Our Man in Iraq (13 page)

“It’s interesting,” he mused, “for a moment there you reminded me very much of Kiro.”

“You’re joking.”

“I was at a symposium down in Macedonia several years ago. Someone remembered me, and I was invited.”

He seemed to soften, the hardness melted from his face, and he told me a tale—a remarkable tale about the collapse of Yugoslavia:

“Seeing as I was down there, I thought I should call in on Kiro. When you go to a country and know the president it’s a shame not to visit him. Kiro was getting toward the end of his second term in office, so I didn’t think he’d be all that busy. We were sitting in his office and his mobile phone was ringing all the time; he’d just recently received it and didn’t know how to turn it off. I didn’t know either.

“It was just like now when we were talking, except that his was ringing all the time. He was president, after all. But he didn’t know how to turn it off, so the two of us old men sat
there in front of the mobile and looked at it. It was haranguing us like a crying child.

“As his mobile was ringing, I was complaining about our pensions, and he said: ‘Ole—,’ he always called me that, ‘you know, Ole, my pay is 700 marks, and I’m president, and I keep thinking I could have more, but it’d be unpleasant to ask them to give me a raise.’

“Kiro was always like that, you know. We had a nice long chat although his mobile was ringing all the time and annoying us. At one point he asked: ‘Who should succeed me as president?’ His second term in office was drawing to a close, so he couldn’t run again. Now he needed to choose someone who he could personally support, but he still didn’t know which of the young fellows would do.

“I said to him: ‘Well, I don’t know—I don’t really follow things here—but what about Vasil Tupurkovski?’ You know, Tupurkovski, the paunchy guy with the handlebar moustache who always wore a woolen jumper. But he wasn’t stupid, and he had experience—political experience—back in Yugoslavia, and he was a socialist, so I expected he could be good.

“And Kiro said to me: ‘Vasil? Yes, I’m thinking about him too. It’s not that there are any who are better, but I’m really not sure.’

“Kiro thought deeply for a moment. Then he asked me: ‘Do you remember, Ole, when Yugoslavia was collapsing? It was the last Party Congress.’ He told me about the last session where everything went down the plughole, when first of all the Slovenians left, and then Račan and the Croatians walked out too. But before that things had gone on all blinking day, there had been one argument and quarrel after another, it was drama nonstop, the tension lasted for hours, the session dragged on into the evening and still no end was in sight. Vasil was sitting next to him and kept whispering in his ear that he was starving.

“Kiro told him: ‘Wait a bit, you can see they all want to go—the Slovenians, the Croatians—and if you go now it’ll look like we Macedonians were the first to leave.’

“Then, when the Slovenians had left, Vasil whispered to Kiro: ‘All right, I’m going now.’

“But Kiro still wouldn’t let him.

“‘Come on, Kiro, I’m starving,’ Vasil pleaded. But Kiro put his foot down: ‘Be patient. You can see the country’s falling apart. I don’t want people to say that we let Yugoslavia collapse because you were hungry. Wait for the break, or else history will judge you!’

“‘Fortunately the others were famished too, so they set up a smorgasbord and Vasil was able to fill up,’ Kiro said. ‘But I just took two canapés. I didn’t feel like eating anything much, you see, because I saw what was coming. I could even count the dead—believe me, I had experience.’

“‘The session was restarted after the smorgasbord but it soon finished again because neither the Slovenians nor the Croatians returned to the hall,’ Kiro said.

“Now I can’t remember exactly all the details he told me, but you appreciate the situation. Kiro continued: ‘What could we do? So I said to Vasil: Let’s go back to Skopje. We have no choice—there’s nothing we can do here any more.’

“This was all quite a blow for Kiro because he’d built up Yugoslavia and seen through the reforms.

“And Kiro said: ‘We got our things and went to the car, and I told the chauffeur: “To the airport!” And I thought to myself: Yugoslavia has collapsed, a historical epoch has ended; here I am now, and who knows if I’ll ever come back to Belgrade; and a fine rain was falling, it made you feel despondent.’

“But Vasil disturbed him and said: ‘Kiro, there’s a nice little place here in Karaburma that’s open all night and always has
fresh roast.’ Kiro looked at him: ‘Haven’t you just eaten, Vasil? I can’t eat, my appetite’s gone, I just feel miserable. You can go, if you like, and I’ll stay in the car and doze a bit,’ Kiro said. ‘We drove there and Vasil went into the eatery, but he probably felt awkward knowing I was waiting in the car, so he came back ten minutes later with some slices of roast in a plastic bag. And so we headed for the airport; I leaned my head against the window, I wanted to calm my nerves, to doze a bit, but the crackling of the cellophane was in my ears all the time because he was rummaging in that bag.

“We boarded the plane and rose up above Belgrade, and I looked out into the night. I wanted to go to sleep so much, so I closed my eyes, but I kept thinking: What’s going to happen now? My life flashed before my eyes and I thought: Yugoslavia has failed, I can’t believe it. What’s going to happen to Macedonia now if everyone starts grabbing whatever bits they can? So that abyss was down below us, I couldn’t get to sleep, and I kept hearing the crackle of the cellophane as he rustled in the bag; the noise really bothered me, Ole, and I was upset; I opened my eyes and looked at Vasil, about to tell him off, but stopped. I just couldn’t believe it all, and I watched him as he demolished that meat.

“When he saw I was looking at him, he said: ‘Kiro, there’s nothing better than cold pork chop!’

“Kiro’s mobile on the table kept ringing as he was telling me this, and I didn’t know if he was getting agitated because of it or because of the story.

“And then Kiro spread his arms and said: ‘So tell me, Ole—could he be the president?’”

That was too long for an anecdote in the newspaper, I figured as I left Olenić’s building. The rain was easing up and I was
hungry, almost like Vasil, so I retro-ed into a dank diner left over from the previous system. I had the old waitress in orthopedic work shoes bring me tripe soup. Usually I found backwaters like this relaxing, but today I remembered that I had ignored Milka’s calls.

I felt that I couldn’t beat around the bush with Milka. She a mother and I just a journalist. Provincial women know their area of operation: family and extended-family concerns. They leave politics and other foreign affairs to the menfolk, but as far as extended-family matters are concerned—if someone happens to need supervising, keeping tabs on, or brainwashing, if a confession and an expression of penitence have to be elicited—they’re on deck. I’d always known that Milka was the informal boss of the extended-family ministry of the interior. She went to visit everyone, called up regularly, inquired, and interrogated. She even kept in touch with distant relatives on other continents.

When she came to our place she always complained about her son, and she provoked my old ma to complain about me too. So in my presence they complained together, about my unfinished studies, about me not yet being married, not having children, not having a flat of my own, and guzzling beer by the gallon. This yammering was their medium, and it devastated everything around them. Milka very quickly made me feel miserable even when I thought things were going wonderfully. I was glad not to have seen Milka since she had that falling-out with my ma. That was where the conflict began. Milka was the elder and acted like an authority and couldn’t forgive my ma for aligning herself contrary to caucus instructions. But my old ma persisted bravely in her mutiny.

The downside was that she had to endure the long-term consequences. Milka had done thorough groundwork to turn the whole extended family against my ma and make her a kind
of dissident, isolating our family from the rest of the clan. As a consequence, my mother became embittered, as edgy as a Soviet defector with the KGB on her heels.

Since we didn’t have anything else to talk about, my mother continually informed me about the development of the conflict, which from here in Zagreb looked like a soap opera. I sometimes recounted that colorful Mediterranean imbroglio with a smile at parties. All the same, my ma carried out her dissident struggle and it kept her alive; otherwise, life as a pensioner would have killed her.

Yet I hadn’t thought about that in depth, the way Olenić thought about the economy. From my perspective, the whole thing seemed unreal and unrelated to me. But thinking about it now it was clear that my old ma had one ace up her sleeve: me. She gave everyone my number to prove the modern power of our faction. Perhaps we didn’t have any real support on the ground, but we held the capital and the media. The West was on our side, and the liberal intellectuals too.

Only now did I realize what it meant that my mother sent Boris to me. She gave him my number and sent him to me like a misfit who scrounges a favor—as if he was seeking asylum. She wanted it to be a public humiliation for Milka in the eyes of the family. That was why Milka and Boris weren’t communicating. He’d accepted the help of the family dissident and betrayed his mother—he’d gone over to the other side like the Bolshoi Theater ballet dancer who sold his homosexual soul.

My involvement in all of this was much deeper than I’d realized. Milka now assumed, logically enough, that I was part of the conspiracy. And I was. Damn it, in Milka’s eyes I was the chief operative in the service of my ma. My ma had devised a plot, and I had put it into practice. Not only had we humiliated Milka by driving her own son to betray her, but
we’d even gone so far as to send her son to Iraq to disappear in the desert.

Everything I’d run from for decades had caught up with me. The provincial world and all that went with it were pursuing me like a posse. The past, spirits of a pre-modern life: everything that I wanted to emancipate myself from. I imagined myself running across an urban wasteland hotly pursued by peasants armed with pitchforks and whatever they could lay their hands on, and Milka was leading them on like Delacroix’s Marianne, an open-shirted heroine boldly raising her arm and advancing with her old boobs at the fore.

I’d fled to Zagreb and become a city boy; here I went to a thousand concerts, lived with an actress who played avant-garde dramas, I acted cool, and did everything right. The fear of someone thinking I was a redneck made me read totally unintelligible postmodernist books, watch unbearable avant-garde films, and listen to progressive music even when I wasn’t in the mood. I was terrified of everything superficial and populist. If something became too popular, I rejected it. Even in moments of major inebriation when I felt like singing a popular peasant song I stopped myself. I maintained discipline. But in vain. All at once they were breathing down my neck again. I thought I’d given them the slip, but now they’d encircled me, having used Boris as bait, and were closing in for the kill.

Half pissed already but needing to drown these thoughts I went and stood at the bar. I tried to strike up a conversation with the waitress about the war in Iraq, purely along the lines of whether the war had been worse here or if it was worse there. Since Boris had survived here as a soldier, I wanted to assure myself that he’d probably survive there as a civilian.

The waitress calmly ignored me; she’d apparently learned in her school of bar diplomacy that one shouldn’t talk about
the war with fellows my age because you couldn’t tell who had post-traumatic stress disorder and who had a cousin in Iraq.

I phoned Sanja; she said she was going home to relax before the premiere, so I decided to return to the office to give her some peace. There I checked my email, excited to see a message from Vito Čuveljak, the Reuters cameraman in Iraq. But he didn’t know anything about Boris.

Just as I started working on the interview with Olenić, my mobile started ringing again. Milka. I switched the ringer to vibrate. Every few minutes or so my mobile trembled.

I shouldn’t have sent him there. That’s all I can say to her. What else can I do?

But I didn’t answer.

My mother called. She’d read Sanja’s interview. “I'm ashamed she's talking about sex like that.”

“She talks about it—and you’re ashamed?”

“I’m ashamed.”

“What did she say to get you so hot?”

“Hot? Why canna’ ya talk like a normal human being? If ya don’ mind. Whaddid she say? She said she’d go naked for a film. Insteada gettin’ married and havin’ kids, she’d go naked for a film! Y’are not normal.”

“That’s just how it is.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“I’m at work. I can’t talk now.”

“I dunno where you’re from, and who made you and brought you up. I dunno why you’ve turned out the way you are.”

Next, Markatović called. His voice was subdued.

He was calling from the bathroom; his wife was packing suitcases.

“Whose suitcases?” I asked.

“Hers. When someone’s going away they pack their own suitcases.”

“Where’s she going?”

“I don’t know,” he whispered. “She’s gone crazy.”

“What happened?”

“I told her I had shares in Rijeka Bank and was still waiting to see what happened.”

“Where’s she going?”

“I said I don’t know.”

“Well, ask her, man.”

“But she’s crazy.”

“So what?”

“All right. I’ll go and ask her,” Markatović muttered and hung up.

In the end Sanja rang too. She said she’d been napping and had been woken by the phone—or rather by Milka. She didn’t believe I wasn’t there. And when Sanja asked her politely to leave her in peace because she had a play, Milka replied that she would also like to have a play with us because we had it coming, so Sanja unplugged the phone and did a bit of meditation. Now she felt better. She was just about to leave for the theater and suggested we meet after the premiere. I wished her good luck and said everything would be just fine.