Free The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugrešić Page B

to—and no less valid than—the official one.
1. What united Yugoslavia more than the slogan “brotherhood and unity” were its Austro-Hungarian tracks and stations. I get a lump in my throat each time I see the stations’ yellow facades, the geraniums in their flower boxes. The very sight of them means home.
2. The first train in my life appeared in the children’s book Train in the Snow by Mate Lovrak. The first event in the history of Yugomythology—and in the history of the Yugoslav cinema—was Veljko Bulaji’s Train with No Timetable . It is about the exodus of a group of people, by train, from the rocky Dinaric Alps to Yugoslavia’s “breadbasket,” the rich, fertile Baranja (or was it Baka) region in the north. In the course of the journey they fall in love, they fight, they have ideological debates, a child is born, a man dies. Train with No Timetable begat a spate of train episodes in the Yugoslav cinema, all the way to the cruel love scene in the filthy WC in Emir Kusturica’s When Father Was Away on Business . Incidentally, it was with Kusturica that the Yugoslav cinema breathed its last.
3. Railway tracks were an icon of the fifties, the time of the youth shock-worker movement, international and domestic. The younger generation was assigned construction of two important stretches: Brko-Banovii (Brko-Banovii is our aim/By summer’s end we’ll make good our claim) and šamac-Sarajevo. For a time youth brigades were a hot item in movies made for domestic consumption. The Extra Girl starring Milena Draviis of many.
4. Once the tracks were built, we couldn’t get enough of the trains: we took trains on school outings; we took trains to the seaside; we took trains to the army. All trains had “JDŽ” painted on them in Latin and Cyrillic letters. Many people came into contact with foreign languages for the first time on trains: “Do not lean out of the window” was engraved on small brass plates under the windows with a translation into French, German, and Russian. It became a catchword in books and movies and had its moment inthe sun in the refrain of the popular song “The White Button” (Take the train, Selma, but don’t lean out of the window…. ) There was a framed photograph of some Yugoslav town or tourist attraction over every seat. My favorite was Makarska-by-Biokovo because of the “by.” The tastiest sandwiches we ever ate we ate on the train. The juiciest roast chicken we ever ate we ate on the train. The most important invention of the day was the thermos bottle, the most memorable sight, engraved in the memory of millions of Yugoslavs, was the sight of the Adriatic as it emerged on the horizon after a long absence. Everyone taking the train to the Adriatic played the same game: the first one to sight the sea would cry “Waaater!” and get five dinars. Or whatever the going rate was….
5. The sixties and seventies were characterized by “ Gastarbeiter trains,” the preferred means of transport for the Yugoslav, Greek, and Turkish workforce making its way to and from the West until it began acquiring cars. The hunger in an anonymous Yugo on the train trip home comes out clearly in the Gastarbeiter ditty:
    Pull your pants down, love, it’s no holds barred.
    All the way from Frankfurt I’ve been hard.
6. The icon of Yugoslav consumerism of the eighties was the train to Trieste. It was a train loaded with black market goods: jeans, coffee, rice, olive oil, T-shirts, briefs, panties—you name it. The peak of the Trieste shopping spree coincided with Tito’s death. Tito died at the age of eighty-eight, and one of the ways the event was marked was by a flurry of agricultural activity: one communityplanted “eighty-eight roses for Comrade Tito,” another “eighty-eight birches for Comrade Tito,” and so on. Hence the Gypsy joke: A customs official on the train from Trieste asks a Gypsy, “What have you got in those sacks?” The Gypsy responds without missing a beat,