Our Man in Iraq (18 page)

You have to. You have to! You want to take out that loan, stride boldly into the future, buy a nice shack and lounge around there in style. You have to, this isn’t for fun, you have to. Your whole life is ahead of you, just as it always has been. I have to, I have to, I told myself.

Finally, I slapped it together. Another Boris report from
Iraq. It was muddled and not much different from Boris’s style. If he had post-traumatic stress disorder, I wasn’t far off it myself.

My bloody mobile kept ringing. Always unknown numbers. I put off answering. GEP’s title page gave me no peace. When colleagues came into the office they gave me a sympathetic wave or hello, treating me as if they’d come to pay me a visit in the hospital.

I ordered a Vodka Red Bull at the little café by the staircase. Something had to give me a lift. It was just one o’clock in the afternoon, and I was losing the fight against sleep. I drank by myself. Charly and Silva hadn’t come in yet. Still wrecked from the night before. No call from Markatović either, no word from Sanja. They were all still sleeping. Even the muvver of Niko Brkić who was s’posed to play in Nantes would be a welcome sign of life.

And then Dario appeared—just who I needed to make my day. He ordered a macchiato.

“How are things?” he asked.

“Fantastic, brilliant.” I said.

“Did you get on to Rabar yesterday?” he said sarcastically.

I said nothing.

“Are you for real? I haven’t told anyone, but you go calling GEP, ask for Rabar, and then today this sabotage comes out. A bit strange, huh?”

I grabbed him by the collar and pushed him up against the wall. “Don’t tell anyone about this, got it?”

His eyes bulged.

“D’you hear me? You’re not going to tell anyone about this, or about Rabar,” I growled, tightening my grip on his throat. “I could kill someone after all this shit!”

I let him go, and he stood there coughing. “I won’t say a word,” he spluttered, steadying himself. Then he shuffled toward the office.

The waitress was staring at me.

“He’s forgotten his macchiato,” I remarked.

I drank the Vodka Red Bull. Then my old ma rang. She was in shock too. How could it be, how was it possible, she just didn’t understand. I heard her out. It seemed she was the focal point of everything: her phone kept ringing and people kept asking her questions. We were wrecking her nerves, she said, she’d end up in the psychiatric ward. Still, she cursed Milka and was on my side. Dad, on the other hand, offered to come if I needed help. He even came up with the idea of calling Milka and smoothing things out a bit so there wouldn’t be any further complications.

He soon called me back. He’d phoned Milka, and she’d told him: “I'm going to hang up on you like your son did to me.” He told me that my ma had then also called Milka, although the two of them weren’t on speaking terms, and started swearing at her as soon as she answered the phone, so Milka couldn’t give her a talking to. They exchanged salvos of insults, with my mother occupying the moral high ground: we’d tried to help Boris and find work for him, and she was treating us like dirt.

At that point my mother took the receiver and said I should always tell people that; she always started by saying that we found Boris a job because people understood that and then they were on our side. Everyone knows how hard it is to find work nowadays, and if someone’s helped you, you can’t go whining in the newspaper, because Iraq isn’t any more dangerous than Bosnia was, and Boris was in Bosnia, so how can Milka claim he’s inexperienced? Who sent him to Bosnia anyway? If you put it like that, clever people are on our side, my old ma told me. We had about thirty percent support, by her assessment. “So tell that to the journalists! I dunno who they think they are. We'll come when you need help. Call us,” ma added, as if she was messaging from HQ to boost morale.

We’d closed ranks. I felt part of the family again. A combat unit: me, my old man, and ma. Even my sister rang. She was pregnant with her second child and living in Sinj, but she still made a point of getting in touch and asking if I needed help. She could knit socks for those of us in the trenches, engage in propaganda, and look after the wounded, I said. I shouldn’t make light, she replied: she was there and was always on my side, whatever I did. I felt her support. The strength of the family—strength in unity! Like a little mafia. Only my family understood me. They knew who Milka was and who we were: who was the aggressor and who the victim. That’s how it is when a local conflict escalates. Outsiders don’t understand a fucking thing.

After all that, the office secretary called and told me to see the Chief. It was urgent, she said. Dario, I assumed, that little turd got up and went to Pero’s office. His feet were up on his desk.

“Your old ones were better.”

He was holding the latest issue of
Objective
.

“I’m a little unfocused,” I said, taking a seat. “Didn’t get much sleep last night.”

He was still staring at me as if I was an exhibition piece.

“Could you get up for a minute, please,” he said.

“Is this some kind of joke?”

“No, please, it’s very important.”

I stood up.

“Step back a bit, please, toward the door.”

He took his feet off the table, got up and moved about, regarding me from different angles. He scrutinized the issue of
Objective
he was holding. “You know? You look a bit like the guy from Iraq.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“It only just dawned on me now.”

“What’s dawned on you?” I asked weakly, standing near the door, wanting to turn and run away.

“Have you given me all the photos you have of him?”

“What’s been published is all we have.”

“We don’t have a photo of him from Baghdad—and that’s what we need,” Pero said. “I thought of Photoshopping Baghdad into the background, but we can’t do that with these photos we’ve already used. With your physical similarities it occurred to me that we could take a photo of you and sort out the background on the computer.”

“You’re not serious.”

“It’s good you didn’t have a shave this morning. We’re going to tan you a bit, stick on some shades, give you some headgear and field clothing—no one will know the difference.”

“I can’t do that,” I protested.

“Hey, who started this shit?” The eternal question in the Balkans. “Find the nearest tanning salon and do maximum exposure.”

I was stupefied. “Can’t you find some disco bro to do that?”

“No, you and Tosho are going to do it. He’ll photograph you and do Baghdad on the computer.”

“Then why doesn’t he just tan me on the computer too.”

The Chief’s tone became threatening. “You’ll play along. You’ll ‘come back from Iraq’ the day after tomorrow. You’ll walk about the office and stroll about the city. We’ll take your photo on the main square smack in front of the Ban Jelačić statue. Then let GEP try and prove you’re missing in Iraq.”

“Are you crazy?” I sputtered. “A tanning salon?”

“Do you realize we can sue you over this? For fraud! For damaging our reputation. For commercial damage. For endangering peoples’ lives. The boss has been cursing and swearing at me on the phone all day! Are you aware of that?”

“No, I didn’t . . .”

“But you act like you’re some kind of prima donna! ‘Oh deary me, I don’t want to go to the tanning salon.’ Go to the tanning salon.”

Juliette Beauty Center: I entered as timidly as I did the first time I went to the chemist’s to get condoms.

A tanned blonde and a tanned brunette—one of them was bound to be Juliette—were sitting and sorting lotions and creams. Tropical aromas and Eros Ramazzotti were in the air.

“I’d like to get tanned,” I said.

“Setting?” asked the brunette. She’s probably Juliette, I thought.

“Um, maximum?” I said, a little intimidated.

“What do you mean ‘maximum’?”

“I don’t know how much is allowed?” I asked, thinking of desert conditions. “I need to get a good tan like the sun’s really given me a whack.”

“Have you been for a tan before?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“The first time. What would the maximum be?” Juliette asked the blonde.

“Y’mean you really wanna full blast?” the blonde asked me.

“Well, yeah,” I said.

“OK then. Put ’im on twenty-five minutes,” the blonde suggested.

“Twenny-five?” Juliette asked the blonde. “Really?”

“How about fifteen?” I asked.

The blonde looked at me as if I was gutless, while Juliette seemed open to compromise. “OK then, twenty! How ’bout that? The sunbed’s pretty strong. That oughta be enough for you.”

She led me into the next room, opened the sarcophagus,
and explained that I just needed to pull it down when I was lying inside. And close my eyes.

“You’ve got two minutes to get undressed,” she said.

A humming began as the solar motors started. Now they were finally going to launch me in this capsule far away from everything. I’d shoot out naked into space. I felt warmth, a stream of air, and through my closed eyelids I saw a pinkish glow. Points of pink light glittered. I felt I was melting and turning into a slimy liquid like the guy in
Terminator 2
.

Then pictures came to me—parts of pictures. Mixed with parts of other pictures. It was like a chaotic little film. I was with Sanja in the theater. A camera flashed and didn’t go off anymore. Then afterward, but still in the theater, we were looking up into the sky—there was no ceiling or roof, and I appeared as a parachutist, coming down out of the sky, laughing. Then the camera walked about the office—a very wobbly camera. Sanja came into the office and glided through it on one leg like a ballerina. Darkness. Applause.

There was a knocking and ordinary white light again.

“Still alive?” asked Juliette. Dark-haired Juliette, that center of beauty, looked down at me as I lay there naked, dark-skinned and hot. “You OK? We’ve been waiting, but you didn’t come out.”

For a moment I thought of pulling her inside the sarcophagus so we’d be in that universe together.

“I had a hard night.”

“All right,” she lowered the lid so she wouldn’t see me anymore, “time to get dressed.”

I opened the tanning bed again. The old rebel rises from the dead. I looked in the mirror. I looked a bit like James Brown. Ai feel gud, ta-na-na-na-na. I wiggled my hips in
front of the mirror, and my dick waved in a semi-erection. They say tanning is a mood-lifter. See, it’s true. Besides, I’d finally got a bit of shut-eye.

I had half an hour until the photo session and wanted to cool down but was paranoid about going to a bar where I'd be recognized, or even worse, not recognized at all. When my beer came, I called Markatović.

“Have you finally woken up?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “and you?”

“A lot of shit’s been going down.”

I was going to tell him some of it, but he started sobbing. He’d finally read Dijana’s fourteen-page letter. “Am I really so bad?”

“I’ve asked myself the same question,” I said.

“All the stuff she wrote, it all sounds true. I’ll prove to her that it’s not true if only she gives me another chance. I’m always able to explain everything when she gives me a chance.”

“She’ll give you a chance,” I said, and it occurred to me that everyone gets to lament before me. This is a country of lamenters—you can’t get your turn.

“I don’t know why I can’t cope with marriage. I mean, I did cope with it—out of seven days I coped with six. But it just keeps going, there’s no day off.”

I almost laughed. Still, I tried to console him. “Come on, don’t take it so hard.”

“There are wonderful moments too. Like, let’s say, when the kids were born,” and he burst into sobs again. “It was a miracle. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“I was so happy and couldn’t take my eyes off them—the
first fortnight, the first month, the first six months. But it just keeps going, it all just keeps going.”

“Yeah, OK.” I was waiting for him to finish this shit.

“She says I’ve been avoiding them, that she’s lonely. She says I should devote myself to her again so she knows I love her.”

“And so you should!”

“But I can’t do all that I should do,” and more tears flowed.

“Are you still high?”

“I can’t. I can’t love her anymore! How can she expect that of me? But the letter says I have to love her.”

“I don’t know. I mean, you don’t have to—she’s your wife.”

“I have to, I have to. I used to love her voluntarily, but now I have to. That’s the difference. It’s not of my volition.”

“How do you mean it isn’t? You married her,” I said.

“Well, yes. And now I have no choice anymore! You understand?”

The conversation puttered out. Markatović said farewell as if he was going to curl up and die.

A little later Pero the Chief rang.

“You don’t have to go and get photographed.”

I knew it. The tanning had just been his way of having revenge.

“Well, at least I got a tan at the company’s expense,” I quipped.

“It’s too risky. Besides, we have to go on TV tonight. The
Up to Date
team called—they’re dedicating the whole program to it.”

“Look, it’s best I don’t go on TV.”

“We’ll go together.”

“Listen, man, I’m tanned like a glamour puss. No one’s going to take me seriously. Who believes a tanned guy?”

“We have to tell our side of the story,” said Pero.

“No one will understand,” I pleaded.

“They’ll brief us, and we’ll make our case point by point. There’ll be guests as well: Boris’s mother will be down in the regional studio. You’ll have to face up to her. We’ll have to patch things up a bit.”

Milka? Via videolink?

“No, no way, I can’t. I’m unfocused, I haven’t slept, and I’m at the end of my tether. Plus—I’m tanned!”

“Take it easy. The lawyer and PR will brief us. We’ll work out every word. We only need to challenge that he disappeared, that’s all. Surely the two of us can deal with an old biddy.”

“I can’t, I really can’t. I’ve given my all.”

He cursed and hung up.

There had just been an excellent review on Radio 101. Hadn’t I heard it? They praised her sky-high. She’d wanted to record it on cassette but mucked it up in her rush, Sanja reported.