The Ministry of Pain

by Dubravka Ugrešic

Mario had met a Dutch girl in Austria—where his parents had sent him, fearing he’d be conscripted into the Croatian army—and she took him back to Holland with her. “Maybe I married her for the passport and fell in love with her after the fact,” he once told me with a smile. “Or maybe I was in love with her to begin with and made it official because of the passport. I can’t remember.”

  Boban had gone to India on a package deal with a group of Belgrade matrons, followers of Sai Baba. The trip had been engineered and financed by his mother, whose only concern was to save him temporarily from the army. In India he’d ditched the tour and wandered about for two months, but then he picked up dysentery and boarded the first plane out. He landed in Amsterdam, where he was to change planes for Belgrade, but somewhere on the way from one toilet to another in Schiphol he’d had a brilliant epiphany and asked for political asylum. It was still a possibility back then. For a year or two the Dutch authorities were lenient: anyone coming from the former Yugoslavia could use the war as a credible motivation. But in time things changed and the gate slammed shut.

  Johanneke was Dutch. She spoke “our language” fluently and with a Bosnian accent. Her parents were Dutch leftists who had built roads and railway tracks with international youth brigades after World War II. Later they went to the Dalmatian coast as tourists. During one of their stays Johanneke visited Sarajevo, fell in love with a Bosnian, and was stranded there for a while. Now, divorced and the mother of two little girls, she had made up her mind to get a degree in Slavic languages. She was an accredited court interpreter from “our language” to Dutch, which turned out to be highly useful: she would translate and authenticate any document our kids needed.

  There were those who showed up once or twice and quietly disappeared. Laki was from Zagreb. He remained in my memory because he was the only one who called me Mrs.: Mrs. Luci. He clearly considered “comrade” to be “Yugoslav,” “Communist,” and therefore “Anti-Croat.” He had a Zagreb way of talking that got on my nerves—the la-di-da stress on the last syllable, the constant use of reflexives, verbal forms referring to the self, that made him sound intimately related to everything on earth…. Like so many others, Laki had come to Amsterdam for the cheap pot. He had come before the war and studied Slavic languages and literatures for years, living on welfare and in heavily subsidized public housing. The kids all said that he was a paid police informer, that he bragged about translating the bugged telephone conversations between Yugoslav mafia members the Dutch police had under surveillance. The kids called him Laki the Linguist because he claimed to be working on a Dutch-Croatian dictionary for which he could never find a grant. He refused to acknowledge the existing Dutch–Serbo-Croatian dictionary.

  Then there was Zole, who had set up house with a Dutch gay partner to qualify for a residence permit, and Darko, from Opatija, who really was gay. The Dutch authorities were particularly generous about granting asylum to those who claimed they had been discriminated against in their home countries for “sexual difference,” more generous than to the war’s rape victims. As soon as word got around, people climbed on the bandwagon in droves. The war was a fig leaf for everything. It was something like the national lottery: while many tried their luck out of genuine misfortune, others did it simply because the opportunity presented itself. And under such aberrant circumstances, winners and losers had to be judged by new criteria.

  They studied servo-kroatisch because it was easy. If you didn’t have a refugee visa, you could prolong your stay legally by enrolling in a university program. Some had begun or even completed programs at home, but they meant next to nothing here. Servo-kroatisch was the fastest and easiest way to come by a Dutch diploma, not that even a Dutch diploma would get you very far. If, like Ana, you had another language as your “major,” you could pick up a few effortless credits with servo-kroatisch, but if what you were really after was student loans and scholarships, then servo-kroatisch was your ticket.

  They coped. Most of them “played tennis,” playing tennis in their group slang meaning housecleaning. It paid fifteen guilders an hour. Some worked as dishwashers or waiters in restaurants. Ante picked up small change playing the accordion in the Noordermarkt. Ana sorted mail in the post office every morning. “It’s not so bad,” she would say. “I feel like the dwarf in apek’s ‘Postman’s Tale.’”

  But the best-paying job you could get without a work permit was a job at “the Ministry.” One of “our people” found work at a place where they made clothes for sex shops and soon the whole gang was working there. It wasn’t strenuous: all you had to do was assemble items of sadomasochistic clothing out of leather, rubber, and plastic. Three times a week Igor, Nevena, and Selim went to Regulateurstraat in Amsterdam Nord where the Atelier Demask, purveyor to the many-faceted Dutch porno industry, was located. There was an S/M porno club in The Hague called the Ministry of Pain, and my students took to calling their porno sweatshop “the Ministry.” “Those S/M types, Comrade, they’re real snappy dressers,” Igor would joke. “They don’t think the most beautiful body is a naked body. I wouldn’t forget that if I were a Gucci or Armani.”

  The kids did a good job of coping—considering where they came from. They dragged their former country behind them like a train. People said the Yugomafia was responsible for a third of the criminal activities in Amsterdam. The papers were full of its thefts, prostitute trafficking, black marketeering, murders, and vendettas.

  Nor did they know what to make of the country’s current status. If they mentioned Croatia and Bosnia, it was with great caution. If they mentioned Yugoslavia, which was now the name for Serbia and Montenegro, it was with great agony. They couldn’t deal with the names the media kept throwing out. Rump Yugoslavia, for instance. (“Where’d they get that one from, for Christ’s sake,” Meliha would cry. “Is it ’cause they hacked it up like a steak?”)

  Yugoslavia, the country where they’d been born, where they’d come from, no longer existed. They did their best to deal with it by steering clear of the name, shortening it to Yuga (as the Gastarbeiter, the migrant workers in Germany, had done before them) and thus “the former Yugoslavia” to “the former Yuga” or playfully transforming it into Titoland or the Titanic. As for its inhabitants, they became Yugos or, more often, simply “our people.” The possessive pronoun also came in handy when referring to the language they spoke together (none of them being Slovenian, Macedonian, or Albanian): to avoid its former, now politically incorrect name of Serbo-Croatian, they called it simply “our language.”

  CHAPTER 3

  It is not photogenic

  And it takes years.

  All the cameras have gone off

  To other battlefields.

  Szymborska

  The first time I entered the classroom I could tell what made them “our people” “Our people” had an invisible slap on their faces. They had that sideways, rabbitlike look, that special tension in the body, that animal instinct of sniffing the air to tell which direction danger is coming from. The “ourness” came through in a certain strained melancholy in their features, a slight cloud on their brows, a barely visible, almost internal stoop. “Our people prowl the city as if it were a jungle, terror-stricken,” Selim would say. And we were all “ours.”

  We had scampered out of the country like rats deserting a sinking ship. We were everywhere. Many had scurried about within the borders of the former country, taking cover for a time, thinking the war would soon be over, as if it were a rainstorm rather than a conflagration. They would hole up with relatives, friends, or friends of friends, who did their best to help. They would go to the improvised refugee camps, abandoned tourist colonies, hotels willing to put them up temporarily, mostly hotels on the Adriatic coast, but “only in winter, when there weren’t any tourists and then they’d have to take care of themselves, then they’d go back home, the war wouldn’t last forever, no war lasts forever, war wears people down and when they’re tired enough it stops.” Some stayed on for a year or two or thr
ee—the tourists didn’t come back after all—others moved on. And they all had stories to tell.

  A woman from Belgrade, “seeing where things were heading” and horrified at the hatred she perceived in her fellow Serbs, sold her house and, just before the war broke out, moved to “peaceful” Croatia. She bought a flat in Rovinj. But when the Croats started showing their fangs, she sold the flat in Rovinj and moved to Sarajevo. The very first Serbian grenades—they might have been following the lines in her palm to bring about the fate awaiting her and her family—split her Sarajevo flat down the middle. “Thank God she wasn’t at home when they hit,” said a friend of hers in her artless version of the woman’s story. “And now she’s just fine,” she writes in her latest letter. “Who’d have thought that of all the cities in the world she’d end up in Caracas!”

  Refugees from Slovenia—Croats—made for Zagreb, for Istria, for the sea. Refugees from Bosnia went south, to Croatia, or east, to Serbia. The Croatian Serbs beat a quiet retreat from Croatia until they were chased out en masse. The Vojvodina Hungarians slipped noiselessly into Hungary, followed after a while by a number of Serbs as well. And soon the Kosovo Albanians were on the move….

  We fled from wherever we could to wherever we could. The price paid depended on the circumstances. Some thought only about their own, some about their own and others’, and some never bothered to ask who was who. Some Bosnian Muslims went to Turkey, Iran, Iraq, even as far as Pakistan; many rued the day. Some Bosnian Jews went to Israel; many of them rued the day. People changed their names, given and sur; they bought cheap passports when they could. What had till recently meant everything to them—their faith, their nationality—was suddenly worthless currency. Survival took over. And once survival was assured, once they had landed on a safe shore, heaved a sigh and pinched themselves to make certain they were alive, many of them again hung out their flags, put up their icons and escutcheons, and lit their candles.

  We were everywhere. Those who scrambled got the best places: America, Canada; others hesitated and were lost, relegated to whatever was left open to them with tourist visas for a month, for two months, then returning home and gearing up to start again. In the general confusion many used rumors as their sole compass, rumors about where you could go without papers and where you could not, where life was better and where life was worse, where they were welcome and where they were not. Some found themselves in countries they would otherwise never have seen. Passports from the first two breakaway countries of Slovenia and Croatia quickly soared in value. A Croatian passport could get you to Great Britain for a while—until the Brits caught on and shut the gate. A few of the more naive fell for obsolete rumors—like the open arms with which whites were greeted in South Africa—and followed suit. The Serbs were a pushover for Greece, as tourists and prostitutes, as war profiteers, launderers of dirty money, and thieves. Some acquired three passports—Croatian, Bosnian, and “Yugoslav”—in the hope of hitting the jackpot with at least one; others decided to wait, following the war as if it were a tempest about to die down. And people with children were more concerned for the children than themselves: it was the children’s safety that mattered.

  Europe was teeming with former Yugos. The wave of war émigrés numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands of recorded names, names of people with legal refugee status. Sweden had accepted some seventy thousand, Germany three hundred thousand, Holland fifty thousand. As for the illegals, their number was legion. We were everywhere. And nobody’s story was personal enough or shattering enough. Because death itself had lost its power to shatter. There had been too many deaths.

  I soon learned to pick out my fellow countrymen in a crowd. The men, especially the older men, stood out the most. The main railway stations and the flea markets were their cult gathering places. They would appear in formations of three or four, like dolphins, wearing windbreakers, leather by preference, their hands thrust into their pockets. They would stand together for a while—shifting from one foot to the other, exhaling cigarette smoke, exorcising their fear—and disperse.

  In the Berlin neighborhood where Goran and I had lived, I would stop in front of the large window of a refugee “club.” Through the glass I could see “our people” mutely playing cards, staring at the television screen and taking occasional swigs of beer straight from the bottle. The hand-drawn map on the wall was festooned with postcards. It had a geography all its own. The places they came from—Brko or Bijeljina—stood at the center of the world: they were the only country the men had left. Surrounded by smoke rings, they looked as “former” as their onetime nationality; they looked like corpses that had risen from the grave for a bottle of beer and a round of cards but ended up in the wrong place.

  On the street I often caught snatches of their language. It was all numbers. They couldn’t stop talking numbers. Marks, five hundred marks, three hundred marks, a thousand marks…. Here in Amsterdam it was gue, this or that number of gue…. They would draw out their vowels as if babbling, and it was in fact more babble than talk, their endless computations of existing or imaginary funds.

  They all had derogatory terms for the inhabitants of the countries where they had landed: švabo for the Germans, Daer for the Dutch, šved for the Swedes. It made them feel important. They peppered their conversations with “Like I say” and “Take it from me,” emphasizing their role in the matter at hand, as insignificant as the matter was and as piddling as their role was in it. Sticking to your guns was all. “I can make it from Oostdorp to the Leidseplein in eleven minutes.” “How can you make it in eleven minutes? It takes fifteen at the very least. Have you timed it? Well, I have, man. Fifteen minutes on the nose. From the second you get on the tram.” They totally did the men in, those conversations. Each word was calculated to postpone the encounter with humiliation, to exorcise the fear.

  The manner in which they moved and the places where they came together betrayed their loss of personal space: the bench in front of the house, where they could watch the world pass by, or on the waterfront, where they could see what ships came in and who came down the gangplank; the town square, where they could walk with their friends; the café, where they could sit at their table and have their drink. In the cities of Europe they vainly sought the coordinates of space they had left behind them, their spatial coordinates.

  They also sought human coordinates. Goran was often prey to Yugonostalgia, and when it was on him he was wont to pick up the first “compatriot” he ran across and drag him home for a drink. I’d soon heard my fill of stories about German refugee centers and their experiences there. “Our people” would stick like glue to every Russian, Ukrainian, Pole, or Bulgarian they met, feeling an our-like bond with them. A Bosnian told us the story of some Polish women who would come to Berlin on one-day bus tours to give “our people” good prices on Polish cheese and sausages and occasionally on a “roll in the hay.” With the money thus earned they’d do their Berlin shopping for the week and take the bus back home. They could always sniff out one another on the street: it was their common misfortune that did the trick. The same Bosnian told us about a Berlin brothel (he used the German slang word Puff) where he spent all his refugee allowance. The girl he went there for, Masha by name, would “take him for all he was worth” and “give him zilch in return,” but that was fine with him. “Because she’s a Russian, one of us. I wouldn’t throw my dough away on a German girl. Those German girls have no soul. Not like ours.” And by “ours” he meant his Russian Masha.

  The men complained more than anyone; they were eternally complaining: about the weather, about the war, about their fate and the injustices done them. They complained about conditions in the camps if they lived in one; they complained about conditions in the camps if they didn’t. They complained about welfare; they complained about the humiliation of having to accept welfare; they complained about not receiving welfare. They complained all the time and about everything with the same intensity. It was as if life itself were
a punishment: everything chafed, everything itched, everything pinched; nothing was enough for them and everything much too much.

  Women were much less visible than men. They remained in the background, but kept life going: they darned the holes to stop it from flowing out; they took it on as a daily assignment. Men seemed to have no assignments; for them being a refugee was like being an invalid.

  Here in Amsterdam I occasionally looked in on a Bosnian café called Bella, the hangout for a gloomy, tight-lipped crew of card-players and TV watchers. Each time I entered, I’d be met by long looks expressing nothing—not even surprise or indignation—at the sight of a female invading male space. I’d take a seat at the bar, order “our” (Turkish) coffee and sit there for a while, as if doing penance, instinctively drooping my shoulders a bit to fit in. I felt the invisible slap on their faces invading my own. I had no idea what I went there for. Out of an obscure desire to sniff out my “herd,” perhaps, not that I was ever certain it was mine—or ever had been, for that matter.

  My pupils too consented to being “our people” part of the time, though none of us quite knew what it meant, and refused part of the time, as if it entailed some real, concrete danger. And when we refused, we refused to belong to either “our people down there” or “our people up here.” There were times when we accepted our fuzzy collective identity and times when we rejected it in disgust. Over and over I heard people say, “It’s not my war!” And it wasn’t our war. But it was our war, too. Because if it hadn’t been our war, too, we wouldn’t have been here now. Because if it had been our war, we wouldn’t have been here, either.