The Ministry of Pain Read Online Free PDF

bears, African masks, Indonesian vajang dolls, models of ships, miniature replicas of typical Amsterdamhouses—had one and only one message: “I live here. Look! I live here.” I had the feeling that all the “still lifes,” the ikebanas , the “installations”—even the simple window decoration of a cheap Ikea vase housing an inspired two-guilder Xeno “shipwreck”—bore witness to the inhabitants’ subconscious fear of evanescence. The doll’s houses embedded in doll’s houses, the infantile urban exhibitionism, the imprints left willfully in the sand—on some level they all resonated with my own angst, whose name and source I was unable to put my finger on.
     
    I lived very close to the railway station and found myself increasingly drawn to the main hall, where I would stand staring at the timetable, as if the display of arrivals and departures could provide the key to my angst. Once, on an impulse, I took a train to The Hague, walked through the city, and returned a few hours later. From then on, I made a habit of taking trains to places not particularly meaningful to me. I would go north, to Groningen and Leeuwarden, or south to Rotterdam, Nijmegen and Eindhoven, east to Enschede; I would go to the nearby cities of Haarlem, Leiden, and Utrecht; I would go to places simply because the sound of their names appealed to me: Apeldoorn and Amersfoort; Breda, Tilburg and Hoorn; Hengelo and Almelo; or Lelystad, whose name reminded me of a lullaby. The Netherlands was poignantly small. Often I simply got out, walked up and down the platform, and took the next train back to Amsterdam. The journey alone calmed my nerves. I would gaze out of the window, my mind blank, the Dutch lowlands tempering my angst. I took pleasure in the absolute, undisturbed constant of the horizontal in motion. I also came to appreciate the signs and would read out their words flashing past in the rhythm of a children’s counting rhyme: Sony, Praxis, Vodafone; Nikon, Enco, JVC; Randstad, Philips, Shell; Dobbe, Ninders, Ben …And just as we seem to fancy people more for their faults than for their virtues, so I gradually developed a sympathy for that landscape of absence, the straight, light green line of the horizon, the cold nocturnal vistas with their full moons and flocks of large white geese shining in the dark, or the frozen shadows of cows idling in the road like friendly ghosts.
    In the trains and stations I mastered the language of loneliness. I, the aimless wanderer, soon discovered I was not alone. Standing on the platform, I would turn to a fellow traveler, who could see the computerized timetable as well as I, and ask, “Excuse me, but the next train is going to Rotterdam, isn’t it?”
    “Sorry, I couldn’t say.”
    “And where are you going?”
    “Me? Rotterdam.”
    I would watch the people in the trains, listen in on their conversations even though I didn’t understand the language, sniff their smells. I would project their faces onto a computer screen and scroll down, registering one detail after the other, the chance images taking hold for longer or shorter periods of time, and I often had the feeling that someone other than myself had opened the door to them.
    The image of a young girl sitting opposite me in a train. There is a tiny speaker in her ear. It is attached to a wire. The wire ends up in a half-open handbag with an Esprit label on it. The train is packed, but the girl is oblivious to her surroundings: she is talking loudly, staring expressionless at a point straight ahead of her. On and on she talks, her voice strident, like a machine, and she sits bolt upright, her bag in her lap, afraid perhaps it will fall and break. The handles of the bag are upright, too, and nearly reach her mouth, which gives the impression that the words are pouring out of her mouth into the bag. When the conversation is over, she removes the plug from her ear, takes the mobile phone out of the bag, turns it off, sticks it into