The Ministry of Pain (17 page)

“But what would really grab us,” said Meliha, “is a novel about the
Gastarbeiter
, about our fathers and grandfathers who trudged off to Germany and Sweden and France and Holland and slaved away for years only to come back and pour their hard-earned nest eggs into huge houses—something solid to leave behind, to
make them die happy—that then stood empty like memorials to the utopia of carefree retirement, like pyramids, like tombs. Because the war came and everything went up in smoke.”

“Maybe,” said Ana uneasily, “but is that really our story?”

“You bet it is, sister, if your parents spent half their lives in Germany and you’re living abroad without a penny to your name. Ask my friend Alda. She’ll tell you. Her parents retired after thirty years. Put every penny they’d saved into a bank in Sarajevo. Thought they’d build a house and settle down. And where are they now? Back in Cologne! That’s how it is with us: every generation starts with nothing and ends with nothing. My grandmother and grandfather—and my parents after them—they had to start from scratch after the Second World War, and this new war put them right back where they’d started from. And now here I am, starting from scratch, with nothing, zilch, zero.”

Nobody said a word. Meliha’s zero was dangling above our heads like a noose.

Anthropologists studying migration have taken over the term “sleeper” from popular spy novels. Sleepers are emigrants who make “normal” lives for themselves in their new environment: they learn its language, adapt to its ways, seem fully integrated—and suddenly they have an epiphany. The fantasy of a “return to the motherland” takes over with such a vengeance that it makes them into robots. They sell everything they have acquired and move back. And when they realize the mistake they have made (as most do) they go back to the land where they had “slept” for twenty or however many years, forced to relive (as they would on a psychiatrist’s couch) the years of adjustment until—twice broken, yet twice restored—they make peace with their lot. Many live a parallel life: they project the image of their motherland on the neutral walls of the land where they are living “only temporarily” and experience the projected image as their “real” life.

My students were far from being “sleepers,” nor could they ever dream of becoming them. They belonged neither here nor there. They were busy building castles in the air and peering down to decide which place suited them better. Of course I was up there with them. I too belonged neither here nor there. The only difference was that I couldn’t bear to look down. I had vertigo.

I couldn’t quite pinpoint
what had brought it on. There were times when I found myself stopping in the middle of the street because I’d forgotten where I was going. I’d just stand there like a child afraid to be thrown out of a game if he moves a muscle. “And out goes Y-O-U!” Maybe the confusion came from the fact that it didn’t really matter where I was going, that I could just as easily have been standing on a street in another city, that my very presence in the city was a matter of chance, that, when all was said and done, everything was a matter of chance. Many of us had ended up in places we’d never dreamed of seeing no less inhabiting. And it would happen from one day to the next. It was like going to sleep in one life and waking up in another.

Sometimes my sleep was interrupted by an oppressive but nondescript pain, a painless pain. I would get out of bed and make my way to the bathroom, switch on the light, let the water run for a while and take a series of small gulps, trying to quench a thirst I seemed to have had for ages. Then I’d lean my forehead
against the mirror of the medicine cabinet and watch the mist of my breath spread gently over the surface.

“O my wound, O my soul. The autumn has come, O my wound. Woe is me, O my wound, my festering wound…” Wounds are intimates in my country; they are our sons and daughters, our sweethearts. Wounds are love; love is pain. Goran and I once heard a turbo-folk rendition of “O My Wound” blaring out over a Berlin street. The street vendor showed us a cheap cassette with
Ach, meine Wunde
on the cover. As Goran handed over the money, he said to me with a smile, “Our wounds are our hottest export.”

“O Germany, O stranger. I gave you my lover, I gave you my brother,” they wail, as they have wailed, keened, and howled for decades over migrant workers, refugees, émigrés, exiles,
Gastarbeiter
, adventurers, conmen, crooks, deserters…“O Australia, O stranger,” “O America, O stranger,” “O Canada, O stranger.”

I could never understand the point of the cheap, patriotic video clips—half travel commercial, half political campaign—of swarthy, mustachioed men recently back from stints abroad expounding on the magnetic pull of the motherland. With crammed suitcase in each hand and gold chains and crosses on their hairy chests, they tramp the hills and vales leading to their native villages, where mustachioed crones in black await them by sooty hearths. “My Moootherland! My naaative soil!” my musical compatriots bellow, gazing into the beautiful distance, which is usually the sole beautiful thing they have to gaze into. Maybe all émigrés are character actors condemned to endless soaps; maybe the very genre of exile keeps them from transforming what they do and how they feel.

Whenever I found myself in the subgenre of émigré insomnia, I would wrack my brains over how things would be were they not as they are. Hoping to make a warm spot for myself, I would shuffle together everyone I know as if they were packs of cards. I would think of Goran cuddling up to his Hito. They have an orderly way of sleeping, nestled together like spoons. He groans; she awakens.
Anything wrong?
she asks. The groaning ceases; the breathing goes back to normal; Hito goes back to sleep. I would think of Goran’s mother going to the kitchen for a glass of milk. She takes a cookie out of the canister with “Danish Cookies” written on it, then changes her mind and takes out another two. And one more. She dips them in the milk, then pushes them all the way down with one finger, then eats them with a spoon. The sweet mush calms her nerves. “I don’t understand it. I can’t stop eating,” she laments. “Especially at night.” I would think of myself curled up in the bed in Mother’s “guest room” and hear the shuffle of slippers, the scrape of a door, and the tinkle of urine in the toilet bowl: my mother is urinating in the toilet next to my room. The room swells like a sound box with the noise. Then it stops and she shuffles back to bed. And as she falls asleep, she decorates her past like an Easter egg. Deliberately. Complacently.

Only at such times, lying awake on the bed in my Amsterdam burrow, was I able to gain a clear picture of myself. I picture myself pulling on my jeans, throwing a jacket over my pajama top, and sailing out of the basement. I attempt a deep breath, but the air is tepid and as sticky as cotton candy. A numbing subtropical wind whisks litter along the street. Two plastic bags caught on the branches of a nearby tree make a snapping noise and glow dully in the dark like messages from another world.

I see a compatriot of mine, a short, squat woman with a sprightly gait. She has a tall, gray-haired woman in tow. The older woman
is walking with the aid of crutches. “Get a move on, Mama,” the younger woman commands in a voice that penetrates my eardrum like a needle. All “our people” know this woman.
“She’s a genius,”
they say. Sometimes she sports a veritable troop of fictive offshoots, sometimes a fictive eight-and-a-half-month stomach, sometimes today’s fictive cripple of a fictive mother, but she is always accompanied by a glowering man who follows her like a shadow, his hands thrust deeply into the pockets of his short jacket. They claim she can steal anything “our people” care to buy: clothing, jewelry, VCRs….
“Let’s go, Mama,”
she grunts.
“Get a move on.”

A drunk young Englishwoman pulls my sleeve and asks,
“Got a match?”

“Sorry,”
I say.

“Fuck you!”
she says back and totters away.

I am standing in front of a tattoo studio. The studio is closed, but the TV in the display window is showing a documentary. “I began getting myself tattooed to learn what pain means,” says a young Japanese man, turning to expose a richly tattooed back to the camera. “Each of these patterns is a memento of pain.” Another young Japanese man covered with tattoos nods vigorously and says, “No pain, no gain!”

The thick, black water in the canal round the corner shimmers ominously. A white swan emerges abruptly out of the darkness and freezes ghostlike. Just then the TV set in the display window shuts off and the screen goes blank. I keep standing there for a while. The plastic bags in the branches are still snapping like children’s kites. The subtropical wind licks my face. Sweat trickles down my back. “And out goes Y-O-U” Then I scamper back to my hole like a mouse.

And then came
the exam. There they were—all four of them: Johanneke, Meliha, Ana, and Igor—in the corridor outside my door. Johanneke came in first. I asked her several questions, all of which she answered correctly. I gave her an A. She had worked much harder than the rest and proved a discreet observer of the goings-on. Only now did I realize I’d never had a serious conversation with her. We had adopted her, and she was “ours.” That had apparently sufficed.

“I hope you’ll stay on,” she said.

“I may,” I said, trying to sound cheerful.

I stood, walked to the door with her, and held out my hand. She looked uneasy.

“Good luck,” I said like a fool, realizing that I needed it more than she did.

The moment Meliha entered, I knew I couldn’t go on with my role.

“Forget about the exam, Meliha,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t bring myself to quiz you,” I said honestly. “Exam or no exam, you deserve an A.”

“Now you tell me! And here I crammed all night, just like when I was a student. It was great, by the way. Really!…So you’ll be back next year?”

“I may be.”

“Well, if you are,” she said cheerfully, “I’ll be back, too.”

We talked a little about her parents, her plans, the status of her studies….

“I don’t know what to do,” she suddenly blurted out. “I’m in love!”

“Who is it?”

“A
Da
er!
”

So we talked a little about her
Da
er
. A great guy. And wild about Bosnia. Works for an NGO. Violence prevention, something like that. Spends more time in Sarajevo than here. Knows the language. Maybe she’ll end up going there with him. Who’d have thought it would take a
Da
er
to make her want to go home. “And then there’s…well…My dad—he’s going downhill. All he can say is, ‘Life’s one big joke.’ He’s like a parrot. You ask him how he wants his eggs, fried or scrambled, and he says, ‘Life’s one big joke.’ Though it may be I should take some lessons from the guy.”

She stood. I followed suit, and we shook hands. She was on the point of opening the door when she paused and a shadow drew across her face. It made her look ten years older.

“What’s the matter, Meliha?”

“Nothing. Sometimes I think I’m going mad. I’ll be walking along, and suddenly I have to stop and pick up the pieces, the pieces of myself. My arms, my legs, and phew! there’s my crazy head. You don’t know how glad I am to find them. So anyway I glue them together and they hold for a while. I think that’s it for good, and then I’m in pieces again. And again I pick them up and put myself together like a jigsaw puzzle until the next time….

She opened the door and added, “Now my face is all wet, and my
Da
er
’s downstairs waiting for me.” Then she forced a smile over her face and slipped out.

Ana was next.

“I want you to know I didn’t come for the exam,” she said, entering the room.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s no point. I’m not going on.”

“Why the sudden decision?”

“I’m going back to Belgrade,” she said.

“Hold on. Back up a little. What’s made you decide to go back?”

“Geert has always preferred Belgrade, and this place is getting on my nerves.”

“You won’t miss anything?”

“No.”

“But you’ve spent several years here, haven’t you?”

“They could have been anywhere.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to give you a grade?”

She didn’t seem to hear the question.

“I only came to say good-bye,” she said, then added impulsively, “Are you on your own?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Living in a foreign country—it’s much harder when you’re on your own.”

“That depends,” I said. I was not eager to pursue the conversation.

“You know…,” she said, “what happened would have happened no matter what.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You didn’t realize it, but you were the last reason for us to get together. Things would have fallen apart without you.”

“Why is that?”

“Because that’s how it goes. At first we were in an up mood: we got a kick out of life. Life was a blast, a never-ending party. And then one morning we woke up to find a clearing all around us.”

“A clearing? What do you mean by ‘a clearing’?”

“I don’t know. I suppose what I mean is the awful feeling that there’s no one behind you and no one in front of you.”

“But you’ve got Geert.”

“The Dutch are much better on foreign soil than on their own.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“They take swimmingly to living abroad, but they’re like fish out of water when they’re at home.”

“What do you expect to find when
you’re
‘at home’?”

“One horror after another.”

“And what would you have here?”

“The absence of horrors.”

“For many that’s enough of a reason to stay.”

“Though Holland is tough, too, in its way,” she said calmly.

Then she took an envelope out of her bag and put it on my desk.

“What’s that?”

“The key to the flat.”

“Whose flat?”

“We don’t need it anymore, and you may be staying.”

“I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

“But it may turn out that you will.”

“Is it your flat?”

“No, Geert’s. Government subsidized. All you have to pay is the gas and electricity, and they come to almost nothing. Oh, I should tell you: it’s not in the center of things. The address and telephone number and everything else you need are in the envelope. The furniture’s pretty old, but you can chuck it. You can make all the changes you like. Geert and I are leaving in a week. Let me know when you decide. Go and have a look at it. Leave the key in the box if it doesn’t appeal to you.”

I was surprised at Ana and for a split second jealous of her. She seemed to have a certain knowledge I lacked. I stared at the envelope for a while after she left, then stuck it into my bag. Ana’s key had briefly opened the door that was holding back all my fears.

That left Igor, but I couldn’t bring myself to move. I kept thinking about Ana and Meliha and the lives they’d been leading, lives I’d known nothing—but nothing—about.

Igor’s paper lay in front of me, and I leafed through it absentmindedly though I’d read it before. As the basis for the paper on the theme of “return” in Croatian literature Igor had chosen a completely unexpected work, the fairy tale “How Potjeh Sought the Truth” by the classic children’s writer Ivana Brli
-Mažurani
.

In a clearing in an old beech forest there lived old man Vjest and his three grandsons. One day the god Svaroži
, whom Igor calls “the Slav Superman,” appears to the three brothers. And when he had spoken, Svaroži
gave a wave of his cloak and lifted Ljutiša, Marun, and Potjeh onto its skirt. And he gave another
wave of the cloak and it took to twisting. And the brothers on its skirt took to twisting with it, to twisting and turning and turning and twisting, and all of a sudden the world started passing before them. First they saw all the treasures and the fields and the estates and the riches that were then in the world. Then, twisting and turning and turning and twisting, they saw all the armies and the spears and the javelins and the generals and the spoils that were then in the world. And then, twisting and turning and turning and twisting even more, they suddenly saw all the stars, all the stars and the moon and the Seven Sisters and the wind and all the clouds. And these visions did greatly perplex the brothers, and still the cloak fluttered and rustled and swished like a skirt of gold. But then they found themselves back in the clearing, did Ljutiša, Marun, and Potjeh, with the golden lad Svaroži
facing them as before. And thus did he speak: “This is what you shall do. You shall remain here in the clearing; nor shall you leave your grandfather until he has left you; you shall not go into the world for good or for ill until you have returned him his love.”