Our Man in Iraq (8 page)

Sanja smiled as she read. “He’s just having fun.”

“I don’t know if he’s gone crazy or not.”

“I think it’s tongue-in-cheek,” she said.

“He’s messing me around, the dickhead! If anyone’s the object of that humor, it’s me.”

“I don’t find it all that weird, you know. He has no training in your language. I think if someone sent me to tag along behind the Yanks as if I was reporting on a sports event, I think I’d kind of want to muck up too.”

“OK, I know you’re against the war.”

“And why shouldn’t I be? At least this guy is saying something; your paper doesn’t have any position on the war.”

“So basically you mean he’s being subversive?”

“Consciously or not.”

So they were the subversive ones, and I represented the system; they were on the side of freedom, and me—of repression. Sanja laughed as she read more. So he’s witty, and I have no sense of humor? And I have to rack away at the crud he’s written to patch it up while the young ’uns could let it all hang out.

“I’d publish it like that,” she said.

“I can’t publish that. We’re a normal newspaper, not a fanzine for nutters.”

“Yes, you lay down what’s considered ‘normal,’” she said.

“Tell that to Ingo. Sounds like you’re a bigger punk at home than on the stage.”

“That was below the belt.”

“You’re lecturing me as if I’d just started thinking about all this today! I know all that stuff! But that’s how I get paid, and I’m having to take out that fucking loan. I know what’s possible and what’s not!”

“I’m lecturing you? You keep talking.
Stop yelling
.”

The
Buena Vista Social Club
soundtrack sounded through the speakers. I’d seen the film and realized something was wrong with the Cubans. They were so much better than us.

I had a nose for talents and starlets, relatively gifted individuals with their hearts set on recognition and fame. Maybe the point was that for years I’d spent too much time in bars and knew every idiot. In a nutshell, I volunteered as the newspaper’s human resources agent because whenever they needed someone young and enthusiastic they’d ask me.

That’s how fresh blood arrived in journalism, including even the Chief. It may sound strange, but I picked him up too, straight from a bar, back in the dawn of the democratic changes,
and led him by the hand to the paper. Poetically put, his success was faster than the wind. Because our country has great social mobility. We don’t have a stable elite. Socialism destroyed the old elites—what little bourgeoisie and provincial aristocracy we had, war and nationalism in the ’90s destroyed the socialist elite. And then democracy happened and the remnants of the nationalist elite had to be done away with.

Defeated elites can survive in nooks and crannies. Oh yes, they can conduct their businesses and pull the strings from the shadows; but out in the light of day, in representative media we constantly needed new people. New columnists and opinion-makers, new faces, new photos. So, in the ten years of feverish change we’d gone through three media paradigms: socialist, wartime, democratic.

Uncompromised people were in short supply. If until recently you’d listened to Lou Reed, worked as a waiter, or studied viticulture, you now had the opportunity to put forth those new values. Democracy, pop culture, slow food. Without questioning capitalism, of course—we’re not Reds!—so there was nothing you could do about the privatization that was pushed through in the ’90s by the shock troops of happiness. The dough was safely stashed away and young media cadres came along to portray an idyll of Europeanization and normalization. After all, what else is there to do after the revolution has been carried out and the dough tucked away? What we needed now was harmony, security, consumers, and free individuals who paid off their loans. We could promote a little hedonism too, let people enjoy themselves, but within limits, of course, so as not to displease the Church.

We were a new society, a society with constantly changing backdrops and new illusions. We were all new at the game. There was no House of Lords, landed gentry, or old bourgeoisie, only the former socialist working people
who’d spruced themselves up and now crowded forward in a carnivalesque exertion, grasping for the stars. The Eastern European post-communist version of the American dream did exist. Success depended on chance amidst the general turmoil and rapid repositioning. One of the ordinaries would be shot into orbit. But who?

The Chief had outdone me, there was no doubt about that. He became the great editor, while I was still collecting losers by the roadside. And Pero, as we know, was no longer the same person.

I’ll never forget when Pero began to progress; for a time he shunned my gaze, greeted me hurriedly, avoided sitting at the same table as me. Had he forgotten who’d brought him to the office in the first place?

I always made the same mistake: I inadvertently reminded people of what they used to be.

Later I accepted him as a new person who had nothing to do with the waiter from Limited. Then he, in turn, accepted me again.

Logically thinking, I must have changed in some way too, despite my best efforts. If Pero became my boss nothing could stay the same.

I mentioned these things to Sanja, I think, but always with a laugh and a joke, as if I was wafting in a higher universe safe from so-called social values. Stuff from the world of careers didn’t interest her anyway. She only saw love. Our love and love in the wider world. Ecology. Genuineness. She loved me just the way I was. It was only recently that she’d begun to follow the Career column of the horoscope.

And now, through nervous conversations, we’d begun to arrive at it, at the context—like in
Alien
, when the crew, after initial arrogance, begins to grasp the magnitude of the problems lurking in the cave in that distant galaxy.

Now, after Boris, it was crystal clear that my voluntary mediation in human resources was extremely stupid. Sanja compared it to her experience of volunteering in the alternative drama group Zero. Her circles from the Academy had gathered there, full of enthusiasm, only to break up in rancor in the winter, with everyone feeling they’d been used by a bunch of thankless idiots.

The fact that there was no cash caused feelings to get all muddled. Who knows why, but doing away with monetary accounts inevitably leads us onto the path of emotional reckoning. Wherever there’s no dough you open an emotional account: you seek some form of acknowledgment. But how are you going to measure that? In the end everyone feels the others owe them something. That was the end of Zero. Everyone quarreled with everyone else, the expletives were as foul as foul could be, and Sanja felt used; she decided that in the future she’d only act when she was paid.

To tell the truth, it bugged her a bit that she’d departed from her youthful ideals so quickly.

I felt like that myself when I dropped out of Drama. I was working for various newspapers and, parallel to that, listening to the bullshit of pocket-monied students at uni. The longer I worked, the more avant-gardist they became. We read the deconstructionists and tried to apply them to the field of drama. We had conversations verging on the schizophrenic.

I was angry at my parents for canceling my pocket money and making fun of my efforts at deconstruction. I was angry at the Zagreb alternative bimbos who sooner or later would become part of the local glamour scene. I was angry at the proles and the elite, at work and art—having ended up somewhere in between. I was someone who hadn’t managed to penetrate the haze between all those cultural classes, all those people who were so damn convinced of their own
authenticity. I was angry at myself because I couldn’t express myself.

When Sanja left volunteering on the fringe I told her it was the right thing to do. She agreed. There was no other option, and if there was, it had to stay a secret, like masturbation in the bathroom at work, or me voluntarily sticking my nose into human resources.

Here I channeled my anarchic instincts and enriched the staff profile with unexpected guests like Boris, whom no tie-wearing staffer would ever have chosen. That was a holdover of my subversive tendencies from the days when I used to sing along with Johnny Štulić—fellow rebel and Yugoslavia’s answer to Joe Strummer:

             
The street is lined on either side
With office buildings tall
Bureaucrats creep and teem
Help, oh help
It makes my flesh crawl
.

Like bacteria that become resistant to antibiotics, my rebellion mutated during the search for enjoyment under capitalism. Find yourself a little hole in the system, have your fantasies, and live on them, cultivate them like people grow a little bit of pot in a secret place.

The whole business with Boris was prime evidence that my idea of subversion was only doing harm to myself. But I didn’t want to talk about it with Sanja in these terms. I didn’t see any way of saying all that to her without it having major consequences. I thought it’d have a disastrous effect on her image of me—and of us. She believed we were special.

Being very young and an actress, Sanja could still enjoy everything. Her identity was dynamic. But I couldn’t change as
the wind changed. I felt everything was in the process of being defined and I was developing my own vision of the future, a vision that haunted me. At first glance it was nothing terrible, everything seemed down to earth. But I saw a putrid life in a putrid atmosphere with people who were half putrid. We met at work-related parties and children’s birthdays, sipping beer and slagging off about this and that, about our government and the Americans, and then the fun began as we talked about minor victories we encountered at work. I saw people buying new washing machines, fitted kitchens, and hi-fis to listen to rock, buying shelves and arranging their CDs on them. I saw them exchanging exotic recipes, showing photos from summer holidays, and talking about Istrian stone houses. I saw people to whom I was afraid to show pity, I saw happiness becoming compulsory and everyone saying fantastic, fantastic, fantastic. I saw them park, park, park in front of fenced-in holiday cottages where they were holding their child’s birthday party, and someone would say, Where have you been? I haven’t seen you for ages! I saw myself among them making a few sick jokes, but taking care not to insult anyone, especially not all of us together.

At 7:29pm a huge clock appeared on the screen. It happened every day. I don’t know if the evening current-affairs program begins like that everywhere or only in former socialist countries.

The TV showed the entrance of Rijeka Bank and zoomed in at the bank’s logo above the entrance.

There was a problem with the bank—that much was clear if they were filming it like that. Money had inexplicably disappeared.

Tomorrow they’d reproach me for us not reporting it first. Why hadn’t our sources alerted us?

I rubbed my eyes. Sanja made a movement beside me, but when I looked I saw she was sleeping.

Now for Baghdad. The reporter looked me in the eye and told me the situation there was returning to normal.

I switched to Bosnian TV. Easier to watch the Bosnians. Their mess was essentially the same, only much worse, so their view of things calmed me a little. They announced a feature on the recipient of Police Officer of the Year.

My mobile rang.

“Who is it?” Sanja asked, raising her head.

“One of the many.”

She just sighed with irony.

“Markatović,” I said. “I’ll call him later.”

“I bet he was born with a mobile in his hand.”

“That’s just his business side.”

“Is there anything else to him?”

   From: Boris <
[email protected]
>
To: Toni <
[email protected]
>

   The rate of advance is now 30-40 kilometers a day, resistance is eliminated from the air, and I’m still eating the biscuits I’ve lugged with me from Kuwait. They stick in my throat, I bum water wherever I can, otherwise I’m always drinking warm Coca-Cola, there’s enough to throw away here, as if Coke is sponsoring this whole rally. I’m on a Coca-Cola high, soon all the bubbles will come out on my skin as blisters!

Sanja took the remote, flipped through the channels, and stopped at a police series.

I touched her neck like I was gently massaging her. I got behind her and kissed her on her uncovered lower back, and she gave a wiggle of pleasure. She turned around, kissed me on the mouth and stroked my hair. She leaned against me and looked at me pleadingly as if she wanted to take a rest from everything.

On the screen a forensic expert, who also happened to be a psychiatrist, prepared a psychological profile showing that the man they were seeking was a sex maniac. She argued that he actually wanted to be caught and was therefore leaving traces, and he was terribly intelligent, which opened up a whole gamut of potential plots for scriptwriters. Series like this one were becoming ever more popular. A whole civilization lived in fear of sex maniacs because civilization is a sex maniac.

I stroked her back and then moved down lower.

“Hmm. You know, I have to get ready. The dress rehearsal’s at eleven,” she said.