Our Man in Iraq (9 page)

The phone rang, the landline this time.

Sanja answered, then held out the phone. “It’s some woman.”

I took the receiver. “Hello.”

“H’llo, guess who this is?”

I shat myself. “Milka?”

I could see that strong, stocky woman, vintage hairstyle from the age of the first moonwalk.

“Thought you’d recognize me!”

“H-how could I not?”

Milka was my mother’s eldest sister, but I hadn’t seen her since she fell out with my ma in a dispute over an extended-family inheritance; neither of them stood to inherit anything, they just sided with different camps, which ultimately led to them testifying against each other in court.

Milka was also Boris’s mother.

“So how are you?” I thought it better to use the formal “you” to help maintain distance.

“Alive and kicking. And you?”

“Good.”

“Do you know why I’m calling?”

“To do with Boris I suppose?”

“Where is ’e? What’s goin’ on?”

“He’s in Iraq.”

“I know that much. But he don’t call me, like. What a shameful boy. I dunno what to do with ’im. Does he call you?”

“He was in touch just a few days ago.”

“And where is ’e now?”

“In Baghdad.”

“I shouldna let ’im go there,” she whimpered and started sobbing.

“Listen . . .”

“Poor wee lad. You shouldna sent ’im there.”

“No, Aunt Milka, listen! He asked me. I didn’t ask him to go, let alone tell him to go.”

“E’s mad!” Milka exclaimed. “Believe me, the lad ain’t in ’is right mind.”

Then she fell silent. I very much wanted to console her, so I started defending that black sheep.

“Maybe he simply can’t call you. Do you have email?”

“What?”

“Email.”

“No, where would I get that from? But, ’e could’ve phoned me. Ain’t ’e got a mobile?”

“It doesn’t work there,” my voice trembled as I lied. “It’s pretty chaotic.”

“So you think everythin’s OK?”

“Everything’s under control.”

She sighed again. “All right then. Sorry to trouble you. Muvvers will be muvvers—we worry.”

“I know, Aunt Milka, it can’t be helped. Talk to you soon.”

Talk to you soon? Why the hell did I say that?

“There are cool people and hot people,” I said to Sanja.” Cool people let you live your own life, but hot people don’t. With them, everything always turns out communal. Open a little door for them and they’ll burst through by the million.”

“Don’t think about that now,” Sanja said as she got ready to go out. “He might get in touch tomorrow.”

“There are more of them for sure. We’re cool people who live in a hot country, that’s our problem.”

“That’s so true,” she said, looking at herself in the mirror.

“The idiot hasn’t called her even once—their relationship must be a bit of a dog’s breakfast. She acts as if I had personally mobilized him. Fucking hell, as if I’m George bloody Bush.”

“Hey, don’t get so upset. Nothing’s happened yet, has it?”

“No, it hasn’t. Unless they drag me into their shit. Now I have to become part of their madness.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Like hell I don’t. You don’t know Milka.”

“Calm down.”

“Everyone can just go and stick it. Is this what they call life? This is shit!”

“No, that’s not true.”

“Oh really?” I sneered. “Why don’t we go and see that flat? Can you explain that to me?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Everything. It’s got everything to do with it.”

“What do you think, that I’m avoiding—”

“I don’t think anything!’ I thundered.

She looked away.

“Sorry,” I said.

“All this drives me round the bend, sorry.”

“Don’t take out your anger on me anymore.”

“I won’t. It was out of line.”

I went to her, kissed her on the shoulder.

“It’s OK,” she said. “I have to get going.”

“Good luck tonight.” I held her arm. “You can do it. You’ll be great.”

She hugged me. Tight, like I was a traveler returned from a distant journey. Happy that I was back.

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

   Terrific, terrific, terrific! The Tomahawk missile introduced during the First Gulf War is still a terrific miracle of technology that flies, flies, flies just below the speed of sound, follows the terrain and hits a programmed target with a 450kg warhead up to 1,600km away. How beautiful it is to write that? Nothing hurts! The US Navy has around 1,000 Tomahawks and each one of them costs $600,000, so I can tell you, it’s simple: you’ve gotta have a good fucking reason to want to hit someone with it, I mean, to fire at someone with a thingo worth $600,000, you have to have a damn good financial reason, otherwise it’s not worth it, cuz. It’s no good if a missile’s worth more than what it hits. I’ve realized that’s the main problem with American involvement around the world. You can’t target every idiot. You can only fight wars where it’s worth it. In Africa, for example, it really doesn’t make financial sense. Whatever you hit is cheap. The damage in no way justifies the cost
of the missile. That’s the problem with wars in the Third World—low real-estate prices. They’d say you’re producing losses.

   That’s right, losses. Look how far it’s gone. The Africans ought to develop a bit, they have to be given a boost, then they can be targeted. But it’s pointless the way things are at the moment. There’s no sense to it, and sense is the most important thing.
When the price of Tomahawks comes down the world will change. When they come up with advanced weaponry at an acceptable price, the world will be different. Then the Yanks will also be able to intervene where there’s no money. But the question is when that’s going to happen. I think advanced weaponry will stay expensive. Purely so that not everyone blasts away at everyone else. If some down-and-out guy got hold of a Tomahawk, everything would be up shit creek. At least the rich go round their properties and do a cost-benefit analysis first. But if a poor man has weapons—I mean weapons and nothing else—uh-oh! It really makes you want to fire on them yourself to show you have a weapon as well. You simply can’t resist, you have to fire a bit. That’s the problem with the wars of the poor. You decide what you’re going to do with this, but I have to philosophize a bit; I’ve got nothing else to do here.

   The Serbs, for example, the losers, were warring for all of the ‘90s, but they don’t have a fiscal plan. They fight and fight and get more and more fucked up. That can’t happen to the advanced nations. Our Serbian bros blam away their resources, run up huge losses, and then they don’t know what to do. They seize half of Bosnia and then sit there doing nothing.

   You know, all that stuff ruins people mentally as well. After the war and all that wretched stress a man wants to have a bit of a rest. And not, fucking hell, drudge away to make up for the damage. Who’ll force a warrior to work? That’s an old Indian question. You
can’t stick him in a reservation to sow corn. Geronimo and his braves would rot there—as soon as it was time for a scrap they’d have to go to the shrink. As long as the shit is going on, as long as you’re taking rock after rock, hill after hill, ditch after ditch, thicket after thicket, as long as you’re pushing back the borders, it all looks like you’re going somewhere, like things are evolving, like there’s some perspective.
That’s a serious problem for us pauper warriors! We have no idea what to do when the war is over. Be a philosopher? A priest? Who? What?

“You called?” I said to Markatović in place of a greeting.

“Have you got time for coffee? It’s important.”

Why couldn’t he invite me out for a beer like normal people do? Why were we constantly meeting like two over-important businessmen?

“Are you going to drag me into another scheme?” I asked.

“Now Dijana’s calling, I have to get that. I’ll call you back in a minute.”

When the phone rang again it was the landline. It couldn’t be Markatović, he always called me on my mobile. I stood above the phone and looked at it. Finally it fell silent—and then started again. It was still ringing as I left the flat, slamming the door as if I’d just had a falling-out with someone.

By the time Markatović called I was already in the car.

“Meet me at Limited,” I told him.

“That’s not exactly on my route.”

“Too bad, I’ve just found somewhere to park.”

“Man, I’m in a suit, with a tie too,” he complained.

“Well, take it off then. If it’s that important, I’m here.”

I worked my way through the crowd, checking to see if I knew anyone. Old lounge lizards used to hang out here, but
our generation of fighters and survivors was becoming fewer and fewer. We’d suffered heavy casualties, no doubt about it. In spite of the crowd, if someone from the old guard had rung up and asked me who was there, I’d have said, “There’s no one here.”

There was nothing else to do but watch the girls, wait for Markatović, and wonder what he’d come up with now. It seemed he feverishly thought up jobs just to keep people at the table and delay going home. He loved Dijana, he said, but he just couldn’t bring himself to go home.

Still, I was glad when the old goth came in.

“Anyone here?” He winked to me after glancing around.

He ordered a double whiskey with lots of ice. When his drink came he suggested moving to a table in the back, so we could talk.

“How’s work then?” he asked.

“I’m waiting to see what happens. And you? How’s your poetry coming along?”

“Slowly. I work on it when I have time.” He glanced around furtively. “Did you see what happened today on the stock market?”

“Don’t mention the stock market. Is that too much to ask? Same with Dolina. I don’t want to hear about him.”

I was on the verge of telling him that it’d be best for him to go home. I was sick of watching him turn into a workaholic, while running away from his wife and constantly talking about other things. More, it annoyed me that we had to seclude ourselves at a corner table. I didn’t like the static view; I wanted things to be moving in front of me. That was the Mediterranean in me. Everywhere in the Mediterranean, from North Africa to Venice to Istanbul, people are used to watching the waves coming in, they’re accustomed to that rhythm. In the Mediterranean you can sit anywhere—on stairs, a stone
wall, or the ground, and aimlessly watch the pulsing of the sea. Markatović was a continental guy and had no feel for that.

“What’s up with you?” he said.

“Either go home or let’s drink like men.”

“Have I done something to offend you?” he asked.

“I’m a bit tense.”

Markatović knocked back his whiskey and waved for another round.

“Everything’s fucked,” he griped.

“Tell me about it.”

“You, too? What’s up?”

“I recommended a blockhead to be our correspondent in Iraq. He’s gone there, and now I can't reach him, he's not answering.”

“So what are you going to do now?”

“I’ll wait. It’s not too late, he could still get in touch. Luckily, we are a weekly newspaper, not that he knows it.”

“You shouldn’t get worked up in advance. Look, one day a guy came back, some kind of cameraman, and get this, he’d smuggled golden pipes out of Saddam’s house in Tikrit. I heard that from an antique dealer.”

His mobile rang again. It was Dijana.

If I’d had to describe his voice, I’d have said he was trying to sound soporific. It sounded like a ballad about the wide, blue sea.

“Really, I’m with Toni. In Limited. We’re just finishing something.” A blast of music:
You gotta fight for your right to paaarty
.

He put down the phone and blew out a tired plume of smoke.

“She’s been so nervous recently,” he said.

“You work too much.”

“I have to,” he sighed and became pensive. “Have you heard the news about Rijeka Bank?”

“Yes, dammit.”

“It’s serious,” he muttered.

I rolled my eyes. “How wonderful it is when people use media events to flee from themselves! All those affairs sound so important and no one can stop you from talking about them, even if you’re fucked up for a completely different reason.”

“Someone knew before the others and sold up. Someone from the bank for sure.”

“And now what? Do you want me to write a book about it?”

“The shares will plummet,” he predicted.

“Yes,” I said, grinning, clinking my glass against his. “Probably to zero.”

“Think so?” He sighed like the loneliest man in the world. “I’m in it in a big way.”

“Do you have shares in Rijeka Bank, RIJB-R-A?”

“Heaps.”

“When did you put your money in?”

“This morning,” he said, staring at his glass as if he was going to smash it against his head.

“Shit, you were still on that coke from last night. Did you sleep at all?”

“I went into it quite rationally. It’s a bank that was bought by the Germans, fucking hell.”

There you go: even the Germans were no longer what they used to be. As soon as they came here they got corrupted.

“I stuck in a heap of cash, even the lump I got from Dolina this morning. I’ve been following the shares. My computer has a live feed and I saw it all happen. The trading was strong. I thought of catching the wave and exiting again as soon as the share went up a little; I withdrew some dough like that two months ago, but a smaller amount. I wanted to take advantage of having cash in my account.”