Read Online The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugrešić - Free Book Online
Authors: Dubravka Ugrešić
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’bout a lope?”
That was how they spoke. It was their slang. For them a “lope” was a “walk,” from the Dutch lopen . He might also have suggested a “wandel,” from the Dutch wandelen (“go for a walk”). They’d also say things like “Let’s go for a kopje koffie .” Selim’s Dutch-Bosnian combinations were hysterical.
Even though my students made it clear that they enjoyed our common project, I could never quite rid myself of the minefield image. One day when Igor and I were wandering through the streets, I tried to bring him out on the subject.
“Tell me, Igor, how do you feel about the class?”
“You know what Tito said to his future wife the first time they met?”
“No, tell me.”
Hear my thoughts, O Jovanka.
Your hands are less guilty than mine.
My forehead burns tonight.
My eyelids quiver.
I’ll dream a beauteous dream tonight:
Thy beauty shall me unto death deliver!
Thus did a line from a Croatian poetess and a stanza from a Croatian poet merge in Igor’s imagination.
“Is nothing sacred?” I said, laughing.
Instead of answering, he asked, “Tell me, Comrade, have you noticed that angels never laugh?”
“I can’t say I’ve given it much thought.”
“You’ve never looked an angel in the eyes?”
“No, I don’t think so…. Not that I remember…”
“Well, then, we have an urgent call to make.”
We spent the rest of the afternoon in the Rijksmuseum looking at angel faces of the old masters.
“See? I was right,” he said. “Angels don’t smile, do they?”
“Like hangmen.”
We both burst out laughing, though it wasn’t at all funny. The laughter was a way of dealing with an invisible angst.
Convalescents, I suddenly thought—people recovering from an illness or a trauma of some kind, an accident, a flood, a shipwreck—they don’t laugh, either. We were convalescents. I didn’t say anything, though.
CHAPTER 9
Surrounded by the indifferent walls of our imaginary laboratory, we breathed life into a life that no longer was. We took turns massaging the heart and giving artificial respiration. Clumsy and amateurish as we were, we eventually succeeded in bringing back the beat of that bygone era.
Most of them returned to their childhoods: it was the safest, least threatening territory. Whether the details were their own or what they had gathered from their parents or whether they had made them up, as Igor often did, was not important. Every detail contained its morsel of truth.
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.
At times I wondered whether what I was doing wasn’t diametrically opposed to what I thought I was doing. After all, the stigma the ideologues of the successor states had placed on memories of the collective past had backfired: it had made that collective past more attractive. Perhaps by stimulating memories of the past I would destroy its halo. Or perhaps my attempt to reconstruct the past would end in no more than a pale imitation, thus exposing the poverty of the “baggage” we deemed so powerful. Yet whenever I turned over these and related issues in my mind, the pleasure we derived from our memory game would push them aside, as I had pushed aside a discovery that hit me like a ton of bricks one day, namely, that I had forgotten a lot more than they had and was therefore not the best qualified memory tutor. But it was too late: I had set the gears in motion and could no longer stop them.
NEVENA: THE FIRST OF EVERY MONTH
My papa worked in a factory; my mama
That was how they spoke. It was their slang. For them a “lope” was a “walk,” from the Dutch lopen . He might also have suggested a “wandel,” from the Dutch wandelen (“go for a walk”). They’d also say things like “Let’s go for a kopje koffie .” Selim’s Dutch-Bosnian combinations were hysterical.
Even though my students made it clear that they enjoyed our common project, I could never quite rid myself of the minefield image. One day when Igor and I were wandering through the streets, I tried to bring him out on the subject.
“Tell me, Igor, how do you feel about the class?”
“You know what Tito said to his future wife the first time they met?”
“No, tell me.”
Hear my thoughts, O Jovanka.
Your hands are less guilty than mine.
My forehead burns tonight.
My eyelids quiver.
I’ll dream a beauteous dream tonight:
Thy beauty shall me unto death deliver!
Thus did a line from a Croatian poetess and a stanza from a Croatian poet merge in Igor’s imagination.
“Is nothing sacred?” I said, laughing.
Instead of answering, he asked, “Tell me, Comrade, have you noticed that angels never laugh?”
“I can’t say I’ve given it much thought.”
“You’ve never looked an angel in the eyes?”
“No, I don’t think so…. Not that I remember…”
“Well, then, we have an urgent call to make.”
We spent the rest of the afternoon in the Rijksmuseum looking at angel faces of the old masters.
“See? I was right,” he said. “Angels don’t smile, do they?”
“Like hangmen.”
We both burst out laughing, though it wasn’t at all funny. The laughter was a way of dealing with an invisible angst.
Convalescents, I suddenly thought—people recovering from an illness or a trauma of some kind, an accident, a flood, a shipwreck—they don’t laugh, either. We were convalescents. I didn’t say anything, though.
CHAPTER 9
Surrounded by the indifferent walls of our imaginary laboratory, we breathed life into a life that no longer was. We took turns massaging the heart and giving artificial respiration. Clumsy and amateurish as we were, we eventually succeeded in bringing back the beat of that bygone era.
Most of them returned to their childhoods: it was the safest, least threatening territory. Whether the details were their own or what they had gathered from their parents or whether they had made them up, as Igor often did, was not important. Every detail contained its morsel of truth.
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.
At times I wondered whether what I was doing wasn’t diametrically opposed to what I thought I was doing. After all, the stigma the ideologues of the successor states had placed on memories of the collective past had backfired: it had made that collective past more attractive. Perhaps by stimulating memories of the past I would destroy its halo. Or perhaps my attempt to reconstruct the past would end in no more than a pale imitation, thus exposing the poverty of the “baggage” we deemed so powerful. Yet whenever I turned over these and related issues in my mind, the pleasure we derived from our memory game would push them aside, as I had pushed aside a discovery that hit me like a ton of bricks one day, namely, that I had forgotten a lot more than they had and was therefore not the best qualified memory tutor. But it was too late: I had set the gears in motion and could no longer stop them.
NEVENA: THE FIRST OF EVERY MONTH
My papa worked in a factory; my mama
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