“What’s going on here?” Meliha called out, laughing. “New regime in power?”
I chose to ignore the remark.
“How can we read all these books if the library’s got only one copy of each?” Mario protested as his eyes ran down the reading list.
“You’ll have to share them among yourselves or photocopy them,” I said. I’d spent a good part of the weekend in the departmental library photocopying the first books on the list myself.
“Has the library even got all the books on the reading list?” Selim asked.
“All the books on the reading list are in the library. Otherwise I wouldn’t have included them.”
I gave a copy of the syllabus to Cees as well.
“Two hundred pages a week? Isn’t that overdoing it a bit?”
“Not at all. American students read as many as four hundred a week. Besides, that’s what you asked for, isn’t it?” The fact about the American students, which I’d read somewhere, seemed to have the desired effect. Cees’s only answer was a shrug of the shoulders.
The lectures were devoted to a brief comparative survey of the histories of Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, and Macedonian literature, which amounted to a strenuous jog through a field full of facts, names and dates, though I’d left some time at the end of the semester for a thematic analysis of several Croatian novels.
The disbelief stuck to their faces for a while. They tried to put my behavior down to a whim and forgave me, hoping the whim was only temporary and the next time things would go back to how they had been. For my part I kept studying their faces, searching for the one who had denounced me. At times I thought it might be Meliha, then Nevena, or Igor, or Boban…I went through hell trying to work out if it was only one of them or if two had worked together. I pictured Meliha and Igor delivering regular reports on class activities to Cees. Or Selim rushing to Cees to tell him the crazy things going on, the resurrection of a country that its own citizens had destroyed in the name of historical necessity. Though could it have been Johanneke? Or Ana?
I would leave immediately after the lecture was over. I never went to my office. I did everything I could to discourage contact. Gradually the disbelief on their faces turned to puzzlement and finally to disappointment. Yet they would still come up after class, waiting for me to invite them for coffee. Meliha tried once, then Nevena.
“Hey, Comrade. You up for a kopje koffie? Our treat.”
“Thanks, but I’m very busy at the moment,” I said both times.
I could see them absorbed in conversation in the café opposite the Department. A joint meeting of the chiefs of staff. I knew they were talking about me. “The bitch. Luci
has turned into a real bitch.” I imagined one of them, the informant, sitting there tight-lipped and frowning. I tried to guess who would be first to stop coming to class. Igor? Ante? Nevena?
Only once did I lose a grip on myself. I had required them to memorize Ujevi’s “Everyday Lament.” I had asked them to be able to recite it from beginning to end and from end to beginning. It was a silly trick I’d picked up from a much-hated professor of Croatian poetry who delighted in torturing us with like assignments. I remember swearing to myself at the time that I would never inflict anything like that on my future students.
Nevena refused to learn the poem in either direction. I asked her to read it aloud. She made an awful muddle of it. I then asked her to read it backward. She just stood there, at a loss. It was a painful, humiliating scene. Finally Igor came to the rescue by standing and reeling it off beautifully.
“Thank you, Igor,” I said. “And, Nevena, you may come back once you’ve mastered the poem.”
Nevena packed up her things and, hissing “Bitch!” through her teeth, stomped out of the classroom. I think I heard her burst into tears as she slammed the door behind her. Sorry as I felt for her, it was too late. I had no idea how to escape the role I had assigned myself.
I could sense their dissatisfaction grow. I could sense it every time I entered the classroom, sense it almost physically, like a change in the temperature. At times it seemed to fill the room, fill it so full that I was afraid it would shatter the windows. Yet they said not a word. I kept wondering when they would reach the breaking point and rebel or at least whether any of them would finally confront me and ask why I was behaving as I was. But they said not a word. Only Igor appeared unaffected by it all. He looked straight at me, as if seeing into my soul, and would occasionally put on his earphones, which he never removed from around his neck.
“Turn off your Walkman, Igor. This is a classroom, not a rock concert.”
“I don’t use a Walkman at rock concerts.”
“How can you hear what I’m saying when you…”
“Don’t worry. I hear you better with the Walkman on.”
“We’ll see about that,” I said. “At the exam.”
It was terribly trying. I kept mouthing things that weren’t my own and hated myself for it. If I persevered, it was because I couldn’t rid myself of the thought that one of them had gone to Cees and told him everything that had gone on during the first semester.
And yet the routine of the new regime gradually wore down my animosity until at one point I began taking a certain pleasure in giving “real” lectures. The students reacted accordingly. Meliha assumed the role of the diligent student, Igor never missed a class, Ana took down everything I said, and Johanneke showed such enthusiasm that for a while I suspected her of being the one who had denounced me to Cees. But by then the class had shrunk to them and only them: Nevena never returned, and one by one Mario, Selim, Boban, and Darko stopped coming.
We got through the historical survey without much trouble. Our race through the periods and schools, the authors and titles had a kind of anesthetic effect. I left the theme of “return” for the end. None of them knew whether they wanted to remain or return, but they all felt they were living here “only temporarily” and they concentrated their energy on getting their “papers.” Once they had their papers, they thought, they would be able to make up their minds. The “motherland” still glittered somewhere inside them as a possible Exit sign.
So here I was, packing my students’ refugee suitcases again. It was the same thing I’d done during the first semester with one difference: this time the suitcase contained no contraband. I was familiarizing them with their own literary family, their forebears. The examples I selected amounted to a kind of biography of fictional heroes. Often the narrative began in the third person and ended in the first in the form of the protagonist’s diary or letters to a friend. And although the protagonists were “homegrown,” they all — especially their Croatian variants — bore a distinct family resemblance to young Werther and Childe Harold, to say nothing of the Russian characters dubbed “superfluous men” by the critics, characters like Griboedov’s Chatsky, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Lermontov’s Pechorin, Turgenev’s Rudin and Lavretsky and Kirsanov and Bazarov, Goncharov’s Oblomov, Chekhov’s Ivanov, and Olesha’s Kavalerov, all of whom crawled around the other Slavic literatures like so many crabs. So much for the male line. The female line consisted principally of three types: the young and beautiful patriot, whom the hero generally abandons; the femme fatale, who taunts the hero but likewise inspires him; and the silent martyr, who faithfully accompanies the hero to the end of his days.