Читать книгу Our Man in Iraq - Robert Perisic - Страница 6
Оглавление1. DAY ONE
‘Iraky peepl, Iraky peepl.’
That’s the password.
They’re supposed to answer: ‘I’m sory.’
‘I’m sory.’
No sweat.
I passed the checkpoint. Looked around.
Yeah! What a view – endless columns on the road from Kuwait to Basra.
The 82nd Division’s Humvees, armoured vehicles, tankers, bulldozers...
The place is full of camouflaged Yanks and Brits, the biological and chemical carnival has begun, and me, fool that I am, I haven’t got a mask. They’re expecting a chemical weapons attack and say Saddam has got tons and tons of the shit.
I dash around with my camera and ask them all to take my photo. It’s not for keepsakes, I keep telling them, it’s for the paper.
The columns pour along King Faisal Road towards the border. Dust is always coming from somewhere.
‘Iraky peepl, Iraky peepl.’
‘I’m sory.’
We continue on our way.
I keep looking to see if there are any pigeons.
I’ve heard that the British biological and chemical detection team allegedly has pigeons.
There were none in the Land Rover Defender. They set up an air analyser there that registers the smallest changes in the composition of the air. It’s a simple, soldierly device. You don’t need to think: when the indicator goes red, things are critical.
That’s what they say.
Things would be critical anyway, even without it. Things are critical with me – I want that to be published. I see all those pieces of iron, pieces of steel, and I’m shut into a piece of metal myself. I can hardly breathe in here. You can’t help me. No, not you. You’d suggest I get out, but that’s even worse. You’d offer me your hand and help me out, but that’s even worse, when you know what’s going on outside. The 82nd Division’s Humvees. I watch them. They don’t know I’m inside.
Or do they? The British soldiers don’t want to introduce themselves. They say they’re not allowed to. That’s it, I said, Jeezus that’s it... No introductions. For security reasons. Why am I constantly introducing myself, when I’m not who they think I am anyway, and only put myself in danger for no reason? This job is fucked. You have to introduce yourself. I say I’m a reporter from Croatia. I tell them my name and ask if they’ve got pigeons.
I ask if it’s true that the NBC team (short for nuclear, biological, chemical), if it’s true that they’ve been given cages with pigeons.
No reply.
I tell them I’ve heard (heard?!) about it.
Birds are apparently the best detectors of airborne toxins cos they’re more sensitive than humans.
Then they reply. They say they’ve heard the story too but they’re not sure if it’s true.
I eye them distrustfully.
They’ve got masks, like I said. But sometimes they take them off and show themselves.
I don’t know if they’re hiding the pigeons or if they really haven’t got any.
Do what you like with this. I think the bit about the pigeons is interesting. It’s a good illustration: pigeons or doves in Iraq, the symbol of peace and all that.
I made up the bit with the passwords.
Films
It wasn’t New Year’s Eve, but never mind. I entered the flat carrying some plastic bags and called out in a deep voice from the door: ‘Hoho- ho, Daddy Frost is here!’
‘Oooo!’ She held her hand coyly over her mouth, imitating an innocent girl.
I put the bags down next to the fridge.
‘But that’s not all!’ Daddy Frost said, standing up tall and proud. ‘I’ve brought some drugs too!’
I hadn’t really, but never mind.
‘Oooo, lucky me, lucky me!’ she chirped. ‘I can see you’re already smacked up.’
‘Just a bit.’
‘You naughty baddie, you!’ she said.
‘That’s just the way I am, miss,’ I answered, and added a gutsy ‘Yeah!’
She gave me a loud kiss on the cheek.
‘Hey, miss, where were you when I was shooting up? In Biology, learning about the birds and the bees?’
‘And pneumonia,’ she said.
‘Hmmm. Hmmm. Where does pneumonia come into it?’ I asked.
But we were already laughing at each other. Not that I really knew why. Part of our love (and understanding) thrived on nonsense. We could talk about non-existent drugs or make up the craziest of things.
I guess that element of the absurd helped us relax (‘after a hard day at work’). One of us would say something silly and the other would laugh and say: ‘Gawd, how stupid you are! Who am I living with?!’
We enjoyed exchanging those insults.
I think it was she who started it, long ago.
Her name was Sanja and mine – Toni.
‘What pneumonia?’ I asked again.
‘I watched a Serbian film,’ she explained. ‘A woman kept complaining:
My child will get pneumonia.’
‘I know that film,’ I said with a professorial air. I gave her a few smacks on the bottom, and she squealed and ran off.
Now we were supposed to ‘do it’ somewhere in the flat.
But, just so she knew who was the eldest, I made a face to show that I didn’t feel like playing those childish games.
* * *
What can I say, we met after the war, under interesting circumstances: I was Clint Eastwood and she the lady in the little hat who arrived by stagecoach in this dangerous city full of rednecks; she’d probably won the ticket in a draw. I watched as she climbed out, a fag between her teeth, and the smoke and sun got in my eyes and gave me a pained, worried face. She had a whole stack of suitcases, bound to be full of cosmetics, and I saw straight away that she’d missed her film and I’d have to save her in this one.
All right, sometimes I told the story that way because I was tired of telling the truth. Once you’ve told the same story a few times over you have to insert a few new elements – why else labour your tongue? Our first meeting never ceased to fascinate her. Whenever she got in a romantic mood she made me tell the story again. The beginning of love is magic. That self-presentation to the other, putting yourself in the best light, striving to be special... Flowers bloom, peacocks strut, and you become a different person. You play that game, you believe in it, and if it catches on – you become different.
How do you tell a story if everything is full of illusions from the beginning?
I had several versions.
One went like this: She had a red strand in her hair, green eyes, and was punkishly dressed, with emphasis on the dressed (that’s the version of punk which isn’t exactly cheap). It’s the domain of bimbos with certain deviations in taste. And that’s how she behaved, too, not quite upright, boyish, deviant; she looked a bit wasted, too, a look which I think trendy magazines called heroin chic. I took note of her – how could I not have – when she first came to the Lonac Café (or whatever it was called), but I didn’t go up to her because her pale face revealed an apathy and pronounced tiredness from the night before. You know those faces which still radiate pubescent contempt for all around and the influence of high-school texts with their occasional enigmatic, bright-eyed ladies, which gothic make-up just highlights; the nightly neon throws a final malediction on it all. People like that don’t want to live in a world like this, they can’t wait to cold-shoulder you when you come up – as if that’s what gives their life meaning.
At that point she usually thumped me on the shoulder – ‘Idiot!’ she said – but she loved it. She loved it when I described her, when I wrapped her in long sentences, when she was the centre of the story and the focus of attention.
‘Anyway, I didn’t go up to her. I just watched her out of the corner of my eye and blew trails of smoke into the night.’
She liked to listen to how I eyed her from the side. That refreshed the scene, a bit like when the country celebrates its national day and founding myths as retold through history and official poetry replete with lies. My language flowed – she loved my tongue and intercepted it with hers.
‘It was in front of the Lonac Café one day: I remember her crushing out her cigarette with a heavy boot, and then she turned in her long, clinging dress, with a little rucksack on her back, and looked at me with the eyes of a young leopardess. She stalked up to me as if she’d sighted a herd of gnus. That was the moment: she decided to make my acquaintance (emancipated as she was). Yes, she came straight up to me and said Sanja, even though my drawn features, as she later admitted, revealed an apathy and a pronounced tiredness from the night before, and she was afraid I wouldn’t react at all.’
Basically we were so cool that this crossing of paths was almost inconsequential.
Wotcher Ned, how’s them parsnips comin’ along? How’s the harvest goin’, cuz? Hey bro, where ya been? That’s how city kids mess around with mock swagger and rural ethos! God, when I think back... At times we had no idea if we fitted any of those roles. At home you’re someone’s child and you roll your eyes; you study at uni and you roll your eyes; then you go out into the world and become your own film star and you roll your eyes because no one gets your film and what you’re all about, and you pine away unrecognised in these backwoods of Europe. But you still switch films depending on the circumstances.
I acted in many films before they took me for my role in this serious life: I worked as a journalist and wrote about the economy. And her: she managed to become an actress with a capital A, which is just what she always dreamed of.
‘How was the rehearsal?’ I asked.
She waved dismissively as if she wanted to take a rest from it all.
A lot of stuff had happened in the meantime, you see. And right now she was taking things out of those plastic bags – you remember the ones.
I’d bought bread, cigarettes, mayonnaise, pancetta, milk, yoghurt, parmesan cheese, a bottle of wine, and so on; I’d been over at the supermarket and paid by card.
‘She’s ripped you off again!’ Sanja protested as she checked the receipt.
‘She can’t have.’
‘She’s typed in three yoghurts although you’ve only got two,’ she said, waiting for me to get angry.
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘I’m going to go over and have a word or two!’ she menaced, as bolshie as could be.
‘Oh come off it.’
‘Of course she’s going to rip you off if you don’t pay attention.’
‘I know –,’ I said, ‘but if I kept tabs on her I’d have to say: You’re ripping me off!’
‘That’s right!’
‘But the checkout lady is always so friendly.’
That sort of thing drove Sanja up the wall.
‘As if you were a millionaire!’ she sneered. ‘When you buy a flat they’ll charge you for a non-existent balcony and get away with it.’
I gave her a kiss on the cheek.
Then I slapped myself on the forehead and exclaimed: ‘D’oh, they’ve stolen our balcony!’
Sanja just rolled her eyes.
Fatal slow food
‘Is there anything in there for us?’ I asked when I saw the classifieds lying open on the coffee table.
‘There are a few we could call,’ she said, and went to on the couch. I slumped into the landlord’s old armchair.
She read out loud: Refined apartments with charm. I closed my eyes and listened to her voice. While she read out the square footage and the location of the flats I envisioned them: A peaceful and quiet street, air conditioning, lift...
And soon we were climbing up into the clouds, up above that quiet street. We imagined that life, looking down at everything. But it wasn’t one hundred percent definite that we needed that peace and quiet. Or that we needed what it said lower down, in a second advert: Close to the tram line, kindergarten, school. That made us think of children of our own growing up quickly and switching from kindergarten to school in the course of the sentence.
‘And in the city centre? Is there anything there?’
Refurbished attic flat, right in the heart of the city centre, with parking space.
Immediately we saw ourselves coming down from that penthouse, going from café to café in the centre, with everything close by, like when you go out to get cigarettes and meet a whole load of people and breathe in the tumult of the street, with its boundless life.
We did that every day. Hovering in weightlessness and reading the adverts, we felt life was light and variable, and we thoroughly understood people who added the word urgent after the description of the flat.
Urgent, urgent, urgent.
We were catapulted into that imaginary life.
‘Come on.’
‘You do it.’
‘I called last time,’ I said
‘Oh, give me the phone then.’
It was nicer to read those adverts in weightlessness than to descend into the lower levels of the atmosphere and talk with those people, hear their voices and feel how businesslike they were. There was something draining about those conversations.
Still, we had to ring that number.
The one with ‘urgent’ next to it.
* * *
We’d been in that flat for a bit too long, that was for sure, and were starting to get sick of the furniture which the landlords had dumped there in bygone ages. My friend Markatović and his wife Dijana had bought an apartment on credit and furnished it futuristically: it was spacious and spacey. We’d been there a few times: they’d cook slow food for us, we’d drink Pinot Grigio from Collio Goriziano and feel part of a new elite in that designer apartment, so light and spacious.
Each time we returned from their place our rented flat looked... like a charity shop. They had boldly moved into a new world, while we dwelt among the dark wardrobes of aunts long dead.
We didn’t talk about that openly, but I sensed the disappointment in the air and – oh my woes – I even found myself wondering if I was successful in life.
I mean, what sort of question is that?!
I’d only just begun to live after the war and all that shit; I’d only just caught my breath again.
But there we were, one time when we’d returned from the Markatovićs’ and that fatal slow food. It was heavy in my stomach for some reason and I couldn’t sleep, so I got a beer out of the fridge and looked around at the cramped flat and its ugly furniture. Why don’t you take out a loan too, whispered a voice (probably my guardian angel). That bewildered me. I never would have thought of the idea because I always considered myself a rebel. Just look at Markatović, the voice said, he’s your generation, and he’s got such a fancy place and even twins. Why couldn’t you have that too?
Hmm, me and a loan, a loan and me... I thought about it that night. I don’t recall the date, but I thought about it long and hard that night. It was a fact that we were still living in Sanja’s student flat although she’d finished uni. At my age, my old man tells me every time, he’d already... And at my age my ma had already... ohoho... What can I say when I think how they lived back then? Perhaps I’d better not tell you. They didn’t have enough money to buy shoes, but they still had children and even built a house. So, naturally, they wonder what Sanja and I are thinking. Do we think? When do we think? When do we think of thinking?
I looked at our Bob Marley poster on the wall, a black and white portrait with him in a statesmanlike pose, and wondered: What does a Rasta think? But he just holds his joint enigmatically between his lips. We have Mapplethorpe’s black male torso on the other wall, which motivates me to do sit-ups regularly. That’s what we’ve invested in. And then you start thinking. A loan – hell, talk about feeling deepended! I wandered the flat that night looking around as if I was saying goodbye.
* * *
When I slept here the first time, Sanja’s rented flat seemed quite a des res: situated on the fifteenth storey of a tower block, above a tram loop. The view was so good that I was afraid to go up to the window:
I was afraid of falling out.
Of course, we came back drunk that first night. We were careful not to be loud because of her flatmate in the other room.
I couldn’t come. She tried to give me a blow-job but turned out to be inexperienced at that. It was nice that she tried, although her teeth scratched. We kept on screwing, the condoms dried out quickly and kept bunching up around the head of my penis. I finally came in the third round. And now? Nothing had been further from my mind than pacing the flat at night and racking my brains over loans.
Anyway, after my first visit I dropped by again the next day, too, but skipped it on the third day so it wouldn’t look like I’d moved in.
I tried to stick to some kind of rhythm, so my moving in was never officially confirmed. I’d visit in the evenings, spontaneously, as if I’d heard there was a good film on TV.
I haven’t organised anything and I don’t have any expectations, I wrote to her on a postcard which I sent from Zagreb to Zagreb just for fun.
She liked that.
She liked everything I said.
At breakfast I made jokes, as fresh as morning rolls, and also entertained her flatmate Ela to try and keep her on side; it wasn’t hard to make her laugh, and it seemed she didn’t object to a guy hanging around the house in undies. So she slept in the bedroom, while Sanja and I curled up on the couch in the living room. When we made love we’d lock the door with a quick, quiet turn of the key. Later we’d quietly unlock it and run to the bathroom.
For the first year I kept on paying rent in my basement bedsitter in another part of the city so as not to lose my independence. My things were there, I’d say.
I made a point of going and sleeping there occasionally and tried to keep up a rhythm of sorts. I didn’t want to lose my independence entirely. When I went there I’d lie on my back, all independent, listen to my old radio and stare at the ceiling.
* * *
At one stage Ela became nervous during our breakfasts, despite the fact that I used to go down to the shop and buy everyone a pastry.
Once she found a little pile of my laundry in the washing machine and said with a look of mild disgust: ‘Aha, so you two are in a serious relationship then!’
‘Where else am I to put his undies?’ Sanja defended herself nervously, and I felt guilty.
I stared downcast at them both.
I said to Ela by way of apology: ‘I haven’t got a machine, you know, and...’
They both began to laugh.
They laughed long and hard: ‘He hasn’t got a machine,’ they repeated, started giggling again, and were soon hooting with laughter.
But Ela soon found herself a new flat.
Our sex became louder. The ladies down in the shop started calling me ‘neighbour’: I bought bread, salami, milk, newspapers, cigarettes, two pastries and the non-existent yoghurt.
* * *
It all ran by itself, without any particular plan. We enjoyed that experiment. We went on our first summer holiday together, then there were autumn walks in Venice, the Biennale, Red Hot Chili Peppers in Vienna, Nick Cave in Ljubljana, a second summer holiday, a third, Egypt, Istria, and so on. Mutual friends, parties, organising things... Everything rolled along nicely as if nature were doing the thinking for us. And then we reached an invisible point.
At a particular moment, I don’t know exactly when, we started to wait – waiting for things to keep happening all by themselves like before. Sometimes, on empty days, you could literally feel the standstill. We’d screw, lie sweaty on the bed and wait for things to go on. We caressed each other, gave each other sloppy kisses, kept each other warm, fell half-asleep, and then one of us would get the remote and zap through the channels.
Now and then I asked myself: what now? It wasn’t that boredom crept in between us. It wasn’t that it might have been good to get up to go off and do something by myself. It wasn’t that; we didn’t speak about that. All in all, things were perfect. We ought to have been happy. That’s when we should have been happiest. That lolling around on the couch, our bodies’ mutual laziness – that’s the ideal of consummate love. We didn’t have a crackling fire in the fireplace, but central heating is all right. The blokes at the heating plant were shovelling like mad. The heating panels were really aglow.
Now and again there’d be an unexpected bout of the blues. But it wasn’t that. Perhaps there was also some kind of anger, but we weren’t aware of it. It just coiled up in our bodies and sometimes made us feel a bit tense. The muscles in your back stiffen. You wake up and you’re not rested. The alcohol really starts to knock you about. Sometimes you have attacks of hypochondria, but they pass. You watch TV, channel-hop...
We’d have arguments over little things.
I’d blow up and then apologise: ‘Sorry, I don’t know where that came from.’
‘Perhaps we should break up,’ Sanja would say, offended, without looking at me.
That was how she spoke. For example, she’d say ‘perhaps I shouldn’t go with you to X’ – not because she didn’t want to go, but so that I’d assure her that she was going with me. So she said ‘perhaps we should break up’ so I’d assure her of the opposite. So I’d prove to her that it all made sense.
I had to make sense of things.
At some point things stop developing by themselves and you have to give them a boost. Think up a new project. Feel a new drive. Playfulness, joy, passion.
Now I watched Sanja ringing up adverts for flats.
It was her turn; I’d done the calling the day before.
She was trying hard to make a serious impression. The people on the other end thought her voice sounded immature – they felt she couldn’t be a serious buyer.
She smoked and periodically nibbled the nail of her little finger.
She rolled her eyes.
I saw that she’d hit on an another old lady who was going on and on and being a pain.
‘Yes, I know where the Savica market is. Yes, I know we need to come and look at it, but could you please tell me the price?’
She just wanted to finish the conversation, but sometimes it’s hard to.
‘We’ll probably drop in,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to see when my boyfriend gets back from work.’
‘Say “husband”.’
‘What?’ she cocked her head as she put down the receiver.
‘Why did you lie that I was at work?’ I laughed. ‘Do you think it makes us sound more serious?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said darkly.
‘If you’re going to lie, say “my husband’s at work”. The boyfriend bit is half-baked.’
‘Oh, shut up!’
* * *
Baghdad is burning, the Allied bombing has begun, yoo-hoo!
You saw it, and what can I tell you, the Alliedbombing tore us out of our depression, life has become sportive, dynamic, everyone is fighting to get a word in edgeways, everything is in motion.
The Allied bombing, bro, like when you pour sugar into coffee, night and white crystals, attractive images you see again and again. I watch the allied bombing from the Sheraton Hotel in Kuwait City and am looking for a way to attach myself to the troops, to be embedded, cuz, but for some reason they don’t trust me, which doesn’t surprise me cos I don’t trust myself when I promise myself things, and they can probably see it in my eyes: I emit it like radiation or it comes out of me like bad breath.
I hear the alarm sirens, in Kuwait City they take them seriously, you know how it is at the beginning: people call their families, turn off their hi-fis, suddenly everyone hurries home, and the traffic jams, bro, long lines of waiting cars, and all in big cars, everyone honks their horns from inside, out from everyone’s metal box, the windows are rolled right up, everyone is afraid of poison gas, people just breathe the air in their vehicles, they sweat and stare out like fish, and I don’t know what to do with myself, so I go out roaming in the gloaming in that city of tall, shining towers by the light of the silvery moon.
OK, it’s not silver, but never mind.
Everything here now depends on which country you’re from, and Croatia’s decided to be against the war, so Lieutenant Jack Finnegan, the officer in charge of liaison with journalists, doesn’t believe me when I say I’m on their side, he won’t give me a press ID card cos in his eyes I represent Croatia, so I go out walking around Kuwait City in the name of Croatia, I look at the shop windows in the name of Croatia; they say several missiles came down in the sea, and the government has closed the schools for seven days.
On TV kids yell in the streets, they party in front of the American embassy somewhere in Europe, I see them as they enter the public eye, they present themselves, everyone has a chance to be someone as long as the Allied bombing lasts, gravity increases, everything gains weight, your voice gains character, and character means enjoyment.
Otherwise I guess I’ve become mean in Kuwait City – I’ve lost weight and developed dark circles under my eyes. Do you remember the first sirens? You think something’s going to happen up there, right at that moment, things will be resolved, you think it’ll soon be over and last no longer than a war film. But it turns out more like a boring TV serial: you dash down to the shelter, stand around until the episode’s over, later you run there a second time, and wait for it to happen... Here people rushed to the shelters three times today, nothing’s happened and they’re crazy already.
I read these emails on my black laptop and kept things to myself.
‘Uh-huh,’ Sanja said, concluding another conversation. She noted down the address on the edge of the newspaper. ‘We’ll call again tomorrow, thank you.’
She put down the receiver.
‘Attic flat, quiet street, 55 m2... Now he mentioned there are sloping walls. I don’t know, we’d have to see it.’
‘That sounds good,’ I said. ‘How about straight away?’
‘I told him we’d come tomorrow,’ she objected.
‘Tomorrow is your dress rehearsal,’ I reminded her.
‘But I’ll have a break, and it’ll do me good to get out and stretch my legs.’
‘OK,’ I said.
A chance passer-by
Guys who cook were coming into fashion in those days and I bought a book by an English cook who had his own programme on TV. I opened it on the worktop as if I was about to chop it up.
I read and leafed through the pages with knife in hand: there are so many different foods, you wouldn’t believe it.
I put down the knife because I’d decided to make spaghetti after all (sensible as I was).
But, all the same, I kept muttering in English while I spun hyperactively around the kitchen. I adopted a nasal twang to try and sound English and spoke in a series of short sentences: ‘Itts veri fasst. Veri fasst. Naw wee edd sum beens.’
The spoken instructions didn’t match the cooking of spaghetti carbonara but helped create atmosphere.
‘Itts not big filosofi. Poteitous, poteitou chipps... Itts simpl, itts fantastik.’
I left mess wherever I went.
She laughed.
‘It’s a disaster,’ I said.
She joined in a bit. She hovered around me and made light work where I’d been clumsy; then I hovered around her like an overeager apprentice.
Although she took over everything, I kept playing the part of the guy who was cooking.
Everyone needed the illusion of the domesticated male, and I was providing an example. I dangled around like Pinocchio on his strings.
‘It’s ready,’ she said.
Then we ate the spaghetti.
‘Hmm, not bad,’ she said. ‘Well done!’
I smiled. I liked it when we were a good team, when we supported each other, regardless of the reality.
* * *
I ate my plate clean.
‘Oh, I bumped into Ela today,’ I said.
She looked at me quizzically as she grabbed a strand of spaghetti hanging out of her mouth.
‘Nothing special,’ I continued, ‘she just asked how you are...’
That came out by itself because whenever I met someone she’d want to know: Did they ask about me? I know part of our conversations off by heart.
‘...and said to say hello,’ I added.
She swallowed and said: ‘I rang Ela today.’
‘Really?’ I wondered. ‘Why did you ask me then?’
‘I didn’t ask you anything.’
‘Didn’t you?’ I said, taking some more spag.
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Want any more?’
‘No,’ she answered.
‘All right,’ I said, helping myself to the rest.
‘I invited her to the première. She was very happy.’
‘Sure, you have to invite your old friend,’ I said.
‘How does she look?’ Sanja continued. ‘I haven’t seen her since... I don’t know when.’
My mouth was full and I made a face which meant I didn’t know what to say. Ela had been through periods of depression in recent years, and Sanja told me after I swore secrecy that she’d also been having clinical treatment.
‘Was she fat?’ Sanja asked.
‘She hasn’t lost weight,’ I said.
‘It’s a disaster,’ Sanja sighed. ‘First she punishes herself with diets, then she screws someone and falls unhappily in love, then she bingeeats again and ends up getting depressed.’
Sanja used to tell me this often, wondering at the way things with Ela kept repeating themselves.
I don’t know why we became such experts on Ela. We weren’t actually in touch with her any more. But we often talked about people that way; we harmonised our opinions and felt we were an organised entity.
‘In fact, I don’t know if she did say to say hello,’ I admitted. ‘Maybe she didn’t.’
‘Who knows if you saw her at all,’ Sanja said and looked at the TV, which was on with the volume down low.
I looked too: it was an afternoon talk show with a whole battery of columnists from women’s magazines.
‘Look, look, turn it up!’ I said.
I thought I’d seen him before. Yeah, it was him, Icho Kamera! He was in the audience, holding the microphone and asking a question.
‘The remote’s over there somewhere,’ Sanja said.
I zipped over to the couch, got the remote and turned up the volume, but Icho was already gone.
The popular compère Ana blinked charmingly as if wondering whether she’d missed a joke. Icho, a real country bumpkin, had obviously asked something out of context.
‘I can’t say, hmm,’ said one of the guests. ‘I wouldn’t want to judge at first glance,’ another columnist declined with a polite smile; Icho Kamera with his rugged Balkan face, moustache and grizzled sideburns looked at them with a parliamentarian’s earnestness, only to nod glumly at the end.
Who knows what Icho asked.
The compère quickly moved on to another question from the audience.
‘Stone the squids, who’da thought Icho Kamera would make it thru to Ana’s programme! I canny believe it!’ I said.
‘Is he one of your relatives?’
‘No. Have I told you about him?’
‘No, I just thought he might have been because you switched to dialect straight away.’
‘Uh?’ I hadn’t thought about that. I just wanted to make her laugh.
* * *
As kids we used to shout: ‘There’s Icho Kamera!’ We were happy to see him because he lived in the very next village. But our fathers commented: ‘Fools always rush in!’
Icho annoyed them; there was nothing at all special about him, but for decades he’d been chasing every opportunity to go on TV and radio and to get himself in the papers.
He had his system and invested a lot of energy. At Hajduk football matches he’d stand in an empty section of the grandstand so the camera would catch him for a moment, and then he’d wave. All the cameramen knew Icho Kamera; people said they were sick of him and insiders claimed he paid them to film him; he was a well-todo farmer who grew lettuce on an industrial scale but always went around wearing the same sombre old jumper and jacket, so people didn’t know if he was a miser or spent all his money travelling around after the cameras and bribing low-level media personnel. Football matches were his speciality because from there, doing a deal with the cameraman, he was best able to make it through to a mass audience. But Icho Kamera didn’t pick and choose; if he was caught in a traffic jam after a car accident he’d immediately set off for the scene of the accident and hassle the photographer. The local media’s crime news archives contain a vast number of photographs of Icho Kamera who, seemingly by chance, is at the edge of the image showing a mangled Lada and a Peugeot, or we see him walking in front of a foreign exchange office which had been robbed by two masked attackers, probably drug addicts, who stormed it in broad daylight, threatened the teller with a pistol and told her to ‘take all the money out of the safe and hand it over,’ according to the police report.
TAKE ALL THE MONEY OUT OF THE SAFE AND HAND IT OVER, the drug addicts roared, and Icho just happened to be passing by; that’s how I imagined turbulent city life as a village child.
Icho Kamera evoked certain emotions in me; after all, he was my first link to the outside world. Whether it was a vox pop by a fan leaving the stadium downhearted after the team had been knocked out in the UEFA Cup qualifying round or the opinion of a chance passer-by on German unification, Icho Kamera from the neighbouring village would come round the corner as an anonymous citizen who simply had a nose for surveys.
Later, when I planned to become an artist and developed an ironic distance to everything – and I mean everything – I intended to do some kind of ‘project’, as we called it, with Icho Kamera, that unsung hero of media culture; I got my younger sister to cut photographs out of the newspapers and video the appearances of Icho Kamera, tasks she willingly accepted, and she collected several video snippets as well as five or six photographs; no sooner had she got her friends from school to also keep an eye out than my mother found out what she was doing; she gave me a ferocious talking-to and explicitly forbade my sister from being involved, as if this was all something fiendish. Only afterwards, wondering what to do with the project, did I think of asking Icho Kamera personally to show me his archive; he was bound to have it all documented.
The summer the war began I once saw him from the bus; he was coming out of a shop; I got out at the next stop, rushed to catch up with him and introduced myself, but Icho Kamera just gave me a sullen look and continued on past as haughtily as a real star. I stopped for a moment before setting off after him again, like a paparazzo, to explain the project to him, going on about how great I found it that he’d been propelling himself into the quota of chance passers-by for so many years, and that it was a kind of deconstruction of the system; until he stopped and said: ‘Hop it or my boot’s gonna fin’ an arse to kick!’
That knucklehead! That loony – he really thought he was someone. I watched him from behind and realised he was not a likeable figure at all, but more the symptom of a disease.
I was irate because I knew that without his contribution I wouldn’t be able to carry out the project which I’d thought would make me famous.
That encounter dampened my enthusiasm for the project, one of the many I didn’t finish, and besides, the war began, and various chance passers-by began to die, becoming media heroes of the day, until there were too many of them. I stopped following the matches and reading the regional newspapers, and I hadn’t seen Icho Kamera for quite some time until he appeared on Ana’s afternoon talk show; he’d obviously come to Zagreb by train to be in the audience, and he got hold of the microphone and asked an unintelligible question.
I told Sanja about it all. She laughed and shook her head, thinking I was exaggerating. And then, at the end of the programme, the camera panned over the audience again and Icho managed to wave.
‘What did I tell you!’ I said.
Daughter Courage
I’d dozed off a bit, and when I opened my eyes I saw her from behind, standing in front of the mirror: she was singing in a hushed, hoarse voice, playing a non-existent guitar.
Once, in the flower of my youth,
I thought I was a special bloom,
Not like every farmer’s daughter,
With my looks and talents,
My aspiring for something higher.
She was shaking her head and playing her air guitar; then she noticed me behind her and smiled bashfully.
‘Hi cutie,’ I said softly, like a paedophile, and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Ugh, ugh,’ she went. ‘I don’t want to be a cutie. I’m supposed to look... brassy.’
‘Sorry, wasn’t with you.’
‘OK, OK,’ she said. ‘But I have to go now.’
‘What, already?’
‘You slept for two hours.’
‘Uh?’
‘Tonight we’re rehearsing the whole piece for the first time,’ she explained.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I said and hugged her.
For the last two months she’d been working on the play Daughter Courage and Her Children. Her first leading role in a major theatre. The East German director, Ingo Grinschgl, was doing a kind of free rendering of Brecht. Sanja was ‘Daughter Courage’, and her ‘Children’ were the band she performed with near the front lines. The piece was set during a ‘Thirty Years’ War’. It had time-warped from the seventeenth century into the twenty-first. Things were a bit jumbled, as they often are with avant-gardists. I hadn’t quite got my head around the story but it ‘had something going for it’.
Daughter Courage was the singer, the frontwoman of the band. All the band wanted to do was to ‘live and play’; a certain ‘Council’ organised their concerts and saw to the overall image of the army and the war. Daughter Courage and Her Children was set on the ‘Eastern Front’; their enemies ‘didn’t like rock or the West’, so it looked like the band played a particular role in the clash of cultures. Impressions like this were required in higher spheres, in which the Council operated. The ‘Children’ had no idea about all this, of course, and the band performed in harsh environments in front of the troops, although the majority of the soldiers would have preferred to listen to cheerful music or sentimental songs ‘for the soul’ rather than their punk rock. Over time the band adapted itself to the audience and began to perform the songs they requested. Daughter Courage went along with it all just to keep the band together, since some of the band members wanted to join the army and get a taste of real fighting. She tried to get them to stay, even with sex, but the band fell apart, and in the end she remained alone with the drummer and performed a kind of punk striptease. At the end of the play she had to bare her breasts to a furious drum roll. And then everything drowned in darkness.
Ingo chose Sanja at an audition, at which the candidates had to bare their boobs at the end, and prominent actresses boycotted this indignity. Only a handful of unestablished actresses and a few female exhibitionists turned up. So it was that Sanja received her first lead role, and from the very beginning there were witty comments that this was the only role officially given on account of an actress’s breasts. Sanja knew she’d have to act brilliantly to counteract that humour, otherwise her career would start off on the wrong foot in this small country and she’d become a metaphor for bare breasts in the main role.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I repeated.
My hands rested on her shoulders.
‘Jerman and Doc and their horsing around – we’ve wasted so much time.’ She shook her head.
She’d told me about that: Ingo didn’t speak Croatian, so Jerman and Doc were slack from the beginning with learning their lines. They goofed around at rehearsals and played Brecht in a rendition of their own: ‘Where’ll we go for a few after?’ ‘I can’t hack this no more!’ ‘Well, how ’bout Limited?’ ‘Why ya lookin’ at me like that?’ ‘Just look at that German – as if we were playing extra time!’
Ingo barracked and gesticulated, he wanted them to dig their teeth in. He was convinced he was working with real professionals. But it just turned out that Jerman and Doc, in parallel, had both recently suffered marital shipwreck. Nursing their wounds, they spent whole nights dancing on a raft on the River Sava which had been declared a disco, and they came to rehearsals wasted. Somehow they managed the physical part of the acting, but they had no energy left for their lines. Sanja felt like a real nerd when she spoke her part to them: If he becomes a soldier he’ll end up beneath the grass so green, that much is clear. That will be the price of his bravery if he’s not sensible... Oh, will he be sensible? And she’d receive the answer: Don’t hassle me, OK? Just leave me, as of tomorrow I’ll be back to normal... Just keep going now, come on, just keep speaking as if I’d given you the proper answer.
Things went on like this for a while until Jerman and Doc let things slide just a bit too far and started slipping in modern and slang words like ‘debacle’, ‘no-brainer’ and ‘aspirin’; Ingo probably just twigged to the word ‘aspirin’ and started following the script. Although he didn’t know a single word of Croatian, he quickly realised something was amiss. From then on, he came to the rehearsals with an assistant to check the spoken text, and work proceeded properly to make up for what had been let slip.
Ingo had now lost faith in all of them, Sanja said. He’d become paranoid and considered her part of the conspiracy. He was growing a beard and had declared a dictatorship.
‘It’s a disaster,’ she groaned.
‘You do your bit and everything’ll be OK. Doc and Jerman are mental, but when the panic hits them they’ll get down to work.’
I knew them well from my student days.
‘OK, I’m off,’ she said.
* * *
Private Jason Maple removes his mask. He’s 20 years old and says he’s happy the war has finally started.
Everyone who’s squatted around in a dusty trench for months can hardly wait for something to happen, of course, it’s normal, since they’ve come here, otherwise nothing makes any sense, and sense is the most important thing. Even in war – sense is the most important thing. It’s incredibly important. Sense. You have to grasp for every scrap of sense, you just have to, for every propaganda of sense, for every lie of sense, cos... When there’s no sense, and there isn’t, you go round the bend, madness comes out of your ears, so you have to believe in sense, particularly in war, you have to believe in sense fervently, and even after the war you have to believe with the faith of a fanatic if you want it to make any sense, otherwise it doesn’t.
Jason Maple, twenty years old – I watch as the dust flies up around him, whirls up, but all that has fuckin’ sense, everything is infused with the power of sense. It’s the worst - nothing is crazier than sense and the wish to be imbued with it.
You have to have strong nerves, I said to Jason, I’ve got some experience, war has begun, and war is boring, boring, you have no idea how boring it can be, it’s never as concentrated as it is in a film, here you’re constantly on hold, and then when it happens you whack your helmet on and you can’t see, you can’t see even when you’re hit, you can’t see it at all, once when it was all over I looked at my wound, it was under my arm, and when I raised my arm it opened up, that was it, the most interesting sight of the war, cos war is boring, it’s not at all like a film, it’s so boring that it drives you to other things, to the fun of war, to all those things you didn’t think of doing, not in your wildest dreams, but now you want to, it’ll make you become someone else, and that someone else will make sense, you’ll know that it’s not you, that you’re not the one who enjoys it, but, in real terms, you will be the one, and you’ll be a no-one when it starts to be fun, and then ask me: where were you and what did you do?
Jason Maple is happy, he says, cos it’s started, and that happiness is an incredible thing: you’re dirty, exposed to diseases, the air is full of hot lead, you have to salute idiots, a whole pyramid of idiots sitting on your shoulders, but you’re happy. OK, you’re not happy all the time, you’re temporarily happy, but that too is incredible. I was so happy when we were cleansing villages there, it doesn’t matter where. And now I’m unhappy when I leave the flat, and I go back to check I haven’t left anything switched on, so nothing catches fire, cos I don’t trust myself and I know what it’s like when there’s a fire.
I was happy when we were cleansing those villages, and that’s why I don’t trust myself, cos today, when someone talks about it, you wouldn’t believe what stories there are, today when they just tell me how it was – they just need to mention it – I get unhappy, madly unhappy, aggressively unhappy. It’s enough for me just to remember why I was happy back then, and I’m unhappy now, and that’s why I don’t trust myself and why I’m happy, cos I don’t trust myself, and being like that I’ve come to see you guys, to see your happiness, I told Jason.
He didn’t understand me at all, of course, imbued, as he was, with meaning.
Worker and individualist
I read those pieces again, they got under my skin and made me feel strangely uncomfortable; I tried to relax my shoulders and kept stretching my arms. I heard my joints crack.
Fortunately I was interrupted by a call: ‘Excuse me, did you put in the advert: Former rebel, tall and swarthy, needs a guarantor for a loan?’
It was Markatović, the joker. He was highly amused that even I now had dealings with a bank.
‘OK, former goth,’ I replied, ‘I’ll remember you’re interested.’
‘Listen, have you got time for coffee?’ he asked.
‘You drink too much of the stuff,’ I said.
Markatović was always asking me to ‘go for coffee’, and always with a business motive. He wasn’t one of those guys who you never see around any more when they have kids. With him it was the opposite. He had a registered firm for marketing, publishing and all sorts of things, and he drank too much coffee all over town; he handled a million pieces of information from all sorts of different spheres. He liked to say he knew half the country, and he presented himself as a link for everyone and everything.
‘Come on please, I need your help – it’s important,’ he said.
I had to go to the Churchill Bar; I hadn’t been there before. When I arrived I saw it was a posh place by any standards: full of fancy little glass cases full of fat cigars, with leather armchairs and pungent smells. Markatović greeted me with outstretched arms as if I was just the man they had been waiting for. He wasn’t alone...
Here, unhoped-for, I saw the notorious sheriff of a small town in a valley, surrounded by several bodyguards; I’d never seen the fellows before but I could tell straight away that they were bodyguards because of the way they glanced around like children looking out of a car. They were redundant, of course, because this tycoon, who went by the nickname ‘Dolina’, was himself an intimidating hulk; clearly he only kept bodyguards so as to make an even worse impression.
I had no idea what they were talking about, but Markatović said straight away that I was a genius at ‘those sorts of things’; he introduced me as an editor of the weekly Objective and an ‘image specialist’, and languid Dolina sized me up suspiciously like a sumo wrestler before a fight.
‘What’s this all about?’ I asked.
Markatović told me straight out that this Cyclops needed ‘a new image’.
‘A new image,’ Markatović repeated with an air of importance and nodded to me, which made the bodyguards twitch; now they kept a cautious eye on me as if looking to see if I’d brought the ‘new image’ along.
After a dramatic pause, Markatović explained to me what I already knew: this ‘gentleman’ with millions of euros to his name, had recently left his party, which was generally inclined towards the filthy rich and had allowed him to amass wealth and take over his valley during the war – thereby gaining himself the nickname ‘Dolina’, meaning valley. Markatović was therefore trying to persuade him that, without the backing of the party, he could no longer keep the same old image... ‘He’s in new circumstances now, politically speaking, and can’t use the old image any more,’ Markatović told me, although his words were intended primarily for Dolina, who probably still needed persuasion because, I’m afraid to say, he didn’t know until now that he possessed any image at all.
‘Yes, yes, he needs a new image,’ I said gruffly.
I helped Markatović out now and then, out of habit. War and capitalism in the nineties had been a nasty shock to my system, and penury made me develop the habit of taking on any work, even if that meant doing three or four jobs at the same time. I actually wanted to slow down a bit now. I tried to explain to Markatović that panic was on the decline these days, but he claimed the situation now was even worse. Besides, business meant growth: you had to pay off old loans with new ones – if you didn’t rush forwards, the masses would catch up with you from behind. As soon as you stood still you were done for, Markatović told me.
‘That means the new image needs to be tailored to suit the new situation,’ Markatović said to me, actually speaking to Dolina.
I saw that I’d have to say a few words too.
‘That’s right, the new situation... Redesign is fundamental.’
‘Ugh, yes,’ Dolina nodded after some difficult thinking. ‘Y’mean you can take care of that?’
He said that to Markatović, and Markatović glanced at me.
But Dolina was still looking at Markatović.
I suppose I wasn’t making much of an impression.
Unlike Markatović.
I watched him. I envied old goths like him a bit. It was easy for them to switch into career mode: black polo-neck, black suit, black coat, shiny black shoes. For me, an ordinary old rebel, there was no painless transition. I tried the bright, bold and stylish. I even bought woollen jumpers, only to take off all that stuff again a minute before leaving and put on my standard gear: T-shirt, leather jacket, sneakers or boots, and jeans in the middle. I just couldn’t make an impression.
That was a bit depressing. Whereas the allegedly depressive goths became all the more energetic as years went by.
Markatović now explained to me that, with my help, he was planning to profile Dolina as a dissident who’d clashed with the powers-that-be in the capital; now he was a regionalist.
Good, but seeing that Dolina’s valley wasn’t the size of a region, ‘Let him be a microregionalist. Hah, how does that sound?’ he asked. Hmm, I looked at him, then at Dolina, the microregionalist. ‘No, no, microregionalist isn’t quite right.’ Regionalist still sounded better.
Markatović continued: the task was to make him a dissident, a regionalist and... an individualist. That was the logical conclusion since he’d left the party. And a liberal. It all added up: dissident, regionalist, individualist – he was bound to be a liberal too.
Dolina’s comment? He had to go to the toilet, so off he went, accompanied by a bodyguard.
If there were no real liberals in those backwoods we had to invent them, Markatović told me. This meant we were onto something BIG... Because if we presented him as a liberal maybe someone sensible would join him. There were sure to be people in those parts. And if they took heart... Markatović couldn’t stop. His ideas came thick and fast.
‘I get you,’ I said, ‘but count me out of it.’
‘All right –,’ he answered, ‘but just stay for a bit longer, please.’
Dolina lumbered back from the toilet and sat down, breathing heavily. He looked like a good-natured alligator. He hadn’t just had a snort, had he?
‘Boys,’ said Dolina in a grating, throaty voice, ‘I see, er... I see ya’re good.’
He smiled at me with an expression as if he were looking at a newborn baby.
‘We’ve got work to do,’ he creaked in thick southern dialect and patted us on the back. ‘I got the councillors to walk out with me. Nice political crisis, y’know, and then elections and all that. Ha, ha, ha, microregional elections... Ha, ha, fuckin’ elections...’
His bodyguards smiled too.
‘Just get the advert done for me and we’ll move on from there,’ he said to Markatović as he got up. ‘You’ll have the money tomorrow.’
* * *
‘Don’t do that to me any more!’ I growled at Markatović when they’d gone.
‘Hey, I’ll devise the campaign for him in half an hour,’ he sighed repentantly, and then added with a wistful glance: ‘But, like, I can’t be the owner of the firm, line up the job and then do it myself too, y’know – that’d look dilettantish to him. I have to bring someone else in so he sees, like, that I’ve got workers, staff. Sorry.’
I glanced around the cigar bar. Just the place where I’d act the worker. ‘Thanks a million,’ I said. ‘I’d downright forgotten that I belong to the working class.’
‘But I’ve devised everything already,’ he consoled me. ‘Now I just need to hire someone to do the design.’
‘The designer is a worker,’ I said. ‘And you’ll need a photographer too – he’s also a worker.’
The old goth stayed serious. ‘If you want, you could travel down south, like, and tour the area. We can pay for all that, it’s just that I don’t have time to travel. Besides, it’s better that someone else goes, like I said, so they see a whole team is involved.’
‘Markatović!’ I glared at him as if I was about to bash him with the ashtray.
‘OK, OK, I just wanted to mention it,’ he said.
Then his mobile phone rang. It was his wife, Dijana, and he told her that he was negotiating things with me – business matters.
He tried to sound soothing as if he was rocking her on waves of optimism and, yes, he’d be heading home in ‘half an hour or so’. I don’t know if she fell asleep in the middle of his story or if she hung up on him. He just looked at the mobile in surprise.
His wife had always wanted to be remembered to me in the past. ‘Dijana sends her regards,’ Markatović would say when he’d finished.
He didn’t say that any more.
I got the impression that Dijana considered us both alcoholics. Who knows, maybe she thought I was a bad influence.
‘I’m going to the toilet,’ Markatović said.
He was there for a while, and when he came back he spoke softly:
‘Know what? I’ve got some coke. Want me to give you a bit?’
‘Oh –,’ I uttered, not knowing what to say.
I didn’t have all that much experience with it.
There hadn’t been any coke in our circles until recently. But now, it seemed, we were making progress... And the whole country was under development.
‘Er, I wouldn’t now,’ I said, ‘I have an editorial meeting in the morning.’ Then I thought it could be a treat for Sanja and her mob after the première and I could show off.
‘Well, actually – give me a bit,’ I said.
He handed me a packet under the table and I stuck it in my pocket.
I felt a bit strange.
‘How long have you been into that for?’ I asked him.
‘Just recently, when the atmosphere’s right,’ he said.
I looked around. Not exactly what you’d call atmosphere.
‘Don’t think... It’s not heroin,’ Markatović said.
‘No, I’d never take horse,’ I quickly agreed.
‘Me neither,’ Markatović said. Then he nodded and made a face as if a tragic memory had just crossed his mind.
I nodded too.
For a second we felt like boys on the right path.
Then Markatović started talking about the stock market. He leaned towards me. I could write a guide for stock-market beginners for his publishing house – the basics, kind of – because he knew I played around with shares a bit. He tried to persuade me; he said we lacked a reference book in Croatia because people were inert and still had socialism in their heads.
But you’re full to bursting with new ideas, aren’t you, I scoffed inside. Fortunately he didn’t seem to take those ideas seriously. He’d prattle about them vigorously for a while, and then he’d never mention them again.
‘I’ll think it over,’ I told him.
A waitress, young and wasp-waisted, came up to the table. ‘I’ll have a beer,’ I said.
Markatović ordered coffee. Then he had an afterthought: ‘No, wait, better whisky – and a beer.’
‘Coffee’s going to make a wreck of me,’ he said in justification. ‘You mustn’t mix coke and coffee,’ he added.
All that coffee all day was killing him, you could see it. His face was puffy and – surprise, surprise – he’d developed a beer belly. I’d say he looked quite a bit older than me although we were the same age; we’d first met at an Economics entrance exam long ago when we’d both just left the Yugoslav People’s Army.
Looking back, that was rather a fateful encounter.
My way
We sniffed each other out back at the entrance exam for Economics and discovered that we’d both been cajoled into going to that faculty, despite our inclination towards philosophy and art. To get me to enrol in Economics, my folks bribed me with a Sony hi-fi, a state-of-the-art system back then with a double cassette deck, and Markatović’s folks bought him nothing less than a Yugo 45 to drive. But for us the most important thing was to come to the big city with all its concerts, clubs and the vibrant social scene.
The rest of the group at the entrance exam were already discussing where they’d work after uni. The majority were counting on government jobs, while the more avant-gardist advocated entrepreneurship and risk, which there would be more and more of in our country too, they said. We sided with the pro-riskers. But we were hardly accepted into their ranks because we seemed too much of a risk; compared with the crowd from Economics, Markatović and I looked like outright vagabonds, even to ourselves, which we couldn’t have imagined back in high school. The crack corps of sex, drugs and rock’n’rollists didn’t make it to uni – those first waves of rebels get bogged down early on, cannon fodder of the subculture.
Now we, in turn, advocated creative business. We pretended to admire Bill Gates and his ilk, came out with their quotes and generally sowed confusion among the straight-and-narrow Economics students. Markatović claimed to have read in The Economist that Gates was working on a combination of a computer and a washing machine and as such would bring a computer to every home, which others considered impossible. He was inspired by that idea throughout the 1990-91 academic year and acquired several disciples, particularly among female students.
To tell the truth, our debauched lifestyle was only accepted to a limited degree during the first semester. The nerds soon closed ranks and we were declared no-hopers, especially seeing as the girls liked to sit around with us in the cellar canteen. We enjoyed that dubious reveller’s reputation, and the professor’s pets whispered with Schadenfreude that we had no future. But somehow we managed to scrape through that academic year while the country hurtled towards war.
We were still dutiful sons of our parents and thought our elders knew where they were leading us. Then the war began in earnest. Although it’d been long in the brewing, it still caught us all by surprise. It was hard to muster the concentration to study. Moreover, both Markatović and I spent the end of that summer in uniform and missed the start of the third semester, but in the end we were able to present ourselves as even greater guys – heroes, almost. We enrolled in second year on the basis of those elastic wartime documents: we had army certificates, and the lecturers didn’t use us to set an example in exactitude.
During this period I saw the world fall apart. Nothing was permanent, authorities faded and people flinched before us. We realised that we belonged to a generation which had a moral advantage because it was defending all those old folk accustomed to the moulds and models of socialism. Lost as they were, they patted us on the shoulder as if they were thanking us for something. We vocally despised socialism and they agreed with us on that. We despised their life’s experience and they agreed with us on that too. We disdained all they’d done and stood for, and again they agreed with us. To leave no doubt that the future belonged to us, we disdained everything which until yesterday had been of any worth. They agreed with us on all that.
Markatović now came to uni wearing his camouflage jacket, and I wore mine when I needed a staff member’s signature. Our self-confidence grew, we despised everyone and everything at uni; basically we were up ourselves. We spent most of our time in the canteen, getting blotto like big, disappointed men racked by lovesickness early in life and on a mission to prove it. The war went on, and in the 1991-92 academic year we were allegedly still studying Economics, down in the canteen, drinking beer by the bottle and frightening the faculty staff with our subcultural rebellion, for which the war provided an unexpected pretext. We found it amusing that no one contradicted us, although we were just ordinary arseholes. Once I defined our situation in these terms, and Markatović laughed. He’d get sloshed in the canteen and then go up to people, wearing his uniform, and ask them: ‘Why does no one contradict me when I’m just an ordinary arsehole?’ He grinned like a loony after asking them.
We even tried out our crude humour on the girls to see if we could scare them. That was fun, in a strange way. But this lifestyle led to isolation. We no longer went to lectures at all: we felt we’d lose part of our libertine integrity if we sat there like good little sons of our parents and listened to those crusty lecturers while war profiteers and politicians privatised state firms, the poor butchered the poor, concentration camps sprang up all over Bosnia, and reports came in about mass rape.
If you looked closer, you could see we were barricading ourselves in the canteen to hide from the world.
Although we never would have admitted it to each other, we were shite like the others, rickety and rotten through and through, but we wore the masks of tough lads, not knowing how else to defend ourselves. We went to the canteen for a bit longer, purely out of habit; besides, there were none of the concerts we’d come to the metropolis for, and the bars around the city were full of guys like us, plus the occasional real psycho.
Summer was in the air again, the low-intensity war dragged on, the exam season began and students sat out on the terraces around the faculty building while we were still drinking down in the dark – isolated, like self-convicted felons. We stared into our academic records and realised we had no idea what that faculty was about. We were a bit surprised. Still, we never doubted that we’d be able to get into the swing of things when the deadlines drew close.
But we had no intention of admitting defeat. We simply concluded that uni was shit and not our thing. We belonged elsewhere, somewhere better – we were damn artists, after all! No one understood us. Everyone there was counting imaginary money in advance, what were we doing among those squares and yes-men anyway?! We spoke a different language. They say Croatian and Serbian are different, and back then everything was done to make them differ even more, but this gulf was incomparably greater! We’d entertained them for two years, wasting our talent, and they didn’t give a damn.
‘We’ll never make it good here!’ Markatović said.
‘Never make it good,’ I repeated, as if swearing an oath.
So it was that we found a new path when the right moment came – after the eighth beer in the canteen, when summer was in the air. Our rebellion, which had built up down in the cellar, finally exploded, and we decided to go to the university registry, pick up all our documents and devote ourselves to art. I remember us rolling up there drunk, the ladies from the registry looking at us strangely, and us cheerfully going out into the sunshine with all our papers. Markatović was so exhilarated that he flung them into the air, and we grabbed them as they fluttered down on the gentle breeze in the parking lot... The girls were wearing miniskirts, the war stretched out like chewing gum, and we were finally free.
We fell around laughing.
Marijuana
Later Markatović enrolled in first-year Literature and even published a book of poetry, which received several reviews. They said he was promising – if only he would modernise the manuscript a little. But not a single woman fell in love with him over his poetry, which was probably why something in him broke. His path to literary fame petered into endless procrastination, and then he met Dijana, who didn’t read poetry, and they had twins, two identical boys. Now he ‘had a family to feed’, so he founded his own company...
As I looked at him, puffy and bloated, a witness of my stupid biography, I realised I didn’t look so great myself. Anyway, after Economics I decided to switch to Drama. The competition was fierce – they were all kids from arty families, but I made it all the same.
My folks still placed all their hope in my Economics, especially under the new capitalist system, and pronounced the word for Drama – dramaturgija – in a mystic, tragic voice, like our neighbour Ivanka back in the early eighties when she found out her son was smoking hash. We all heard Ivanka going round and round their yard, holding her head in her hands and moaning: ‘Marijuaaana... Marijuaaana, oh my God... Marijuaaana...’
It sounded hair-raising; that long, undulating word was taboo under socialism; Ivanka swayed like a cobra mesmerised by a snake charmer, and that’s just how my mother behaved many years later...
‘Draaamaturgija... Draaamatuuurgija, oh my God... Draaamatuuurgijaaa,’ she wailed, holding her head in her hands.
When word got around that marijuana was a soft drug, everyone realised I’d moved on to harder stuff.
My parents, who until then had been disinterested in culture, now became its bitter enemies. When the culture programme began on TV they didn’t change the channel straight away any more. Now they glowered and slighted: ‘Huh!’, ‘Talk about a bunch of smart-arses!’, ‘And that’s s’posed to feed you?!’ and so on. It was hardly surprising: war had impoverished them, capitalism had deprived them of their rights, and culture had killed off their last hopes.
I couldn’t count on their financial support, obviously, so I started freelancing for newspapers while still studying. I covered the infamous culture scene, dashed around all day from promotional event to vernissage; where I drank vermouth, which apparently is good for digestion; and in the evenings I’d eat canapés at exhibition openings and premières so I had something to digest after so much vermouth. That was a life full of ‘cultural highlights’. And then, unsuspectingly, I once mentioned in front of the chief editor that I’d studied Economics; he looked at me in disbelief which quickly turned to enthusiasm. The paper was full of Arts dropouts, as it turned out, and Economics dropouts were ‘as rare as hen’s teeth’.
He didn’t want to listen to my complaints, but instantly promoted me, although many thought undeservedly, to ‘economics editor’; I had a whole page to fill with ‘boring news’, as the chief editor put it, and if I found out about any scams I was to report them to him so they could be written up separately because that was exclusively what he and our readers were interested in as far as the economy was concerned.
They put me on the payroll, which saved me from my vermouth diet, but my mother’s occasional comment – ‘See, didn’ we tell ya to stick to Economics?’ – never failed to annoy me.
And now Markatović was trying to persuade me to write a blasted stock-market guide. We fought over it, you can’t say we didn’t... But the economy was lurking in the shadows and, after a dramatic pause, would surely tear us apart.
Markatović and I didn’t talk about that. I think I was waiting for him to mention that guide during his eighth beer; but I was waiting to point it out to him nicely, despite him never officially admitting defeat, because he still considered himself a writer based on that youthful debut, which is probably only possible with writers. On the outside, he was a has-been, but there was still always the possibility of him publishing something again, and in order to preserve that illusion Markatović occasionally mentioned a novel in our conversations at the pub (he’d switched from poetry to prose, the drunkard); it was coming along ‘slowly but solidly’, he said, and bandied around enigmatic, incomplete sentences as if he was chicken to reveal any details, maybe so that no one would steal his idea or because he had nothing to say; still, technically speaking that endless prevarication allowed him to survive as a writer because no one can deny with one-hundredpercent certainty that he perhaps had some rudimentary jottings in a deep drawer. He looked at me glassy-eyed and said: ‘Sooner or later people will flock to the stock market, like the Chinese, you’ll see.’
‘Oh, let’s change the topic,’ I groaned.
We ordered another round.
If it weren’t for Jason I’d’ve died of boredom. He asked me things, he said that since they’d been out in the field they hadn’t had any information, they’d been in an information blockade for weeks, so he asked me what was going on in the world.
The war’s begun, man, I said, were you born yesterday?
A long column of camouflaged bulldozers passed by.
