The Ministry of Pain (23 page)

I was sitting in the room surrounded by peeling walls and the smell of old dust. It suited me just fine: it belonged to somebody else and went well with my newly acquired low-life visa and several pieces of luggage I might just as well have left to rot in a public locker somewhere. If I had done so and if the authorities had traced the luggage to me, I would have been hard put to tell them what was in it. The contents were untranslatable. So there
I sat surrounded by peeling walls with a profession that was likewise untranslatable and a country that had come apart at the seams and a native language that had turned into three languages like a dragon with a forked tongue. I sat there with a feeling of guilt whose source I couldn’t put my finger on and a feeling of pain whose source I couldn’t put my finger on.

I pressed “off” and “eject” on the remote, took the cassette out of the VCR, and put it back neatly on the shelf. I decided that my best option was to go on staking out my territory, set up a day-to-day routine, get things done. Tomorrow, I thought, I’d start by picking up a newspaper to check on the date (I wasn’t sure just how much time I’d spent in the cell I’d locked myself up in) and locating the nearest launderette. Then I had to clean up the rest of the mess and buy new wallpaper for the places where it had buckled and come off. But first I’d need to get rid of the ugly stains on the walls. This time I’d sand the walls and fill the cracks with putty before hanging the wallpaper. I might even just paint it—white, of course.

I went over to the window and opened it. The concrete square was lit by the pale glow of the streetlamps and the bright letters of the
BASIS
sign on the other side. There was a hot, heavy, subtropical humidity in the air. All the way to the right I could see a piece of the turquoise dome atop the small concrete mosque. 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. It was unusually quiet. I was soothed by the sight. Perhaps I had come home after all, I thought.

And then out of the darkness into the semidarkness of the concrete there emerged the figure of a man. He made his way slowly and with difficulty, as if wading through the ocean. Suddenly he flicked something that looked like a cigarette butt to the ground,
and there was a sharp retort. It was a firecracker. Not realizing that he was being observed, the passing stranger had left his mark upon the night: he had sent a message with no content only to vanish into the dark. As he disappeared, he seemed to be walking at a slight angle, like a dog.

I left the flat
and headed toward the metro station. I was almost there when I felt a blow on my back, a blow so powerful and unexpected that it knocked the breath out of me. A second or two later I felt a determined tug at my bag, which was hanging from my shoulder. My shoulder blade kept the strap from slipping off, and I turned, pulling back the bag, to see three small boys with satchels on their backs. They were coming home from school. They could not have been more than ten. One of them, I saw, had a toy pocketknife in his hand. He lowered his eyes and dropped
it. All three had the dark, sullen look of grown men. I can’t tell how long we all stood there motionless. Two or three seconds at most. Clearly none of us knew how to deal with the situation. But then the strongest of the three took over and, opening his mouth wide and aiming his black pupils at my face, he let out a long, piercing cry full of hate. The hate was as unexpected and powerful as an electric shock. It came from some unknown depths, some unknown darkness; it came from light-years away to crash before me, bare and sharp as a knife and completely divorced from the situation and the boy, whose lungs, throat, and mouth served merely as a chance medium.

The boys turned and fled. They had an awkward, childlike, flat-footed way of running, and their satchels bounced up and down on their backs. Once they felt they were at a safe distance, they stopped and turned. The sight of me still standing there rooted to the spot and staring after them elicited several mocking gestures on their part, after which they burst into high-pitched giggles. Their first attempt at theft may have been a failure, but this part was great fun. I stood there watching them until they moved on.

I opened my hand to find I was holding the knife. I couldn’t remember having bent to pick it up. Staring at it, I realized the incident that had just played itself out was both moving and dreadful. The boy’s hate-driven scream still echoed in my ears.

It was late afternoon. The dusk was magnificent, the sun pouring its warm terra-cotta glow over everything. The pain had subsided, and I set off, still clutching the knife, but no longer clear as to where I was headed. I used deep breathing to suppress the incident, which could have happened to anybody, in any part of the city, anywhere. I thought of myself living in the largest dollhouse in the world, where everything is simulation, nothing is real. And if nothing is real, then there’s nothing to be afraid of,
I thought, and felt a certain spring come into my step. It was almost as if I were walking on air.

Madurodam unraveled before me like a skein of wool. I couldn’t get over the fact that everything looked new: the bonsai imitating mighty oaks, the patches of grass imitating luxuriant lawns. Everything was suddenly clear as crystal, plain as the nose on my face. The Madurodamplein was rice-paper thin. A bluish horizon glowed in the distance. Looked at thus, the heart of Amsterdam had the form of a partially bisected cobweb. First came Magere Brug, whose filigree made me think of a dragonfly, then the De Waag Chinese fish market with its wriggling catch, then the Waterlooplein flea market. The scenes flashed by before me, fragile, lacelike, limpid like the caps on the girls’ heads in the painting by Nicolaas van der Waay. I saw canals overhung with shady trees; I saw the façades of the houses along the canals—the Herengracht, the Keizersgracht, the Prinsengracht, and Singel in neat rows like pearls; I saw Mint Tower, the flower market, and Artis and took in the heavy, warm, intoxicating sight of the Botanical Museum. The entire city lay before me, a city of sky, glass, and water. And it was my home.

In front of the small Anne Frank Museum I saw an earthworm of a line. Inside I saw myself standing in front of a monitor absorbed in its video quiz:
1. Whom did Anne first share her room with? 2. Whom did she have to share it with later on? 3. What did Anne do to liven up her room? 4. Who built the bookcase? 5. From which country did the Frank family flee? 6. Were all Anne’s girlfriends refugees?

I suddenly realized that the house at Prinsengracht 163 bore a distinct resemblance to the houses that obsessed me in my nightmares, and it was with a sense of relief that I mounted the virtual stairs, opened and closed the virtual doors, and left the house simply by pressing the Esc key. I no longer had anything to fear: escape was always an option.

I pictured a Hague Tribunal the size of a matchbox, with tiny judges in tiny gowns, tiny defendants and witnesses, tiny counsels for the defense and the prosecution, miniature surrogates simulating a life in which right and wrong exist. 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. And as long as the curtains open and close, as long as the windmills turn, as long as the bonsai grow, as long as the blood flows through our filigree veins and into our filigree hearts, everything is just fine. The language of Madurodam has no words for fatality, destiny, or God. God is the mechanics; fatality is a breakdown. Now that I have settled down here in Madurodam, be it of my own free will or not, this is something I must understand.

I must understand that simulation is all and if simulation is all I am not guilty; that here in Madurodam, under the bright skies
of Madurodam, I am guilty of nothing; that it is all a matter of perspective, that things are big if we experience them as big and small if we experience them as small; that for us, the inhabitants of Madurodam, the magpies that alight on our rooftops are more dangerous, are in-com-pa-rab-ly more dangerous than the boy’s sudden, inexplicable, hate-saturated scream that had just caused me a pain disproportionate to its significance.

It was late afternoon. The sunset was magnificent, the sun pouring its warm terra-cotta glow over everything. I was walking toward the woods, my feet scarcely touching the ground. It was unusually quiet: all I could hear was the occasional
whoosh
of a passing cyclist. I saw the kerchiefed women sitting on the grass like mother hens, their broods all around them. My nostrils swelled with the scent of newly mown grass. I entered the woods. It was so sparse I could see the blueness of the lake through the trees. Although it was August, autumn was in the air. I sucked that air into my lungs greedily as I walked. I can’t say for sure how long I walked and how long it took me to reach the clearing….

Life is sometimes
so confusing that you can’t be certain what came first and what came later. By the same token I don’t know whether I’m telling this story to get to the end or the beginning of things. Since living abroad, I have experienced my native language—which, as the Croatian poet’s ecstatic verse would have it,

as a stammer, a curse, a malediction or as babble, drab phrase mongering devoid of meaning. Which is why I sometimes feel that here, surrounded by Dutch and communicating in English, I am learning my native language from scratch. It’s not easy. I swallow words, regurgitate vowels and consonants. It’s a losing battle: I fail to convey what I want to say, and what I do say sounds empty. I’ll come out with a word, but can’t sense its substance, or I’ll sense a certain substance, but can’t find the word for it. I keep wondering whether a language thus maimed, a lan
guage that has never learned to depict reality, complex as the inner experience of that reality may be, is capable of doing anything at all, telling stories, for instance.

Life has been good to me. I’ve learned to leave my curtains open. I’m even trying to consider it a virtue. I’ve enrolled in a Dutch course. Like my classmates, I overuse the personal pronoun
ik
. For beginnings the world begins with
ik: Ik ben Tanja. Ik kom uit vormalige Joegoslavië. Ik loop, ik zie, ik leef, ik praat, ik adem, ik hoor, ik schreeuw
…For the time being
ik
doesn’t commit me to anything:
ik
is like a children’s game, it’s like hide-and-seek. People say it’s easiest to hide out in the open. In the Dutch mountains. Behind that tough little
i
and
k
.

True, my nightmares have started up again. Now I dream of words, not houses. In the dream I speak an unchecked, uncontrollable language, a language with a false bottom, whose words leap out like a jack-in-the-box and thumb their nose at me. They are usually monologues reflecting my fickle moods. I go through them with a fine-toothed comb. They are long and painful, a never-ending list of complaints. I am often awakened by a painful doglike whimper, my own. 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.

But life has been good to me. Paul and Kim, the American couple whose children I take care of four days a week, pay me more than a decent wage. I’ve become an expert in nursery rhymes and counting rhymes: ours, the English ones, and even a few in
Dutch. The children know
En ten tini, sava raka tini, sava raka tika taka, bija baja buf
. And
Eci peci pec, ti si mali zec, a ja mala vjeverica, eci peci pec
. They know
Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub: the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker
. And
Amsterdam, die grote stadt. Die is gebouwd op palen. Als die stadt eens om-meviel, wie zou dat betalen
…. Paul and Kim never fail to introduce me to their friends and relatives: “This is Tanja, our babysitter. She’s wonderful with children. She really has a way with them….”

My mother is doing fine too, if “fine” is the word for it. She perks up whenever I phone. She tells on life the way children tell on one another: she pulls out her list of complaints and goes on about her diabetes (which she calls “the sugar curse”), her arthritis, the high cost of living…. She never asks about me: I’m just there to register the complaints. I’ve made peace with my role and grown used to our one-way dialogues. I’ve learned not to let it hurt too much.

Goran’s father is no longer with us. “They might as well have stuck him in a garbage bag!” said Olga, sobbing into the receiver. “A garbage bag!” He’d fallen into a coma, so she called for an ambulance, but the paramedics couldn’t get the stretcher into the elevator, so they had to wrap him in a blanket and carry him down all ten flights. He died in the hospital a few days later. She told me all about it when I phoned with my condolences. “Though it had to end somewhere,” she added in an odd voice, thereby putting a sad yet apathetic end to the incident.

Ana survived her return to Belgrade by less than two years: she was with the Belgrade Television team that perished in the NATO bombing of the city. I’ve kept the letter she sent me several months after her departure. Along with a short note saying she
had found a job and was doing fine, she enclosed a short composition entitled “Depot,” her late contribution to our imaginary museum of everyday life in Yugoslavia. It was a melancholy description of the place where the Belgrade tram lines come to rest, a description of the sounds, the sultry summer sunset, the smell of the dust-filled air. “Put it into our plastic tote, the one with the red, white, and blue stripes,” she wrote. I was touched by the sweet folly of the gesture. Geert decided to remain in Belgrade. I have no idea what he’s doing or how he earns his keep. He phones me now and then, and I can tell from his voice that I, a foreigner, am his only link to “home.” I am still at his address.

As for the rest of them, they seem to be holding their own. Ante still plays his accordion all over town. He’s at the Noordermarkt every Saturday. People toss their coins into a cap given to him by the fellow from Virovitica who has the hat stall there. All “our people” know him. Nevena has married one of “our” boys and has a daughter by him. She’s working at the Mercatorplein branch of the Rabo Bank. Meliha is in Sarajevo. She’s managed to reclaim the family flat and evict the people who had been living there illegally. Meliha’s parents will have nothing to do with the city: they haven’t been back once since moving here. Meliha is living with her
Da
er
, who has set up an NGO for “vulnerable people.” Mario has left the university and found work in computer graphics. He has a baby, too, a boy. Boban has joined a local Buddhist sect, shaved his head, turned vegan, and got himself on welfare. Only Johanneke has stuck it out at the university. Her elder daughter has run away. She’s in Bosnia with her father. Johanneke is devastated. Selim has gone super Muslim, hanging out with the Vondel Park weirdos, grumbling about how “us Bosnians gotta kick the shit out of them Serb bastards and then the Croats and then the whole Euro crowd, Yanks included.” Zole, who came to class only once or twice, has supposedly split
for Canada, claiming to be a “double victim”—of Miloševi
and of the NATO bombs. But a more likely version is that he got in with the local Serb mafia and split to save his skin.

I had this all from Darko when I ran into him on a deserted beach near Wassenaar one day. It was surreal. I barely recognized him: He had a bronze tan and light blond hair, and sported a pair of chic sunglasses and a Walkman. And he was on a horse. He looked like a Calvin Klein model or, rather, a fragile version of same. He was taking riding lessons at the Wassenaar Equestrian Club, he told me. He had a friend, a successful American businessman, and hung out with the gay crowd. Except now he’d left the low life—which he’d always been open about—for a house in Reguliersgracht: Thanks to the friend who’d blown a cool million on it. That’s right—a million dollars, two million
gu
e
….

“I’ve discovered I love riding,” he said. And giving me a soulful look, he added, “Sign up for a course, any course—yoga, salsa, whatever—I tell everybody. As long as it’s physical, you get a lot out of it.”

“I’m taking Dutch,” I said.

“Good for you!” he said, as if talking to somebody somewhere else.

Just then I caught my reflection in his sunglasses and a chill ran up my spine: there were two faces glinting in the lenses, and neither was mine.

But most incredible of all was Igor’s story. He’d gone off the deep end, people said. First he got a job as a translator at the Tribunal, where he wasn’t the only member of our gang to be thus employed, by the way. But he got himself fired when he stopped showing up for work. Then one day he was found—found himself might be closer to the truth—at some airport or other in Calcutta, Kuala Lumpur, or Singapore. 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. They last anywhere from a few days to a few months and trigger a total blackout, during which the “fugued out” have to manufacture an identity: they have no idea who they are or where they’re from. And when they go back to their former lives, they have no idea what they went through in their fugued-out condition. It is a completely crazy lost-and-found disorder nobody’d ever heard of before. Some psychiatrists claim that the fugues don’t just happen, that they’re set off by drink. Maybe so, but Igor didn’t remember having been a drinker. Nobody knew where he was or how he was making ends meet. He might even have gone home. As for the others, they’d gone their separate ways. They’d lost touch.

“By the way,” Darko said in a voice a bit too cheery, “I’ve made another discovery.”

“Namely?”

“Opera!” he said, pointing to the Walkman. “I’m wild about Verdi.”

He paused and slumped ever so slightly, a fine shadow crossing his delicate, pretty-boy face.

“That time with Uroš…” he said haltingly, as if spitting sand from his mouth, “after the dinner, when we celebrated your birthday, remember?”

“I remember,” I said.

“Well, I walked him home, and we…horsed around a little…. Uroš wasn’t gay…But we were drunk….”

“Why are you telling me this?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Don’t know…. It’s been bothering me forever….”

As far as the Hague Tribunal is concerned, the files are piling up, the mounds of paper growing; the videotapes of the proceedings
could cover the length and breadth of the land that is no longer. Every loss seems to have been taken care of in real, ironic, or grotesque terms—yet taken care of nonetheless. Wounds have healed properly for some, poorly for others—yet healed they have. Even the scars are fading. Everyone is somewhere, some doing what they do best, others doing the best they can. Life has dealt better cards to some than others, but everyone has found some kind of niche. The dead and disappeared have yet to be counted, many of the perpetrators are still at large, much rubble has yet to be cleared, many mines defused, but the dust has settled. Life goes on and for the present at least is good to everyone.

One day the Tribunal will land the biggest culprit of them all, and I will go have a look at him. He will be wearing a gray suit, white shirt, and bright red tie. The color of the tie will be identical to that of a judge’s robe. The defendant will sit in his glass cage, his jaw clenched and his mouth in the shape of an upside-down U. The clock will show the time, but it will not be the time of the world outside the courtroom. I will be shocked to discover that in the few intervening years I have forgotten everything, that I can scarcely bring up the names of the people who so played with our lives. I will have the feeling it is a hundred years since the war broke out, not nine or ten. I will confront my forgetting head on and with a profound sense of horror. The man in the red tie will speak a language I no longer understand. I will remember even the following detail: leafing through the papers in front of him, the accused will lick his fingers like a village shopkeeper; he will raise his head, as if to sniff the air around him, and squint into the courtroom; at that moment the eyes behind the glass and mine will meet; the eyes will be dark, dull, void of expression; his tightly clenched jaw and dull stare will remind me of a polar bear; then he will lift his paw, brush the invisible
flies away from his nose, and go back to staring blankly in front of him.