“Tell me, has it occurred to you that all that time you may have been torturing us? Has it occurred to you that the students you forced to remember were yearning to forget? That they made up memories to indulge you the way the Papuans made up cannibalistic myths to indulge the anthropologists? Your students aren’t like you. They love this country. Flat, wet, nondescript as it is, Holland has one unique feature: it’s a country of forgetting, a country without pain. People turn into amphibians here. Of their own accord. They turn the color of sand; they blend in and die out. Like fucking amphibians. That’s all they care about: dying out. The Dutch lowlands are one big blotter: it sucks up everything — memories, pain, all that crap….”
Igor paused. He seemed tired. He took down the šenoa again from the shelf and leafed through it absentmindedly.
Suddenly I felt tears running down my cheeks. I couldn’t make out what had caused them. Humiliation? Self-pity? The tragic nature of the situation I found myself in? Or its comic nature? Christ! I thought. I feel closer to this man at this moment than I’ve felt to anyone in my life, and I have no way of letting him know. And I wasn’t referring to the fact that my lips were sealed with tape; they would have been just as sealed without it.
Igor must have read my mind. Turning to face me, he read out the following passage: “‘The barometer of your heart is falling, and your eyes are brimming with tears.’”
I was on the other side. We were separated by an invisible wall of ice. Could he also tell that I had only one desire at that point, namely, to knock my head against that wall? I needed help. There was something wrong with my heart, but I was unable to determine how serious it was. I desperately needed a refuge, a warm lap to curl up in, somewhere to wait for the pain to pass, somewhere to come to, to return to myself.
“Pray tell, Professor,” he said, theatrically tossing the book to the floor, “what am I to do with you? A minor literature like ours doesn’t rate an opposition party. No, no, don’t worry. I’m just sorry for you. You’re a teacher of minor literatures, small literatures, and even they have shrunken as of late. But you go on dragging them behind you wherever you go. Time is passing, it’s too late to change fields, you can’t very well toss them out, can you? So what do you do? You save what you can. It’s all gone to hell, boys and girls, but let’s pick up the pieces, let’s go through the rubble and play archaeology.
“Have you given any thought to what went to hell? Piles of books in Croatian and Serbian, in Slovenian and Macedonian, in languages nobody needs and about what? Teaching the ‘people’, the ‘folk’ to read. Real literature doesn’t teach people to read; it assumes they can read. The year Madame Bovary came out, Zagreb was a village of 16,675 inhabitants. Sixteen thousand six hundred and seventy-five! By the time our local assholes picked up their pens, all the European giants — Goethe, Stendhal, Balzac, Gogol, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Maupassant — were in place. The year Crime and Punishment came out, eighty percent of Croatians were illiterate.
“So get real, Comrade. Have a look around you. Your classroom is empty. Your students have passed you by. They’ve gone out into the world — they’ve got their own value systems; they read all kinds of languages (if they read, that is, and if reading means anything anymore) — while you’re still back in the age that knew “no more glorious task than spreading light, culture, and knowledge among the people.” The heart beating in your breast is the heart that beat in šenoa’s village schoolmistress Branka over a hundred years ago. What else do you know? You haven’t even learned fucking Dutch! Just that puts you a giant step behind your students.
“And that memory game you forced on us! In a few years all that nostalgia crap is going to be a big moneymaker. The Slovenes were the first to cash in on it: they’ve got a CD with Tito’s speeches on the market. Mark my words. Yugonostalgia will be coming out of our ears. And if you want to know what I remember most about our former homeland, what I remember is that the local motherfuckers wanted to put me in uniform and pack me off to war! To safeguard the achievements of their fucking country. What fucking country? The whole kit and caboodle was mine. You know the song: ‘From Vardar in the South to the Triglav in the North…’”
Igor was falling to pieces — contradicting himself and gasping for breath — but so was I, and I saw no way of putting myself back together.
“I had no one to stand up for me. Nobody. I’d be a corpse today if I hadn’t escaped. You didn’t stand up for me, either. But we didn’t need your fucking grades. Or your fucking literature for that matter. What we needed was a reasonable human being to put things in place. At first you seemed on the right track, you hemmed and hawed and wrung your hands. But you capitulated soon enough. You stopped halfway. Your course was about a culture that had totally compromised itself, and you neglected to mention that fact. Besides, you talked exclusively about the past: when you lectured on Andri
, you neglected to mention that the current cohort of culture butchers have chopped him in three and there’s now a Croatian and a Bosnian and a Serbian Andri when you lectured on literary history, you neglected to mention that the Sarajevo University Library was bombed out of existence and that even now books are being tossed into bonfires and dumps. There you have the real literary history of the Yugonation. Arson. You didn’t lecture on the statistics and topography of destruction. No, you stuck to your syllabus. You didn’t stand up for what you believed, not even here, where you are free to say what you please. You totally discredited yourself.
“At first, like I said, you seemed to get it. You said we were all sick and you were sick, too. But then you got scared and decided to save your skin. Like the only thing that mattered was your field, because that’s what you were paid to teach. But what a miserable little field it is and how full of shit. Still, you thought if you were a good girl they’d give you the job for good and you’d be on cloud nine. How wrong you were. You hadn’t counted on Draaisma, another pitiful character. But he’s got one advantage over you: he’s Dutch, he’s defending his home turf, and he’s worked like hell to get it. He’s as superfluous as you and he knows it, but unlike you, he’s got power. So he gave the job to people he has control over — his wife — or can outsmart — Laki.
“I pity you, Comrade. Grab the first Da
er you can get your hands on. Because this country, it’s okay. It won’t let you down. And one more thing. You’re a lucky bitch. You’re lucky I’m telling you all this. Because one of three things happens when you’ve been through what all of us have been through: you become a better person, you become a worse person, or, like Uroš, you put a bullet through your brain.”
Igor broke off abruptly, and the room filled with a balmlike silence. His eyes were still on me.
“Well, I’ll be damned! You’re enjoying all this! You’re a wild little beastie, you are.” He ran a finger over my features, as if penning a message: “My sweet little Croatian teacher, sweet little Serbian teacher, sweet little Bosnian teacher….”
I held my breath.
“What am I to do with you, Teacher? Tell me. You’ve withdrawn. You’re hiding. You’re a tortoise, under your shell. No one can get to you. You’re peering out of an invisible burka.”
Again he broke off. He put his hand in his pocket and took out a razor blade. I froze. He bent over me, grabbed my right hand, pressed it palm down into the chair arm, and made a slow, careful incision in the wrist. It was short and shallow. Then he made a second and a third.