The Ministry of Pain

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  The prosecutor had called a witness to the stand. The shutters went down for a time, then back up, all but the one blocking the witness. The witness’s TV image was indistinct, but we could hear his voice. He was reading from a computer screen. There were long pauses between his responses, because he had to wait for the translation of each question to appear on the screen. Every once in a while the cameras would turn toward the spectators and we would see our own faces on the monitors. We could also see the reflections of our faces in the glass wall superimposed on the faces of the people beyond it.

  At first we followed the trial through the glass, throwing only an occasional glance at the TV monitors, but more and more I caught my eyes lingering on the screen, as if I found its image more reliable than the live proceedings. The words we heard, switching channels from time to time to hear how things sounded in English, French, or Dutch, were in any case unreal. The reality the glass wall separated us from inspired no more confidence than “real” reality: both of them—the one that churned out lies, lies, and more lies and the one that promised the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—were equally fantastic, if that is the word for it.

  The questioning centered on a carp hatchery. Uroš’s father had been the head of a carp hatchery in a small town in Bosnia. He was being asked about repairs that had been made on the leaky roof of the main building, about the sheet metal that had been used to cover the roof and how much it cost and who was supposed to pay for it, and then about some truck or other and the driver and so on and so forth. The endless, tedious stringing together of details that made no sense whatever to us was intended to show whether Uroš’s father and two accomplices had had enough free time to slip off to a nearby shack where the town’s Muslims were being held, force them to play humiliating sexual games—their favorite allegedly being “father and son”—and then beat them to death with their fetid-carp hands and toss their corpses into the ponds.

  All the defendants in the production sounded like amateur actors: all they were doing was reading out prepared statements from the computer screens in front of them. By speaking Robot rather than Human, they turned evil into a mechanical plot line, as mechanical as any other. None of the accused felt the slightest guilt. Of all the people who had destroyed the country—leaders, politicians, generals, soldiers, crooks, murderers, mafiosi, liars, thieves, villains, and volunteers—not a one was willing to come out and state, I am guilty. I had not heard the word “guilty” from them before, I did not hear it while sitting in the courtroom with Igor, nor do I ever expect to hear it. They were all just doing their duty. Do you feel guilty when you hammer a nail into a wall? No. Do you feel guilty when you hang a picture on that nail? No. Do you feel guilty when you beat a hundred people to death? No. Of course not.

  I wondered how things stood with the hundreds of thousands of nameless people without whose fervid support there could have been no war. Did they feel guilty? And what about that herd of foreign politicians, diplomats, envoys, and military personnel who had stampeded through the country? Not only had they been liberally paid; they had earned the epithet of savior, to say nothing of promotions in the UN or whatever institutional hierarchy they chanced to represent. (And Croatia and Bosnia weren’t exactly hardship posts: the hotels were quite serviceable, the food decent, the Adriatic close at hand.) Did they feel guilty? They too were only doing their duty. Just like the sniper on the hill who gunned down the woman in the streets of Sarajevo. Just like the foreign photographer who took the woman’s picture (though it never occurred to him to call an ambulance) and won a prize for the best war photo of the year. Even the poor woman writhing on the pavement, the blood gushing out of her, even she, little as she was aware of it, was doing her duty by her authentic representation of war. Who is guilty of the death of Selim’s father? Who of the death of our Uroš? Who is guilty of riveting Igor and me to our seats, hungering for absolution?

  There we were, Igor and I, watching television! It was the image of the perverted reality in which all of us, perverted as we were, were accomplices. In a way there was no difference between me, who sat there glued to the TV screen, and Uroš’s father, who sat glued to his screen reading out canned responses in a metallic voice. In a world thus mediated—and mediated so many times over—everyone was guilty. Crime was unreal. Everything was unreal. I felt it would take no more than a single click of the mouse to do away with the judges, the defendants, and us, the spectators. One blissful, conciliatory delete. Only one thing was real: pain. Pain was the speechless, useless, and only true witness. The pain that would surge through Selim’s veins and surface at his temples. The pain that pounded dully in me. And Igor. The deaf, dumb, and blind pain that could suddenly bowl us over, that signaled something was radically wrong.

  So there I sat facing the glass wall and musing…. What would happen, I wondered, if all that pain came together in the feeble mind of an Oskar Mazerath and he stood and opened his mouth and let out a scream? I pictured the glass wall shattering into thousands of tiny slivers, the computer screens, the lights, the eyeglasses, the porcelain caps on people’s teeth—all smashed to smithereens. I pictured that piercing, earsplitting voice shooting the gray potato head of Uroš’s father into the air, sending all the heads of all the blood-drenched murderers flying through the air, bursting their hardened eardrums and callous hearts….

  I glanced over at Igor. Feeling my glance on his face, he turned and gave me a questioning look. I took the earphones off his ears.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  CHAPTER 4

  Leaving the courtroom was like leaving a funeral at which one wasn’t quite sure who was being buried.

  “Where to?”

  “Home,” I said. “Amsterdam.”

  We got onto a tram. The visit to the Tribunal had been a bust: we had come to see instant punishment meted out to Uros’s father and were leaving empty-handed.

  “The Hague is no Nuremberg,” said Igor, guessing my thoughts.

  “That’s for sure.”

  “And the trial is nothing like Eichmann’s in Jerusalem.”

  “You’ve made your point,” I said with a snort.

  “Hey, what’s got into you? Why are you being so crotchety?”

  “Because you shouldn’t make light of institutions of justice.”

  “La-di-da! Will you listen to her! Institutions of justice. I didn’t know you were a romantic, Comrade.”

  “Well, I didn’t know you were a cynic. And where it least becomes you.”

  “Okay, okay. Pipe down.”

  “Look, those people are trying to clean up the shit we left behind. Because we don’t feel obliged to do it ourselves. Because it doesn’t even smell so bad to us. But they’re not into American movies, so we didn’t see Uroš’s father strung up the way we’d have liked.”

  “They may even set him free,” he said.

  “It’s worth it if they sentence anybody.”

  “All that exorbitant rigmarole for one crook?”

  “What do you care? It’s not coming out of your pocket, is it?”

  “Okay. Pipe down, pipe down,” he grumbled. “I’m not Karadži, am I? Or Mladi.”

  “Those people are trying to help us, and we look on from the sidelines, grinning like morons! You and me—we didn’t even have the patience to sit it out a few hours.”

  “But it’s a tribunal, not a church.”

  “It wouldn’t do us any harm to think of it as a church. And sit through the service for humility’s sake.”

  “Well, I wasn’t the one who wanted to leave.”

  I blushed. He was right. I felt like belting him one. He gave me a piercing glance. I could feel him reading my mind. People in the tram were looking in our direction.

  Just then the tram stopped and Igor pulled me out of my seat.

  “Come on. Let’s go.”

  “Why did you want to get off?” I protested when we were in the street.

  “First of all
, because you embarrassed me by talking so loud, but also because I want to introduce you to my girl.”

  “You’ve got a girl in The Hague?” I said like a student in a course of Croatian for foreigners.

  “What’s so strange about that?” he replied. “It’s no different from saying, ‘I’ve got a girl in Bjelovar.’”

  A sudden onslaught of fury lodged like a ball in my throat, and I made several attempts at a deep breath.

  “Don’t hyperventilate on me now,” he said playfully.

  I spat the invisible ball out of my mouth and was finally able to breathe.

  Igor stopped in front of the Mauritshuis.

  “Taking me to another museum?”

  “This is where my girl works,” he said.

  We climbed a flight of wooden stairs covered with a thick, red carpet. At the top of the stairs Igor turned to the left. On the wall of the first room, next to the door, hung Vermeer’s famous Girl with a Pearl Earring.

  “So that’s your girl!”

  “Yup,” he said in English. “That’s my chick.”

  I knew the picture—I’d been to the Mauritshuis—but I didn’t let on. It took my breath away. The original looks like a pale imitation of its numerous reproductions. The first time I saw the painting, I was surprised at how light the blue of the girl’s turban and the gold of her raiment were, much lighter than in the reproductions.

  “You look a bit like her,” he said cautiously.

  “I’m not angry anymore. And you’ve got your A. You don’t need to flatter me.”

  “You might be her elder sister. No, really. There’s something in the facial expression. It reminds me of the ‘human fish.’”

  “How can you say such a thing! Did you ever see the human fish?”

  “Only in a picture,” he confessed.

  “Well, I did. When I was a kid, all Yugoslav elementary schools took a day trip to the caves at Postojna.”

  “Well? What does it look like?”

  “Like something that lives in a cave. And it’s one of a kind.”

  “Now that’s what I call an exhaustive description.”

  “All right, then. Proteus anquinus. The human fish. Length: between ten and twenty-five centimeters. A kind of amphibian reject. A unique case of unsuccessful metamorphosis. It breathes through its gills mainly, but can use its skin, too. It is blind, and while it does have arms and legs of sorts they seemed to have been abandoned along the way: the legs are mere stumps and the arms end in hands with three fingers. It can apparently survive several years without food, and its life expectancy is unusually long—a hundred years or more. It has no pigment, and its skin is a pale, milky white, all but transparent. You can see the slightly bloody gills, the thinnest of veins running through the body and a minuscule heart. In short, it is a failed mutant, something between lizard, fish, and human embryo. The human fish was our Yugoslav miracle. We should have put it on our flag instead of the red star. It’s our E.T.”

  “Pretty impressive, Comrade,” he said in English.

  “Oh, there’s something else. I believe it reproduced in the larval stage, though I can’t be certain.”

  “Where did you pick all this up?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea. And one more thing…”

  “What?”

  “The human fish is a cannibal. For some reason there are times when it eats its young.”

  “Well, well,” said Igor, though his mind seemed elsewhere. “So I was right after all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My girl emerges from the cave a unique, endemic specimen.”

  “Tell me more about it.”

  “The thing I like most about her is the color of her skin. It’s the color of a stalactite.”

  “You mean stalagmite, don’t you?”

  “Get off my back!”

  “But I like the way you describe her. Go on.”

  “I have the feeling her skin is desiccated, yet moist to the touch. I like her expression of gentle, pliant helplessness. And the half-open mouth, the shiny, dry film over the lips and the drop of saliva at one side of them. The dewy quality of the gaze, the barely perceptible tear about to be shed. The fascinating duality of absence and constant presence in the eyes. Look at them: they seem to be following you. And the white collar cradling her slender neck. The sweet little face that can’t wait to fall into someone’s warm, protective hands—or under the guillotine…. There’s something unfinished about her. She’s like the human fish in that way, too. See? She has no eyebrows. My girl’s a beautiful larva waiting for metamorphosis.”

  Igor, who had been standing behind me, took me by the shoulders and moved me slowly up to the painting.

  “Now take a closer look at the earring in her ear,” he said.

  “Okay….”

  “And what do you see?”

  “Nothing. The pearl.”

  I could see our reflection in the glass protecting the picture. Igor’s hand remained on my shoulder.

  “Look closer.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “That’s what I thought. Wait a second. I’ve got a magnifying glass.”

  “You’ve got a magnifying glass?”

  “Yes, I happen to have a magnifying glass in my pocket.”

  “What else do you happen to have in your pocket?”

  “None of your business,” he said. “Just have a look at the painting through it.”

  “I see the pearl…”

  “And in it?”

  “A reflection.”

  “Boy, you really are blind! Look again.”

  “I don’t know. Given the genre, you might expect to see a representation of death.”

  “Haven’t got a clue, have you? The pearl contains Vermeer’s face!”

  He was jubilant.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “You mean you still don’t see it?”

  “No. Come on, admit it. You’re making the whole thing up.”

  “Isn’t it fantastic?”

  “Even supposing it’s there, couldn’t it be a convention of the time?”

  “The painter, her creator, in the pearl in her ear!”

  “There are those who say that the girl in the picture is Vermeer’s daughter, Maria, in which case it could be seen as the first symbolic representation of DNA.”

  “Which would make it even more fantastic! The old man becoming one with her. The first symbolic representation of piercing!”

  “But there are also those who say it’s the portrait of someone completely different or a character study. Rembrandt did turban portraits too. Right here in this museum you can see…”

  “The ones who say she’s his daughter are right.”

  “If so, your chick is wearing her old man in her ear.”

  “Tell me,” he said abruptly, “who do you wear in yours?”

  “I don’t know. Just as she doesn’t know she’s wearing the image of her creator and hypothetical father. But then neither do we. It isn’t everyone who goes through life with a magnifying glass at the ready.”

  “There’s Sherlock Holmes….”

  I could feel the weight of his hand on my shoulder and the warm, gentle flow of his breath on the nape of my neck. Suddenly I bristled. I carefully removed the hand and turned to face him.

  “And you?” I asked. “Where’s your tattoo?”

  “Haven’t got one,” he answered.

  “Uroš had one.”

  “Uroš?”

  “Well, a brand, the stigma of his father.”

  “That man’s a murderer, not a father.”

  “Remember the questionnaire I handed out on the first day of class?”

  “Yes, I remember that stupid questionnaire,” he said, stressing the word “stupid.”

  “Well, the answer Uroš gave to my question about what he expected to get out of the course was ‘To come to.’”

  “Sounds a little corny to me. Though Uroš wasn’t, ho
w shall I put it, the sharpest tool in the shed.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “He wasn’t particularly bright.”

  “That’s not a nice thing to say.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Uroš sent out plenty of SOS signals. We just didn’t notice. Or didn’t care to. It’s all my fault.”

  “And now your conscience is bothering you, right?”

  “Those children’s suitcases…. There’s a message in them, a message we haven’t deciphered. It’s right in front of us, there are all kinds of signals in the air, and we’re blind. It’s like your putative Vermeer image. Maybe the world would look different if we all walked around with magnifying glasses in our pockets. Or if we had the gift that fairy-tale characters are given, the gift of understanding plant and animal language, or even just human language, really understanding how people talk.”

  “Forget it, Comrade,” said Igor. “People don’t talk; people bullshit. But that’s enough for now. They’re closing. We’ve got to go. Can I offer you a hot chocolate?”

  Igor and I were the last to leave, but I managed to buy a souvenir in the museum bookshop: an oval glass paperweight. Under the glass was a reproduction of Igor’s girl.

  A light, wispy snow was falling as we came out of the museum. We crossed the small square and went into a cafeteria. We found a seat at the window and ordered our hot chocolates. Now that I had started in on Uroš’s death, I couldn’t stop.