The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugrešić Read Free Book Online

pop, the veins in our temples swell to bursting, and no words come out. So out comes the sword.”
    The class broke into a round of applause.
    “Well, well, well!” said Igor. “Didn’t know you had it in you! You beat Miloševiin eloquence hands down!”
    “Right on!” cried Meliha. “And I’m a Sarajevo samurai.”
     
    I could always count on Meliha. We never got enough of her stories about Sarajevo—the fear, the dark, the humiliation, the madness, the hatred, the living and the dead…. Meliha was a master of detail, even when describing the impenetrable darkness in the shelters during an alarm. 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; of her own life before the war and the refugee camp where she was first interned and the fine old Dutchman who paid her to keep him company; of her mother, who was learning Dutch by taking care of a neighbor’s three-year-old, and was using the child’s babble to ease her way into a world without pain, to erase the recent past she so longed to forget.
    We hung on her every word. No one else was willing to open up the way she was. Some were still too scared, others too ashamed; some were stymied by the guilt of not having experienced the war, others by the horror of the experience.
     
    In the end, the hue and cry back home over the “national substance” of language was both a pack of lies and the gospel truth; in the end, my students had an easier time saying what they had to say in languages not their own—English and Dutch—even though their command of both left much to be desired. Themother tongue—the “tongue of the clan,” the language that, as the Croatian poet’s ecstatic verse would have it,
    Rustles, rings, resounds, and rumbles
    Thunders, roars, reverberates—
    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.
    “Hey, everybody!” Meliha burst out one day. “Fuck language! Let’s just talk!”
    And suddenly the ball was rolling again.

CHAPTER 7
    At the Department I felt somewhat of a stowaway. I made several attempts at setting up an appointment with Cees Draaisma, the chair and my “host,” and he always said, “Yes, definitely. It’s just that I’m terribly busy at the moment. If there are any practical matters that need seeing to, Dunja will help you, I’m sure.”
    Dunja, the secretary of the Department, was Dutch. She was married to a Russian. Her real name was Anneke. Anneke looked like a large, listless seal. Surrounded by dusty plants, she basked in her aquarium of an office, occasionally gracing visitors with a blank gaze. Nothing could get a rise out of her: she would answer any question I might have with a reluctant “yes” or “no” or play deaf.
    “We were going to have a talk about my course,” I said to Draaisma several times by way of reminder.
    “Slavs are natural-born teachers,” he would say in the voice of a football coach.
    I couldn’t tell whether the remark was meant in jest or in praise.
    “Ines sends her regards. As soon as she tidies up the back-to-school mess, we’ll have you to dinner, okay?”
    Draaisma was only confirming what I’d heard from Ines each time I phoned her. (“You’ve got to come and see us. But not till the dust settles. You’ve no idea what a bother children are. I can’t even get to the hairdresser. Now you, you’ve got it made. I tell you what. You run round to all the museums and then we’ll have you over.”)
    The fifth floor, where the Department was, consisted of a long dark corridor and fifteen closed doors. From time to time I saw a colleague slipping into his room and paying me no heed. Anneke kept the door to the departmental office closed, and it often