The Ministry of Pain (3 page)
My pupils too consented to being “our people” part of the time, though none of us quite knew what it meant, and refused part of the time, as if it entailed some real, concrete danger. And when we refused, we refused to belong to either “our people down there” or “our people up here.” There were times when we accepted our fuzzy collective identity and times when we rejected it in disgust. Over and over I heard people say, “It’s not my war!” And it wasn’t our war. But it was our war, too. Because if it hadn’t been our war, too, we wouldn’t have been here now. Because if it had been our war, we wouldn’t have been here, either.
Our language, our souls’ only treasure,
We stuffed in the suitcase
Next to the family album,
And off we went to tilt at the windmills
Beating the chilly Dutch air.
Ferida Durakovi
The first thing
I required of them was to write out the answers to a few questions. I asked them what they expected to get out of the course, whether, given that Yugoslavia no longer existed, they thought the literatures of the country should be treated separately or as a unit, which writers and works they admired, and so on. Then I had them compose thumbnail autobiographies. In English.
“Why English?”
“To make it easier on you,” I said.
And I meant it. I was afraid (though I was wrong) that using “our language” would lead them to adopt a confessional mode, and that I didn’t want. Not yet.
“Whatever,” somebody mumbled.
“Well, do as you like.”
“You want our full names?”
“The first name will do.”
“What do you want us to put into it?”
“Whatever comes to mind.”
“We did this in elementary school,” grumbled somebody else.
I read them at home. I was touched by how naive their responses were. (“Literature is a painting of the mind, a song of the soul.”) The writers and works they listed as their favorites were disappointingly predictable. Hermann Hesse, of course, represented by several novels:
Siddhartha, Magister Ludi, Steppenwolf
. Then Meša Selimovi(the students, who read literature for its “powerful message about life,” rightly or wrongly thought of Selimovias Hesse’s Yugoslav counterpart) and his classic
Death and the Dervish
. I am certain they could all reel off two passages from the book, one that encouraged them to bolt from their provincial existence (“Man is not made of wood; his greatest tragedy is to be tied down”) and another that infused them with the sweet nihilism of the provinces (“For death is as nonsensical as life”). Another popular item was
The Zoo Station Kids
, a cult teenage book their generation identified with. There was also the inevitable Bukowski, who had wowed several generations with his rebellious outsider status. They called him “cool,” “hip,” “in” he represented “what literature is all about,” “literature with balls.”
Their responses called up a long-forgotten image of Yugoslav provincial towns: the sole bookshop, which sold more stationery than books; the sole cinema, where they saw—once if not twice—every new film; the few smoke-filled cafés, where they gathered regularly; the
korzo
, that Mediterranean institution of public square cruising, sniffing out one another like puppy dogs. Their taste had been formed by lackluster provincial towns like Bjelovar and Vitez and Bela Palanka plus a dollop of Castañeda,
who had come their way along with their first joint, a little third-hand Buddhism, a little New Age fashion, a little vegetarianism, a little Bukowski, a lot of rock, a little required reading (just enough to keep the prof at bay), loads of comic strips (read under the school desk), loads of movies and bits of English, which derived more from the movies than from their English teachers. It was a bittersweet patchwork, one that kindled a desire to make a run for it, take the first opportunity to head for Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo—or beyond.
In the end, what my little exercise demonstrated was that they couldn’t care less about literature. It bored them. Even if they’d had a literary education—Meliha had a degree in Yugoslav lit from the University of Sarajevo—the war had altered more than their priorities; it had altered their taste:
My taste began to change the moment the war began [Meliha wrote]. By now I can scarcely recognize myself. Things I despised before the war, ridiculed as sickeningly sweet, I now shed tears over. I can’t tear myself away from old movies that end with justice triumphant. They may be about cowboys or Robin Hood or Cinderella or
Walter Defends Sarajevo
. I might as well have forgotten everything I learned at the university. I put down any book that doesn’t pull on my heartstrings. I have no patience with artistic folderol and the swagger of literary devices or irony—the very things I used to set great store by. Now I go for simplicity, for plot stripped to parable. My favorite genre is the fairy tale. I love the romanticism of justice, valor, kindness, and sincerity. I love literary heroes who are brave when ordinary people are cowardly, strong when ordinary people are weak, noble and good when ordinary people are mean and ignominious. I admit that the war has infantilized my taste: I weep when I read my old children’s books—
The Strange Adventures of
Hlapithe Apprentice, The Pál Street Boys, The Train in the Snow
. And if anyone had told me I’d go wild over tales of partisan exploits in BosniaČthe stuff of Branko
opi, say—I’d have thought he was off his rocker
.
Most of them answered the question about whether Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian literatures should be treated as a unit in the affirmative. (“Of course it should. We speak the same language, don’t we? But then why not go all the way and include the Slovenes and Macedonians and Albanians. The more the merrier,” wrote Mario.)
When it came to the thumbnail autobiographies, they all wrote two or three sentences in stilted English (“I was born in 1969 in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where I lived all my life…” “I was born in 1974 in Zagreb of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father…” “I was born in 1972 in Zvornik. My father was a Serb, my mother a Muslim…” “I was born in Leskovac in 1972….”) The more I read, the clearer it became that writing in a foreign language had provided an excuse for being dry and brief. I myself wouldn’t have been able to squeeze out much more than that I was born in 1962 in Zagreb in the former Yugoslavia, so I was all the more gratified by Igor’s
“Shit. I don’t have any biography,”
and burst out laughing.
My own biography struck me as empty as my empty apartment, and I didn’t know whether somebody had removed the furniture when I wasn’t looking or whether it had always been like that. Confronting the recent past was pure torture, looking into an unknown future—discomforting. (What future anyway? The future there? The future here? Or a future awaiting you somewhere else?) That’s why we found the standard thumbnail autobiography so tough a genre. Even the most basic questions
gave me pause. Where was I born? In Yugoslavia? In the former Yugoslavia? In Croatia? Shit! Do I have any biography?
I was also a bit nonplussed by their dates of birth: their mental development lagged far behind their age in years. Maybe exile was a kind of regression. At their age they might well have been gainfully employed and bringing up children, yet here they were, hiding behind school desks. The state of exile had brought all kinds of deeply suppressed childish fears to the surface. Suddenly the sight and touch of Mother were no more. It was like a nightmare. We would be in the street, in the market, on the beach, and, whether through our fault or hers, our hands would disengage and Mother would vanish into thin air. Suddenly we faced a world that seemed terrifyingly large and hostile. Gigantic shoes advanced menacingly toward us as we made our way through a jungle of human legs, our panic growing…
I often had the impression of seeing a kind of hologram of that fear in the shadows flitting over my students’ faces. “In emigration you are prematurely old and eternally young—at the same time,” Ana once said, and therein, to my mind, lay a profound truth.
In response to the question about what they expected to get out of the course, Uroš wrote, “To come to,” which, given the way he used it, seemed to mean not only “recover from a shock,” “regain consciousness,” “come back to life” but also “come back to oneself,” as if it presupposed a space and an individual floundering in that space and searching for the road home. I was first unnerved, then frightened by Uroš’s response. Was I prepared to deal with that kind of need?