Dubravka Ugresic - The Ministry of Pain

She is from Zagreb, Count, a true product of Zagreb and a truly remarkable young woman. Though still in her salad days, she has a will of iron and is steadfast and intrepid. I hardly need state that she is at home with the standard school subjects, but she also knows French and Italian, can sing and draw, and is a dab hand at embroidering. She is so taken with her calling that she performs her duties with great passion, and there is an idealistic strain to her nature, which makes her regard the reform and ennoblement of the souls entrusted to her as a sacred mission.

It was an excerpt from šenoa’s Branka , that classic of Romantic prose in which a young teacher, imbued with the ideals of the Croatian national revival movement, leaves Zagreb for the remote village of Jalševo to teach the village children. Pouring the coffee with my back to Igor, I listened to him read from the copy I had taken out of the library. I could feel my chin trembling. I was afraid I was going to cry. It was a childish way to provoke me, but I sensed it was no more than an introduction to the extravaganza he had planned.

“So you’ve been spending all this time staring at people’s legs,” he said, putting down the book and nodding in the direction of the barred window.

“You can cope with anything if you know it’s temporary,” I said in as calm a voice as I could muster. “Besides, I’m leaving in a few days.”

“What makes you so sure it’s temporary?” he asked, either unconcerned about where I was going or feigning lack of concern.

I took him his coffee on a tray. I knew what he’d come for and decided to take the bull by the horns.

“Look, Igor, I’m terribly sorry…” I began, putting the tray down on the table.

“Great. You’re sorry.”

“Sit down,” I said, and sat down. He remained standing. He had turned his back on me again and was staring out the window.

“I know you’ve come because of the grade.”

He turned and trained those dark, slightly crossed eyes on me.

“And if I have?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I heard my voice crack and felt my chin tremble again.

He turned again and crossed the room to the basket I used for various knickknacks including the presents I’d received for my birthday. Igor started going through them.

“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.