Dubravka Ugresic - The Ministry of Pain

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 Da er 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. His 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….”

Igor fixed me with his dark, slightly crossed eyes as if gauging my soul. I held my tongue.

After he had left and shut the door behind him, the room filled with a new, heavy silence. For a while I sat there numb, straining my ears; then suddenly I convulsed and spit out an invisible bullet, the one I’d been clenching between my teeth since it all began. And from my throat came a mighty scream, the scream Igor must have been trying to coax out of me the whole time. But by then he was too far off to hear it.

After Igor’s departurean image of my first year in school flashed through my mind. The way our teacher punished pupils was not by standing them in the corner but by standing them behind the blackboard, blackboards resting as they did at the time on wooden stands. “Behind the blackboard” was thus a symbolic space of shame and humiliation.

In the depths of the image stood a girl the teacher had sent behind the blackboard. All we could see of her were her legs in white knee-socks and feet in black patent leather shoes. We would have completely forgotten about her had we not suddenly heard a faint sound that grew louder as we stopped talking and held our breaths: a thin stream of urine was trickling onto the wooden floor. We sat and stared at the golden puddle growing under her legs, then making its way along the floor toward our desks.

Enlarged and in slow motion the scene now played itself out before my eyes. The girl’s body was still hidden by the blackboard; all I could see was the stream of urine splashing into myriad sparkling droplets. And then I realized I was urinating. I could feel the warm liquid trickling down my legs. I sat there for a while, all but comatose, listening to my heart beat. I held my breath and followed its rhythm. It might have belonged to a bird about to take wing.

Then more images came, slow, languid images from far, far off. The first to float to the surface was a familiar one, a small black-and-white picture from Mother’s album. I must have been four or five when it was taken. I am standing on a barren piece of land looking straight at the camera. It is winter, but there is no snow. I am wearing a severe-looking double-breasted tweed overcoat, its collar and flaps trimmed with velveteen. One hand is in a pocket (the flap is sticking up a little), the other at my side. My face shows the trace of a smile. There is nothing behind me. There is nothing to either side. I am the only thing in the picture. I am a small human figure that has been catapulted into a clearing somewhere. As familiar as I am with the picture, I was struck for the first time by how clearly and unequivocally alone I am in it.