在英国作为留学生的期间，我逐渐意识到，一种语言即使不曾消失，也可能慢慢失去对一个人的掌控。我能够听懂课堂讲授、写电子邮件，也能从容地参加一顿饭局。但我失去的，是那种能够以真实分量表达痛苦、怨愤与混杂着困惑的愤怒的语言。这些情绪必须先被缩短、变得礼貌，才能从我口中说出来。我的第一语言依然属于我，只是在一段时间里，它不再是我日常生活中使用的语言。那种痛苦是真实的，但也有其限度。一次假期就足以让我重新穿上那件语言的外衣，再次感到自己完整地存在于一个句子之中。
跨文化传播学为这一阶段的经历提供了一个名称。卡尔维罗·奥伯格（Kalervo Oberg）将其称为“文化冲击”：一个身处异地的人，在陌生的文化信号之间生活所承受的压力，而随着时间推移，他或许能够逐渐适应。伊娃·霍夫曼（Eva Hoffman）回忆自己进入英语世界的经历，描述了这种压力在内心深处的表现。一个词即使使用正确，也仍然可能无法触及自我最初形成的那一层。我所感受到的，正是这种语言剥夺，只不过它的程度较轻，而且可以逆转。在阅读《痛苦部》（The Ministry of Pain）的整个过程中，我始终记得自己终究能够回去，因此也害怕将自己的经历与书中的故事进行比较。我失去的，只是一两年里无法流畅地做回自己的能力。而乌格雷西奇笔下的叙述者，失去的却是对苦难终将过去、生活终有后来这一想法的任何清晰认知。
坦娅·卢契奇（Tanja Lucić）从萨格勒布来到阿姆斯特丹。她向一群和自己一样逃离故土的学生讲授一个已经不复存在的国家的文学。学生们称她为“同志”，在克罗地亚语 drugarice 一词的最后一个元音上拖长声音。这门课程在教学计划中被列为文学概论，却逐渐变成了一场集体尝试，试图让一颗已经停止跳动的心重新跳起来。最安全的切入点是童年：一个红、白、蓝三色的塑料袋，一块蛋糕，一句小学时学过的话。乌格雷西奇毫不含糊地指出，这间教室里使用的语言已经灭绝。局外人能够听见这些词语，却只有那些失去过它所承载的生活的人，才能在彼此构成的圈子里重新唤醒那段生活。
斯图亚特·霍尔（Stuart Hall）将文化身份描述为两种运动，而这间教室就存在于两者之间。其中一种是继承：一个群体通过共同记忆重新凝聚在一起。这场研讨课试图实践的，正是这种运动。另一种则是断裂：身份是战争与流离失所塑造出来的结果，它并非一种被储存起来、等待取用的东西，而是在不断变化中生成的、尚未完成的存在。南斯拉夫的解体已经迫使人们经历了第二种运动。学生们仍然称之为“我们的语言”的语言，已经被划分为克罗地亚语、塞尔维亚语和波斯尼亚语，每一种都被要求独立代表一个民族。他们共同拥有的过去，只能在教室里以一种被新的政治秩序打碎、重新命名的事物的形式继续存在。
命名，是这本书最难被当作一个普通案例来分析的地方。玛丽·简·科利尔（Mary Jane Collier）区分了我们主动认领的身份与他人强加给我们的身份。在教室里，“我们的人”和“同志”都是主动表达身份认同的方式。而在教室之外，他人对身份的界定总是先一步到来。由于坦娅的丈夫戈兰是塞尔维亚人，他们在萨格勒布的公寓被克罗地亚军队征用。按照那套逻辑，她便成了“那个塞尔维亚婊子”。一名来自萨格勒布的学生拒绝称她为“同志”，而改称她为“夫人”，因为在他看来，旧时的称呼带有南斯拉夫和共产主义的色彩，因此也意味着反克罗地亚。后来，她所在的荷兰大学系主任起草了一份提案，建议荷兰大学将克罗地亚语与塞尔维亚语分开教授，而这一改变被称为早就应该实施的措施。接纳她的国家，也参与完成了这场切割。许多跨文化教学将文化接触设想为不同文化之间的一次相遇：这些文化足够稳定，因此能够被比较、被解读，并最终实现沟通与连接。但在这部小说里，相遇的过程仍在继续拆解原本存在的联系。
这种伤害还有实际的一面，而皮埃尔·布迪厄（Pierre Bourdieu）关于“语言市场”的论述，恰好为其提供了清晰的解释。一种语言的价值，取决于制度愿意承认它多少。在阿姆斯特丹，学生们的语言几乎无法换取任何实际价值。学期刚开始时，坦娅要求学生用英语写简短的自传。她是出于善意。她担心，如果让他们使用“我们的语言”，他们会立刻陷入自我剖白，因此希望把这件事暂时推迟。我理解这种善意。这也是我在国外处理自己的愤怒时所做的事：我将愤怒转移到一种可以提交、不会引发场面的语言之中。霍华德·贾尔斯（Howard Giles）会将这项英语写作练习称为“趋同”：向大学认可的正统语言靠拢。而后来重新使用 drugarice，以及重新分享彼此才懂的笑话，则属于“趋异”：这个群体通过彼此靠近，抵御一座根本不需要他们的语言的城市。两种选择都有其合理之处。趋同将痛苦转化为可以提交的东西；趋异则让痛苦变得私密而亲近。然而，学期终究会结束，那间教室也终将不复存在。
我回家了。坦娅的回乡之行却只持续了七天。她没有办成新的身份证，也没有见到律师。飞机离开地面时，她感受到的是解脱。在机场，她买了一盒克拉什（Kraš）巧克力，包装盒仿照新版克罗地亚护照设计，上面还印着国徽。故乡已经变成了一件可以送给别人的物品。文化冲击理论描绘了一条曲线：人从危机出发，最终重新回到某种可以继续生活的状态。这是因为旅行者原本的文化仍然存在，他可以重新融入其中，或者重新与之建立联系。坦娅的曲线却无处抵达。在她离开的那些年里，她原本所属的文化也已经被废除了。
教室是这本书中最动人的部分，也是我最不敢完全相信的部分。在那些冷漠的墙壁之间，学生们试图为一种已经消逝的生活进行心肺复苏。有些记忆属于他们自己，有些来自父母，还有一些是他们编造出来的。叙述者说，每一个细节都仍然包含着一小块真实，但完整的经验却无法传递给圈子之外的任何人。朱莉娅·克里斯蒂娃（Julia Kristeva）笔下的陌生人也处于类似的隔绝状态：语言与身体深处的夜间记忆分离，也与童年时期那些最初以恐惧和味觉形式出现的词语分离。每周有几个小时，这门课都试图重建那段夜晚的一小部分，但这份重建只属于他们自己。
斯维特兰娜·博伊姆（Svetlana Boym）提出的两种怀旧，帮助我解释为什么这间教室既令人感到关怀，又暗藏风险。“修复型怀旧”希望重建失去的家园，修补缺失的过去，并最终将其封存为一个完整的故事。“反思型怀旧”则停留在渴望本身，保持着反讽与未完成的状态，拒绝接受一个圆满回归所带来的安慰。坦娅布置的作业，最初带有第二种怀旧的意味。她知道，这个国家不可能重新拼合起来。然而，这场仪式却不断向第一种怀旧倾斜：按压胸口，拿出旧物，仿佛那种已经灭绝的语言仍然拥有一个民族。后来，伊戈尔带着从学生们工作场所拿来的手铐来到她的公寓，他将这种方法始终未能明说的东西直接说了出来。他把荷兰低地称为一块吸墨纸，吸收记忆与痛苦；那是一个遗忘之国，人们在其中学会逐渐淡出。甚至连书名，也参与了将痛苦转译成某种近乎诙谐之物的过程。《痛苦部》是学生们给一家为性用品商店供货的作坊取的名字，这个名称借自海牙一家施虐与受虐主题俱乐部。灾难以笑话、道具和隐喻的形式进入故事。这本身已经是一种美化，而且完成得极其巧妙。
爱德华·萨义德（Edward Said）写道，流亡在思想上具有一种奇异的吸引力，但亲身经历却令人痛苦：它在人与故土之间、在自我与真正的家园之间，制造了一道无法愈合的裂缝。文学常常乐于将这道裂缝描绘成一种深度。乌格雷西奇写出的东西更加克制，而对我而言，也更加难以释怀。她赋予坦娅的命运，本身已经是一种宽恕与怜悯，而她又将这种怜悯写得如此动人。
这种怜悯是真实的，我们不必为承认它而感到难为情。坦娅活着逃了出来。她曾经拥有一间教室。她免于死亡、征兵，以及那些永远无法被编入教学大纲的苦难。书前的一则说明又增添了一层距离：叙述者及其故事都是虚构的，甚至连阿姆斯特丹也并非完全真实。战争中最残酷的部分，大多留在场景之外。雨水、反讽与教室则占据了前景。我理解这种怜悯，却也感到它对我愿意称之为“结局”的东西施加了压力。
在尾声中，这种压力变得明确起来。在异国他乡，坦娅发现自己的母语变成了口吃、诅咒，或者一串再也无法描绘任何事物的胡言乱语。她被荷兰语包围，靠英语勉强应付生活，却感觉自己仿佛正在从头学习母语。一个词出现了，它所承载的实质却没有随之而来。一种实质向她逼近，而语言却失去了表达它的能力。这正是雅克·德里达（Jacques Derrida）用一句话概括的处境：“我只有一种语言，而它并不属于我。”她报名参加荷兰语课程，和其他同学一样，过度使用 ik（“我”）。Ik ben Tanja. Ik kom uit vormalige Joegoslavië.（“我是坦娅。我来自前南斯拉夫。”）她说，至少此刻，ik 并没有让她承担任何承诺。这是一场捉迷藏。她躲在众目睽睽之下，藏在一个简短而坚硬的词后面。
金永云（Young Yun Kim）将适应描述为一个从压力走向成长的过程：旧有习惯逐渐消退，新的习惯逐渐形成，最终出现一个跨文化的人。“生活一直待我不薄”，正是在这样的语境中说出的。坦娅已经学会不再拉上窗帘，并试图将暴露在他人目光之下视为一种美德。她每周有四天照看一对美国夫妇的孩子，薪酬不错。她用孩子们的语言、英语，以及那种曾经属于自己的语言，教他们唱童谣。一首仍然活在孩子口中的童谣，确实是一种真实的残存。但它同时也是一名文学教师在自己的语言失去价值之后，所剩下的东西。
同样的篇章，也逐渐瓦解了它们所宣告的成长。如今，她梦见的是词语，而不再是房子。这些词语有着虚假的底部。句子像藤蔓一样缠绕着她生长。她被自己发出的呜咽声惊醒，却无法判断这过剩的语言究竟是一种惩罚，还是一种赦免。随后，书中再次说出那句话：“生活一直待我不薄。”一个人必须两次宣告自己是幸运的，说明她正在构建一个句子，以便继续生活在其中。这个句子支撑住了她，但灾难依然与她同处一室。霍米·巴巴（Homi Bhabha）提出的“第三空间”常常被视为文化相遇所带来的创造性成果，但在这里，它始终紧闭着。荷兰语中的 ik 是一个藏身之处。在这里，混杂性成为一种生存形态：当一个人得以建立自我的那些条件被剥夺之后，幸存下来便呈现出这样的形状。
我可以用关于异乡旅居者的理论来理解自己在国外度过的那一年。奥伯格为一种已经结束的痛苦赋予了名称。霍夫曼则提醒我，不要把一种可以逆转的沉默，仅仅当作身处异国时的尴尬。但我无法接受坦娅的幸运就意味着她重新获得了生活。我知道，作者已经在多大程度上压低了她的声音。这个“我”所得到的命运，至少仍然可以被讲述：一间房子、一份工资，以及一种安排痛苦的能力——先将它组织成一门课程，再将它写成一部小说。乌格雷西奇已经美化了许多东西。我依然无法接受这种美化。接受它，就意味着承认：一个人的语言、国家与名字都已被拆解，而我们仍然可以用“她适应了”来充分描述她的处境。 我只是站在那场拆解的边缘，而我的边缘还包含一条可以回去的路。仅仅站在边缘，就足以让我无法承受中心的重量。这部小说仍然直视着那个中心，然后又用幸运将它包裹起来。我相信坦娅确实是幸运的。但我无法将她最终留下的生活，称作一种我知道该如何接受的生活。
English
While I am studying abroad, I learned that a language can loosen its hold without disappearing. I could follow a lecture, write an email, and sit through a meal. What left me was the speech in which pain, grievance, and a confused anger can be said at their real size. Those feelings had to be shortened and made polite before they would leave my mouth. My first language was still mine. For a while it simply stopped being the language of ordinary life. The pain was real, and it had a limit. A holiday was enough to put that language back on and feel whole inside a sentence again.
Intercultural communication has a name for this season. Kalervo Oberg called it culture shock: the strain of living among unfamiliar cues, borne by someone who is away and may, with time, adjust. Eva Hoffman, remembering her own passage into English, describes the inner version of that strain. A word can be correct and still fail to reach the layer in which the self was first made. What I felt was that linguistic dispossession in a small, reversible form. I kept the fact of my return in mind the whole time I was reading The Ministry of Pain, and I was afraid of the comparison. What I lost was a year or two of fluency in being myself. What Ugrešić’s narrator loses is any clean sense of an afterward.
Tanja Lucić has come from Zagreb to Amsterdam. She teaches the literature of a country that no longer exists to students who have fled it as she has. They call her comrade, holding the last vowel of drugarice. The course is listed as a survey. It becomes a collective attempt to keep a stopped heart beating. The safest place to press is childhood: a red, white, and blue plastic bag, a cake, a sentence learned in primary school. Ugrešić is plain about the language spoken in that room. It is already extinct. Outsiders can hear the words. The life those words used to wake stays inside the circle of people who lost it.
Stuart Hall described cultural identity in two movements, and the classroom lives between them. One movement is inheritance: a people drawn back together through common memory. The seminar tries to practice that. The other is rupture: identity as what war and displacement have made of us, unfinished and produced rather than stored. The end of Yugoslavia has already forced the second movement. The language the students still call “ours” has been divided into Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian, each required to stand as a nation. Their shared past survives in the room as something a new political order has broken and renamed.
Naming is where the book becomes hardest to treat as a case study. Mary Jane Collier distinguishes identity we claim for ourselves from identity other people assign. Inside the classroom, “our people” and “comrade” are claims. Outside, assignment arrives first. Because Tanja’s husband, Goran, is a Serb, their flat in Zagreb is requisitioned by the Croatian army, and in that logic she is “that Serbian bitch.” A student from Zagreb will not use comrade. He calls her Mrs., because the old address sounds Yugoslav, Communist, and therefore anti-Croat. Later her Dutch chair drafts a proposal to separate Croatian and Serbian in Dutch universities, and the change is called long overdue. The country that receives her helps to finish the cutting. A great deal of intercultural teaching imagines contact as a meeting between cultures stable enough to be compared, interpreted, and eventually bridged. In this novel the meeting continues the taking apart.
There is a practical side to the injury, and Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the linguistic market names it cleanly. A language is worth what institutions will recognize. In Amsterdam the students’ language buys very little. Early in the term Tanja asks for short autobiographies in English. She means to be kind. In “our language,” she fears, they would slide at once into confession, and she wants to delay that. I recognized the kindness. It is what I did with my own anger abroad: I moved it into a language that could be handed in and kept from becoming a scene. Howard Giles would call the English exercise convergence, a shift toward the university’s legitimate tongue, and the later return to drugarice and shared jokes divergence, the group drawing close against a city that has no use for its words. Both choices make sense. Convergence turns pain into something that can be submitted. Divergence makes the pain intimate, and then the semester ends and the room is gone.
I went home. Tanja’s attempt occupies seven days in Zagreb. The new identity card is not obtained. The lawyer is not seen. When the plane leaves the ground, what she feels is relief. At the airport she has bought Kraš chocolates in a box made to look like the new Croatian passport, stamped with the coat of arms. Home has become an object one can give. Culture-shock theory draws a curve from crisis back toward some workable life, because the traveler’s own culture is still there to integrate with, or to rejoin. Tanja’s curve has nowhere to arrive. The home culture has been abolished in the same years as her departure.
The classroom is the most moving thing in the book, and the part I trust least. Behind indifferent walls the students give artificial respiration to a life that is gone. Some memories are theirs, some come from parents, some are made up. Every detail, the narrator says, still holds a morsel of truth, and the whole cannot be passed to anyone outside. Julia Kristeva’s stranger lives in a similar cutoff: speech separated from the body’s night memory, from the childhood in which words were first fears and tastes. For a few hours a week the class rebuilds a little of that night, and only for itself.
Svetlana Boym’s two nostalgias let me say why the room feels like care and like a risk. Restorative nostalgia wants the lost home rebuilt, the missing past repaired and closed. Reflective nostalgia stays with the longing itself, ironic and unfinished, and refuses the comfort of a completed return. Tanja’s assignments begin in that second mood. She knows the country will not be put back together. The ritual keeps leaning toward the first: press on the chest, bring out the old objects, speak as if the extinct language still had a people. Igor, who later comes to her flat with handcuffs taken from the students’ workplace, says aloud what the method leaves quiet. He calls the Dutch lowlands a blotter that soaks up memory and pain, a country of forgetting in which people learn to fade. Even the title participates in the translation of pain into something almost witty. The Ministry of Pain is the students’ name for a workshop that supplies sex shops, borrowed from an S&M club in The Hague. Catastrophe enters as a joke, a prop, a metaphor. That is already a beautification, and it is done with great skill.
Edward Said wrote that exile is strangely compelling to think about and terrible to experience: an unhealable rift between a person and a native place, between the self and its true home. Literature has often been glad to make the rift look like depth. Ugrešić writes something quieter and, for me, harder to settle. She gives Tanja a fate that is already a mercy, and then she writes the mercy well.
The mercy is real, and it should be said without embarrassment. Tanja gets out alive. For a time she has a classroom. She is spared the deaths, the conscription, and the suffering that never becomes a syllabus. A note at the front of the book adds one more distance: the narrator and her story are fictional, and even Amsterdam is not wholly real. The worst of the war stays mostly behind the scene. Rain, irony, and the classroom stand in front of it. I understand the mercy. I also feel it as a pressure on what I am willing to call an ending.
In the epilogue the pressure becomes explicit. Abroad, Tanja experiences her native language as a stammer, a curse, or as babble that no longer depicts anything. Surrounded by Dutch, getting by in English, she feels she is learning her first language from the beginning. A word arrives and its substance does not. A substance presses at her and the word fails. The condition is the one Jacques Derrida put in a single sentence: I have only one language, and it is not mine. She enrolls in a Dutch course and, like her classmates, overuses ik. Ik ben Tanja. Ik kom uit vormalige Joegoslavië. For the moment, she says, ik commits her to nothing. It is hide-and-seek. She hides in the open, behind a small, hard word.
Young Yun Kim describes adaptation as a movement through stress toward growth: former habits fall away, new ones form, and an intercultural person emerges. “Life has been good to me” is spoken in that key. Tanja has learned to leave the curtains open and is trying to treat the exposure as a virtue. She is paid decently to look after the children of an American couple, four days a week, and she teaches them nursery rhymes in their language, in English, and in what used to be hers. A rhyme still alive in a child’s mouth is a real remnant. It is also what remains of a literature teacher once her language has lost its price.
The same pages unravel the growth they announce. She dreams of words now, houses no longer. The words have a false bottom. Sentences grow over her like vines. She wakes at her own whimper and cannot tell whether the excess of language was punishment or absolution. Then the book says it again: life has been good to me. A person who must announce her good fortune twice is building a sentence she can go on living inside. The sentence holds. The disaster remains in the room with her. Homi Bhabha’s third space, so often offered as the creative yield of cultural encounter, stays shut. The Dutch ik is a place to hide. Hybridity, here, is the shape survival takes after the conditions for a self have been withdrawn.
I can use the sojourner’s ideas for my own year. Oberg gives a name to a pain that ended. Hoffman keeps me from treating a reversible silence as mere awkwardness abroad. What I cannot do is accept Tanja’s fortune as a recovered life. I know how much the author has already lowered her voice. This “I” receives a fate that can still be told: a room, a wage, the power to arrange pain first as a course and then as a novel. Ugrešić has beautified a great deal. I still cannot accept it. Acceptance would mean agreeing that a person whose language, country, and name have been dismantled can be adequately described as someone who adapted. I stood only at the edge of that dismantling, and my edge included a way back. The edge was enough to make the center unbearable. The novel looks at the center anyway, and then wraps it in good fortune. I believe that she was fortunate. I cannot call what remains a life I know how to receive.