The Ministry of Pain Read Online Free PDF Page A

questions at all: there seemed to be no time for it. Suddenly I had time to spare, and it made me veryanxious. It was as if there were too much time and too little me. More and more often I was overcome by an unpleasant sensation, a numbness I’d never known before. I kept examining myself, the way one examines one’s mouth with one’s tongue, hoping to get my feeling back, but the self-induced anesthesia was powerful and refused to yield. I had no idea where it had come from or when it had come on.
    Very soon after I moved in, the flat started making me nervous. The poky, windowless bathroom with its shower, white tiles, and concrete floor had a nightmarish feel to it; it was like a quotation from an old black-and-white movie. I kept trying to spruce it up; I bought little gewgaws—a nice soap-dish, an expensive towel with a hand-embroidered lace border; I redid the lighting. The new lights revealed thin accumulations of dirt in the indentations between the tiles, and one night I spent hours removing the dirt with an old toothbrush in a headstrong attempt at transfiguring the looscape by brute strength. The wall of the tiny hallway was painted a gray-green halfway up from the floor and divided from the other half by an ugly green line. The floor was covered with black linoleum, which gave the flat the aura of a hospital or penitentiary. I did everything I could—I bought a vase, a lamp, a black-and-white poster of the skyline of New York—but their presence merely pointed up the anxiety of absence. The absence of what? I had no answer. I wondered whether another space would have made me feel better. I wasn’t too sure. At night, wound round with darkness and a woolen blanket, I would sit at the window in my armchair and stare out through the bars on the qui vive for noises and voices, for a pair of shoes or a cat darting past. The space was definitely not me. But then again I wasn’t me, either.
     
    My angst in the basement flat grew with tropic alacrity, like a passionflower, a passiebloem , the creeper that decorated housewalls and garden gates in many parts of town. I kept finding myself grabbing my bag, flinging a coat over my shoulders and racing out of the place, not knowing where I was off to.
    The city, which was like a snail, a shell, a spider’s web, a piece of fine lace, a novel with an unusually circular plot and hence no end, never ceased to baffle me. I was constantly getting lost and had the greatest trouble remembering street names, to say nothing of where the streets themselves started and stopped. It was like drowning in a glass of water. I had the feeling I might well—if like Alice I should lose my footing and fall into a hole—end up in a third or fourth parallel world, because Amsterdam itself was my own parallel world. I experienced it as a dream, which meant it resonated with my reality. I tried to puzzle it out just as I tried to interpret my dreams.
    The most fascinating thing about it was the sand. I would stand next to a house that was being demolished and watch the rotten beams coming down and the water spurting up out of the invisible depths through an ugly hole in the sand. I would watch workers repairing the Amsterdam cobblestones, prizing them up out of and setting them back into the sand. Sand provided the city with a metaphorical as well as literal foundation and provoked an almost physical reaction in me: I constantly felt it in my mouth, hair, and nostrils.
    I couldn’t get over the number of signs and signals—“fingerprints”—by which the inhabitants of the city made it clear that they belonged. I thought the signals childlike and consequently touching, like the breadcrumbs Hansel and Gretel sprinkle behind them to guide their way home. Every one of them—the figurines of cats climbing the fronts of old houses, the flags hanging out of the windows, the posters and even family photos, especially of newborn babes, inscriptions and slogans, tiny sculptures, toys, teddy