Cultural Amnesia (115 page)

On a fine day in summer, it is not unknown for more than a thousand people to turn up. Most of the visitors are from the
Czech Republic. They come to see what life was like a hundred years ago, under the old emperor: the era in which the future republicans grew up, nourishing their democratic dreams with the rich
traditions that lay around them. The books I had been reading dated from the time of Masaryk and Bene, whose own books were produced to the same standard. While a guest of honour at the Olomouc
Festival of Documentary Film in 2001, I searched the second-hand bookshops and found a two-volume set of Masaryk’s writings dated 1925, and matched it with a two-volume set of Bene dated
1927. Each set carried the word
Revoluce
in its title, but of course it was not a revolution at all. Revolutions trample the past. The republic of Masaryk
and Bene grew out of the past organically, bringing the established cultural wealth along with it. You can see it in the look of their books: the proportion of the printing, the lustre of the
linen bindings. When I got the four volumes back to London, I laid them out on my library coffee table and drank their appearance in. I opened them and caressed the thick, good paper that will
never grow brittle. I did everything but read them. I can’t read Czech: not yet, anyway. I am told that once you master the alphabet it is not as hard as Russian. It is certainly easier
than Polish to pronounce. The prose of Bene is famously unreadable but I would like to be able to judge that for myself, and Masaryk was such a man as few countries are given for a spiritual
father: I would like to relish what he wrote in the way he wrote it. If I had the knack of Timothy Garton-Ash, I would be reading it by now. Those of us with more pedestrian powers of
assimilation have to find the time, and at my age I am feeling a bit short of time altogether. But the books will go into my shelves anyway, where one day, if my library stays
together, someone like me might come along and take them down—I hope without having to brush them free of cement dust, or whatever residue might characterize the next barbaric age.

Dubravka Ugresic

Miguel de Unamuno

Pedro Henríquez Ureña

DUBRAVKA UGRESIC

Dubravka Ugresic (b. 1949) might have been put on Earth for the specific purpose of reminding us
that there is never anything simple about the Balkans. She was born in Croatia into a family of mixed ethnic origin, with a Bulgarian mother. She spent time at Zagreb’s forbiddingly
entitled Institute for the Theory of Literature. A graduate of Moscow State University, she did academic work on the Russian avant-garde. In 1993 she left Croatia, staying first in Holland
and Berlin before taking up a succession of posts in American universities, among them Wesleyan and UCLA. Her novels, which I have not yet read, are usually described as the work of a
writer’s writer, or perhaps of someone who has been to the Institute for the Theory of Literature in Zagreb. One of them has, at least in English translation, the best title of the
twentieth century’s twilight years:
The Museum of Unconditional Surrender
. Her journalism, which I have read with respect, despair and delight, is
essentially a refusal to surrender to the historically determined chaos of the area where she was born and grew up. As brave as Oriana Fallaci ever was but less burdened by ideology (so far
she has not stuck herself with any large theories that she might need to repudiate, except possibly for the Theory of Literature),
Ugresic is unbeatable at explaining the
inexplicable entanglements of Balkan cultural traditions, particularly as they relate to the hellish position of women.

One hot summer’s day I stopped in the New York subway
hypnotized by what I saw. A middle-aged couple was dancing an Argentinian tango, describing around them an invisible circle in which only the two of them existed, the man and the woman, and a
dusty cassette player on the ground beside them. The man and the woman were neither ugly nor beautiful, neither young nor old. They were dressed in black, their clothes were tidy but worn,
the man’s black trousers shone with a greasy sheen. They danced seriously, modestly, without emotion, without superfluous movements, with no desire to please. The crowd around them was
becoming steadily larger.

—DUBRAVKA UGRESIC,
The Culture of Lies
, P. 131

T
HIS IS WHAT
the tango
can give you: an atoll of bliss in a sea of turmoil. Just to watch it, let alone dance it, is a holiday from the accidental, and a free pass into the realm where the inevitable, for once, looks
good. The dance is beautiful all by itself: the dancers don’t have to be, and in this passage they obviously aren’t. Ugresic goes on to ask rhetorically why a couple of tango dancers
can make hard-bitten New Yorkers, who would otherwise hurry past, stop to watch and miss their trains. She deduced that they were being taken out of themselves. It was true for her. Like the
moment it describes, the passage is an interlude made doubly sweet by what the rest of life is like. Her book is a cautionary tale for anyone who might think he can guess something about the
Balkans without having been there.
The Culture of Lies
is really a collection of observations, many of them focused on the official abuse of language: the
ghost in the background is Karl Kraus. What Kraus did for Austria and Germany in the pre-Nazi period, Ugresic does for Croatia in the Tudjman period, with the Bosnia of Milosevic looming in the
wings; and she does it at least as
well. Whereas Kraus’s real measures of normality lay in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose last phase he lived through and never
forgot, Ugresic’s, unlikely though it may seem, lay in the vanished Yugoslavia of Tito. For her, Yugoslavia lingers in the mind and heart as the dreamed reality, whereas Croatia is the
living nightmare. Tito’s iron hand at least kept the ethnic minorities from each other’s throats. The new iron hands want something else, and throats are their first target. Their
second target, however, is the one that fascinates her, for reasons that become steadily more obvious. Whatever faction a man represents, the uninvited penetration of a woman seems to be his main
reassurance of personal power. Beside and scarcely below the threat of murder, rape becomes a part of a woman’s life expectancy. It is hard to think of another book in which a climate of
casual violence incubates such a lucid concern for women’s rights. Nadezhda Mandelstam’s two books of memoirs add up to the great twentieth-century record of everyday frightfulness,
but Nadezhda wasn’t thinking about women’s rights. She probably found Alexandra Kollontai absurd. Kollontai campaigned for women’s rights to be granted by a state dedicated to
the principle that nobody of either sex had any rights at all. Nadezhda would have been glad to have the old repressions back, and male chauvinism along with them.

But Ugresic is in a different place, a different time, and a different frame of mind. She knows what has come true for
women in the West, and is ready to blame the whole mess in her country exclusively on the strutting male. She calls him Yugo-man and sometimes the Yugomaniac. She makes a very convincing job of
it. Whether Serb, Croat, Slav, Muslim, Bosnian this or Herzogovinian that, all the men in the book carry on like wild animals whenever they see a skirt. She doesn’t make enough of one of
the saddest facts of all, perhaps because it didn’t fully emerge until much later: Muslim women who had been gang-raped by Serbian men were scared to tell the Muslim men, lest they be
punished for having submitted to dishonour. Apart from that, however, her readiness to distribute her scorn evenly makes her the writer she is, and surely she is one of the most interesting to
come out of Eastern Europe in modern times. (Ugresic attended the trial of Milosevic, and I can hardly wait to see what she writes about it.) She comes from one of what Kundera memorably called
the Kidnapped Countries, and she has
given it its voice, which is the voice of a woman. The woman carries plastic bags full of the bad food and the thin supplies she has
queued for by the hour while the men sit around in the square scratching their crotches and dreaming up their next war. In the course of their dimwitted conversations, the men refer to any given
woman as a cunt. The twin functions of the cunt are to put dinner on the table and lie down when required. Most male readers will find this an uncomfortable prospect, as they are meant to.
Multicultural ideologists, if there are any left, will find it even less comfortable than that. According to Ugresic, multiculturalism in rich countries abets ethnic cleansing in the poor ones.
Try this:

Proudly waving its own unification, Europe supported
disintegration in foreign territory. Emphasizing the principles of multiculturality in its own territory, it abetted ethnic cleansing elsewhere. Swearing by European norms of honour, it
negotiated with democratically elected war criminals. Fiercely defending the rights of minorities, it omitted to notice the disappearance of the most numerous Yugoslav minority, the
population of a national, “nationally undetermined” people, or the disappearance of minorities altogether.

Residents of Britain will find such passages particularly embarrassing. It was British foreign policy,
as propounded by men who thought they were acting for the best, that kept America from dropping its bombs on Slobodan Milosevic until it was almost too late to save anyone. The idea was to leave
the area alone while things worked themselves out. (Long before, with regard to Biafra, Harold Wilson’s government had pursued the same policy, and with the same results.) From those
helpless civilians who were left alone while things were working themselves out, and who somehow managed to survive the experience, anger is the least we can expect. Ugresic’s tone can be
taken as a commendably moderate expression of the opinions she must have held while searching the sky in vain for the NATO aircraft that are held to be the worst thing in the world by those who
have no idea how bad the world can get. If that’s the way she wrote it, that’s the way it probably felt, at the
very least. No wonder then, if, on a brief holiday
in New York, she found the tango dancers a holiday from history. If the Twin Towers had been hit at that very moment, it would have been no surprise to her. It would have been just a bigger
version of the routine gang rape, or of a woman taking a hit from a sniper and falling on her plastic bags.

MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO