The Ministry of Pain

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The narrator, her story, the characters and their situation in the novel you are about to read are all fictional. Not even the city of Amsterdam is wholly real.

D. U.

I don’t remember when I first noticed it. I’d be standing at a tram stop waiting for a tram, staring at the map of the city in the glass case, at the color-coded bus and tram routes that I didn’t understand and that were of little or no interest to me at the time, standing there without a thought in the world when suddenly, out of the blue, I’d be overcome by a desire to bash my head into the glass and do myself harm. And each time I’d come closer to it. Here I go, any second now, and then…

“Come now, Comrade,” he would say in a slightly mocking tone, laying a hand on my shoulder. “You’re not really going to…?”

It’s all my imagination, of course, but the picture it creates can be so real that I actually think I’m hearing his voice and feeling his hand on my shoulder.

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