The moment I said it, I hated myself more than I ever had in my life.
He shrugged, picked up his backpack, and made for the door. But then he turned and said, “Just a footnote, Professor. In literature it’s always the men who go out into the world. Go out, come back, and shed their ‘prodigal tears.’ Where are the women?”
I didn’t respond. I squinted in his direction, deaf and dumb. I could barely make out his features. I dug my stumps into the ground and turned the color of my surroundings. I felt the Proteus anguinus, the human fish that had got stuck in the process of metamorphosis, stirring somewhere inside me: gills breathing, blood flowing through the thinnest of veins, a minuscule heart beating all but inaudibly. Help me, beat the heart. Touch me and I shall turn into a beautiful maiden; leave me and I shall be prisoner of my darkness forever.
Once Igor had left, I settled down to grading the students. I decided to pass Nevena, Selim, Mario, Darko, Boban, and Amra, and gave Meliha, Johanneke, and Ana A’s. But what to do with Igor?
I don’t know why I did what I did. I was like Brlic-Mazuranic, who didn’t know why she had tampered with a genre that had proved its worth many times over. Something had gone wrong, something inside her; something had prevented her from ending that tale in the prescribed manner, the manner in which she had effortlessly ended so many others. All I know is that I was unable to control the impulse to turn my tale in the wrong direction, and when after a long period of vacillation I finally gave him an F — together with a brief, guileful explanation for it — I felt physical revulsion combined with a feeling of shame and shame combined with a feeling of relief.
Now all I had to do was take the grades to Anneke, give her back my office key, and see Cees. I looked around the room. I was in a clearing. There was a wasteland behind me and nothing in front of me but the key in the envelope at the bottom of my bag.
But then I opened the desk drawer to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything, and saw a piece of paper folded in two. It was an anonymous note that had been placed in my box in the departmental office a few months earlier. I had dropped it into the drawer and completely forgotten about it, and I now read it as if I’d never seen it before.
Yugobitch
Fuck you. When I think of the people who died trying to brake out of the Commie shithouse, & you go spreading that brotherhood & unity shit. No more of your Yugoslavia crap, you hear?! Death to the people & freedom to Fashism!
Captain Leši
P.S. Up yours.
Not a single word in the note gave away its author’s identity as a Serb, Croat, or Bosnian. It would have thwarted the most assiduous linguistic inspector. I realized that with all the practice I’d accumulated lately I’d willy-nilly become an expert in the field of hate texts. And yet how hard it would be to elucidate the contents of the text to, say, a Dutchman. How could I convey the use of assonance in the inventive coinage Jugokuja, “Yugobitch,” or the resonance of the stock phrase “brotherhood and unity”? How could I explain what lay behind the slogan “Death to the people and freedom to Fascism!” or the reference to the fictional Yugoslav hero from the early fifties, Captain Leši?
The anonymous note was a leftover piece of shrapnel. But even though it had landed in my drawer, I had no interest in discovering where it had come from. I picked up a red (yes, red) felt pen and corrected the spelling mistakes with a kind of affectionate apathy. Then I tore the sheet of paper into tiny bits and threw it into the air like so much confetti. The war was over.
CHAPTER 9
I walked slowly down the five flights of stairs and who should I run into on the ground floor but Laki, Laki the Linguist from Zagreb, who had attended a few classes during the first semester only to disappear. He paused for a moment, as if in doubt as to how to proceed, then screwed up his eyes, looked away from me, and said in a lazy drawl, “So how are we doing, Mrs. Luci
?”
“I’m fine, thank you. And you?”
“Fair to middling. Still hanging around the Department, as you can see.”
“Right. Otherwise we wouldn’t have run into each other.”
“And starting September I’m going to be here every day.”
“Really?”
“They’re giving me an office. So I can finish up my dictionary.”
“Good for you.”
“Not bad, and things will be even better once the dictionary comes out.”
“I’m sure they will.”
“We could never have dreamed of this when the Commies were in power.”
“That’s for sure,” I said, the irony in my voice clearly going over Laki’s head.
“I’ve got some funding from the Ministry of Tourism in Croatia. It’s in their interest, after all. It’ll help the Dutch tourist trade. I’ve managed to squeeze something out of the Ministry of Culture, too. And the Department here is doing its bit with the office. No great shakes, of course, but they may also let me teach a few drill sections.”
“Sounds great.”
“Not bad…. By the way, you going home for the summer?” He used the word “home” as a neutral substitute for the country that, while it was still in existence, the Gastarbeiter had all called Yuga and pronounced with extra-long vowels.
“I may.”
“Well, I can’t wait. My parents have this great house on Hvar. I spend two months there every year.”
“Yes, well…. See you.”
“Best of luck, Mrs. Luci,” he said.
The screwed-up eyes that refused to hold your glance for more than an instant, the anti-Communist stance so fashionable after the changing of the guard (though Laki had had nothing to do with Communism one way or the other), the mishmash of “now” urban speech, dialect, and literary affection (it was as if grandfather and grandson were speaking out of the same mouth), the ever so forced “Mrs. Luci”—it was all vaguely nauseating, like a premonition of something unpleasant.
Instead of going out, I went back upstairs and knocked on Cees’s door. He was alone.
“Come in, Tanja. Good to see you. I’ve been meaning to track you down.”
Neither he nor Ines had made any attempt to “track me down” since I’d been to their place that evening. In fact, I had phoned them once or twice and been treated to Ines’s warm words about how busy they were and had no time for anything and I’d been constantly on their minds and they’d been hearing such good things about me from my students and we’d eventually get together and “have a good chat.” She made the “good chat” sound almost physical.
Now Cees explained that despite the excellent reports he’d had about my class that semester (did he mean “reports” in the literal sense or was it just a polite phrase?), he would be unable to hire me back come September, because he’d been unable to find the necessary funding. The Dutch Ministry of Education had been cutting the budget for higher education for the past few years now, and until he could come up with funds for a position in Croatian language and literature — and he was doing everything in his power to do so — Ines would have to take over on a volunteer basis. It was a real sacrifice on her part, but it was the only way of keeping the program alive. The Department was in trouble: even Russian, its bread and butter, was losing enrollment. He couldn’t ask me to work for nothing. No, he wouldn’t dream of it, knowing the situation I was in; he wouldn’t want to exploit me. I’d find something, he was certain. After all, I had a doctorate, I had teaching experience and “a big heart.” And what was most important, Slavs are natural-born teachers, aren’t they? Ines had sent her regards and was sorry she hadn’t been able to see me. She’d just left for Kor