Read Online The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugrešić - Free Book Online Page A

was a housewife. Our most important family holiday was “first of the month.” Papa would bring home his pay in the “pay pocket” (that’s what it was called) and present it to Mama. Mama took care of the money: such and such an amount for gas, such and such for electricity, such and such for rent, and such and such to pay off the things we had bought on credit. Then we would dress up, as if going out for dinner, and go out shopping.
    Papa used the Turkish word for shopping— bakaluk —Mama the Croatianized German fasung . Mama led the fasung expedition, because only she knew what we needed (how much sugar, how much flour, how much oil, how much salt, how much coffee, and how much macaroni and noodles to last till the first of the following month), and we all pranced along behind her. Mama always bought unroasted coffee, which wethen roasted ourselves in a cylindrical tin pot with little doors and a handle on one side. We’d pour the gray beans in through the doors, shut the doors, and put the pot on the gas burner. Then we’d rotate the handle and the pot would rotate and the coffee would rotate in the pot ever so slowly and roast on the fire. The whole apartment would smell of freshly roasted coffee. How I loved that smell. We needed a lot of coffee, because neighbors came to see Mama and drink coffee every day. We didn’t buy many other things. Mama made jam and preserves, she pickled cucumbers, she turned red peppers into paprika and ajvar —that kind of thing. She was also good at making liqueur out of cherries, nuts, and chocolate, so we didn’t buy that either. We kept everything in the pantry. Mama would paste labels on the jars with the name of the produce and the date. The most exciting time for us kids was dessert. Mama would buy a few boxes of biscuits and “cooking chocolate” (that’s what it was called), because that was the cheapest kind. There was a kind of biscuit in the shape of a slipper with strips of chocolate on top and a kind called “housewife biscuits,” which were the best for dipping in milk. And Mama always bought each of us a round, crisp chocolate wafer called a napolitanka . Us kids always thought “store bought” tasted much better than “homemade.”
    Mama would also buy ten packets of bread sticks and ten packets of pretzel sticks, but that was for company. Whenever we had company, Mama put the bread sticks in one cup and the pretzel sticks in another. The guests would sit on the couch. “Have some pretzel sticks,” she would say as she put the cups on the long, low coffee table, and the guests would take a pretzel stick or a bread stick and start munching on it. They looked like rabbits. Then Mama would take out her “ikebanas,” as Papa called them, two or three flat plates she had filled with rings of sliced pickles and sausage and peppersand cheese. Each slice had a toothpick coming out of it and in the middle she put a mound of ajvar . Guests always complimented Mama on her ikebanas , but they got on Papa’s nerves .
    “Someday somebody’s going to choke on one of your toothpicks,” he would say angrily .
    “You have no sense for what’s in,” she would answer .
    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.
    After dessert Papa would turn the television on. Our television had a plastic filter like a rainbow across the screen to make it look like color when it was really only black and white. We would die of laughter whenever Citizen Mollycoddle was on .
    Now that I write all this down, I’m not so sure it’s the way it was. It’s all so hazy and dreamlike; it’s like I was telling somebody else’s story rather than mine .
    BOBAN: MY FAVORITE COMIC STRIP
    There weren’t many books in our house, but there was one that caught my