I felt no pain, but tears streamed down my cheeks. Through the tears I could see thin spurts of blood running along my hand. The bloody slits in my wrist looked like a natural bracelet.
“Something to remember me by. Your watch on the left wrist and on the right — Igor, the teacher’s pet…. Well, I’ll be off. And by the way, the number of the police is one one two.”
He picked up his backpack from the floor and headed for the door. But then he turned back and with a quick flick of the wrist pulled the tape off my mouth. I yelped.
“Shhh!” he said soothingly, placing his hand on my lips. Then he took his hand away, bent down, and gave me a delicate, childlike kiss, his lips gathering up my tears on the way. “You have another chance now to say your piece, Professor.”
I stubbornly held my tongue.
Looking me straight in the eye, he said in a calm voice that was nearly a whisper, “What if I was the asshole who went and complained to Draaisma? I could have been. I hated your self-possession, your self-righteous feeling of indignation, your simulated uncertainties, your halfhearted participation in our lives. Yes, it could easily have been me. Because I too have turned terminator. The Schwarzenegger jaw — we all have it. Murderers, crooks, innocents, victims, survivors, refugees, the old folks at home and the new folks here — we’ve changed. The lot of us. It’s the war that did it, that fucked us up. Nobody comes out of a war unscathed. Nobody who’s sane. And you looked so shiny and bright. Like a porcelain teacup. Of course I wanted to break you, smash you, knock something out of you. A shred of sympathy, a flicker of compassion, anything….”
Igor fixed me with his dark, slightly crossed eyes as if gauging my soul. I held my tongue.
After he had left and shut the door behind him, the room filled with a new, heavy silence. For a while I sat there numb, straining my ears; then suddenly I convulsed and spit out an invisible bullet, the one I’d been clenching between my teeth since it all began. And from my throat came a mighty scream, the scream Igor must have been trying to coax out of me the whole time. But by then he was too far off to hear it.
CHAPTER 2
After Igor’s departure an image of my first year in school flashed through my mind. The way our teacher punished pupils was not by standing them in the corner but by standing them behind the blackboard, blackboards resting as they did at the time on wooden stands. “Behind the blackboard” was thus a symbolic space of shame and humiliation.
In the depths of the image stood a girl the teacher had sent behind the blackboard. All we could see of her were her legs in white knee-socks and feet in black patent leather shoes. We would have completely forgotten about her had we not suddenly heard a faint sound that grew louder as we stopped talking and held our breaths: a thin stream of urine was trickling onto the wooden floor. We sat and stared at the golden puddle growing under her legs, then making its way along the floor toward our desks.
Enlarged and in slow motion the scene now played itself out before my eyes. The girl’s body was still hidden by the blackboard; all I could see was the stream of urine splashing into myriad sparkling droplets. And then I realized I was urinating. I could feel the warm liquid trickling down my legs. I sat there for a while, all but comatose, listening to my heart beat. I held my breath and followed its rhythm. It might have belonged to a bird about to take wing.
Then more images came, slow, languid images from far, far off. The first to float to the surface was a familiar one, a small black-and-white picture from Mother’s album. I must have been four or five when it was taken. I am standing on a barren piece of land looking straight at the camera. It is winter, but there is no snow. I am wearing a severe-looking double-breasted tweed overcoat, its collar and flaps trimmed with velveteen. One hand is in a pocket (the flap is sticking up a little), the other at my side. My face shows the trace of a smile. There is nothing behind me. There is nothing to either side. I am the only thing in the picture. I am a small human figure that has been catapulted into a clearing somewhere. As familiar as I am with the picture, I was struck for the first time by how clearly and unequivocally alone I am in it.
A sudden chill drew me out of my comatose state, and I pushed my way over to the phone. But once there I fell apart again and froze for a while. Then I somehow managed to get the receiver off the phone, dial 112 and grunt my address into the mouthpiece. When a policeman appeared at the door a while later and saw me handcuffed to the chair, saw the three stripes of congealed blood on my right wrist, and smelled the urine, I read something I could identify with in his glance. Something came together with something at that moment, and I finally made the connection: the policeman was observing me with the look I had used to observe the girl in the clearing.
Igor was right. I won’t forget him. Nor will he forget me; of that I am certain. Because I could have kept his name from the policeman, but I didn’t. What is more, I accused him of rape, and for breaking and entering and rape he would, I presume, get several years and a criminal record that would hound him the rest of his life. If I hadn’t done it, he wouldn’t have remembered me. I did it so he would. I had sown my seed. I was a teacher, wasn’t I?
There is no such thing as mercy, no such thing as compassion; there is only forgetting; there is only humiliation and the pain of endless memory. That is the lesson we brought with us from the country we came from, and it is a lesson we have not forgotten. Screaming and shouting are like Pavlov’s bell to us; we are deaf to everything else. Catching the scent of terror is child’s play to us; nothing tickles our nostrils more.
The natural bracelet of the three small incisions on my right wrist and the acrid odor of urine were the invisible handcuffs that would bind us, me and my pupil. I saw my future self making a newly acquired gesture, a kind of tic I would long be unable to shake off. It consisted of bringing the mouth down to the wrist, slowly pressing the lips to the three thin stripes and kissing them — Igor’s stamp, Igor’s brand — then tracing them with the tip of the tongue, testing whether they were still there, and finally raising the wrist slowly and holding it up to the light so that the stripes, now moist with saliva, glistened like mother-of-pearl.
PART 5
CHAPTER 1
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
I was plagued by nightmares at the beginning of the war and again when Goran and I left Zagreb. They had the same structure and were connected with a house. The house always had two sides to it: a front and a back. The front I knew; the back I came to know as I dreamed. The back was a false bottom, leaping out at me like a jack-in-the-box and thumbing its nose. In the dream I would come across a door, a set of stairs, or a passageway that would lead me to a parallel part of the house whose existence I had never suspected, or else I would discover that the house was partly floating, like the proverbial castles in air. I would move a shelf away from a wall and find a large hole with a gale of a wind rushing through it or no wall at all, and I looked out to see the house dangling on a thin, frayed wire.