The Ministry of Pain (13 page)

“Whatever.”

“Hmm. I don’t know.”

“Nor do I. I was there yesterday and I can’t remember whether I saw it.”

“I’ve never bought anything there,” he said. “How come it bothers you so much?”

“It just does,” I said.

The day after
I got back to Amsterdam I paid a visit to the Department. Classes didn’t begin for a week, but I thought it best to check in.

“I hear one of your students has killed himself,” the secretary said in a voice she might have used to inform me of a change in the teaching schedule.

“What are you talking about?” I managed to come out with.

“That’s what I hear.”

“Which student?”

“How should I know?”

I could have strangled her.

“Who told you?”

“Another student of yours. Just now.”

I rushed downstairs and over to the café, where I found Nevena and Igor. From the expressions on their faces I could tell there was something wrong.

Yes, they’d heard that Uroš had killed himself. No, they didn’t know how it had happened. They’d heard that Uroš’s brother had come to Amsterdam to take care of things. Oh, and that Uroš’s father was suspected of war crimes and was currently under interrogation at the Hague Tribunal. No, they’d had no idea, no idea about his father. Uroš was so reserved.

I had noticed that, too. And like me they had never seen him outside class.

“It was the shame of it, Comrade,” Igor said simply.

The war had brought a rash of suicides in its wake.

Mama told me the story of a soldier back from the front—a boy, less than twenty—who had paid a visit to his former school. He apparently spent the whole day in the schoolyard, plying the kids with sweets and showing them what a hand grenade looks like. The next morning his remains were scattered all over the place. Parts of the body had landed in a tree and were still stuck to the branches. He had blown himself up a few hours before classes began. The staff didn’t know—how could they?—so the kids came trooping in on the bloody remains.

Yes, a whole rash of suicides. Quiet, peaceful, unobtrusive suicides, because there was too much misfortune and death in the air for people to have much compassion for them. Suicide is a luxury in wartime, compassion in short supply.

They had various ways of doing the deed: they would drink themselves to death—that was the cheapest way—or take an overdose (as a result of the war the borders were wide open, and drugs
fairly flowed in), or simply “die of a broken heart,” the euphemism for the untreated heart attacks and strokes that spread like wildfire during the war. Other diseases left untreated could likewise come under the rubric of suicide. Then there was the case of the student daughter of a Serbian general war-criminal who took her own life out of shame. Or of the elderly Belgrade woman who slipped and fell just as a bus pulled up before a waiting crowd. The crowd stampeded onto the bus, trampling the body beneath their feet. No one thought to help. The doctors managed to patch the woman up, but soon after they sent her home she threw herself out of a fourth-floor window. Shame again.

There were suicides among people who had escaped the war, too. We heard all kinds of stories in Berlin. About a Bosnian woman who had hanged herself in a psychiatric hospital the day before she was to be released. About a Bosnian refugee who had hanged himself in a refugee asylum after smothering his wife and two-year-old with a pillow. Here in Amsterdam a Croatian woman at one of the asylum centers had turned on the gas and then burned herself to death. They did it out of humiliation, despair, fear, loneliness, and shame. Quiet, anonymous deaths, the lot of them, war victims, though absent from the statistics of the war dead.

We learned the details from Darko, who showed up at the café before long. Darko was the only one who had maintained a more or less personal relationship with Uroš. He told us that Uroš had shot himself in the temple with a revolver. He’d had no trouble getting hold of the weapon: all he had to do was make contact with Yugoslav mafia circles. Amsterdam was awash with Yugo weapons: the police were constantly running across discarded grenades in the parks. Two children had recently perished after stepping on one.

Uroš had given his flat a thorough cleaning before pulling the
trigger. He threw away everything he owned—books, clothes, everything, including what he had been wearing just before the fatal shot. He left behind only a black plastic bag. On the bag he had stuck a Post-it with his brother’s name and address in neat block letters. He had killed himself on Saturday or Sunday, when his landlady was out of town. She had found him on Monday evening and immediately notified the police. He was lying in the middle of the room stark naked. His body had risen to the occasion: except for a few drops of blood and urine, it was pristine. It was flanked by seven cardboard children’s suitcases, the kind sold at Blokker’s. Each one had the same contents: an unused toothbrush, a pad, a well-sharpened pencil, and a yarmulke.

“Was Uroš Jewish?” Nevena asked.

“Not that I know of,” said Darko. “His father was a Bosnian Serb. That you all know.”

The setting of Uroš’s death as described by Darko seemed infantile, yet at the same time cold as a knife. The children’s cardboard suitcases were the baggage Uroš felt necessary for his journey: yarmulke, toothbrush, and pad and pencil seven times over. They were likewise Uroš’s will in hieroglyphs for anyone who wished to decipher it.

“Oh, and one more thing,” said Darko. “He had a bullet in his mouth.”

“What for, I wonder,” Nevena said.

“I don’t know.”

“Right,” said Igor distractedly. “What for?”

“Like I say, I don’t know. But what if—once he’d cleaned up the place and stripped and put the gun to his head—he realized it was going to hurt. He might cry out. Somebody might hear him. Maybe he thought of a scene in a war film where they put something hard between the teeth of a wounded man they had to operate on with no anesthetic. To keep the man from screaming.
And for a second he panicked because there was nothing left: he’d set everything in order. But then he took a bullet out of the revolver, put it between his teeth, and shot another one into his head.”

Darko could scarcely get the words out. He seemed on the point of tears the whole time he was trying to reconstruct the scene. It was as if he were simultaneously thinking how senseless Uroš’s death was, protesting against it—there was such a thing as a noble and meaningful death, after all; why was Uroš’s death meaningless?—and in the end sympathizing with Uroš, precisely because his death was so meaningless. But I was only guessing at what had gone on in Darko’s mind. The protest was in fact my own.

Igor showed us a short article in the
NRC Handelsblad
dealing with the trial of three war criminals, one of whom was Uroš’s father. They were among the first to come before the Tribunal, mere small fry. The big guns wouldn’t make their appearance for a few years.

“Shall we go and have a look at him?” he asked, meaning Uroš’s father.

“You mean the trials are open to the public?”

“I got two passes today at the Department.”

“Like for a movie.”

“They think of it as language practice,” he said ironically. “Free of charge.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow, if you like.”

Nobody said a word. I had forgotten about the war during the course of the semester. So had the students. Uroš’s death had sent me back into the fray, the nightmare. I was beside myself. How could I have failed to know? Because I had never asked. And I’d
never asked because I’d been afraid to. Now that it was too late, I was tormented by the questions I could have asked.

“Uroš’s brother has taken care of everything. He’s got friends who’ve lived here forever, and they helped. There isn’t a thing that you or any of us could have done. We can’t even go to the funeral.”

“We can drink to his soul, can’t we?” said Nevena, moving in the direction of the bar. “My treat.”

We sipped our Dutch
rakija
in silence. I was no longer thinking of Uroš I was thinking of a sequence I had seen on television early in the war. It showed a young man Uroš’s age, a Slovene in the uniform of the Yugoslav National Army, who had been taken prisoner by the new Slovenian Territorial Defense force. There he stood—his hands up, the tears running down his cheeks—shouting, “Don’t shoot, guys! I’m one of you!” A few seconds later the Slovenian “guys” shot their own “guy.”

Our drinks duly downed, Nevena, Darko, Igor, and I went our separate ways. That day Amsterdam looked like the set for Fellini’s
Amarcord
. The snowflakes had an unbelievably Extra Large look to them.

I didn’t know
what to do. I paced the cramped space of my flat, shivering with a mild fever. I couldn’t concentrate on anything, the thought of Uroš’s death having taken over like a migraine. And then my eye lit on a notebook, one of the three Papa had just given me in Zagreb. I’d left the other two with Mother, knowing I’d have neither the time nor the inclination to read them. If I took even one, it was to assuage my conscience. I plucked it off the shelf and started leafing through it.

The text had been typed single-spaced with virtually no margins. The print was fuzzy. He must have given me the third or fourth copy. He had stapled the sheets together, covered them with light green cardboard and written “Memoirs of a Small Town Schoolmaster” on it in his own hand. He called the notebooks “books.” I don’t know the title he gave to “Book One,”
which presumably dealt with his early childhood. “Book Two” may have been called “School Days, School Days, Good Old Golden Rule Days.” I had “Book Five,” which bore the dedication “To my future progeny.” Papa had little hope of “future progeny,” the progeny being merely a romantic excuse, but since he had made several copies of this, his life’s confession, he apparently did hope that somebody else would eventually read it.

Papa’s confession was infused with his experience as a political prisoner on Goli otok for his Cominform sympathies. It had completely derailed him: even after his release he did not feel absolved. While he was “inside,” “absent from life,” while he spent “all day, every day carrying a ten-kilogram rock up a fifty-meter incline and, if the guard happened to be in a good mood, dropping it to the ground for a moment’s respite before proceeding back down the incline with the rock in tow,” the people on the outside had learned, ever more shamelessly, to “pick the state’s pockets.” He called his postprison life posthumous and himself “the corpse,” forced to hide his Goli otok past like a case of syphilis. He felt exiled from life on other accounts as well: he had lost his partisan status (at one point he describes how he was stripped of all military honors) and was no longer a Communist (he had been expelled from the Party). All he was now was a “schoolmaster.”

Tone and mood varied: self-pity would yield to a schoolmasterly sermonizing or the indignation of the true believer or the activism of the provincial social worker–cum–political functionary. At first I thought he was addressing a set of invisible prison walls, but before long I realized that his true audience was
neither his future progeny nor Tito nor the Party nor the secret police nor the Yugoslav state nor the brutal Goli otok guards; it was the small town where he had taught.

What gradually emerged was a picture of everyday life in the Yugoslav provinces during the fifties and sixties. Papa gave a minute description of how after several years as a teacher in N he started renovating the dilapidated school—cementing over the muddy courtyard, then gathering some discarded boards and putting up a workshop; how much later, when he had become head of the local university-extension branch, he undertook the construction of a House of Culture and the creation of a Workers Society for the Arts; how he set up an amateur theater group for which he managed to acquire real floodlights; how the first cinema came to be built and how they procured films for it; how they founded the first genuine public library and reading room and how they financed books for it; how they put new life into the much neglected municipal park; how they built a secondary school complex and the first swimming pool; how they organized a basketball club; how they instituted the first music school….

The pages devoted to his pupils were particularly warm. At one point he recounted having misspoken and said “Go up on the board” instead of “Go up to the board,” and while his back was turned the pupil thus bidden had taken him at his word. “The boy had removed the blackboard from its wooden stand and, to the great merriment of the class, stepped onto it. That boy eventually earned two university degrees.”

Upon retirement—he had moved to Zagreb by then—he received the standard symbolic gold watch for having done his duty, but he was deeply wounded that no sign of gratitude came from the town where he had spent the best years of his life.

At the very end of the “book” Papa devoted inordinate space to descriptions of the various cupboards, wardrobes, and shelves
in his life, from childhood to old age (coffins belonging for him to the same category). He was especially expansive on the bookshelves in the Zagreb flat, out of which all kinds of documents, posters, and medals were wont to fall. One such document praised him for his “selfless educational endeavors on behalf of the younger generation during the War of National Liberation,” another for his “selfless endeavors to develop and strengthen the social and cultural life of our country.” Yet another was called “The Partisan Teacher Certificate.” (“It reminded me of the days when the three Rs were taught to the roar of German bombers in one direction and Allied Flying Fortresses in the other, of cannon fire in the distance and machine-gun fire close at hand. Our pupils would sit beneath a tree with slates in their laps and chalk in their hands, learning words, reading, and doing sums under the watchful eye of the partisan teacher….”)

Papa belonged to the generation that truly believed it was building a brighter future. He had joined the partisan movement as a convinced anti-Fascist and felt he had won the war. If he had ended up in a camp for the politically unreliable, it must have been because he had stated somewhere in public that he refused to accept the existence of Stalinist camps. Upon his release, “unshaken in his convictions,” he went back to “building a better tomorrow,” but by the time he retired he had lost his illusions—hence the “books.” There he lined up the shades of the people who would eventually bring down everything he had believed in, many of whom, too weak to withstand the herd instinct, were members of his own generation. And once he had put down everything he knew, he threw open the window to take a deep breath and examine the ruins. Time had regressed. He was back where he had started from. It was wartime again. There were camps and barbed wire.

I wondered whether anyone would ever read what he had to say. The grandchildren he hoped for, should he have any, would speak Japanese. Olga, who had heard it all a thousand times over, was more concerned about when she would be able to paint the walls white. Over the years Papa had turned from victim to torturer and turned Mama into a mother confessor whom he constantly battered with words.

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 sub
jected, 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.

I thought of Goran, too. Goran like his father nurtured his share of slights. He had doubtless dragged them to Japan with him, smuggling them across the border like a cache of jewels. Like his father he had been tainted (“tainted” is a word his father uses somewhere) by the experience of exclusion.
Expunge—eliminate—delete—expel—excommunicate—ban—interdict—keep out—shut out from—prohibit from—banish—erase—exclude
…And out goes Y-O-U!

Goran no longer loved me. That was why I refused to go to Japan with him. It had happened quietly, imperceptibly, for no one specific reason. Goran tried his best: he did everything he could to stimulate his heart and quicken his pulse; he didn’t believe that love could simply slip away like that. But little by little the feeling he’d had for me yielded to a feeling of having been slighted. Maybe I have the same feeling; maybe it was hibernating in me. It’s hard to find our own fault lines and sense the taint as it enters our veins.

Goran was of the same stuff as Papa. The moment he scored a victory, he would submit it mentally to his own, personal “town of N.” And the greater his achievements, the deafer the town was to them. The only thing the town cared about was his failures. Those it was willing to hear about because they confirmed it had been right about him. So for both Goran and Papa the country was divided into two opposing, equally passionate camps: the victims and the victimizers. And then for the first time I realized they might be on to something: perhaps that now de
funct country had in fact been inhabited exclusively by victims and victimizers. Victims and victimizers who periodically changed places.

How do you find release from the past? I kept wondering…. I had asked my students to make their peace with it as the necessary first step. I had offered them the painless territory of the past, trying to protect them as parents protect their children and children their friends, as my mother had protected me and Goran’s father Goran. But no, there was no release; there was only forgetting. And that came from those miraculous little erasers we all have in our brains. Every one of us drags a closet behind him, and every closet has its skeletons. Sooner or later out they tumble, though in disguise, in a form we feel comfortable with, like the documents that came tumbling down from Papa’s shelf. 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. And we can’t make our peace with the past unless we have access to it, unless we can stick a finger in its dike like Hans Brinker, the boy who saved Holland from inundation. Stick your finger in the dike. Fill your screen with pictures. Keep your life dust free. Make occasional changes. Get rid of a thing or two. Uncover A; cover up B. Remove all spots. Keep your mouth shut. Think of your tongue as a weapon. Think one thing and say another. Use orotund expressions to obfuscate your intentions. Hide what you believe. Believe what you hide.

I grew sick at the prospect of all those repetitions, recapitulations, renewed complaints and justifications, of virus-transmitted misfortune and the umbilical cords that encircle and entwine us, tying us all together into the awful, painful, bloody mess we’re forever flailing in—parents, children, grandchildren, hanged
man and hangman, victim and victimizer, guard and prisoner, judge and defendant….

I needed air. I tossed Papa’s notebook onto the floor, pulled on my coat, and went out. I walked along the Zeedijk for a while, then went into De Verdwenen Minnaar, a pub where I had an occasional coffee. I took a seat at the bar and ordered. The hum of human voices and the heat given off by the bodies served to calm my nerves. I needed warm human flesh to put out the pain pounding in my temples as one puts out a cigarette. There was a man sitting next to me. We exchanged a few words, drank a few drinks, looked a few looks, and let our bodies graze against each other: we were working toward a minor transaction of mutual aid involving the commixture of bodily fluids. The transaction was successful: I got what I needed—the consolation of self-humiliation. The pain disappeared.

In the wan morning light coming through the barred window my sleepy eyes picked out a banknote on the bedside table: the man, whose face I had not had time to fix in my mind, had left me a hundred-guilder note. My mouth drew into a smile.
Snip voor een wip!
as the Dutch say. A hundred guilders for a lay. It had completely slipped my mind I was living in the red-light district!