Arnon Grunberg
Words Without Borders

A Master Class in the Technique of Suffering

Since I’m in Kosovo, I had planned to write something about the Balkans, the wars that seem to be forgotten, the necessity of corruption explained to me by a hungry cop in Pristina, the jeeps from the UN, but all of this has to wait.
The coca leaf came up before these things.
Let me start with Michela.
Michela is a girl, or a woman, living in New York, who traveled last week to Amsterdam to join the festivities for my new novel. Since my time was rather limited in Amsterdam, I hooked her up with some of the students I met at the Technical University in Delft when I was teaching there in 2005 (the master class, The Technique of Suffering).
Michela loves to dance, so I wrote an email to the students. “Who is interested in dancing with a young woman from New York?” One of the students was not only prepared to take her to a club, he was even willing to take her out for dinner.
I was relieved, but the following day he wrote me, “She was not interested in eating. Michela had heard that in Amsterdam cocaine was available in coffee shops. So she forced me to ask the barkeeper at a coffee shop for cocaine. His reaction was utterly predictable. He started laughing. Later she found her cocaine in the ladies room at the club.” The lavatory attendant can be trusted with every request, it seems, and not only in New York.
I felt a little bit bad for this student. He thought of dancing, she thought of the lavatory attendant.
And then I read John Tierney’s column in the International Herald Tribune. Yes, the same Tierney whom I quoted a few weeks on this place.
This time he wrote, “When the World Health Organization asked scientists to investigate coca in the 1990’s, they said it didn’t seem to cause health problems and might yield health benefits.” Of course this is the coca leaf, not the cocaine.
But Mr. Tierney is completely right. If we stop fighting a useless war, Kosovo will have less of a problem. As of today, the opium that travels from Afghanistan to Europe goes through Kosovo, with all of the crime, corruption and violence that comes with it.
Maybe the job of the lavatory attendant will lose some of its glamor after the war against drugs has stopped. But we will be able to find suitable jobs for the lavatory attendants. I’m sure the United Nations in Kosovo or elsewhere would be willing to hire lavatory attendants to show the locals what true decadence means.


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A Master Class in the Technique of SufferingThe Mail Bag: Arnon Grunberg and Matteo BianchiCamp Bondsteel