“Students have a right to complain if they feel an instructor isn’t doing his job, and we are obliged to take their complaints seriously. The upshot of it is the students aren’t happy with the way you’ve been teaching your class.”
“That can’t be true,” I managed to say.
“I’m afraid it is.”
“What have they complained about?”
“They say they don’t do anything connected with the field. They say it’s a waste of time.”
“They say that?”
“They say you have no clear-cut program and your classes are chaotic. Not only do they sit around with you in cafés; you require them to.”
“Who says that?”
“I’m not at liberty to tell you,” Cees said evenly.
“You can’t tell me they’ve all complained!”
Cees made no response.
Ines tried to console me. She said I was blind; I refused to see that things had changed. People here in the Netherlands didn’t side with either camp, but they could see that “one and one make two,” couldn’t they? She said I was too bighearted and had got too close to the students. And “you know the old saying: sleep with a baby, wake up wet.” That “wake up wet” and the way she said it made me feel all but a physical revulsion for her. She told me that a proposal had been made to the Dutch Ministry of Education, a proposal Cees himself had drafted, to separate Croatian and Serbian at all Dutch universities, a move, after all, “long overdue, dictated as it was by a political reality of long standing.” If Cees’s proposal was accepted, then starting next autumn Amsterdam would teach Croatian language and literature and Groningen would teach Serbian, which made sense, since Groningen already had Bulgarian. Which meant there was a good chance I’d get a full-time job come September. No, they had no other candidate in mind, absolutely no one. She couldn’t do it because of the children and anyway there was a rule that man and wife could not work in the same department, especially if one was head of the department. Besides, she’d never quite put the finishing touches on her dissertation. She said I should think about myself; I wasn’t getting any younger, and I certainly wasn’t thinking of going back to Zagreb, was I? I’d never get a job there. I knew what “our people” were like. Once you leave, you’re gone forever. And they’re right in their way. “You fall between two stools, no matter how big a rump you’ve got.” Yes, rump. That was the word she used, and again I felt that revulsion for her. Cees was all for me, but Cees was not alone. The students were much, much more sensitive to “national lines” than I had realized. She was amazed I could be so naive, so blind to the way things were, to “political reality.” And then there was the matter of that poor Serb, the one who’d done himself in, yes, right, Uroš. Look at the dreadful things that dogged those kids even after they thought they’d escaped it all….
“We didn’t invite you here to give group therapy sessions,” Cees said.
“I don’t give group therapy sessions! You know how different their educational levels are. I had to base the class on something they could all relate to. They’ve had everything taken from them, don’t you see? How can I force Renaissance comedy on people who’ve escaped a living hell?”
“Haven’t you had everything taken from you?” she cackled. “Of course you have. And thank God Yugoslavia is no more!”
“You haven’t got the training for it, and you’re not being paid for it. We have experts for that kind of thing in this country. They’re called psychotherapists. Your job is to do what we asked you here to do. And what we’re paying you to do.”
“Listen to Cees, dear. He’s got your best interests at heart.”
“You gave them all inappropriately high grades. Everyone in the Department noticed it. You can’t tell me they were all so outstanding.”
“They were,” I mumbled.
“That’s just like you. Tanja of the big heart! She always was bighearted, Cees. I remember her once ripping off a brooch and giving it to me when I complimented her on it.”
I didn’t remember anything of the sort. I wondered whether she had made it up or I had forgotten it.
“Well, now — you see that bribing them with high grades doesn’t work. Your students insist on a curriculum. I think you’ve underestimated them. They’re serious about their studies, and I’m glad of it.”
“Listen to Cees, dear. He knows what he’s talking about.” She was being coy again. She might have been talking to a child.
“I wasn’t bribing them! How you can fail to see that they’re convalescents! We’re all convalescents! And I have no doubt that what I did with them is more important than any academic curriculum.” But even as I spoke, I knew I was speaking into a void.
Cees shrugged his shoulders.
“If they thought it was more important, why did they complain about the lack of a curriculum?”
As far as Cees was concerned, my position was nothing but a weak excuse for having failed to do my academic duty. Something welled up in my throat, and I burst into convulsive sobs. I felt betrayed on all sides: I had been betrayed by my students, and I had betrayed myself by bawling in the presence of Cees and Ines. I could not believe, I simply could not believe that one of my students had gone and tattled to Cees about what we had done in class. Or had there been more than one? Cees had used the plural. Could the whole class have gone to see him? I felt ashamed, abandoned, bitter, and furious. I no longer knew why I was crying, yet I couldn’t stop my tears. And I was so panicked that, strange as it may seem, instead of wanting to make the quickest exit I wanted nothing more than to curl up on their couch and stay there until morning. The thought of returning to my basement flat filled me with despair.
In a genuine desire to be of assistance Ines rushed to the phone to call a taxi, which she saw as an ambulance. (“I won’t have you traipsing from tram to tram in your condition!”) When the taxi came, Cees held out his hand.
“I hope I’ve made myself clear,” he said awkwardly. “See you next week at the Department.”
Ines offered me her cheek.
“Everything will be just fine,” she cooed. “Believe me, Tanjica. Just do as Cees says. You know we love you and want nothing but the best for you.”
As I was going out of the door, she thrust a small package into my hand.
“I’ve sliced you a piece of poppy-seed cake. You can have it for breakfast tomorrow morning.”
As the taxi pulled away, she threw me a kiss and disappeared into the house.
The next morning I noticed a long scratch on the back of my left hand. The skin was red, the scrape having gone quite deep. I was frightened at first, unaware of how it had got there. But then I vaguely remembered having sat for a while in my armchair and run my hand back and forth over the radiator ribs. I wondered how long it had taken to inflict such a wound on myself.
CHAPTER 6
I paused in front of the door. A mere two weeks earlier I would have rushed in, full of enthusiasm; now I seemed to lack the strength to cross the threshold. I took a deep breath, gripped my briefcase like a shield, and went in.
“Hey there, Comrade! How was Zagreb?”
“Bring us the chocolate you promised?”
“Glad you’re back. We’ve been looking forward to it.”
The loud greeting, clearly sincere, threw me off balance. I didn’t know what to say. I waited for it to die down, then distributed the syllabus I had made up over the weekend. It consisted of a list of the lectures I would be giving until the end of the semester. Each was accompanied by a date and a brief summary of the topic to be covered. Next I distributed a list of required reading, which came to approximately two hundred pages a week. I told them I would be sticking religiously to the schedule and they would be expected to have read the texts by the time I lectured on them. I announced that there would be two papers and a final oral examination. I said I would no longer tolerate poor attendance: a poor attendance record would be reflected in the final grade.