The Ministry of Pain (18 page)

When Grandfather asks his grandchildren what they saw in the world and what advice they received from the god Svaroži
, Potjeh cannot remember—Igor uses the English word
blackout
—so he leaves his home for the forest to seek his lost memory and Svaroži
’s advice. There he is set upon by wood demons, whom Igor calls Lex Luthor’s adjutants….

I beckoned to Igor. He came in and sat down. I saw my own reflection in his face. It was like looking into a mirror. He seemed to have recorded every word I’d said during the second semester and had now switched on the tape. He began spitting back at me the dry, academic list of names and dates I’d crammed into the four of them, and he made precious little pretense at concealing his scorn for me. I interrupted him.

“I was a bit perplexed by your paper,” I said.

“It’s on a perplexing work.”

“What do you mean?”

“What’s the important truth Potjeh can’t seem to remember? Svaroži
’s message? All Svaroži
told him was to stay at home.
As simple as ABC.
”

“So?”

“So Svaroži
appears to Potjeh one more time and tells him the same thing: go home. But what happens now that his memory has returned? He dies. ‘A quick wash and back I fly to my dear grandfather,’ he says, leans over a well, falls in, and drowns.”

“Well, what do you make of it?”

“Given the rules of the ‘there’s-no-place-like-home’ genre, they should all live happily ever after. Fairy-tale heroes find wisdom, riches, and princesses on their travels; they don’t fall into wells. Something must have got into Mažuranic to keep her from giving the fairy tale its conventional ending.”

“But Potjeh ends up in Svarožic’s court.”

“Mažuranic puts Potjeh in heaven, which is death plus a happy ending, but it’s a
cop-out
of an ending, because we’re all guaranteed heaven or hell in one way or another. So from a technical standpoint the work is pure
crap;
from a psychoanalytic standpoint, though, it’s pure genius.”

“Why?”

“The message is clear: ‘exile’ equals defeat—Potjeh wanders through the woods in a total fog; he has amnesia—and the return home equals the return of memory. But it equals death as well: no sooner does Potjeh’s memory return than he falls into a well. So the only triumph of human freedom resides in the ironic split second of our departure in this, that, or some third direction. For the sake of that inner truth Mazuranic strayed from the genre and wrote a ‘bad’ fairy tale.”

He looked up at me, his dark, slightly crossed eyes weighing my soul.

He had defeated me: he had shown me something I would never have seen by myself. The work could support any number of interpretations, but Igor’s reading struck me as both valid and terrifying. What if everything he said was true? What if return is in fact death—symbolic or real—and exile defeat, and the moment of departure the only true moment of freedom we are granted? And if it is true, what do we do with it? And who are “we” anyway? Aren’t we all smashed to bits and forced to wander the earth picking up the pieces like Meliha, putting them together like a jigsaw puzzle, gluing them together with our saliva?

“What’s the matter, Comrade? I mean Professor Luci
,” he said with a tinge of mockery, as if reading my mind.

That jerked me back into my role. The talk we’d just had was a step toward reconciliation. I’d held my hand out first, but now I pulled it back.

“Thank you, Igor. That will be enough. I’ll be handing in the grades today. Come back tomorrow or the next day and the secretary will tell you what you got.”

The moment I said it, I hated myself more than I ever had in my life.

He shrugged, picked up his backpack, and made for the door. But then he turned and said, “Just a footnote, Professor. In literature it’s always the men who go out into the world. Go out, come back, and shed their ‘prodigal tears.’ Where are the women?”

I didn’t respond. I squinted in his direction, deaf and dumb. I could barely make out his features. I dug my stumps into the ground and turned the color of my surroundings. I felt the
Proteus anguinus
, the human fish that had got stuck in the process of metamorphosis, stirring somewhere inside me: gills breathing, blood flowing through the thinnest of veins, a minus
cule heart beating all but inaudibly. Help me, beat the heart. Touch me and I shall turn into a beautiful maiden; leave me and I shall be prisoner of my darkness forever.

Once Igor had left, I settled down to grading the students. I decided to pass Nevena, Selim, Mario, Darko, Boban, and Amra, and gave Meliha, Johanneke, and Ana A’s. But what to do with Igor?

I don’t know why I did what I did. I was like Brlic-Mazuranic, who didn’t know why she had tampered with a genre that had proved its worth many times over. Something had gone wrong, something inside her; something had prevented her from ending that tale in the prescribed manner, the manner in which she had effortlessly ended so many others. All I know is that I was unable to control the impulse to turn my tale in the wrong direction, and when after a long period of vacillation I finally gave him an F—together with a brief, guileful explanation for it—I felt physical revulsion combined with a feeling of shame and shame combined with a feeling of relief.

Now all I had to do was take the grades to Anneke, give her back my office key, and see Cees. I looked around the room. I was in a clearing. There was a wasteland behind me and nothing in front of me but the key in the envelope at the bottom of my bag.

But then I opened the desk drawer to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything, and saw a piece of paper folded in two. It was an anonymous note that had been placed in my box in the departmental office a few months earlier. I had dropped it into the drawer and completely forgotten about it, and I now read it as if I’d never seen it before.

P.S. Up yours.

Not a single word in the note gave away its author’s identity as a Serb, Croat, or Bosnian. It would have thwarted the most assiduous linguistic inspector. I realized that with all the practice I’d accumulated lately I’d willy-nilly become an expert in the field of hate texts. And yet how hard it would be to elucidate the contents of the text to, say, a Dutchman. How could I convey the use of assonance in the inventive coinage
Jugokuja
, “Yugobitch,” or the resonance of the stock phrase “brotherhood and unity”? How could I explain what lay behind the slogan “Death to the people and freedom to Fascism!” or the reference to the fictional Yugoslav hero from the early fifties, Captain Leši?

The anonymous note was a leftover piece of shrapnel. But even though it had landed in my drawer, I had no interest in discovering where it had come from. I picked up a red (yes, red) felt pen and corrected the spelling mistakes with a kind of affectionate apathy. Then I tore the sheet of paper into tiny bits and threw it into the air like so much confetti. The war was over.

I walked slowly
down the five flights of stairs and who should I run into on the ground floor but Laki, Laki the Linguist from Zagreb, who had attended a few classes during the first semester only to disappear. He paused for a moment, as if in doubt as to how to proceed, then screwed up his eyes, looked away from me, and said in a lazy drawl, “So how are we doing, Mrs. Luci
?”

“I’m fine, thank you. And you?”

“Fair to middling. Still hanging around the Department, as you can see.”

“Right. Otherwise we wouldn’t have run into each other.”

“And starting September I’m going to be here every day.”

“Really?”

“They’re giving me an office. So I can finish up my dictionary.”

“Good for you.”

“Not bad, and things will be even better once the dictionary comes out.”

“I’m sure they will.”

“We could never have dreamed of this when the Commies were in power.”

“That’s for sure,” I said, the irony in my voice clearly going over Laki’s head.

“I’ve got some funding from the Ministry of Tourism in Croatia. It’s in their interest, after all. It’ll help the Dutch tourist trade. I’ve managed to squeeze something out of the Ministry of Culture, too. And the Department here is doing its bit with the office. No great shakes, of course, but they may also let me teach a few drill sections.”

“Sounds great.”

“Not bad…. By the way, you going home for the summer?” He used the word “home” as a neutral substitute for the country that, while it was still in existence, the
Gastarbeiter
had all called Yuga and pronounced with extra-long vowels.

“I may.”

“Well, I can’t wait. My parents have this great house on Hvar. I spend two months there every year.”

“Yes, well…. See you.”

“Best of luck, Mrs. Luci
,” he said.

The screwed-up eyes that refused to hold your glance for more than an instant, the anti-Communist stance so fashionable after the changing of the guard (though Laki had had nothing to do with Communism one way or the other), the mishmash of “now” urban speech, dialect, and literary affection (it was as if grandfather and grandson were speaking out of the same mouth), the ever so forced “Mrs. Luci
”—it was all vaguely nauseating, like a premonition of something unpleasant.

Instead of going out, I went back upstairs and knocked on Cees’s door. He was alone.

“Come in, Tanja. Good to see you. I’ve been meaning to track you down.”

Neither he nor Ines had made any attempt to “track me down” since I’d been to their place that evening. In fact, I had phoned them once or twice and been treated to Ines’s warm words about how busy they were and had no time for anything and I’d been constantly on their minds and they’d been hearing such good things about me from my students and we’d eventually get together and “have a good chat.” She made the “good chat” sound almost physical.

Now Cees explained that despite the excellent reports he’d had about my class that semester (did he mean “reports” in the literal sense or was it just a polite phrase?), he would be unable to hire me back come September, because he’d been unable to find the necessary funding. The Dutch Ministry of Education had been cutting the budget for higher education for the past few years now, and until he could come up with funds for a position in Croatian language and literature—and he was doing everything in his power to do so—Ines would have to take over on a volunteer basis. It was a real sacrifice on her part, but it was the only way of keeping the program alive. The Department was in trouble: even Russian, its bread and butter, was losing enrollment. He couldn’t ask me to work for nothing. No, he wouldn’t dream of it, knowing the situation I was in; he wouldn’t want to exploit me. I’d find something, he was certain. After all, I had a doctorate, I had teaching experience and “a big heart.” And what was most important,
Slavs are natural-born teachers, aren’t they
? Ines had sent her regards and was sorry she hadn’t been able to see me. She’d just left for Kor
ula with the children, and he would be leaving soon as well, as soon as he handed in his grades. Would I see Anneke in the next few days about the formalities of moving out of the flat she had found me: keys, deposits, and the like.

Cees’s voice radiated sincerity. There wasn’t a hint of ill will.
Of course he didn’t broach the question of where I would be going after Amsterdam—cautious people don’t ask questions whose answers might bind them to something—but the whole time he held forth I had only one thought in mind.

“Cees,” I broke in, panic-stricken, “my visa is running out.”

“I don’t see how I can be of any help.”

“You can write a letter stating that as head of the Department you confirm that I will be teaching here next year.”

“But that would be unscrupulous. I couldn’t risk it.”

“The authorities don’t care about truth; they care about documents. There’s no risk whatever.”

“I don’t know…”

“I’ll come for the letter tomorrow,” I said in a voice I barely recognized. “You can leave it with Anneke.”

I left the office secure in the belief that the letter, departmental stamp and all, would be waiting for me the next day. Then I sailed down the stairs and into the café across the street. I reached the toilet just in time. Never in my life had I vomited with such vehemence.

Later I asked myself what I’d meant to accomplish with the letter and why I’d humiliated myself so to get it. What good was an extension when there was no job to go with it? I’d seen émigré fever symptoms in others—Goran, for example—but I thought I was immune to them. All that talk about “papers,” the willingness to go to any lengths for the proper “papers.” And then what? “Then we’ll see.” I’d watched faces change expressions in quick succession or combine cunning, condescension, and fear; I’d watched the tense, sad, half-criminal look that goes with the scramble for the last mouse hole. I’d heard lively conservations break off abruptly as an invisible shadow of despair descended, but people would snap out of it and conversations resume with the same intensity.

I am not an émigré. I have a passport in my pocket. Why did I humble myself before Cees, to say nothing of Ines, who would certainly hear of the incident immediately. (“I mean, we did everything we possibly could for her. You have to help your own, after all. It’s never so clear as when you’re abroad….”) Oh, Ines! All sweetness and light, all airs and graces, the Austro-Hungarian charm, the
soft
Croatian chauvinism, the warmth of the south, the complacency that comes of a house whose walls are resplendent with booty, the booty of the first marriage (“Something to show the Dutch that we weren’t beggars, know what I mean?”). They saw themselves in a solid, bourgeois bunker, while I saw them balancing on an ice floe, smiling all the while, babbling all the while, as they take down Grandmother’s silver. The silver and the naive paintings are their only weapon against fate, against evil: they are sure signs that they belong to a class which no harm can befall. As for me, I’d find something. I had a doctorate and a big Slav heart.
Slavs are natural-born teachers, aren’t they
? I’d get the visa and a few crumbs from the table, and then what? Then we’d see….

After calming down a bit, I realized Cees hadn’t promised anything. Nor was he to blame for anything. I was without resources, inner or outer. I was vulnerable, up for grabs. Anybody could pick me up, toss me on my back, do what he wanted with me, and leave me battered and bruised. That’s why I was such easy prey for Ines’s babble, why I got stuck in the honey of her words. Nor was she to blame any more than Cees. I had lost my integrity. I had put on a mask as a means of defense, and it had merged with my face, made deep inroads into my person. I was no longer myself.

On my way out of the café, I passed Igor. He was in his usual pose: earphones on and book open. He didn’t notice me. Sud
denly I thought of the Americans whose children I’d sat for in Berlin, the ones who never failed to introduce me to their friends. “
This is Tanja, our babysitter. She comes from the former Yugoslavia. Tanja is wonderful with children. She really has a way with them
.”