Читать книгу Our Man in Iraq - Robert Perisic - Страница 7

2. DAY TWO

The pain of transformation

The editorial office. The staff entered in dribs and drabs. I settled down in an office chair, one of the better ones, and reclined against the headrest.

I felt my persona change as he started to emerge: Mr Journo, morphing out of nothing, mastering the rational mindset, tensing his facial muscles... The mask of the working man demands a lot of energy. It ‘demands your all’, as they say. That’s really the main part of the work. The night before, after the Churchill Bar, I’d been with Markatović to a few other places. We ended up at a bar, boasting in front of some girls, and Markatović kept ordering expensive drinks for them.

In the morning, the working man differs sharply from the night owl. Thus the hangover. The pain of transformation.

The chief editor, my ex-friend Pero – thirty-seven years old, married, with two children, a lover and two loans – had even greater problems. He held his temples with the tips of his fingers and stared at his computer keyboard.

He was silent like fathers are in difficult times.

He produced silence. You could have heard a pin drop, but no one dropped a pin.

This was an editorial meeting, nothing special, but Pero had recently been promoted and now he showed a surplus of seriousness to remind us of his role. He’d been one of us before, but then they launched him into orbit, to a place where it’s normal to call the prime minister’s office every now and again and ask to be put through.

He was still reeling a bit from the jolt.

I kept him at the edge of my field of vision. He couldn’t behave like the old Pero now, and the new one hadn’t yet gelled.

He wiped away parts of his old persona like sweat from his brow, with difficulty, and gathered himself into what was supposed to be a whole.

Chairs and rollers squeaked on the carpet.

Pero took the remote and abruptly terminated the silence: the TV up in the corner of the office droned into life.

Now you could see what was happening in Baghdad, where the Americans had entered a week and a half earlier. CNN talked about restoring order and electricity.

I thought the fact that Baghdad was on TV all day and that there was no electricity there would make a good basis for a witticism. Because – oh my woes – I considered it part of my role to be witty.

Check this: people in Baghdad have no electricity but they’re on television all the time. Just think: they can’t even watch themselves.

At least we could during the war here. I felt that was a point worth making, but then I remembered it wouldn’t be so clever for me to mention Baghdad.

I looked through the glass door and saw Silva and ‘Charly’ coming, both smiling.

When he sat down, Charly sobered up and asked me in the kind of voice which has finally moved on to proper topics: ‘How are you?’

‘Yeah, OK. You?’

‘Oh, today is one big hassle,’ he answered, as if he’d just got sick of life.

I thought of asking Charly what sort of hassle it was, though I knew it could only be an everyday annoyance, a minor problem like bureaucratic bother; his tone of voice gave that away, and his complaints about life felt fake, invented solely to make the conversation serious. Charly had always wanted to have a serious chat with me, who knows why. With Silva, on the other hand, he only ever giggled.

I didn’t manage to ask anything because Silva looked at me with her unfailing and meaningless coquetry, and chirruped: ‘Hey Toni, your hairdo is awesome.’

‘Great, thanks,’ I said.

She was a woman who readily paid compliments yet meted out ironic remarks. I received only compliments from her, which helped me relax; Silva instinctively reflected the corporation’s relations of power in her coquetry. As long as she was paying you compliments things were on an even keel, but if she told you your hair was a mess you had to think about your standing in the firm.

Now Vladić, who there’s no need to describe, looked at me from the other end of the table and said: ‘Yes, yes, Toni is a real himbo.’

He chuckled to himself maliciously.

I started to feel uncomfortable in my chair because of my hairdo. I’d only put in a bit of gel...

So I made a face as if I didn’t get what he was on about, and Silva kept looking at me cheerfully as if she expected something more we could leave open.

She was the entertainment editor, so she could always sit there and look frivolous, even in situations like this before the session of the supreme soviet. She was the representative of our light-hearted side. The rest of us, who dealt with the precarious state of the nation, had no right to be cheerful. Our aura was tainted by the prevailing sociopolitical gloom, while Silva vibrated in the bright and lively colours she shopped for in the boutiques every day.

‘Shall we do coffee afterwards?’ Charly asked me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I have to go and look at a flat with Sanja.’

The Chief looked around as if he was counting his troops.

We were all present. All ten of us. We sat there, aware of the conundrum our Objective was in – and the firm in general: Today, the sister daily to us, seemed to have started producing losses. That’s what the powerful Global Euro Press, known to us as GEP, damn their eyes, had triumphantly published yesterday.

Our firm, which we fondly called a corporation, went under the name of Press Euro Global, abbreviated to PEG. It’d been set up by disaffected creatives who split from GEP, and as such we weren’t just a backroom club of malcontents. We had a mission: to fight for truth and justice, to hold the last line of defence against GEP’s media monopoly...

A little quiet, please.

Pero the Chief stood up and said: ‘I don’t need to outline the situation for you – you’ve all got heads on your shoulders. We need to make a move.’

He took us in with his gaze and continued: ‘That’s nothing new to you, right? Because what are we? We’re prime movers! We make the world go round! If there were no media everything would have ground to a halt long ago! Nothing would have happened because there wouldn’t have been anywhere for it to happen!’

He really was putting on a dramatic performance.

He continued: ‘What I want to say is that nothing is going to happen by itself! Well, granted, there are things like 9/11 – you can’t really say that was a media-produced event...’

‘Some say it was,’ I interjected.

‘Like bloody hell it was,’ he snubbed me. ‘People flew the planes up and crashed them. But every newspaper, even the stupidest, is going to cover an attack like that, right? That means there’s no bread to be earned there for us. Nor in this attack on Iraq, although we sent someone there. That’s not it. It all goes too fast, troops tear along the road through the desert. We’re a weekly and we can’t cover that. It goes too fast.’ He pointed to the telly: ‘That’s for TV.’

He waited so we could follow him.

‘We can’t cover what’s visible, do you understand? That’s what TV does, and then the dailies gnaw the bones – that’s not for us!’

He really has prepared for this, I thought. Once he used to bullshit around in the pubs. Just look what a position makes of a man! You could feel that the old Pero had finally ebbed away. As actors say: he’s grown into his role: the lead role.

‘So what do we cover?’

We all looked at Pero the Chief.

‘We cover the invisible! The imperceptible!’ he thundered.

This left me baffled. I started to wonder where he got this theory from.

‘I want you to be investigative, to reflect, to come up with things! Devise and concoct things, show me something new! Turbo-politics was yesterday. There are no more massacres, Tudjman is dead, Milošević is finished! There’s no real drama any more. You have to turn things around. Search for new hysteria. Where’s the old hysteria gone? It must still be around somewhere. You have to search for it where you haven’t searched before.’

Especially in the Gorski Kotar and Lika regions, I thought. (I’d heard those words in the morning weather forecast.)

‘It was easy in the nineties,’ the Chief continued. ‘OK, we were under attack and that wasn’t easy. But the war provided information. That was our contribution to global information: we made breaking news.

The world took note of us. But not any more. Now we’re ordinary.’ He was right: we were simply stagnating. Vegetating. But things had to go on.

‘Now you have to make stories out of ordinary things. We have to shape this new reality. You’re still searching for the old stories, but what’s happening now is amorphous! Because you haven’t shaped it yet! It’s natural that our circulation is falling! That means: I want creation!’

Hmm, that didn’t sound bad at all...

‘That’s what I want. Otherwise there’ll be some swift sackings,’ he concluded, with all the sympathy he could muster.

Hmm, that did sound bad.

Pero the Chief fell silent. It seemed the poetic part of the programme was over.

I get it, the boss has told him to give people a ‘short sharp shock’: a flurry of redundancy notices, scapegoating, fear, motivation... Hell, we had a crisis with every new editor. Why else did we have a new editor? He came as a saviour. In the name of the saviour, ruin always has to be nigh – all religions are based on that.

We can’t do without ruin and the abyss.

People in Croatia were constantly going on about crisis and ruin and shouted it from the rooftops. We ourselves hyped up our headlines with doom and gloom to jolt people into life.

It seemed I needed a jolt, to be sure.

Zap! OK. I’d got my arse into gear now.

I glanced around. The others had come to their senses too.

Young Dario responded best to the shock therapy: he was jolted wide awake and his eyes gleamed like a cheetah’s although he was so lanky that he looked more like an antelope.

After a pause Pero said: ‘And there’s GEP too, as you all know.’

For some reason he looked around at that ‘as you all know’ as if he was searching for an intruder. Then he rested his gaze on Secretary, the old status seeker, who acted the Sphinx at editorial meetings.

He was no ordinary secretary. Once he travelled with me to Moscow, where I interviewed the oligarch Teofilakovsky who was buying up hotels and sponsoring operas in Croatia. I introduced myself as ‘Toni, journalist’, and the Russians scorned me as a busybody, but Secretary introduced himself as ‘the secretary’ and was accorded deep respect. I still hadn’t fully understood his function, but the Russians figured him out straight away: he was a vital remnant of the old system, except that he’d shed all ideology in the cataclysmic system change.

He told me there in vodka-induced elation that he’d once been a Communist, only later to try out all of the parliamentary parties. He’d finally come to rest in the Croatian Peasant Party. He’d discovered they were the best when he first went out to a rural event – there was real hospitality in the country, he told me. Afterwards you needed at least one day of sick leave. The Peasant Party was probably a doubleedged sword, he said, because since being a member his cholesterol had gone up and his gout had come back, like in the good old days.

‘Secretary will brief someone on the GEP topic,’ Pero the Chief explained.

We were constantly exposing GEP’s covert attempts to monopolise the market. Damn GEP had secret firms. They were at us from all sides; they stole topics from us and featured them first. We suspected they had a mole among the editorial staff who leaked our sensations to them. In order to demoralise us, they bought off our journalists by offering them extravagant salaries. Every little while someone would disappear and we’d never mention him again. The PEG management responded to these low-down attacks by burning bridges: all PEG’s journalists had to produce several anti-GEP pieces, engaging in heated polemics with them, calling them criminals and foreign spies, so that in future they’d be unable to go over to those they’d so zealously abused. We didn’t need rafting and paintball – newspaper warfare was our team building exercise.

Before I understood the tactics of burning bridges I’d already distinguished myself in the newspaper war. Now I was attached to PEG. That’s how it is in small countries: the room to manoeuvre is abominably narrow.

Secretary held a note in his hand and looked around through his glasses.

‘Any volunteers?’ the Chief asked, a little surprised.

I saw Dario fidgeting on his chair – you could tell he was about to volunteer, but he didn’t know if the others had precedence. He knew it was a great honour to take on an anti-GEP topic. In the end he raised two fingers and was the lucky one.

I was probably like that once, too, before I cottoned on – basically until the current boss bought us. A fallen tennis star. During the war he played recreationally with the former president and let him win points, for which Mr President rewarded him with discount shares in several state firms.

At that time the president personally edited the daily current-affairs programme, The Evening News, forcing us to be fighters for the truth, and the circulation of the free media rose. But after we won democracy the truth became more accessible. The circulation fell and recently a preferential investor, the ex-tennis star, had moved in to become our chief shareholder. I was naively surprised; it wasn’t logical to me, probably because, according to emotive logic, I’d thought we were fighting against... against something. But in economic terms the situation was clear: we had no dough, but he did.

Now, finally, I was only working here because it was a job.

I took out the loan.

The democratic processes brought the interest rates down.

* * *

Three Iraqi Scuds were fired at the Anglo-American convoys heading for the border. They came down one after another this afternoon twenty minutes before I arrived on the scene of the miss. Please introduce me as ‘Boris Gale, directly from the scene of the miss’. Usually reports come from the scene of an event, but in war you can only report from the scene of the miss. I mean, if it’d been a hit I wouldn’t be able to report it. That needs explaining to the readers... So: ‘Here’s a report from the scene of the miss from our correspondent...’ But listen, write what you want, that’s your job.

There were two others with me at the scene of the miss, Italians - since I’m an impoverished reporter they let me hop in the back of their jeep.

Like I say, we just arrived there. But they sent us back straight away. They were all in complete NBC gear with masks, rubber gloves and rubber boots.

Rubber, rubber and more rubber. That’s my report.

A non-event, a miss.

Gumboots in the sand, a huge sky.

Nothing to say.

The soldiers in rubber made us skedaddle.

We zoomed off into the desert, ciao.

* * *

We discussed topics for the next issue. I announced an interview with the old economist Mr Olenić: ‘The guy has witnessed all the economic reforms of the last decades.’

Silence.

‘He has all sorts of anecdotes,’ I added.

Pero the Chief nodded at the bit about anecdotes.

The hardest part came at the end...

When the meeting had finished and the others were leaving, the Chief asked me: ‘And our man on the scene?’

‘Yes?’ I looked at him, waiting for the others to go out.

‘That boy in Iraq – is he still there?’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said.

I’d been suppressing it for too long. It was time for an admission.

I looked at the Chief and waited for his onslaught. What exactly should I tell him?

I didn’t know where to start. The fellow we sent to Iraq didn’t have any journalistic experience – but he’d studied Arabic and already been in a war. I’d praised him, first of all to Secretary. ‘Wow, what hat did you pull him out of?!’ he asked, fascinated that the guy knew Arabic. ‘Oh, you know me,’ I said – I was famous for my personnel conjuring acts.

Then Secretary took the matter before Pero. That was probably the first thing the Chief gave his rubber stamp to. He was itching to make decisions. And the recruitment of ambitious amateurs went together perfectly with the paper’s cost-cutting policy. We proudly emphasised that we were a corporation open to young people.

The guy we sent to Iraq was called Boris, and there was a catch. You see, Boris is a cousin of mine. I didn’t tell anyone about that. He’s human too, after all, and with Arabic Studies on his CV he was made for the job.

But now I began to feel the bond of kinship. Not only had I recommended a guy who played the fool instead of writing normal reports, but it turned out that I’d fraudulently employed one of my stupid relatives. I pretended to be a suave European intellectual but in secret I was clowning around for my clan.

I saw now that I was going to be caught red-handed.

My eyes fixed on the Chief.

I wanted to tell him that my mother was to blame for everything. She gave my phone number to everyone!

When you look at it, it really isn’t natural: people flock to the capital like blind mice, the city grows like a tumour, and half the bloody population have my number in their pocket.

So, of course, when Boris came to Zagreb he had my number in his pocket, or rather in his mobile.

He had it from her. As if sending me some forgotten debt, she’d mediated before the local community as a representative of my ‘success’ in the world; as soon as I’m out of earshot she boasts that I’m Mr Big in Zagreb. And there you go, people hold her to her word; she’s practically opened an office at home, receives petitioners and passes on my number. I then get called up by people who I’d forgotten even existed; they call me about the most unlikely things (someone’s pension or operation, the local water supply, the anniversary of their brigade from the war, a paedophile on the beach, etc.), and when I answer the phone they invariably ask: ‘Guess who this is?’

They’re curious if I recognise their voice. They ask that to see if I’m still the same as ever or if I’ve forgotten them.

When I hear that, I know it’s them because no one else plays that guessing game.

I become slightly disoriented when I hear that, like someone woken abruptly from sleep, because I’m suddenly confronted with all the forgotten sounds of my home dialect; that ‘guess who this is’ activates a whole backlog of memories and, I must say, I very often guess correctly who it is.

Each time I say I’ll see and dread when they’re going to call again. And they do call again, and again, until a feeling of guilt comes over me for having absconded and become such an individualist, and then I promise to do all I possibly can... Without this provincial pressure I’d obviously never have recommended cuz Boris for Iraq because I saw straight away that he was crazy. I mean, really crazy. Now it was clear to me that I’d seen it straight away, but I guess I wanted everything to be different. Huh, that won’t be easy to explain to Pero the Chief.

I stood before him now with that whole paragraph in my mind.

He looked at me as if he was pondering the inscrutable. Then he said:

‘The guy covered it, although it’s a bit all over the place... But OK.

When’s he coming back?’

A bit all over the place – just a bit? Ha, ha. Not in my wildest dreams had I intended to show the Chief what the original pieces looked like. Fortunately they only came to my email address. I edited as I’d never edited before, filleted the reports of foreign correspondents, pilfered passages from the internet, soaked up CNN like a sponge and rewrote everything again. I didn’t feel I’d be able to make anything decent out of them. And now, to top it all off, I had to somehow get the idiot back from Iraq.

* * *

The Yanks took out some Brits. They downed a helicopter with their friends in it. Poor coordination, ‘Identify yourself’, ‘Identify yourself’ – and blam! That’s friendly fire for you!

But it’s all logical.

We’re fighting for the Iraqis, for their democracy, for their well-being. We all love each other. Every victim is an accident. It’s all friendly fire.

Friendly fire has been around ever since the notion of humanity has existed. Christianity too, of course, and crusading Christianity and missionary Christianity faced with pagan tribes, where they killed half so the others would understand, everything is friendly, baby, get that, it’s only us in the Balkans who still kill each other with hatred, without real ambitions. The rest is friendly fire. The Brits got stroppy, but they shouldn’t have. The Yanks don’t have it easy either. It’s all the same: Brits, Iraqis, civilians – wherever you fire you hit a friend. I don’t know what more to say about that.

Accounts

I called Sanja. It turned out that she couldn’t come and see the flat.

I sat down to have a coffee with Charly and now he was telling me about a woman he’d ‘screwed because he was smashed’.

With his receding chin and wandering eye, he was less than an Adonis himself, but he said ‘the woman was ugly’; besides, ‘she really thought it was something’.

The poor thing, I thought; she didn’t know that Charly despised all women he managed to end up in bed with and only fell in love with blondes beyond his reach.

But he was tenacious: he became best friends with those blondes, masochistically went out with them and tried, at least in public, to give the impression of being a couple. Silva was one of those blondes; she gave up modelling, with an extramarital baby in arms, and joined the editorial staff via Charly.

If she’d been sitting with us he definitely wouldn’t have been telling me about that woman, although it wouldn’t have bothered Silva. She, for a joke, often mentioned hot young things keen on him. She evidently aimed to divert his erotic attention from herself.

‘But, man, when the morning light filtered in through the blinds –,’

Charly described the horrific moment.

I listened to him. He could only screw a chick when he forgot his high standards. When he woke up in the morning and realised that the hot young things in the porn videos were much better, he got a shock.

‘And now the woman keeps calling me and wants to go out for coffee.’

I wanted to tell him: Well, go out for coffee then – your masochistic friendships with models have gone on long enough. But that didn’t match the image he’d made of himself.

‘The craziest thing is that I splurged on her. We drank probably twenty cocktails and I overdrafted my account,’ he was surprised at himself. Of course, I thought: Charly had sunk all his savings into an eighteenyear- old Jaguar and spent every bit of spare cash on repairs. And with what he has left he buys extra-virgin olive oil for three hundred kunas a bottle from an Istrian farmer ‘because it’s the only sort that’s any good’. The truth is the truth – he suffered from high standards in every respect. He even made a kind of career out of it; he began to write gastronomic columns, recommended the most expensive wines, reviewed restaurants and created a sophisticated image in the midst of our post-revolution hangover, while driving around in his fat Jag. You could always find out from Charly what was trendy and what you weren’t allowed to ridicule: sailing, diving and headhunters had recently enjoyed immunity, as well as Asian films, gardening, slow food and you name it. I wasn’t quite up to date.

‘But the truth is the truth, she’s a good shag.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, she’s a maniac,’ Charly said. ‘She does everything.’

‘Uh?’

‘www perversion dot com.’

He laughed.

I realised he must see himself in those women, yet he had no sympathy for those similar to himself.

‘But what can you do,’ Charly sighed. ‘Shit happens.’

I looked around, waiting for all this to blow over.

‘You know her, in fact, ‘ Charly said.

‘What? Who?’

‘The woman. She knows you.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Ela,’ he said. I recoiled.

‘Fuck, man, you really are an arsehole!’

Charly laughed and nodded with a cheesy grin.

‘Just look at him!’ I said, glancing around as if addressing a jury.

‘What’s so damn funny? She’s a friend of my girlfriend’s.’

Something was amusing him, but I couldn’t tell what.

‘Hey, take it easy!’ he said. ‘She’s not your girlfriend!’

He was right – technically speaking I had no right to object. ‘She’s not ugly. If she lost a few kilos she’d be cool,’ I admitted.

‘Well, sort of, yeah,’ Charly agreed, as if he’d suddenly become serious.

‘The girl’s OK!’ I declared.

‘Sure she’s OK, I never claimed otherwise,’ he defended himself.

‘What are you getting so hung up about?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘What is there to get hung up about?!’

At that moment Silva came along.

‘But maybe it’s not right to, kind of, talk around like that, y’know –,’

I continued.

I intentionally didn’t fall silent when Silva sat down, but Charly pretended to be searching for something in the pile of newspapers he’d brought with him.

I went on: ‘The girl’s OK, I know her pretty well.’

It was on the tip of my tongue to add that he shouldn’t treat Ela like that because she’d been having treatment for depression, but I changed my mind. If Ela thought she might have any chance with this lout she’d kill me if I said anything like that.

‘Hey, have you seen this?!’ Charly exclaimed, trying to change the topic. ‘In Solin near Split there are eight betting shops in a thirtymetre radius.’

‘Uh?’ Silva nodded.

‘Look!’ he opened the newspaper. ‘A guy says: “You oughta come Sundays after Mass, that’s when it’s busiest.” Y’know, they all go to Mass, and then it’s off ta the betting shop.’

‘Who were you talking about just now?’ Silva asked.

I just blew out a plume of smoke.

‘Oh, a girl from the accounting section,’ Charly lied. ‘She messed up a payment to me. I claimed she’s a birdbrain, but Toni defends her.’

Not only did he behave as if they were a real couple but he had that conditioned reflex: he was able to think up a lie on the spur of the moment. I looked at him almost in admiration. If we ignore the fact that it was all pretty inane, he’d come through it remarkably unscathed. ‘Uh?’ Silva went, long and drawn out. Then she looked at me: ‘Why are you standing up for her?’

I paused for a second, and Charly scowled at me as if to say: we’re boys, you’re not going to give me away, are you?

‘It’s just that... the girl’s OK,’ I said to Silva, taking a deep breath.

‘From Accounts? Seriously? Is this something new?’

I had no idea now what she was thinking. Should I conceal what we were talking about, or tell her I was fucking my way through Accounts?

Oh hell, I don’t know!

‘What’s wrong with the girls on the editorial staff?’ she asked with a wiggle.

Oh God, I thought, don’t lean so close to me with that décolletage...

‘I mean: en masse from Mass to the betting shop?!’ Charly fought for attention. ‘That beats them all. Where else do you have anything like that?!’ He wanted to underline the grotesqueness of our religious, post-communist reality.

Silva butted in laconically: ‘Most people go to church to improve their chances.’

Charly rolled with laughter. You could see he considered her the wittiest person in Europe.

When someone has a faithful audience they always turn out witty.

I felt it’d be best to get out of there. Charly had a jealous eye and, as if the Iraq crisis wasn’t enough, Silva’s décolletage was now causing me additional stress...

‘May I sit here?’ our youngest colleague Dario asked.

He kept popping up at our table ever more frequently. He probably saw mixing with us as a way of moving up in the world.

‘Yes, yes,’ I said, looking up gratefully – he’d come at just the right time to kill that conversation.

Dario sat down and whispered worriedly: ‘Whaddaya think? Didya hear the Chief?’

He was pretty scared, but he enjoyed that.

Silva watched him with an ironical smile, while Charly waited for a witticism from her to laugh at. Dario detected that and turned towards me, seeking an ally: ‘By the way, I think those reports from Iraq are fantastic!’

I twitched. Talking about that was the last thing I wanted. And, in particular, I didn’t want him praising it. As soon as someone praises an article there’ll always be someone to sling mud at it.

‘It’s a standard piece,’ I said. ‘But there’s a lot of work in it.’

‘Sure, but I think it’s fantastic,’ Dario went on.

Stop bloody well going on about it, I thought.

‘I don’t know, I’ve had enough of wars,’ Silva joined in.

Me too, I said to myself, me too.

‘I think it’s brilliant because –,’ Dario continued.

‘Don’t be such a slimebag!’ I snapped.

I was losing my nerves. That was an overreaction, I knew straight away. He looked at me in embarrassment and blushed.

I tried to turn it into a joke: ‘Sorry, just kidding. Hey, it was a joke, OK?’

His gaze wandered.

‘Hey, it’s not because of you,’ I said. ‘It’s just that the guy drives me nuts.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Dario muttered.

‘Who drives you nuts?’ asked Charly.

This is going fundamentally wrong, I thought. I stood up.

‘I’m off!’ I said.

They looked at me like a runaway train.

There’s fire

I parked near our tower block in front of the shop window of the ‘last minute’ agency where big letters advertised THAILAND, NEW YORK, CUBA, TIBET, MALAGA, KENYA. Every day you could decide at the last minute.

That wouldn’t be bad, I thought.

I looked in the shop window as I was locking the car. Should I go to Cuba? Or to New York – the centre of the universe? Or to Tibet, to have a revelation and come back a new person?

But I went up to the flat, checked my mails and saw that Boris hadn’t sent anything, let alone mentioned when he was coming back. I read his old mails again, trying to fathom his psyche.

* * *

Saddam is a young villager from the outskirts of Basra, he was named after the President, what can he do, he spreads his hands, spreads his hands wide like a scarecrow, and I spread mine too, spread mine wide, and we chat like two scarecrows in the field, except there are no crops, no plants, no grass and no birds for us to scare away, only sand and scrap iron, and his village, said Saddam, is in a bad place, he spreads his hands, a very bad place, there’s fire there, he says, a lot of fire, so he stuck all his goats in a crazy film pick-up truck and took to the road like Kerouac, except there’s no literature, no Neal Cassady, no poetry, no shade under the vine, as they say here, and his tyre burst, and Saddam the goatherd was out on the Basra-Baghdad highway, his tyre burst and there was no spare, gaaawd, so Saddam is patching his tyre, the goats are bleating in the pick-up, an idyllic scene, Abrams tanks pass by, all looking ahead, amassed forces around Saddam’s goats, I crouch beside him, looking at the tyre, you know, as if I’m going to help, but I don’t.

* * *

I read this as if I was monitoring him like they monitor malingerers in the army; I could hardly reach him but, damn, he sure got under my skin. I kept thinking of his folksy phrases; it was like when you hear a cheap but catchy song and the melody sticks in your head... No shade under the vine, imagine!

I felt he was doing this to me on purpose. I saw straight away how he looked at me when we met a month ago in Zagreb after the nice, long years of not seeing each other.

The layout guy Zlatko had had a baby daughter that day and treated us to a round of drinks; afterwards I went and sat in the bar close to the firm to wait for Boris. Cuz was over half an hour late. I expected he’d got lost. But then I saw him coming along the street, glancing around cautiously.

I waved.

I watched him as he came up: his gait took me back to when we were teenagers and greeted each other loudly with a clap on the shoulder and a yell of Hey, old chum. We learned a rakish swagger: walking broad-legged with our hands in our pockets as it if was cold. We put on a show of enthusiasm when we met in bars and clubs because we were relying on each other in the event of a fight, I guess.

As I watched him now I saw he still walked that way.

I got up: ‘Hey, old chum, how are things?’ and patted him on the shoulder.

‘Is it you?’ he offered me a flabby hand.

He sat down.

He was wearing orange-tinted shades and smiled like a mafioso pretending to be a Buddhist; De Niro wore that ‘mask’ in several films and since then streetwise guys have taken to using it.

Sinewy, with a longish face. We’d always been similar. He’s even got a streak of colour in his hair, a yellowish stripe behind his ear. He looked quite urbane, as they say. You could tell he didn’t live in our village, which incidentally has expanded quite a bit but still isn’t a city, so we called it a ‘town’... Could there be any notion more non-committal than ‘town’? A multi-purpose whatever, an amalgam of dilapidated houses and holiday flats strung out along the road...

But Boris lived in Split – cuz was urbane, a city boy, good on him. I wouldn’t need to feel embarrassed if anyone I knew passed by.

He sat down at the table so sluggishly that I thought he was smacked out. But he said he’d been clean for a long time. Now he told me he’d come to the big smoke cos, like, there’s no perspective back ’ome and grinned as if he wanted to make fun of that hackneyed word perspective.

He wore his underdoggery in a slightly high-handed way like victims of the system do. Soon he took out some sheets of paper and handed them to me: ‘So ya can see ’ow I write.’

The pages were densely typed from top to bottom with a worn ribbon – you could hardly see the words, but I tried... and read a little longer than I wanted. He just stared straight ahead, smiling at the fruit juice he’d ordered, smoking Ronhill and blithely blowing rings.

What he’d given me were poems in prose on some intangible topic.Never mind, I thought, he’s bound to be unrecognised in his neighbourhood. I could see he was literate, and that was something. His filmstar smile which put me on edge was simply a defensive stance in case I told him his writing was crud.

‘You need to take this to a literary magazine and let them have a look,’

I said

‘It doesn’t matter. I can do any kind of writing.’ He started tapping with his leg. His smile faded.

‘Look, this is literature of sorts, it’s special in its own right,’ I stated cautiously. ‘For newspapers you need to write concisely and...’

‘That’s even easier,’ he interrupted.

I ought to have seen straight away that this wasn’t a promising debut.

Well, actually, I did see.

‘I really don’t know just now,’ I told him. ‘If there’s an opening, I’ll let you know...’

‘Fine,’ he said in a descending tone as if I was abandoning a little puppy.

I felt those pangs of conscience again. Why? Was it guilt for me having become estranged? Fear of having become conceited? When he asked me what my girlfriend did and I told him she was an actress, I felt like I was boasting. But what should I have said – that she’s a toll-booth cashier?!

Whatever I said looked like bragging to a provincial audience, a milieu dominated by rough-and-ready Gastarbeiter types. So I spoke in a blasé voice as if none of it mattered, which probably sounded like I was weary of my own importance.

It’s strange when someone like that comes to see you, someone allegedly close who can’t understand you and looks at you like a commercial on TV. I saw that Boris couldn’t conceive of my life in any real terms. I knew where he was coming from and could imagine his life, but he couldn’t imagine mine; that’s why he looked at me like an apparition which had been magically beamed from the summertime shallows where we played ‘keepy-uppy’ in our swimming trunks, into the actors’ jet set, and from there had skydived down into a newspaper office overflowing with cash that was occupied with things arcane.

Once, long ago, we listened to the same records and were so alike in dress and behaviour that old grandmother Lucija could hardly tell us apart; and now look at us... If I hadn’t gone away I would’ve got stuck in a rut like him, I thought. I recognised myself in him like a parallel reality, but he sized me up as if asking himself what made me better.

It seemed I reminded him of some form of injustice.

‘I could write what no one else will,’ Boris said and laughed for no reason. ‘It’s no sweat for me.’

‘Hmm. Shall we have another drink?’ I asked, not knowing what else to say.

‘I’ve only got twenty kunas,’ he warned me.

‘It’s OK, it’s on me,’ I said so it wouldn’t be awkward for him.

‘All right,’ he sighed, as if he’d needed persuading.

I ordered another beer and he – I couldn’t believe it – another juice, and I realised that the conversation wasn’t going to get more fluid. I began to feel time pressure.

‘Don’t you drink?’ I asked.

‘Now and then,’ he said and fell silent.

Then I launched into a spiel about when, how and how much I drink – an inane, incoherent story that soon got on my nerves, but I had to say something so we wouldn’t sit there like two logs; he obviously hadn’t developed a talent for small talk.

We sat there for a little longer and finally he mentioned his degree, which he hadn’t been able to finish. I could tell he’d planned to mention it and had thought about how to present the topic.

He obviously thought I knew what he’d studied.

We were supposed to behave like we were really close, so I nodded. Still, after things ground to a halt again I said: ‘Sorry, what was it that you studied again? I just remember it was pretty exotic.’

‘Arabic,’ he laughed and slapped his hands on his knees. It seemed he was laughing at himself. Probably because he had studied Arabic instead of a more pedestrian subject.

Bingo! It suddenly dawned on me. I was probably a bit sloshed already, and I pointed a finger like Uncle Sam and uttered: ‘Iraq!’

Rabar, the only true go-getter on the staff, had defected to GEP a month earlier, and there he was now reporting for the competitors in Kuwait, so... Unbelievable but true: here was a job in the offing!

Boris smiled sadly and said: ‘Morocco.’

‘What about Morocco?’

‘We were in Morocco, not Iraq.’

‘Uh-huh –,’ I made the connection. ‘I know.’

‘Six years... You know how it was: dad was chief engineer; we had servants and a pool. Then – wham! – the old man had a heart attack.

Right there by the pool.’

‘Yes. I know.’

Now he’d finally found his topic. He’d gone to the international school, but they also learnt Arabic. Later, when they returned, he had ‘the language in his head’. Every time he thought of something in Arabic he’d remember his old man. But he had no one to converse with and started to forget the language. He mentioned that once he’d overheard two Arabs talking in the street; he followed them to a café, sat at the next table and listened to them. ‘They noticed I was following them, and I had them guessing whether I was a spook or a poof. I understood everything they said,’ he grinned. Afterwards he enrolled in Arabic in Sarajevo but couldn’t finish uni because the war began.

‘OK, and now have a think about this –,’ I said, ‘Would you go to Iraq? The Yanks are going to attack any day.’

‘Sure!’ came the answer as quick as a shot.

I’d thought he’d be interested in finding out more about the proposal. I continued, watching his reaction: ‘Now, our guy who went to war zones had his ways of doing things. I don’t know how, but he always coped. He sent things by mail – the photos and the texts. There are also these satellite phones...’

‘No probs, I’ll get the hang of it.’

‘Have a good think. It’s war.’

‘No sweat.’

‘Sure?’

‘Peace has become a problem for me.’

Hmm, right at the start I’d caught a whiff of Vietnam syndrome. It was in vogue after the war among demobbed soldiers. That typical defensive shell: taciturn, phlegmatic face, the occasional long look in the eyes.

I didn’t know where to stand on that. Back at uni me and Markatović had perfected that veteran habitus – here around Zagreb I could have stood in for Rambo if needed, but Boris knew that my experience of war amounted to hanging around up on a hill with an anti-aircraft battery. Nothing ever came anywhere near us, and after a month and a half my old man got me out.

Maybe that was why Boris behaved as if I owed him a favour: because he didn’t have a dad to get him out but followed Arabs down the street.

‘All right then. If peace is a problem for you you’ll have a great time in Iraq,’ I said.

He glanced furtively at me. ‘I think it’ll be great,’ he answered.

Everything should have been clear to me then. But I felt I had to help him in order to return some kind of irrational debt.

When he started to send me his psychedelics, I called him by satellite phone. He acted as if he didn’t hear me well. A bad connection, and pigs can fly... Since then he hasn’t been in touch by phone. He wrote that it’s dangerous, they can be located, but he continued to send mails every day – he didn’t care that we were a weekly. Then I wrote him a mail telling him to come back, afterwards I warned him politely that we expected him to return, and in the end I thoroughly insulted him.

No result.

Now he’d been there for a month already, was probably having a great time, and didn’t reply to any of my mails.

I say all of this to an imaginary listener.

Sometimes that helps me plan what I’m going to say, like a lawyer about to defend himself.

* * *

I tried to occupy my thoughts with something else. I was holding Jimi Hendrix’s biography and trying to read when Sanja entered the flat.

I probably looked dejected.

‘Are you angry? Listen, I really couldn’t go and see the flat,’ she said straight away. ‘I ran into a journalist – from The Daily News.’

‘You’re joking, from GEP? How long did you talk for?’

‘An hour maybe. Plus the photo-shoot.’

‘Hang on,’ I looked at her. ‘That’s more than a little statement. Was it a proper interview?’

‘We’ll see, we’ll see,’ she said, as if she didn’t believe it could be. That’d be the first interview of her life.

I felt all this was happening to me. I wanted to be involved too.

I paused. ‘Did they also ask you about, like, personal things?’

‘Don’t worry, I was careful not to let any cats out of the bag,’ she smiled.

She saw the remnants of the pizza on the table.

‘I’ve already eaten, I couldn’t wait,’ I said.

‘No trouble, I’ve eaten too. We ordered a whole pile of kebabs.’

She came up to me.

‘Do I stink?’ she asked and assailed me with a heavy onion breath.

‘Ugh, get off me!’ I said.

‘I don’t caaare!’ She imitated a naughty child. She was obviously trying to cheer me up. I put on some theatrical revulsion: ‘Jeez, what a disgrace! Bloody hell, I mean: she plays the fancy actress, but here at home she stinks like a skunk!’

‘Your problem. I don’t caaare!’ She giggled and fumigated me with her onion breath, trying to kiss me while I kept trying to evade her.

In the end I let her kiss me, but then it wasn’t fun for her any more.

I wondered whether I should tell her about Charly and Ela...

‘Have Jerman and Doc been cramming their lines?’ I asked to change the topic.

She rolled her eyes: ‘Ingo has moved the dress rehearsal to eleven in the evening! He has to work with them before that. But the craziest thing is: he gives me more shit than he does to any of the others. I mean, they disrupt me too, of course. But then he comes down on me to assert his authority.’

‘Well well, he’s supposed to be progressive but he vents his fury on the girls?!’

‘All he tells me is that I have to act like a punk. His spiel is, like, I have to rebel against how others see that role,’ she said, imitating the director’s speech and his way of smoking while constantly looking up at the ceiling.

‘Hmm, perhaps...’

Now she got edgy: ‘OK, I have to be rebellious, but he shouts at me all day.’

I didn’t know what to say: ‘Who’d have thought.’

Then I added, cautiously: ‘He’s obviously panicking. I mean, you all are.’

I thought she knew what I meant. She knew she was the one panicking. But she wanted to let out her frustration: ‘I know. But today I was about to tell him where he could stick it. Like: if punk’s what you want, punk’s what you’ll get!’

Sanja liked to be brave and to make a stand. If she were male it’d all be different, but I adored it like this: her pugnacity, her independence, her attitude... You’re my hero, I whispered to her sometimes.

But now she sighed, looked away sulkily, took a cigarette... She blew out a drag, and another, and glanced at me furtively to see if I’d noticed that sense of crisis.

‘Well, tell him where he can shove it!’ I said.

‘What?’

‘He should think twice, it’s too late to throw you out now!’

I wanted her to feel my support. She had to act with conviction and show she was prepared to defend herself. She wasn’t going to swear at the director, but she should at least feel that she could. That’d put her back on her feet and get her over the feeling that everyone was taking it out on her.

She looked deep into my eyes, as if she saw a beautiful sight there, and kissed me.

‘Ugh, you really do stink,’ I said.

‘Then I’ll go and brush my teeth!’ she yelled cheerily.

When she came back we sat on the couch, she stroked my head, neck and tummy as if she had hidden intentions, but I probably seemed too wooden to her, so she asked me if it was because of her. She reassured me that I needn’t worry, that she’d see us through it all.

I took a deep breath. This time it was my turn.

* * *

Sanja was against Boris going to Iraq, against the war, against anyone writing about such a spectacle, against infotainment, against various things, and I had an inkling she wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about my relatives either. OK, neither am I, but I always defended them whenever she said anything, the devil knows why, probably so it wouldn’t look like she was genetically superior.

I remember how she rolled her eyes when I told her Boris was going, and I assured her that it wasn’t because he was a relative of mine but because he was the right person for the job – he knew Arabic, he was literate, and war wasn’t a problem for him. So now I didn’t mention the problems to her, but I had to share them with someone, dammit. I just gave her a quick run-down and, of course, it all sounded like a confirmation that she was right.

‘Recommending him was a terrible mistake,’ I concluded.

‘You wanted to help him,’ Sanja said, and added, almost maternally.

‘You’re too sentimental. Your relatives are just using you.’

I didn’t want to talk about that again.

‘Can we skip the topic?’ I said.

‘I had a kind of premonition,’ she continued, as if she herself was in the mess. ‘But you were so enthusiastic about him.’

‘Who me? Enthusiastic?!’

‘Don’t you remember? Your cousin knows Arabic. You said I had to meet him.’

‘I don’t remember.’

I had no intention of talking about that. It’d even look as if I was losing my memory.

‘OK, don’t get angry,’ she placated. ‘You’re just a bit naive, you misjudge people.’

Come off it, I wanted to say to her – I saw straight away what was going on. Then I realised this wasn’t exactly the right time. I felt the gap between those two poles.

She waited for me to say something.

I waited too.

Then I waved dismissively.

Sanja continued in a gentle tone of voice: ‘I just wanted to say something about your relatives: you let them walk all over you...

They’re not interested in you, but they keep dragging you down.’

‘Yeah, Sanja, yours aren’t avant-garde either,’ I said.

The wall and the garage

We’d been putting it off for a long time and living in a fiction, as it were. Not until our third summer together did we set off on an official tour to meet the in-laws: several days with hers, several days with mine.

It looked a bit like an actor’s workshop: we watched each other finetune our performance, took care that the other didn’t put their foot in their mouth, sat at the table stiffly and respectably and exchanged trite phrases in that regional slang. I didn’t exactly know my lines...

But I talked about the high price of living, various ailments and car accidents, basically from memory, a bit stilted I suppose, like an amateur actor.

They asked us about our life in Zagreb in a well-intentioned, worried tone and suspected we were living the wrong way; we tried to stick to factual matters and somehow extricate ourselves because we couldn’t openly admit that we aimed to live a life diametrically opposed to theirs.

It was interesting that we weren’t able to tell them anything about our life as it really happened. When you looked at it, there was hardly anything to say. Our life barely existed, as if it had been left behind in some secret argot, where I had also left my real being, while this imposter sat at the table, enumerated bland facts, nattered about the car and introduced himself to her parents as me... His gaze wandered around the flat. At Sanja’s parents’ there was nowhere to look – there was no empty space. Her mother had a morbid fear of open spaces and the flat was so crammed full of ‘practical’ little tables that there was hardly any air to breathe.

Then, just on our second morning there, Sanja suggested to her mother that they knock down the wall between the kitchen and the living room to gain more space, and I made the mistake of seconding the idea. Her mother glanced at me in consternation and I realised that she was used to her daughter having strange ideas but was disappointed that Sanja had found the same sort of guy. She immediately ridiculed the idea with her Mediterranean temperament; she spoke exclusively to Sanja – you could tell that she couldn’t discuss such intimate topics as knocking down the wall with me. Probably Sanja wanted to appear a mature adult in front of me, so she kept contradicting her mother all the time we there – and not just about the wall. You couldn’t really call it an argument, more a mutual show of disrespect which seemed to keep them cheerful and create a special closeness... In fact, I felt their taunting and teasing actually showed how much they were at home.

I couldn’t talk with her mother like that – I respected her – so I was condemned to silence. Also, my future mother-in-law kept her jabs and wise-talk exclusively for Sanja, not me – because she respected me.

Having fallen silent about the wall, I found it hard to talk at all... Our people are like that, I meditated: they’d always prefer to build a wall than knock one down. They always liked having two rooms rather than one. They loved to count rooms. Now why wasn’t I sensible like them?

I spoke very cautiously with Sanja’s dad, of course. He had disappointment written on his brow. Politics was his particular chagrin, all the parties were a let-down. He watched the news avidly, read the newspaper and was disappointed time and time again. That seemed to be his main occupation. He wanted to know if we journalists were disappointed too. ‘Oh yes!’ I exclaimed and mentioned a few practical examples. I felt a kind of need to join him in disappointment, but maybe he thought I even wanted to outdo him in that because I was a journalist of sorts in Zagreb and had the opportunity to get disappointed first-hand, so in a way he didn’t want to listen; whenever I opened my mouth he’d start explaining how much Zagreb was out of step with the situation on the ground, which was one of the things which disappointed him most.

I sipped beer, relaxed and watched the news. The mass of empty beer cans grew, all rattling in the rubbish bin until they were crushed down into a smaller pile.

We frenetically waved goodbye from the car. I thought of telling Sanja that one actually didn’t look so lost among all the ‘practical’ little tables at my parent’s place, after a drink or two. ‘My folks have got a nice courtyard and a garden, you’ll see,’ I said cheerfully.

Then we arrived and I saw the garage.

They’d told me about the new garage and were pleased with themselves for fitting it perfectly into the courtyard. But I saw straight away that the courtyard was gone. A small amount of space remained but you could see it was unused space.

They proudly opened up the garage for us by remote control as if they were officially opening a new production line, and I parked inside.

‘Oh my God,’ I said to Sanja.

Yep, my folks had become bourgeois, so to speak, and we sat there like we had at Sanja’s folks’. The new edifice in the courtyard stuck out like a sore thumb. And you couldn’t say anything against it. I was about to say a word and they came down on me like a ton of bricks: How dare I cruise in from Zagreb and lecture them – from Zagreb, mind you! Zagreb with its holier-than-thouness was like a red rag to a bull. They needed that new addition: Our garage is our castle.

My mum whispered to Sanja on that occasion, forging a female alliance, that she didn’t need to listen to me all the time because men were stupid: let them have their whims. My father generally followed her remarks with a smile, and here and there heckled his old lady just for fun, which Sanja was supposed to find amusing. I tried to mediate these conversations as far as possible by drawing attention to myself, but my parents only had eyes for their daughter-in-law because, seeing as I’d brought her, it was clear to them that we were going to get married.

Then there we were again, back in our rented flat. Things had stopped developing just by themselves and I didn’t know exactly what we’d think up, what lifestyle, we just had to avoid repeating the same old patterns, I told Sanja. We had to break through in a new direction, bore a tunnel, build a bold viaduct, whatever.

But then Boris had popped up, and now he was a feature in the landscape like my parents’ garage.

I simply couldn’t explain her the whole depth of the problem, so I turned the laptop towards her: ‘Read some of his stuff and tell me what you think.’

She looked at me quizzically.

‘Open one of his mails, any one,’ I said.

* * *