Our Man in Iraq (15 page)

“A system meltdown,” I said to Charly with a grin.

“Is this a Croatian theater or are we in some bloody Serbian wedding?” Charly jeered.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “They’re letting it all hang out.”

“I can’t stand it. You think this is all OK?”

“It’s all a laugh, one big laugh.”

“I don’t get you one fucking bit.”

Again that ontologically naive refrain blared:
What am I, what are you, oh liiife
. If it had been sung by Irish folk musicians Charly would relate to it more favorably.

“Translate the lyrics into English and then it won’t bother you so much,” I said.

“That’s just bullshit, and you know it.”

“You're maintaining discipline, at three in the morning?”

He was offended. That’s what we’re like in Croatia when the fun starts. We try to make sure things don’t get out of control.
There’s always that danger here on the slippery edge of the Balkans. Here we always squabble about what we’re allowed to enjoy and what not. That was part of our culture. We had high standards in order to set ourselves apart from the primitives further south and east. We were small in number, those of us who held high standards, and were aware of our precarious position. Until we collapsed like Markatović.

Now I was angry too. Charly had dragged me into this shitty debate and, in a typical Central European way, I started to think instead of having fun. But the coke rocketed me to be brutally honest.

“You know what?” I began. “I’ve been wanting to tell you for ages that your standards are utterly destructive. And you’ve come here in such a shitty mood just because of Ela.”

“What the hell. What’s she got to do with it?”

“She’s hot on you, but you can’t. Your stupid fucking high standards are in the way because you’ve got your sights on Silva. You keep on trying to meet some artificial standard, you drive around in that fat Jaguar, you go on about locally-grown olive oil, but you don’t fool anyone. I’m smashed and I don’t care, but I’m telling you. Get rid of those fucking fictions. Bloody hell, I can see where you’re at. You don’t have a life. You’re always into imitations. You think people don’t see? Just let people dance, man, go over to Ela and pour water over your head. Otherwise your life will just be one big put-on.”

“It’s about time I put on something,” Doc said as he walked past us.

“Go ahead!” I called out after him. “People here are about to take to the barricades.”

“Don’t you think I can see where you’re at?” Charly retaliated. He’d consumed quite a bit of coke himself, and his eyes glared with self-assurance as he stared at me like in a preelection debate on TV. “You’d like to run with the hare and
hunt with the hounds. You let it hang out at the paper as if you’re so cool, kind of, like you don’t push in anywhere. In fact, you’re not allowed to show ambition because it’d sorta look like you weren’t a punk. You’ve listened to too many smash-the-system songs and read too many books about underdogs. But now you’re packing shit. Your girlfriend’s made it big and now you have to do something too. Isn’t that right? So just be honest with yourself. You’ve been part of the system for ages. Otherwise your life, like you said, will just be one big put-on.”

             
Stop the war in the name of love
Stop the war in the name of God
Stop the war in the name of children
Stop the war in Croatia.
Let Croatia be one of Europe’s stars
Europe, you can stop the war
.

That was the song that Doc had put on.

“He’s mad,” Charly said.

“What, you don’t like this either?”

“Are you cool?” Sanja asked.

“Cool and hot,” I said. “I’m happy because of you!”

I kissed her and grabbed her ass, but she moved away, saying, “Careful. There might still be photojournalists around.”

“So what? We’re a couple.”

“No, come on, it’d look nasty.”

“You know, I could perhaps get a regular column.”

“That’s fantastic.”

“I just negotiated it today: The Red Bull Generation.”

“What’s that?”

“Life, fervor, taking things to the limits.”

“Fantastic, fantastic,” she said, kissing me before moving back to the dance floor.

Markatović was walking with difficulty. Suffering heavy casualties. Now he stood in front of me. “I love people, but not too much.”

I laughed.

“I’m going to the loo. Are you staying here?”

“Sure, I’m not going anywhere in a hurry.”

Then Jerman came shuffling along.

“Shall we go and have a drink?”

“Sure.”

We went through the lobby to the bar.

“Hey, y’know, what was in the paper, fucking hell. It doesn’t have the slightest bit to do with reality, y’know?”

“I know.”

“I just wanna say it so you know.”

“It’s not worth a mention. I get you.”

“OK, what are you having?” He ordered, and then introduced me to Ingo.

Ingo Grinschgl. The director. An East German and, worst of all, he looked like an East German. His pock-marked face and hippie hairstyle told us he wasn’t a Westerner who’d show us the meaning of trendy. A bearded German who learned from Jerman and Doc not to believe anyone in the Balkans.

He praised Sanja: “She hez a greyt fyutcha.” He was drunk but still a bit too serious, very polite and way outside the whole vibrant social scene. The language barrier hampered him. Besides, no one could stick to a single topic at this time of night. He looked like he was watching things flying past as I told him about my job.

“Here I am!” I called out to Markatović who was looking around where he’d left me. I said to Ingo, “Mai frend, lost in speis.”

“Wot you sey abaut ze ekonomik situeyshen hier?” asked Ingo.

“Oh, itts too difikult to ekspleyn.”

“What are you mumbling?” Markatović butted in.

“I’m speaking English and explaining the economic situation to this German.”

“It’s a disaster,” Markatović said. He made the most passionate of expressions and got very close to Ingo. “A DI-SASTER!”

Ingo nodded with sympathy. “Thet’s terribl.”

“Jermans. Deutsch, you undrstand? Deutsch peepl buy benk. My benk,” Markatović said, simplifying things somewhat. “And naw, dizasta! Nix benk! Kaine gelt! KA-TA-STRO-FA!”

“It was like this,” Doc began. “A girl came up to me. She was from one of those socially deprived areas, it doesn’t matter exactly where, but I wanna make the point that she was from one of those areas because this is a social story. And y’know, her dad was a civil servant there, so he arranged for her to be given a nice scholarship, although she wasn’t such a great student. Her dad pulled all the strings via the party to have her enrolled at uni, in Medicine, because in those areas, y’know, every woman who goes to the hairdresser’s dreams of her child becoming a doctor and treating her. Anyway, the girl had seen me in some commercial. I was at The Blitz and she came up to bum a cigarette. She had no idea I was an actor, she’d just seen me in a window ad, and really liked me. Anyway, Jeezus, we screwed all night long, fucking hell. And that was that. I mean, I didn’t promise her the moon, kinda that we’d I don’t know what, though she sure was cute. No gift of the gab but she had good tits and was a maniac, so saucy, giving back all she learned
down there in the socially deprived area. And y’know what? She left in the morning, went straight to uni and I never saw her again. And no, I’m not finished.

“They had microscope practice up at the Medical School that morning. I heard all this from one of her girlfriends who’d been there that night at The Blitz. I ran into her just yesterday and she told me the story, though it all happened back in the autumn. So this friend of the country girl told me they’d had microscope practice and that everyone had a look at their own saliva under the microscope and everyone saw some kind of micro-organisms, only my girl saw something special. She called her friend over—the one who told me the story, and she looked and saw something pretty damn big. My girl called out: ‘Professor, professor, come and see this!’ The professor came over and looked and said, ‘Miss, those things in your saliva are nothing out of the ordinary, just spermatozoa.’ Talk about embarrassing!

“But what happened afterward was pretty fateful. Tragic. This is what her friend told me: she stopped going to uni and, of course, hit drugs straight away—heroin first thing, zoom—and when her folks found out they made her go home, back down south. That was the collapse of all the family’s expectations, the end of their hopes, and the beginning of a big family mess. Her old man went round the bend and killed his old woman, shot her, he probably wanted to kill the girl but hit his old woman, the cops aren’t really sure, but the main thing is that he’s now in custody, and the girl has run away and no one knows where she is. I feel a bit guilty about it. Sounds like a novel, dunnit? It could be a real hit—it’s got sex, blood, and it’s a social story too.”

“Doc, you’re repulsive,” Sanja gave him a look of disgust.

“I knew I’d end up being the culprit!”

We’d all gathered behind the bar. They’d turned the music off too. The best time for the worst stories.

Sanja continued. “I didn’t think sperm could survive.”

“It’s all bullshit, you just made it all up,” Markatović laughed at Doc raucously.

“He’s revolting,” I chipped in, glancing at Doc.

“Like bloody hell I made it up!” Doc snorted righteously.
“Who’d invent a story like that?”

“Coud you trensleyt it?” Ingo asked.

“Itts too difikult,” I said.

“It woz my luv stori. Veri difikult,” Doc added.

The phone rang and rang.

“Go and see what’s up,” Sanja whined, butting me with her elbow.

I opened my eyes. A glance at the clock: seven thirty in the morning. It was Milka, it couldn’t have been anyone else.

“It’s nothing—it’ll stop,” I whispered.

And sure enough, it rang and rang a bit more and then stopped.

I sank back into sleep but the phone blared again. As chief of the family police, Milka obviously knew that you can soften up a prisoner with sleep deprivation.

“Unplug it, please,” Sanja pleaded, a collateral victim.

I had to get up to reach the phone and I was still smashed from the night before. I banged into the doorpost with a real kerthump and fell, knocking over the books and newspapers
piled on the plastic box where I kept important documents.

“Jeezus,” she said, getting out of bed and crouching down next to me. “Are you OK?”

The phone and the whole world around me now rang even louder. Since Sanja had got up too and I was wussing out about Milka, I implored her, “Go and see who it is.”

Sanja tottered to the phone.

“Say I’m not here!” I yelled.

I collapsed back to bed. I just needed to gather strength and then I’d make a dent in the day. But Sanja yelled from the living room. “Toni, your editor wants you.”

Pero, at seven thirty?

“Come to the office immediately,” he commanded.

“Why, what’s wrong?”

“Cut the blathering and get a move on.”

“He’s not exactly in a good mood,” I told Sanja when I returned to the room, which reeked of alcohol.

“I dreamed I was examining a tortoise,” she said.

“What?”

“It kept pulling in its head, arms, and legs. What does that mean?”

“Tortoises don't have arms,” I stated mechanically.

“Yes they do!” she said.

I put some water for Nescafé in the microwave, and my head spun with drunken premonitions that made my hands shake. I figured that I’d had about one hour’s sleep.

Sanja called out from the bedroom. “Have a look if there’s anything in the papers about the premiere and give me a ring. I don’t mind if you wake me.”

Her voice was full of hope. Somehow that got to me. I felt we didn’t live in the same world anymore. I had nothing to hope for. “OK,” I called back. I felt like a badger from a hole. I was inside it with those drunken premonitions, and it smelled
of soil, dark and earthy. Man, am I sloshed, I thought. Have a coffee! Light up a cigarette! Be the man you were!

I hurried into the Chief’s office. He and Secretary were sitting there. Secretary looked at me without a word, and the Chief’s gaze searched the ceiling and walls as if he was tracking a mosquito he intended to kill.

“Good morning,” I offered.

“Good morning?” the Chief asked. “Brilliant morning, I’d say.”

He stood up, lifted the newspaper from the table like a matador and held it right in front of my nose, so close that I couldn’t read it.

“Careful, it’s still hot,” the Chief said.

It was GEP’s weekly
Monitor
, and the bold letters of the title page blared out:
CROATIAN REPORTER MISSING IN IRAQ
.

“Sit down!” the Chief ordered.

I sat down.

“You don’t know anything about this,” the Chief said sarcastically.

“I haven’t read it. You’ve hauled me out of bed.”

Secretary nodded self-importantly, looking at my shoes.

“They exploit every opportunity,” Secretary said, referring to GEP. “They’ll stop at nothing. They know no limits.”

I reached out for the paper but Pero whipped it away from me and, holding it in his hand, started to saunter between his table and the window.

“What absolute scum,” I said, trying to channel emotion at GEP until I came up with a strategy of my own. That sometimes worked when talking about the Serbs, who you could always use for a change of focus. “Where else in Europe would this happen?”

“Do you know, perchance, which reporter they could mean here on the front page?” the Chief asked.

“I have no idea which reporter this is about, but . . .”

“But what?” the Chief said and lit up a cigarette, reminding me of the Gestapo interrogator in a Yugoslav partisan film. I cast myself as the good guy.

“But since you’ve called me in, it could obviously be our fellow in Iraq.”

“Obviously, huh?”

“Theoretically it could be him.”

“Well, why weren’t you at least decent to that woman?”

“Which woman?”

“With the mother of our reporter!”