Dubravka Ugresic - The Ministry of Pain

“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 movies 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…’”