The Ministry of Pain (20 page)

“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
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 pen
ning 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 departure
an 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.

A sudden chill drew me out of my comatose state, and I pushed my way over to the phone. But once there I fell apart again and froze for a while. Then I somehow managed to get the receiver off the phone, dial 112 and grunt my address into the mouthpiece. When a policeman appeared at the door a while later and saw me handcuffed to the chair, saw the three stripes of congealed blood on my right wrist, and smelled the urine, I read something I could identify with in his glance. Something came together with something at that moment, and I finally made the connection: the policeman was observing me with the look I had used to observe the girl in the clearing.

Igor was right. I won’t forget him. Nor will he forget me; of that I am certain. Because I could have kept his name from the policeman, but I didn’t. What is more, I accused him of rape, and
for breaking and entering and rape he would, I presume, get several years and a criminal record that would hound him the rest of his life. If I hadn’t done it, he wouldn’t have remembered me. I did it so he would. I had sown my seed. I was a teacher, wasn’t I?

There is no such thing as mercy, no such thing as compassion; there is only forgetting; there is only humiliation and the pain of endless memory. That is the lesson we brought with us from the country we came from, and it is a lesson we have not forgotten. Screaming and shouting are like Pavlov’s bell to us; we are deaf to everything else. Catching the scent of terror is child’s play to us; nothing tickles our nostrils more.

The natural bracelet of the three small incisions on my right wrist and the acrid odor of urine were the invisible handcuffs that would bind us, me and my pupil. I saw my future self making a newly acquired gesture, a kind of tic I would long be unable to shake off. It consisted of bringing the mouth down to the wrist, slowly pressing the lips to the three thin stripes and kissing them—Igor’s stamp, Igor’s brand—then tracing them with the tip of the tongue, testing whether they were still there, and finally raising the wrist slowly and holding it up to the light so that the stripes, now moist with saliva, glistened like mother-of-pearl.