“Zdravstvuite,”
she would say shyly if our eyes met.

Only once did a colleague knock on my door.

“May I come in?” he asked.

“Please do,” I said.

“So you’re our new colleague.”

“You might say so.”

The man held out his hand.

“Glad to meet you. My name is Wim. Wim Hoeks. I teach Czech. Czech language and literature. Last door on the left.”

I liked him immediately.

“I wonder why Cees hasn’t introduced you to anybody.”

“Oh, it’s probably because I’m here for only two semesters.”

“So what? It would only have been right.”

“I suppose it’s academic etiquette here.”

“Well, we Dutch do take our time. It’s a few years before we invite anyone home. Privacy is a great excuse for all kinds of things, including this inexcusable rudeness. ‘It’s not that we’re unwilling; we just don’t want to impose.’”

“Really?”

“Welcome to the most hypocritical country on earth!” he said. “Now tell me, how are things going?”

“Fine.”

“And what are you teaching?”

“For the time being I’m just getting to know the students.”

“Miroslav Krleza is a great writer,” he said.

“Your Czechs are no sluggards, either.”

“What about the weather? Foreigners always beef about our weather.”

“Well, it’s not the Caribbean, but…”

“Aren’t you bored?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because this is the most boring country on earth!”

“Isn’t that a bit contradictory?”

“What do you mean?”

“How can a country be both hypocritical and boring?”

“Only Holland has that distinction.”

“And I thought East Europeans were the masters of self-deprecation.”

“No, that’s another of our distinctions. Only don’t let us fool you. We don’t mean it. We actually have the highest opinion of ourselves. It’s colonial arrogance. We’ve let the colonies go, but held on to the arrogance. You’ll see…”

He glanced at his watch, stood up, and said, “Look, come and see me whenever you feel like it. We can go somewhere for coffee. Last door on the left, the smallest office on our floor. Yours is a lot bigger. You’re from the former Yugoslavia. You’re higher on the scale than us Czechs.”

“In what sense?”

“You’ve got nationalism, war, post-Communism. And we’re up to our necks in it all at the Hague.”

“Unfortunately.”

“And what a wonderful country it was! Dubrovnik is the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen! I’ll never understand how it happened.”

“You don’t think I do.”

“Of course not…. But when
you
stick a knife in somebody’s stomach, you raise such a racket that the whole world knows. We do it on the q.t. We don’t want people to know, and even our victims are grateful…. But we’ll talk again. Glad to have met you.”

He started off, then turned back at the door.

“That island off the Dalmatian coast foreigners can never pronounce….”

“Krk.”

“Right. Does the name mean ‘neck’?”

“Neck? No. ‘Neck’ is
vrat
. Why do you ask?”

“Because that’s what it means in Czech. And Czechs like to torture foreigners with the sentence
Str
prst skrz krk
.”

“And what does
that
mean?”

“‘Stick your finger through your neck,’” he laughed, giving a demonstration on himself. Then, with a wave, he turned again and strode down the corridor.

The fifth floor was always so deserted that I gave up feeling like a stowaway. I also gave up asking the secretary questions and knocking at Draaisma’s door. I did, however, pop in on Wim three times. His office was in fact smaller than mine. Each time he told me he happened to be very busy, and each time he pressed a signed offprint of an article he had written into my hand—by way of consolation, I presume. The first was about Karel Capek’s
Letters from Holland
, the second about misogyny in Kundera’s
novels, the third about “linguistic hedonism” in the prose of Bohumil Hrabal.

We never did go out for coffee. My only “live” contact at the Department remained the plump Russian lecturer, the one with the invisible sandwich in her hand. Whenever I walked past her office, she would swallow the invisible morsel and utter her timid
“Zdravstvuite.”

All things considered, the Department made a depressing impression on me, which impression was only heightened by the suspicion that the local Slavists were typical of West European Slavists. West European Slavists were wont to enter the field for emotional reasons: they had fallen in love with one of those exotic East bloc types. Or they would cement their choice of field after the fact with a politically, culturally, professionally, sentimentally correct marriage. There was another factor involved: the field made them absolute lords over minor, out-of-the-way, language-and-literature fiefdoms into which no one had ventured theretofore, which made the probability of their competence being adequately evaluated statistically insignificant. Though I should have been the last to condemn them, given that I owed my position to the fact that I happened to know Ines, who happened to have married Draaisma, who happened to be chair of the Department.

Our game derived from Ana’s symbolic bag.

“The first thing to do is what ‘our people’ used to do,” said
Meliha. “Tie it up with string so nothing falls out.” You’d have thought she was describing a hedonistic ritual.

“I must say I was ashamed of ‘our people’ whenever I saw them picking up those wrecks from the luggage carousel at the airport,” said Darko.

“It bugged me, too,” said Igor. “It made me think, ‘Look at the hicks I’ve got to travel with.’ But now I think it’s cool.”

“How come?” I asked.

“You know who has the most expensive luggage in the world?”

“Madonna?”

“Nope. The Russians. The top whores and top mafiosi. That’s what turned me on to the Gypsy look: the plastic bag tied up like a tramp’s boot, the gold tooth…. And how right you were about the missing star, Ana. We’re proletarians all! The only thing is, Papa Marx is dead and buried.”

“Right on!” cried Meliha. “And turning over in his grave at this very moment.”

It was with a certain diffidence that I’d proposed it as a class project—or game, really: a catalog of everyday life in Yugoslavia. Ana was the first to contribute. She brought her composition about the “Gypsy bag” to the very next class. I then suggested that we use her virtual Gypsy bag to store all the items for our “Yugonostalgic” museum.

“What museum?” they asked.

“Oh, it will be virtual, too. Everything you remember and consider important. The country is no more. Why not salvage what you don’t want to forget?”

“I remember the rally they held on Tito’s birthday,” said Boban. “We watched it every year on TV.”

“But we all remember that, man,” said Meliha. “Give us something personal.”

“My first bike. One of those squat ones we called ‘ponies,’ said Mario. “Does that count?”

“You bet!”

“Just like a man: a phallic symbol,” said Meliha in jest. “What about food? Bureks and baklava.”

“Bureks, baklava, and poppy-seed noodles.”

They all perked up at the reference to Balaševi
s song.

“If noodles count, anything counts,” said Nevena.

“Anything that makes you happy,” I said.

“Or sad?” asked Selim, his eyes lowering.

“Or sad,” I said. “Why not.”

“What about Omarska?”

The room was suddenly still. I flinched.

“Do you want to talk about it, Selim?”

“What’s there to say? It’s the only virtual exhibit I’ve got. The Serbs slit my dad’s throat there.”

Selim had tossed in another of his mines. I can’t say I didn’t expect it: I’d been picking my way through a minefield from the start. We all had our war memories, and losses like Selim’s were immeasurable. Selim and Meliha had experienced the war firsthand and in all its intensity. Uroš and Nevena refused to talk about it though they, too, were from Bosnia. Mario, Boban, and Igor had left the country to avoid mobilization and seemed thus to have avoided the virus of nationalist insanity—Boban Serbian nationalism, Mario and Igor the Croatian variant. Johanneke had followed the events from Holland. Ana, who arrived in Amsterdam with her Dutch husband before the war, had kept up with it in the Croatian, Serbian, and Dutch media, but made periodic trips not only to Belgrade but to Zagreb, where she had close relatives. Compared with theirs, my experience of the war was infinitesimal.

I realized I would have to find some common ground, because they differed in more than their war experiences; they differed in
their interests. While Meliha had a degree in Yugoslav literature from Sarajevo, Uroš had only a provincial Bosnian secondary education and was just now entering the university. Mario had been studying sociology at Zagreb University. Ana had enrolled in the English Department at Belgrade University, but dropped out almost immediately. Nevena had done two years of economics. Ante had graduated from the teachers’ training college at Osijek. Boban had made it through the second year of law school. Darko had graduated in hotel administration at Opatija. Selim had just enrolled in the Sarajevo Mathematics Department when the war broke out. As for Igor, he was something of a drifter: he once mentioned having done some psychology, but also told me he’d spent two years at the Zagreb Academy of Theater and Film in the program for theater directors. I never pushed him about his past; it didn’t seem that important anymore.

As for the common ground, I could sense their inner fragmentation, their rage, their stifled protest. We had all of us been violated in one way or another. The list of things we had been deprived of was long and gruesome: we had been deprived of the country we had been born in and the right to a normal life; we had been deprived of our language; we had experienced humiliation, fear, and helplessness; we had learned what it means to be reduced to a number, a blood group, a pack. Some—Selim, for instance—had lost close friends and relatives. Their lot was the hardest to bear. And now we were all in one way or another convalescents.

Amidst such lunacy I had to find a territory that belonged equally to us all and would hurt us all as little as possible. And the only thing that could be, I thought, was our common past. Because another thing we all had been deprived of was our right to remember. With the disappearance of the country came the feeling that the life lived in it must be erased. The politicians who came to power were not satisfied with power alone; they wanted
their new countries to be populated by zombies, people with no memory. They pilloried their Yugoslav past and encouraged people to renounce their former lives and forget them. Literature, movies, pop music, jokes, television, newspapers, consumer goods, languages, people—we were supposed to forget them all. A lot of it ended up at the dump in the form of film stock and photographs, books and manuals, documents and monuments—“Yugonostalgia,” the remembrance of life in that ex-country, became another name for political subversion.

The breakup of the country, the war, the repression of memory, the “phantom limb syndrome,” the general schizophrenia, and then exile—these, I was certain, were the reasons for my students’ emotional and linguistic problems. We were all in chaos. None of us was sure who or what we were, to say nothing of who or what we wanted to be. At home my students resented being typecast as Yugonostalgiacs, that is, dinosaurs, but they felt little affinity with the prepacked retrofuture of the newly minted states. And here in Holland they were stigmatized as “the beneficiaries of political asylum,” “refugees,” or “foreigners,” as “children of post-Communism,” “the fallout of Balkanization,” or “savages.” The country we came from was our common trauma.

I realized I was walking a tightrope: stimulating the memory was as much a manipulation of the past as banning it. The authorities in our former country had pressed the delete button, I the restore button; they were erasing the Yugoslav past, blaming Yugoslavia for every misfortune, including the war, I reviving that past in the form of the everyday minutiae that had made up our lives, operating a volunteer lost-and-found service, if you will. And even though they were manipulating millions of people and I only these few, we were both obfuscating reality. I wondered
whether by evoking endearing images of a common past I wouldn’t obscure the bloody images of the recent war, whether by reminding them of how Kiki sweets tasted I wouldn’t obliterate the case of the Belgrade boy stabbed to death by his coevals just because he was an Albanian, whether by urging them to “reflect on” Mirko and Slavko, the Yugopartisans of the popular comic strip, I wouldn’t be postponing their confrontation with the countless episodes of sadism perpetrated by Yugowarriors, drunk and crazed with momentary power, against their compatriots; or whether by calling up the popular refrain
That’s what happens, my fair maiden, once you’ve known a Bosnian’s kiss
I wouldn’t be dulling the impact of the countless deaths in Bosnia, that of Selim’s father, for instance. The lists of atrocities knew no end, and here I was, pushing them into the background with cheery catalogs of everyday trifles that no longer even existed.

On the other hand, it was all intertwined; you couldn’t have one without the other. Death chewed on Kikis. People killed and were killed, looted and were looted, raped and were raped to the sound of cheap, popular refrains. Soldiers were hit by bullets as they dragged color TVs, the new booty, to the trenches. Death went hand in hand with day-to-day detritus. A detail like Kikis could recur in an infinite number of variations—the image, say, of a girl hit by a sniper, the blood trickling from her lips sweetened by the Kiki she had been chewing. The evil was as banal as the everyday artifact and had no special status.

I did not see how we could come to grips with our past if we did not first make our peace with it. So as our common ground I chose something we all felt close to—the homely terrain of the day-to-day life we had shared in Yugoslavia.

Gradually our red-white-and-blue-striped bag filled up. There was a little of everything: the now dead world of Yugoslav pri
mary and secondary schools, the idols of Yugoslav pop culture, all manner of Yugogoods—food, drink, apparel, and the like—and Yugodesign, ideological slogans, celebrities, athletes, events, Yugoslav socialist myths and legends, television series, comic strips, newspapers, films…

Boban had unearthed a cache of Yugoslav films on video, so we had lots to watch. They proved a most viable testimony to the existence of a Yugoslav life. Reading that life from our posthumous perspective, we discovered detail after detail that presaged the future, prognostications that came true.

I soon set aside the worries that had beset me: our “archeology” our “spiritualism,” the reanimation of our “better past” made us so close that we found it harder and harder to disband. So we adopted another habit from the past: after class we would adjourn to a café and jabber on, dispersing only to run for the last tram, bus, or train. To an outsider we must have looked like a tribe uttering the magic words that call forth its gods; we must have seemed in a trance. Well, we were in a way.

The student I had the hardest time getting a handle on was Igor. His memory amazed me: he would have the most vivid “recollection” of things he couldn’t possible have experienced.

“You weren’t even born then!”

“But I’ve got Yugogenes, Comrade, and they remember.”

He got a kick out of pronouncing the ostensibly nonsensical nonce word, Yugogenes, in the Dutch way, substituting harsh, guttural
h
’s for the
g
’s. We laughed. My students clearly liked the idea that our past was remembered not so much by us as by phantom “Yuhohenes” for which we bore no responsibility.