Free The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugrešić

They’re gone now, too. Each of us would go upto a girl and stand in front of her. Like a beau or something. Without a word. That meant we were asking her to dance. Every once in a while the matron would call out, “Ladies’ choice!” and the girls would stand and come over to us. That was how you could tell which girl liked you.
    Those being our “hormonal years,” we all looked forward to the close dances or what we called “squeezers.” They were slow—“Only You”–slow—and you’d press the girl real close, so close that both of you could hardly breathe. You were almost numb with excitement, but you made believe it was nothing. Just the thought of it still takes my breath away. It was like I was diving and I’d come up with my cheek against hers. We’d be so close my eyes would lose their focus and cross. I could feel her transparent, milky white skin; I could make out the blue veins in her eyelids. Her breath smelled of green peppermint drops. Just the thought of it makes me dizzy still. The girl’s name was Sanja Petrini.
    MELIHA: BOSNIAN HOTPOT
    Memory aids survival.
Marcel/a Proust/i
    Ingredients: ½ kilo boneless pork and ½ kilo boneless beef, cubed; ½ kilo small potatoes, unsliced; 2 onions, sliced in half; 10 cloves of garlic, unsliced; 40 decagrams of fresh tomatoes; 4 green or red peppers; 30 decagrams of kale; 20 decagrams of cabbage; 2 carrots; 2 bunches of parsley; 1 bunch of celery; 1 kohlrabi; 10 string beans; 2 heaping teaspoons of sweet paprika; 15 to 20 peppercorns; several bay leaves; approximately 30 decagrams of water, broth, or white wine. Chop the vegetables coarsely. Place the meat, onions, and vegetables in a pot, preferably earthenware. Add the liquid. Place a border of dough along the pot lid’s inner rim (toprevent steam from escaping) and cover. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 4 to 5 hours.
    JOHANNEKE: VANILLA CONES
    I come from a big family. My parents loved Yugoslavia. So did us kids. Now I see that another reason we took our summer holidays in Yugoslavia was that it was so cheap. We would make the rounds of the camping sites along the Adriatic with one of those big house tents. We were among the first foreign tourists. I had seven brothers and sisters. My father had a job, but my mother stayed at home with us, so we had to watch every guilder and couldn’t throw money away on holidays. Even the Dutch were poor back then. After the war the Dutch went off to foreign countries (New Zealand, Canada, Brazil) and worked by the sweat of their brow just like the Yugos. So for us the Adriatic was heaven. Every day we’d line up, all eight of us—little, bigger, biggest—with Mama and Papa bringing up the rear, and go out for ice cream, and every day Nazif would greet us with the words, “You Dutch, you’re as white as vanilla.” Well, word got round, and soon everyone in town was calling us “the Vanillas.” “Hey look! Here come the Vanillas!” (Our real name was Ter Bruggen Hugenholtz, which nobody could pronounce.) We each got first names, too. Summer names we called them. I was Joka, my brother Gerard Grga, Frans was Frane, Wouter Walter. After Walter in that movie everybody saw, the one about the defense of Sarajevo. “Das ist Walter!” they’d call after him in their pidgin German. “Das ist Walter!” To this day I call him Das ist Walter.
    That ice cream was my earliest memory of Yugoslavia. Our parents never took us out for ice cream at home. It cost too much. The locals called Nazif the ice cream vendor a Shiptar. I didn’t know about your different national groups at the time, soI didn’t know it meant Albanian. You all looked the same to us. We looked like vanilla to you, you looked like hazelnuts to us .
    SELIM: HOMESICK FOR THE SOUTH
    We were all required to study the history of Macedonian, Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin literature, as you are well aware. I never got more than a D. There was this one Macedonian poem called