Our Man in Iraq (16 page)

Unbelievable—bloody Milka had done me in. And so quickly?

How did an idler like Boris end up on the front page? Since when was he so important?

The Chief waved the paper.

CROATIAN REPORTER MISSING IN IRAQ.

After the attack on the World Trade Center our papers came out with title pages saying how many Croatians had died. We searched for them. If none of our people had been in the Twin Towers we would’ve been disappointed. We so much wanted to be part of world news. We elbowed our way into it with the same zeal as Icho Kamera when he elbowed his way into the scene at car accidents. And this thing with Boris now on the cover, you had to admit, was the logical extension. If he’d disappeared anywhere else he could just rot. But there we had it: a Croatian reporter had disappeared in the great vortex of Iraq. Was this the first Croatian victim in Iraq?

“Are you in your right mind?” the Chief asked.

“It’s a fake,” I said analytically. “They’re after the first Croatian victim in Iraq. It’s kinda like the wow-we’re-
participating-in-the-global-drama discourse, don’t you see?”

The Chief looked at me dully, but I continued. “Man, if we got drawn into that war they’d break out the champers.”

“Stop going on about that,” the Chief snarled. “Why didn’t you call that woman?”

“My battery died.”

The Chief let out a subdued moan, narrowed his eyes, and clenched his fist. Secretary looked incredibly uncomfortable.

“She’s mad,” I said. “I talked with her the day before yesterday and everything was normal. But yesterday my battery was low.”

The Chief opened up the
Monitor
. I still didn’t know what it said inside, and that significantly hindered my defense. He read aloud the passage about the “unfeeling PEG editor” who’d sent an inexperienced reporter to Iraq and then “didn’t phone the reporter’s worried mother for days.”

“For days?” I protested. “It was just yesterday!”

“Wait for this,” Pero shouted, raising his finger and continuing to read. “‘When she finally managed to contact him,
Objective’s
editor even snapped at her that he had more important things to do than to talk with her about her son.’”

“I did not.”

The Chief kept reading. “‘It became clear to her that something had happened to her son because he hadn’t phoned home for a whole week.’”

He lifted his eyes and stared at me.

“He didn’t phone home at all,” I said.

“Not at all?”

“That’s what she told me,” I said.

“All right, so why don’t I know that?”

“Hang on, do you mean I’m supposed to bother you, the editor in chief,” I said, “with a pissy little detail like whether or not a journalist talks with his mother? It’s obvious why he’s
not phoning his mother—he ran all the way to Iraq to get away from her.”

“Let’s just take it niiice and slow.”

He took to the paper again and read on. The reporter’s mother was told he didn’t have a satellite phone in Iraq, but the writer of the article doubted that: “To send an inexperienced fellow into the hell of war without even standard equipment—not even PEG would stoop that low.” The GEP hack concluded from all this: “There’s much to suggest that PEG is concealing something. Unfortunately, the anxiety of the correspondent’s mother could well prove to be justified. Now it’s up to PEG to come out with the whole truth.”

The Chief fumed. “In this particular case, PEG means you!”

“This is all crazy. She’s crazy. They’re crazy.”

“I don’t know who’s crazy here,” he mused, watching me suggestively. “But I do know whose side the public is going to be on. Man, is there anything worse than a bereaved mother?”

He glanced at Secretary, hoping he’d confirm that.

I also looked at Secretary. My brain suddenly started to function like a sewing machine and I finally remembered that I’d told him yesterday I had a few problems with Boris.

I waited for him to look up at me, not just at my shoes. But his eyes returned to the Chief.

“Secretary?” I said and looked at him, waiting.

Finally he sent me a quick glance of sympathy. He had the expression of a defense witness cornered by the prosecutor’s questions. The worst thing that can happen to you in life is to have a phony advocate defend you.

“You know I mentioned this to you yesterday,” I said to Secretary. “But that was a mistake. I should’ve told the Chief.” I then looked at the Chief. “A false assessment. It was my fault and I don’t deny it.”

“You didn’t mention a thing, boy!” Secretary said, standing
up demonstratively in protest. “Who do you think you are?”

I sent him a sad glance and spelled it out. “I told you yesterday that I had a few problems with the fellow in Iraq.”

Secretary went red in the face. “He’s lying.”

“Stop it, both of you,” the Chief hissed, looking slightly disoriented.

“I’m really thirsty,” I said. “Last night we stayed on after the premiere.”

The Chief’s eyes sought the ceiling and he spread his arms as if addressing the gods who were so unkind. “Go and get some water then.”

I went into the corridor where there was a water cooler with cold, pure spring water. I carried two plastic cups back to the office, put them on the table and sat down. I didn’t look at Secretary at all.

The Chief had now decided to take a slightly more humane stance toward me. “Tell me everything. Why did his mom make you panic like that?”

“That woman . . . Milka. It's hard to explain.”

“The guy had a piece in the last issue. But his mom must’ve caught on, via you, that something was wrong. Correct?”

“Yes.”

“What a balls-up! See what you’ve done? You blew her off, and she called the competitors to take revenge. A right bloody mess. So it’s not she who’s crazy. Neither are they crazy. Because it’s not just about her having called them. No! Because, check this: they poked around and figured out that you sent emails to people in Iraq asking around about our reporter. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“I do,” I said. There was no way out anymore.

“I don’t want to waste any more time,” the Chief said. “Tell me what the hell is going on.”

I scratched the back of my head. Should I start with the big
bang between Milka and my old ma and finish with the war in Iraq?

“It’s all terribly complicated. He never got in touch by phone, only ever by email. Now it’s four days since his last email. I got a bit worried, but if you look at it rationally there needn’t be any reason to panic. He doesn’t have to get in touch every day.”

All at once the Chief spoke to me intimately, like a friendly copper. “Look, I’m not accusing you. If you said that to Secretary . . .”

But Secretary immediately got up again and stood right in front of me. “You haven’t got an ounce of integrity. Imagine behaving like that toward a mother who’s searching for her son, when the man’s in the middle of a war! That says everything about you.”

It was incredible: Milka’s words still found their mark when they came at me secondhand.

“I can’t talk with him,” I complained.

“Secretary,” the Chief said, “if you can’t help me, then at least leave me to work in peace.”

Secretary was hyperventilating like a heart patient, his face turning an unhealthy shade of red. I thought of offering him some water, but I feared he might take that as provocation.

“I have to go for a walk,” he mumbled and took his coat.

The door closed behind him.

“And?” asked the Chief.

“If I’d kicked up a panic nothing would’ve changed. Who’d go and search for him in Iraq? The Americans?”

“Hang on, are you now admitting he’s disappeared?”

It became clear to me that we were on the same side, in a way. Neither he nor I wanted to believe Boris had disappeared.

“He hasn’t disappeared, but, he’s offended. I wanted to
bring him back from Iraq straight away, but he acted crazy. He pretended not to have got my messages and calls. I told him off in an email and since then he hasn’t got back to me.”

“Why did you keep this to yourself?”

“I covered the idiot. But what use would it've been? If he didn’t listen to me he wouldn’t have listened to you either.”

Pero fell silent.

“Have you got any confirmation in your computer that he was in touch four days ago?”

We left his office and went to my desk.

“Here—this is his last email.”

I printed it. Pero sat at Charly’s desk and read.

All those desks, keyboards, phones, and large windows. There were just the two of us in the office and the space looked unusually tranquil, like the calm in the aftermath of a natural disaster. It was a damp, pastel morning. The occasional drop of rain tapped the window. Inside the air was still with the scent of fresh paper.

Down below by the intersection, a huge billboard sported a poster for a Hyundai Getz, with no down payment, in lots of installments. I followed events via that billboard: before that there’d been an ad for the Raiffeisenbank building society. There’d been the little Renault Twingo, with no down payment, in lots of installments. Tudjman had leered down at us with a bow tie. There’d been Sunmix sun cream, Lisca lingerie, and hot young flesh.

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

   Now, folks, the war is practically over, there’s no Saddam anymore, he’s vanished into thin air, disappeared, it’s like a gap in the story, a sudden draft blowing through it, close the window will you, and if anyone knows whether he’s alive or dead they should put up their hand, let them report it to the police. OK, there’s still no police here in Baghdad, and as long as there’s no police there’s no reality. You don’t know where the borders are and what’s real, I don’t know if you’ve noticed that it’s precisely the police who make life real, they’re the mother of realism, and if there was no realism there wouldn’t be those who’ve skedaddled and who we nab just to make sure they haven’t left us entirely and aren’t lost to the world like Saddam, me, or you.

   Just think, folks, if there were no police there’d be no reality and we wouldn’t be able to think about it. But now we can think because there are police, at least we have them, but if there were no police you could do anything that came into your head and then nothing would be real and nothing would be legal anymore. It would be like a neverending sentence and you’d look in vain for a full stop or an ending, ask God, ask the Law, ask the Next Policeman, and so on, until you run into someone who bashes you on the head, you don’t know where the end is, how far you can really go, what’s fantasy, what’s a forbidden desire, madness and sexual imaginings, you’ve got no idea where you are until you run into the next policeman and ask him, you say you’re lost, you tell him your address, and then he takes you home to your parents, because they work hand in glove on creating reality, they draw the edge of the world. Who says the world has no edge? Never
mind that it’s round, there has to be an edge of the world, otherwise there’s no full stop, only commas, so you walk and walk and walk without end until you can ask a policeman, you go bananas if you can’t find him, you look for that policeman around the world, you pray to God that you might find him, you search like mad for someone to arrest you and draw a line because this is unbearable, this is unreal, can you feel that too, please, call someone to arrest me and put me in the nick—doesn’t that sound nice—because here there’s no one competent, here there’s no police, no reality, people greet the liberators, rejoicing and spontaneous plundering are the order of the day, people shout “Saddam is dead” and “This is freedom,” and everyone takes something from the abandoned government buildings and shops, seizing food, clothing, electrical equipment, and carpets, but also Iraqi army vehicles, computers, and even furniture from the government offices, some remembered the museums, and people of taste carry away works of art instead of fridges. That’s the difference in education, we were surprised that resistance was so weak, the Yanks say, but the resistance to reality is sometimes weak, we know that pretty well, don’t we? Although you pretend you’re a realist, deep down you were waiting for liberation just like me, you waited for your Yanks, and they came, you remember, recently we rejoiced like Iraqi people. Fuck life without freedom. You know how it is when you get carried away by a sea change, people destroy monuments, it’s an earthquake plus tsunami, the regime is gone forever, the Yanks don’t interfere while the people are celebrating, they have exact, predetermined tasks, they found a suicide bomber’s weapons trove in a high school, C4 explosive vests weighing ten kilos with wires hanging out, residents brought the Marines dozens of grenades, rockets, and mortars from other places, the population’s now one hundred percent certain that the regime won’t
be coming back, they go to the Yanks and inform on their enemies, thinking this will help install a new reality, informing on members of the regime who are leftover from the former reality, but the Yanks know exactly what they’re doing, the marines are not here to install reality, they just patrol around, bounding off the ground like astronauts. The Iraqis no longer hold up white flags but T-shirts, they’ve even begun to bare their torsos to correspondents to assure us they’re not carrying explosives, I look at their bare torsos, state TV is still dead, there’s no picture, nothing on the screen, that’s that, remember that image, there’s no image, that’s just that, Iraqi radio is still broadcasting patriotic songs, but that’s unreal, though on the other hand nothing’s real, everything is on the road, in transition, constant improvisation, there’s chaos in the city, chaos in your head, you ought to bring the young anarchists here to learn the trade, they’re all good little children, they’re just decoration for the police as long as reality functions. Days go by before I finish a sentence, there’s no full stop, I smoke cigarette after cigarette, Baghdad is burning, parts of the Old Town, parts of the best-known old street Rashid are in flames, the old buildings are made of wood, there’s no fire brigade, as we know they died in the World Trade Center, the fire spreads unchecked, we moved toward the German embassy where a group of people had just begun loading stolen goods into trucks and cars, they chased us off, that was the very first time the locals were unfriendly to us, but people change from hour to hour when the revolution begins, these are fundamental changes, the personality surges beyond its bounds, it seethes up, color and shape melt, fear evaporates, the worst guys are the first to feel freedom, they take in its grandeur, freedom is an endless field, the predators sniff it out first (first come first served!), the longer the sentence lasts, the less kind people are. The Olympic Hospital was looted, groups of plunderers are cruising
the city in trucks, they’ve begun to carry weapons and threaten journalists who dare to take photos of them, animals come out of the flats, vampires out of the graves, old mummies are unravelled, the Archaeological Museum in Baghdad, eight millennia of Mesopotamia, has been plundered, and the exhibits that were too heavy to be stolen were destroyed, ambulance doctors go on their calls armed with pistols to defend themselves against the heroes who try to steal the vehicle and its instruments, the street gangs size me up, I sorely miss my weapons, send me a shipment, greet the old smugglers, congratulate them on their deserved victory, salute those who quietly implode. Demonstrations began down in front of the hotel, ordinary citizens gather around the American APCs in front of the hotel driveway advocating repression, a middle-aged high-school teacher called Samir, who now sells Marlboros without tax stamps, explains to a Marine that order needs to be restored bullet-in-the-head-wise so no one will plunder anymore, full stop, but comma, the marine looked at him in astonishment, and then colon, a group of Iraqi policemen offered their services to the US forces’ Command in Baghdad—to put an end to anarchy, as the leader of the group, Colonel Ahmed Abderazak Said, is reported as stating on Al Jazeera . . .