The Ministry of Pain Read Online Free PDF Page B

the invisible sand of words that has just poured out of her, and zips up the bag.
    The image of a dark-skinned young man poring over a textbook of Dutch for foreigners and chewing on the eraser of a pencil as if it were a gumdrop. He lays the book down in his lap for a moment, turns toward the window, mumbles a few words to himself, fixing them in his mind, then goes back to the book.
    The image of a young Chinese couple chewing gum in synchronized motion, their faces gray and mouselike. She is wearing a thin, open, none-too-clean blouse with no bra, her small breasts showing through. He, still chewing, puts his arm around her, slips his hand into the blouse, and tugs with lazy satisfaction at a breast as if adjusting the nipple of a bottle. She too goes on chewing and blinks her pupilless eyes.
    The image of a tired Moroccan madonna with a boy child in her lap. He is no more than two. He has thick black hair, parted on the side like a grown-up’s. His face has the terrifying absence of all children’s faces, the kind seen in icons and early paintings.
    During one of my trips the train came to a sudden halt. The train coming in the opposite direction had stopped, too. The seat corresponding to mine in the other train was occupied by a man holding a sheet of music with one hand and conducting with the other. He was completely absorbed in the music inside him and conducted with brief, delicate, restrained strokes of the hand. I was spellbound. His face was illuminated with exaltation from within. The external world did not exist: he was surrounded by the silent music as by an impenetrable capsule; nothing could touch him. But then the trains started up, his and mine, and the man’s face disappeared. I felt a twinge, as if I’d been watching myself in the glass, as if I’d seen myself but couldn’t hear myself. I felt my own reflection had gone off in the opposite direction.
     
    Wandering through the city, I was sometimes overcome by a sudden, almost uncontrollable impulse traceable to an innocent detail. Crushed on a tram next to a bare, smooth, male muscle, Iwould feel an urge to press my lips to that golden region of alien skin. Or confronting an earring in the ear of a man squeezed in next to me, I would itch to tear it off with my teeth. The force of these unexpected attacks terrified me, yet gave me a feeling of release. Release from what? I couldn’t say.
    My internal city map took shape of its own accord. Images would come and go, take hold for a while or dissipate like sand. It was like making my way through a mist or a dream. I drew my internal map on the finest of tracing paper, but the moment I separated it from the real map I saw to my surprise that it was blank. It had nothing on it. Not a thing. I’d be moved by a line advancing in high spirits, and all at once it would stop and break off. Sometimes my internal map looked like a clumsy children’s drawing. A city that in fact looked like a snail, a shell, a spiderweb, a labyrinth, a piece of lace, a novel full of mysterious tributaries, would, on my internal map, turn into a series of blanks, gaps, snippets, and dead ends. My internal map was the outcome of an amnesiac’s attempt to plot his coordinates, of a flâneur’s attempt to leave his tracks on the sand. My map was a dreamer’s guide. Virtually nothing on it coincided with reality.
    But there was one thing I knew for certain. No matter where I went, my students provided the direction. They were my internal center, my public square, my main street, my jugular. I mean that literally.

CHAPTER 6
    Thus we see that life was preserved here, but at a price dearer than the value of life itself, for the strength to defend and maintain it was borrowed from the coming generations, which were thus born into debt and servitude. What survived in the struggle was the sheer instinct to defend life, while life itself lost so much that precious little more than the name itself remained. What has lasted and lives