"The Ministry of Pain"

[fiefoe]

Among many other things, I think Dubravka Ugrešić has changed my idea of Amsterdam and the northern Europe landscape.

• Conversations among my compatriots seem long, exhausting, and devoid of content. Instead of talking, they seem to be stroking each other with words, spreading a soothing, sonorous saliva over one another.
• Everything looked slightly squalid, the worse for wear, as if the sound were down or the picture in slow motion, as if there were something illegitimate about it all, yet it all seemed to hold together in the name of a higher wisdom.
• I’d heard dozens of similar stories. The war meant great losses for many, but it could also be a reason to slough off an old life and start from scratch. In any case, it radically altered human destinies. Even mental institutions, prisons, and courtrooms became everyday elements of existence.
• The Dutch authorities were particularly generous about granting asylum to those who claimed they had been discriminated against in their home countries for “sexual difference,” more generous than to the war’s rape victims. As soon as word got around, people climbed on the bandwagon in droves. The war was a fig leaf for everything. It was something like the national lottery: while many tried their luck out of genuine misfortune, others did it simply because the opportunity presented itself. And under such aberrant circumstances, winners and losers had to be judged by new criteria.
• There was an S/M porno club in The Hague called the Ministry of Pain, and my students took to calling their porno sweatshop “the Ministry.” “Those S/M types, Comrade, they’re real snappy dressers,” Igor would joke. “They don’t think the most beautiful body is a naked body. I wouldn’t forget that if I were a Gucci or Armani.”
• The kids did a good job of coping—considering where they came from. They dragged their former country behind them like a train.
• They did their best to deal with it by steering clear of the name, shortening it to Yuga (as the Gastarbeiter, the migrant workers in Germany, had done before them) and thus “the former Yugoslavia” to “the former Yuga” or playfully transforming it into Titoland or the Titanic. As for its inhabitants, they became Yugos or, more often, simply “our people.”
• Our people” had an invisible slap on their faces. They had that sideways, rabbitlike look, that special tension in the body, that animal instinct of sniffing the air to tell which direction danger is coming from. The “ourness” came through in a certain strained melancholy in their features, a slight cloud on their brows, a barely visible, almost internal stoop.
• A woman from Belgrade, “seeing where things were heading” and horrified at the hatred she perceived in her fellow Serbs, sold her house and, just before the war broke out, moved to “peaceful” Croatia. She bought a flat in Rovinj. But when the Croats started showing their fangs, she sold the flat in Rovinj and moved to Sarajevo. The very first Serbian grenades—they might have been following the lines in her palm to bring about the fate awaiting her and her family—split her Sarajevo flat down the middle.
• Surrounded by smoke rings, they looked as “former” as their onetime nationality; they looked like corpses that had risen from the grave for a bottle of beer and a round of cards but ended up in the wrong place.
• They peppered their conversations with “Like I say” and “Take it from me,” emphasizing their role in the matter at hand, as insignificant as the matter was and as piddling as their role was in it. Sticking to your guns was all. “I can make it from Oostdorp to the Leidseplein in eleven minutes.” “How can you make it in eleven minutes? It takes fifteen at the very least. Have you timed it? Well, I have, man. Fifteen minutes on the nose. From the second you get on the tram.” They totally did the men in, those conversations. Each word was calculated to postpone the encounter with humiliation, to exorcise the fear.
    The manner in which they moved and the places where they came together betrayed their loss of personal space: the bench in front of the house, where they could watch the world pass by
• They complained all the time and about everything with the same intensity. It was as if life itself were a punishment: everything chafed, everything itched, everything pinched; nothing was enough for them and everything much too much.
    Women were much less visible than men. They remained in the background, but kept life going: they darned the holes to stop it from flowing out; they took it on as a daily assignment. Men seemed to have no assignments; for them being a refugee was like being an invalid.
• 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.
• another that infused them with the sweet nihilism of the provinces (“For death is as nonsensical as life”).
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• “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
• Which means that I’ve /  Been living here in Holland a lot longer
    Than all the local waves that roll on with /  No landing. Like these lines.
  Joseph Brodsky
• I  kept examining myself, the way one examines one’s mouth with one’s tongue, hoping to get my feeling back, but the self-induced anesthesia was powerful and refused to yield.
• The city, which was like a snail, a shell, a spider’s web, a piece of fine lace, a novel with an unusually circular plot and hence no end, never ceased to baffle me.
• tiny sculptures, toys, teddy bears, African masks, Indonesian vajang dolls, models of ships, miniature replicas of typical Amsterdam houses—had one and only one message: “I live here. Look! I live here.” I had the feeling that all the “still lifes,” the ikebanas, the “installations”—even the simple window decoration of a cheap Ikea vase housing an inspired two-guilder Xeno “shipwreck”—bore witness to the inhabitants’ subconscious fear of evanescence. The doll’s houses embedded in doll’s houses, the infantile urban exhibitionism, the imprints left willfully in the sand—on some level they all resonated with my own angst, whose name and source I was unable to put my finger on.
• And just as we seem to fancy people more for their faults than for their virtues, so I gradually developed a sympathy for that landscape of absence, the straight, light green line of the horizon, the cold nocturnal vistas with their full moons and flocks of large white geese shining in the dark, or the frozen shadows of cows idling in the road like friendly ghosts
• The handles of the bag are upright, too, and nearly reach her mouth, which gives the impression that the words are pouring out of her mouth into the bag. When the conversation is over, she removes the plug from her ear, takes the mobile phone out of the bag, turns it off, sticks it into the invisible sand of words that has just poured out of her, and zips up the bag
• I drew my internal map on the finest of tracing paper, but the moment I separated it from the real map I saw to my surprise that it was blank. It had nothing on it. Not a thing. I’d be moved by a line advancing in high spirits, and all at once it would stop and break off. Sometimes my internal map looked like a clumsy children’s drawing…  My internal map was the outcome of an amnesiac’s attempt to plot his coordinates, of a flâneur’s attempt to leave his tracks on the sand. My map was a dreamer’s guide. Virtually nothing on it coincided with reality
• Thus we see that life was preserved here, but at a price dearer than the value of life itself, for the strength to defend and maintain it was borrowed from the coming generations, which were thus born into debt and servitude. What survived in the struggle was the sheer instinct to defend life, while life itself lost so much that precious little more than the name itself remained. What has lasted and lives on is stunted or warped; what comes into the world and survives is poisoned in the bud and sick at heart. The thoughts and words of the people are unfinished, cut off as they are at the root. --  Ivo Andri
• You know the ways of the Daer folk by now—give us psychiatrists. Well, our psychiatrist turned out to be one of ‘ours’, a refugee like us. And you know what she told us? ‘Do me a favor, will you, everybody? Find a little crazy streak in you. Think up a trauma or two if need be. I don’t want to lose my job….’”
• “A language is a dialect backed by an army. Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian are backed by paramilitary forces. You’re not going to let semiliterate criminals advise you in matters linguistic, are you?” But I was also aware that I belonged to the last generation whose primary and secondary school literature textbooks had been speckled with readings in Slovenian, Macedonian, Serbian, and Croatian, duly printed in the Roman or Cyrillic alphabet, and that the fact of the very existence of such textbooks would soon be forgotten… My students knew all too well that I wasn’t speaking metaphorically when I brought in the military; they knew that “our” languages were backed by actual troops, the “our” languages were used to curse, humiliate, kill, rape, and expel. They were languages that had gone to war in the belief that they were incompatible, perhaps precisely because they were inseparable
• It was a divorce full of sound and fury. Language was a weapon, after all: it branded, it betrayed, it separated and united. Croats would eat their kruh, while Serbs would eat their hleb, Bosnians their hljeb: the word for bread in the three languages was different. Smrt, the word for death, was the same
• it, too, had been backed by an army; it, too, had been manipulated, polluted by a heavily ideologized Yugospeak. But the history of melding the linguistic variants into a single construct involved a much longer and more meaningful process than the overnight divorce, just as the history of building bridges and roads involved a much longer and more meaningful process than their overnight destruction.
• “I feel more comfortable in Dutch,” she told me, as if Dutch were a sleeping bag
• “All ‘our’ languages are trying to establish their own literary norm, but the only variant that sounds natural is the impure, bastardized variant. Or a dialect. When I hear Dalmatians talk Croatian, I think, ‘Hey, that’s cool.’ When I hear officials talk Croatian, I think airs and graces and rape.
• Stiff, dry platitudes made life easy, made long stories short. Platitudes were a coded language: they depersonalized the speaker, put a shield around him. Platitudes were a language about something that couldn’t be put into language anyway. There seemed to be only two options: to keep an honest silence or to speak and thereby lie
• Language was our common trauma, and it could take the most perverted of shapes. I am haunted by the case of a Bosnian woman who is said to have memorized the story of her rape and repeated it whenever prompted to do so. Then rape as a form of warfare became international news, and she turned out to be the only victim capable of giving a coherent account of it. Soon she was in great demand by foreign journalists and women’s organizations, one of which invited her to America. There she traveled from city to city, spinning the tale of her humiliation and eventually even memorizing an English version of it. On and on she went—reciting a story by now several times removed from its content—like the keeners peasants hire to lament the deceased at funerals.
• And the stories she told. Of a woman who had gone mad when a grenade blew up her child, and spent hours rubbing her cheeks against the stucco facade of her house until her face was one live wound;
• the mother tongue had suddenly appeared to them in an entirely new light. From here the “substance” was more like linguistic anemia, verbal exhaustion, a tic, a stammer, a curse, an oath, or just plain phrasemongering
• “How can a country be both hypocritical and boring?”
    “Only Holland has that distinction.”
• I then suggested that we use her virtual Gypsy bag to store all the items for our “Yugonostalgic” museum.
    “What museum?” they asked.
    “Oh, it will be virtual, too. Everything you remember and consider important. The country is no more. Why not salvage what you don’t want to forget?”
• Because another thing we all had been deprived of was our right to remember. With the disappearance of the country came the feeling that the life lived in it must be erased.
• I realized I was walking a tightrope: stimulating the memory was as much a manipulation of the past as banning it. The authorities in our former country had pressed the delete button, I the restore button; they were erasing the Yugoslav past, blaming Yugoslavia for every misfortune, including the war, I reviving that past in the form of the everyday minutiae that had made up our lives, operating a volunteer lost-and-found service, if you will. And even though they were manipulating millions of people and I only these few, we were both obfuscating reality. I wondered whether by evoking endearing images of a common past I wouldn’t obscure the bloody images of the recent war, whether by reminding them of how Kiki sweets tasted I wouldn’t obliterate the case of the Belgrade boy stabbed to death by his coevals just because he was an Albanian,
• The evil was as banal as the everyday artifact and had no special status.
• our “archeology” our “spiritualism,” the reanimation of our “better past” made us so close that we found it harder and harder to disband.
• As for the whole, it was untranslatable: we were speaking an extinct language comprehensible only to ourselves. How could we have explained them to anyone, those words, concepts, and images and—what was more to the point—the feelings the words, concepts, and images called forth in us? It was alchemy: I had assured them there would be gold at the end of the line, knowing full well that a detail which shone brilliantly one moment could fade and vanish the next. As could the heart we had jointly resuscitated.
• I think that “in” was the most popular word of the day. Mama always knew what the “in” furniture was, the in lamp, the in hairdo, the in curtains, the in shoes, in eyeglass frames. It was the time when everything just had to be plastic. Plastic was the innest of in
• They’re a bunch of sickos, our poets. And not only the ones in the anthology. There hasn’t been a sound mind among them in the past two hundred years or however long they’ve been at it. Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians—it makes no difference. Old farts all. You don’t need a calculator to tell you that.
• The water and sky and windowpanes layered and reflected one another, and stopping in front of a window that fairly forced me into voyeurism I would catch my own image melting into the interior, the picture on the TV screen, the owner staring at the screen from his armchair, the reflections of other passersby. If I passed a window in the red-light district, my reflection would cross the prostitute’s face like a shadow. Everything reflected everything, everything merged, the reflections of the houses swimming in the canals together with the windows mirroring the sky.
• the word “cute,” I was reminded of its equivalent, leuk, in Dutch and realized that leukness was the key to the problem. Leukness was an antiseptic, a disinfectant that removed all spots, all bumps, put everything on an equal footing, made everything acceptable.
• The streets were still empty when the porcelain quiet of dawn was rent by a scream.
• My kids didn’t know that I’d heard the same thing from any number of Yugoslav émigrés. They even cited it as their main reason for having left the country. (“Why did I go? Because in other languages children sleep the sleep of the just and in mine they sleep the sleep of the butchered.”)
• By the time fifty years had passed, what was meant to be an antiwar poem had turned into its opposite: the smile the poetess gave the nation’s leader represented symbolic support of the war he was waging and everything it implied. Here in the Amsterdam pub the lines trickled from the mouth of the young refugee like a repulsive drool.
• She talked about the malady so intimately and with such understanding and concern that she made it sound like a pet dog or cat. She pointed a pudgy finger at various dates, explaining why the sugar level had jumped there and was normal at other times
• Now I was present in frozen, carefully selected fragments. She held absolute sway over her realm, arranging and rearranging its contents as if life were an installation with photographs. The reason she’d held on to the picture of Goran and me was that it kept our relationship going, and as director of the family soap she refused to recognize our separation
• Yes, I’d come “home.” I chewed on the concept like an old piece of gum, trying to extract the last bit of flavor from it. “Home” was no longer “home.”
• “You’re normal,” she said, removing the cuff. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
     That was our farewell hug and kiss. The blood pressure monitor was a visible substitute for something invisible, a bloody umbilical chord, all fresh and shiny like a metal string.
• Émigré souvenir exhibits did not express nostalgia for a former life or the native country; on the contrary, it expressed lack of same. All the gingerbread hearts, peasant-shoe ashtrays, miniature Dalmatian or Montenegrin caps, handmade embroideries and lace, leather drinking gourds, and Adriatic shells were so many minuscule shrines, Lilliputian graves marking the end of a way of life, an unequivocal choice and a willingness to accept the losses that choice entailed.
• You change more than your space when you leave; you change your time, your inner time. Time in Zagreb is moving much faster now than your inner time. You’re stuck back in your own time frame. I bet you think the war took place yesterday.”
• “People have no bent for misfortune, believe me. They can’t identify with mass disaster. Not for long, at least, and not even if the disaster is their own.
• Suicide is a luxury in wartime, compassion in short supply.
• I could just picture Papa plastering the walls with his plaints, sending out signals no one wished to receive, justifying his existence, whining, rehearsing the slights to which he had been subjected, tracing list after list of them in the air, galled by disillusion and petty, filthy, human betrayal. I pictured him standing in the middle of the room in his striped pajamas—the tops unbuttoned, the catheter sticking out of the bottoms—emitting swarms of kamikaze-fly words splatting the walls and leaving blood specks behind
• And then for the first time I realized they might be on to something: perhaps that now defunct country had in fact been inhabited exclusively by victims and victimizers. Victims and victimizers who periodically changed places.
• The past is our “installation,” amateur stuff but with artistic pretensions. With a touch-up here and a touch-up there, here a touch, there a touch, everywhere a touch-touch. (Retouching is our favorite artistic device.) Each of us is curator in his own museum.
• All the defendants in the production sounded like amateur actors: all they were doing was reading out prepared statements from the computer screens in front of them. By speaking Robot rather than Human, they turned evil into a mechanical plot line, as mechanical as any other.
• In a world thus mediated—and mediated so many times over—everyone was guilty. Crime was unreal. Everything was unreal. I felt it would take no more than a single click of the mouse to do away with the judges, the defendants, and us, the spectators. One blissful, conciliatory delete. Only one thing was real: pain. Pain was the speechless, useless, and only true witness.
• The sweet little face that can’t wait to fall into someone’s warm, protective hands—or under the guillotine…. There’s something unfinished about her. She’s like the human fish in that way, too. See? She has no eyebrows. My girl’s a beautiful larva waiting for metamorphosis.”
• “You must try my poppy-seed cake. I made it just for you. Thank God for the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Otherwise we wouldn’t know what real pastry is, if you know what I mean. I had to bring the poppy seed from Zagreb, too. You can’t find it here anymore, not even from the—what shall I call them?—the Turks.”
• And although the protagonists were “homegrown,” they all—especially their Croatian variants—bore a distinct family resemblance to young Werther and Childe Harold, to say nothing of the Russian characters dubbed “superfluous men” by the critics, characters like Griboedov’s Chatsky, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Lermontov’s Pechorin, Turgenev’s Rudin and Lavretsky and Kirsanov and Bazarov, Goncharov’s Oblomov, Chekhov’s Ivanov, and Olesha’s Kavalerov, all of whom crawled around the other Slavic literatures like so many crabs.
• 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.
• As Goran handed over the money, he said to me with a smile, “Our wounds are our hottest export.”
• 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
• 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?
• 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
• 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
• 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.
• “After the first semester somebody complained to Cees that we hadn’t done a thing in class, that it was a big waste of time, and that I forced you to go to cafés with me.
    “You don’t say!” he said in English, his scoffing language
• Sure you felt sorry for the people who suffered, who actually were hit. But—not that you’d ever admit it to yourself—somewhere in the recesses of your brain you think a grenade chooses where it lands. And if it does, there must be some fucking reason for it. Something keeps you from making connections, from grasping that your being our teacher is only a matter of chance.
• Has it occurred to you that the students you forced to remember were yearning to forget? That they made up memories to indulge you the way the Papuans made up cannibalistic myths to indulge the anthropologists?
• 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.
• Your course was about a culture that had totally compromised itself, and you neglected to mention that fact… 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.
• 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.
• We are barbarians. We are the false bottom of the perfect society, we are its thumb-nosing jack-in-the-box, its demimonde, its ugly underside—its parallel world.
• (What can they know about us?) that I had heard so many times and that was merely the arrogance of the colonized and thus of no more consolation than the arrogance of the colonizers. In that scheme of things the perfectly innocent Kaufman became the colonizer of the territory that only I at that moment had the right to inhabit
• Nostalgia, if that is the word for it, is a brutal, insidious assailant who favors the ambush approach, who attacks when we least expect him and goes straight for the solar plexus. Nostalgia always wears a mask and, oh, irony of ironies, we are only its chance victim. Nostalgia makes its appearance in translation—most often a bad one—after a complicated journey not unlike the children’s game “telephone.”
• and the former Yugoslavs, who basically occupied themselves. I was beating my head against the wall of a generalized human loss. Like a Balkan keener I wailed my agony over one and all, only my agony was mute.
• They will be deep thinkers, voracious readers, and consummate stylists. They will have multiple identities: they will be cosmopolitan, global, multicultural, nationalistic, ethnic, and diasporic all in one. They will wear any number of hats and be flexible in the extreme, ever ready to define and refine themselves, reflect and deflect themselves, invent and reinvent themselves, construct and deconstruct themselves. They will be the champions of democracy in these transitional times, and since everything is and has always been in a state of flux the words mobility and fluidity will be like chewing gum in their mouths.
• The crowns of the chestnut trees had a muted luminosity of their own, and the metal satellite dishes on the nearby balconies shone white through the darkness.
  栗子树的树冠自带一种哑光效果，附近阳台上的金属卫星锅在黑夜中闪着白光。
• In actuality, there are no right people and wrong people, no good people and bad people; there is only the mechanics of it all, the operation. And the only thing that counts is action; action is all. For the windmills to turn, as small and lively as the city’s sparrows; for the bridges to go up and down, for boats to buzz along the canals like remote-controlled flies; for tiny prostitutes in the red-light district to open and close the curtains of their displays, as neat and meticulous as those old-fashioned barometers; for tiny mounted policemen to make their rounds on horses no bigger than white mice.
• In the dream I populate the space around me with words. They burgeon and wind round me like lianas, they spring up like ferns, climb like creepers, open wide like water lilies, overrun me like wild orchids. Their luxuriant jungle sentences leave me breathless. In the morning, ravaged, I can’t tell whether to construe their lexical exuberance as punishment or absolution.
• They said he was suffering from a post-traumatic syndrome with a great name, the musical name of “fugue”: dissociative fugue, to be exact. These fugues are apparently brought on by a sudden trip.
• en deliver the oxygen crucial to his. We both feel an intoxicating blast as the present invades our every last vein, and for a time we inhale the pure extract of nothing to remember and nothing to forget.