At the Department I felt somewhat of a stowaway. I made several attempts at setting up an appointment with Cees Draaisma, the chair and my “host,” and he always said, “Yes, definitely. It’s just that I’m terribly busy at the moment. If there are any practical matters that need seeing to, Dunja will help you, I’m sure.”

Dunja, the secretary of the Department, was Dutch. She was married to a Russian. Her real name was Anneke. Anneke looked like a large, listless seal. Surrounded by dusty plants, she basked in her aquarium of an office, occasionally gracing visitors with a blank gaze. Nothing could get a rise out of her: she would answer any question I might have with a reluctant “yes” or “no” or play deaf.

“We were going to have a talk about my course,” I said to Draaisma several times by way of reminder.

“Slavs are natural-born teachers,” he would say in the voice of a football coach.

I couldn’t tell whether the remark was meant in jest or in praise.

“Ines sends her regards. As soon as she tidies up the back-to-school mess, we’ll have you to dinner, okay?”

Draaisma was only confirming what I’d heard from Ines each time I phoned her. (“You’ve got to come and see us. But not till the dust settles. You’ve no idea what a bother children are. I can’t even get to the hairdresser. Now you, you’ve got it made. I tell you what. You run round to all the museums and then we’ll have you over.”)

The fifth floor, where the Department was, consisted of a long dark corridor and fifteen closed doors. From time to time I saw a colleague slipping into his room and paying me no heed. Anneke kept the door to the departmental office closed, and it often sported a Back Soon sign. I finally stopped trying to see Draaisma. The only living being I saw with any regularity was the plump Russian lecturer. She would be sitting at her desk behind a half-open door, moving her lips as if eating an invisible sandwich or reading something to herself.

“Zdravstvuite,” she would say shyly if our eyes met.

Only once did a colleague knock on my door.

“May I come in?” he asked.

“Please do,” I said.

“So you’re our new colleague.”

“You might say so.”

The man held out his hand.

“Glad to meet you. My name is Wim. Wim Hoeks. I teach Czech. Czech language and literature. Last door on the left.”

I liked him immediately.

“I wonder why Cees hasn’t introduced you to anybody.”

“Oh, it’s probably because I’m here for only two semesters.”

“So what? It would only have been right.”

“I suppose it’s academic etiquette here.”

“Well, we Dutch do take our time. It’s a few years before we invite anyone home. Privacy is a great excuse for all kinds of things, including this inexcusable rudeness. ‘It’s not that we’re unwilling; we just don’t want to impose.’”

“Really?”

“Welcome to the most hypocritical country on earth!” he said. “Now tell me, how are things going?”

“Fine.”

“And what are you teaching?”

“For the time being I’m just getting to know the students.”

“Miroslav Krleza is a great writer,” he said.

“Your Czechs are no sluggards, either.”

“What about the weather? Foreigners always beef about our weather.”

“Well, it’s not the Caribbean, but…”

“Aren’t you bored?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because this is the most boring country on earth!”

“Isn’t that a bit contradictory?”

“What do you mean?”

“How can a country be both hypocritical and boring?”

“Only Holland has that distinction.”

“And I thought East Europeans were the masters of self-deprecation.”

“No, that’s another of our distinctions. Only don’t let us fool you. We don’t mean it. We actually have the highest opinion of ourselves. It’s colonial arrogance. We’ve let the colonies go, but held on to the arrogance. You’ll see…”

He glanced at his watch, stood up, and said, “Look, come and see me whenever you feel like it. We can go somewhere for coffee. Last door on the left, the smallest office on our floor. Yours is a lot bigger. You’re from the former Yugoslavia. You’re higher on the scale than us Czechs.”

“In what sense?”

“You’ve got nationalism, war, post-Communism. And we’re up to our necks in it all at the Hague.”

“Unfortunately.”

“And what a wonderful country it was! Dubrovnik is the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen! I’ll never understand how it happened.”

“You don’t think I do.”

“Of course not…. But when you stick a knife in somebody’s stomach, you raise such a racket that the whole world knows. We do it on the q.t. We don’t want people to know, and even our victims are grateful…. But we’ll talk again. Glad to have met you.”

He started off, then turned back at the door.

“That island off the Dalmatian coast foreigners can never pronounce….”

“Krk.”

“Right. Does the name mean ‘neck’?”

“Neck? No. ‘Neck’ is vrat. Why do you ask?”

“Because that’s what it means in Czech. And Czechs like to torture foreigners with the sentence Str prst skrz krk.”

“And what does that mean?”

“‘Stick your finger through your neck,’” he laughed, giving a demonstration on himself. Then, with a wave, he turned again and strode down the corridor.

The fifth floor was always so deserted that I gave up feeling like a stowaway. I also gave up asking the secretary questions and knocking at Draaisma’s door. I did, however, pop in on Wim three times. His office was in fact smaller than mine. Each time he told me he happened to be very busy, and each time he pressed a signed offprint of an article he had written into my hand—by way of consolation, I presume. The first was about Karel Capek’s Letters from Holland, the second about misogyny in Kundera’s novels, the third about “linguistic hedonism” in the prose of Bohumil Hrabal.

We never did go out for coffee. My only “live” contact at the Department remained the plump Russian lecturer, the one with the invisible sandwich in her hand. Whenever I walked past her office, she would swallow the invisible morsel and utter her timid “Zdravstvuite.”

All things considered, the Department made a depressing impression on me, which impression was only heightened by the suspicion that the local Slavists were typical of West European Slavists. West European Slavists were wont to enter the field for emotional reasons: they had fallen in love with one of those exotic East bloc types. Or they would cement their choice of field after the fact with a politically, culturally, professionally, sentimentally correct marriage. There was another factor involved: the field made them absolute lords over minor, out-of-the-way, language-and-literature fiefdoms into which no one had ventured theretofore, which made the probability of their competence being adequately evaluated statistically insignificant. Though I should have been the last to condemn them, given that I owed my position to the fact that I happened to know Ines, who happened to have married Draaisma, who happened to be chair of the Department.