Our Man in Iraq (6 page)

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

   This afternoon, three Iraqi Scuds were fired at the Anglo-American convoys heading for the border. They came down one after another, twenty minutes before I arrived on the scene of the miss. Please introduce me as “Boris Gale, reporting from the scene of the miss.” Usually reports come from the scene of an
event, but in war you can only report from the scene of the miss. I mean, if it’d been a hit I wouldn’t be able to report it. That needs explaining to the readers. So: “Here’s a report from the scene of the miss from our correspondent . . .” But listen, write what you want, that’s your job.

   There were two others with me at the scene of the miss, Italians—since I’m an impoverished reporter they let me hop in the back of their jeep.

   Like I say, we just arrived there. But they sent us back straight away. They were all in complete NBC gear with masks, rubber gloves, and rubber boots.

   Rubber, rubber, and more rubber. That’s my report.

   A non-event, a miss.

   Gumboots in the sand, a huge sky.

   Nothing to say.

   The soldiers in rubber made us skedaddle.

   We zoomed off into the desert.

   Ciao!

We discussed topics for the next issue. I announced an interview with the old economist Mr. Olenić who was in the front seat for all the economic reforms of the last decades.

Silence.

“He has all sorts of anecdotes,” I added.

Pero nodded.

When the meeting had finished the Chief stopped me, “And our man in Iraq?”

I waited for the others to file out.

“That boy in Iraq—is he still there?”

I’d been suppressing it for too long. It was time for an admission. The fellow we sent to Iraq didn’t have any journalistic
experience. I’d praised him to Secretary. “Wow, what hat did you pull him out of?” he’d asked, impressed that my man knew Arabic.

“Oh, you know me,” I said—I was famous for my personnel conjuring acts.

Then Secretary took the matter before Pero. That was probably the first thing the Chief gave his rubber stamp. He was itching to make decisions, and the recruitment of ambitious amateurs went together perfectly with the paper’s cost-cutting policy.

The guy we sent to Iraq was called Boris, and there was a catch. Boris is a cousin of mine. I didn’t tell anyone about that. I hadn’t seen the need to reveal this bit of information. With Arabic Studies on his CV he was made for the job. But now I began to feel the bond of kinship. Not only had I recommended a guy who played the fool instead of writing normal reports, but it turned out that I’d fraudulently employed one of my stupid relatives. I pretended to be a suave European intellectual but in secret I was clowning around for my clan. I saw now that I was going to be caught red-handed.

I wanted to blame my mother. She gave my phone number to everyone. When you look at it, it really isn’t natural: people flock to the capital like blind mice, the city grows like a tumor, and half the bloody population has my number in their pocket, including Boris. As if sending me some forgotten debt, she’d mediated before the local community as a representative of my “success” in the world. As soon as I’m out of earshot she boasts that I’m Mr. Big in Zagreb. And there you go, people hold her to her word; she’s practically opened an office at home, receives petitioners and passes on my number. I then get called by people who I’d forgotten even existed. They call me about the most unlikely things, like a pension or operation, the local water supply, the anniversary of their brigade from the war, a
pedophile on the beach, and when I answer the phone they invariably ask: “Guess who this is?”

They ask that to see if remember them. When I hear that, I know it’s them because no one else plays that guessing game. And I start to feel like someone woken abruptly from sleep, because I’m suddenly confronted with all the forgotten sounds of my home dialect. That “guess who this is” activates a whole backlog of memories and, I must say, I very often guess correctly.

Each time I say “I’ll see” and dread when they’re going to call again. And they do call again, and again, until a feeling of guilt comes over me for having absconded and become such an individualist, and then I promise to do all I possibly can. Without this provincial pressure I’d obviously never have recommended cousin Boris for Iraq because I saw that he was crazy.

I mean, now it was clear to me that I’d seen it straight away, but I guess I wanted everything to be different.

Huh, that won’t be easy to explain to Pero the Chief.

I stood before him now with that whole explanation in my mind.

He looked at me as if he was pondering the inscrutable. “When’s he coming back?”

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

   The Yanks took out some Brits. They downed a helicopter with their friends in it. Poor coordination.

   “Identify yourself, Identify yourself”—and blam! That’s friendly fire for you.

   But it’s all logical.

   We’re fighting for the Iraqis, for their democracy, for
their well-being. We all love each other. Every victim is an accident. It’s all friendly fire.

   Friendly fire has been around ever since the notion of humanity has existed. Christianity too, of course, and crusading Christianity and missionary Christianity faced with pagan tribes, where they killed half so the others would understand, everything is friendly. It’s only us in the Balkans who still kill each other with hatred, without real ambitions. The rest is friendly fire. The Brits got stroppy, but they shouldn’t have. The Yanks don’t have it easy either. It’s all the same: Brits, Iraqis, civilians—wherever you fire you hit a friend. I don’t know what more to say about that.

It turned out that Sanja couldn’t go and see the flat.

I sat down to have a coffee with Charly and now he was telling me about a woman he’d screwed because he was smashed.

With his receding chin and wandering eye, he was less than an Adonis, but he was tenacious: he became best friends with the blondes he couldn’t bed and tried, at least in public, to give the impression of being a couple. He suffered from high standards in every respect. He even made a kind of career out of it, writing gastronomic columns: recommended the most expensive wines, reviewed restaurants, created a sophisticated image in the midst of our post-revolution hangover, while driving around in his fat Jag. Charly always knew what was trendy and what you weren’t allowed to ridicule: sailing, diving, and head hunters had recently enjoyed immunity, as well as Asian films, gardening, and slow food.

“But man, when the morning light filtered in through the blinds,” Charly described the horrific moment. “And now the woman keeps calling me and wants to go out for coffee. The
craziest thing is that I splurged on her. We drank probably twenty cocktails and I overdrafted my account.”

I looked around, waiting for this to blow over.

But the truth is the truth, she’s a good shag,
www dot perversion dot com
. You know her, in fact.”

“What’s her name?”

“Ela.”

“Fuck, man, you really are an asshole.”

Charly laughed and nodded with a cheesy grin.

“Just look at him!” I said, glancing around as if addressing a jury. “What’s so damn funny? She’s a friend of my girlfriend’s.”

“Take it easy. She’s not your girlfriend.”

“She’s not ugly. If she lost a few kilos she’d be cool.”

“Sure she’s OK, I never claimed otherwise,” he defended himself. “What are you getting so hung up about?”

I intentionally didn’t fall silent when Silva sat down. She was one of those blondes; she gave up modelling, with an extramarital baby in arms, and joined the editorial staff thanks to Charly.

Charly pretended to be searching for something in the pile of newspapers he’d brought with him.

“I know her pretty well.”

“Hey, have you seen this?” Charly exclaimed, trying to change the topic. “In Solin near Split there are eight betting shops in a thirty-meter radius.”

Silva nodded.

He opened the newspaper. “A guy says: ‘You oughta come Sundays after Mass, that’s when it’s busiest.’”

“Who were you talking about just now?” Silva asked.

“A girl from accounting,” Charly lied. “She messed up a payment to me. Claimed she’s a birdbrain, but Toni defends her.”

“Why are you standing up for her?” Silva asked me.

Charly scowled at me.

“The girl’s OK,” I said to Silva.

“From Accounts? Seriously? Is this something new?”

I had no idea now what she was thinking. Should I conceal what we were talking about, or tell her I was fucking my way through Accounts?

“What’s wrong with the girls on the editorial staff?” she asked.

“I mean: en masse from Mass to the betting shop.” Charly fought for attention. “That beats them all. Where else do you have anything like that?”

“Most people go to church to improve their chances,” Silva said.

Charly rolled with laughter. You could see he considered her the wittiest person in Europe.

“May I sit here?” our youngest colleague Dario asked.

He kept popping up at our table ever more frequently. He probably saw mixing with us as a way of moving up in the world.

“Yes, yes,” I said, looking up gratefully—he’d come at just the right time to kill that conversation.

Dario sat down and whispered, “Whaddaya think? Didya hear the Chief?” He turned toward me, seeking an ally. “By the way, I think those reports from Iraq are fantastic.”

“It’s a standard piece, but there’s a lot of work in it.”

“I don’t know, I’ve had enough of wars,” Silva joined in.

Me too, I said to myself.

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

   Saddam is a young villager from the outskirts of Basra. He was named after the president. What can he do? He spreads his hands, spreads his hands wide like a scarecrow, and I spread mine too, spread mine wide, and we chat like two scarecrows in the field, except there are no crops, no plants, no grass, and no birds for us to scare away, only sand and scrap iron. His village, said Saddam, is in a bad place, a very bad place. There’s fire there, he says, a lot of fire, so he stuck all his goats in a pickup truck and took to the road like Kerouac, except there’s no literature, no Neal Cassady, no poetry, no shade under the vine, as they say back home. His tire burst, and Saddam the goatherder was out on the Basra-Baghdad highway, with a flat tire and there was no spare. So Saddam is patching his tire, the goats are bleating in the pickup, an idyllic scene. Abrams tanks pass by, all looking ahead, amassed forces around Saddam’s goats. I crouch beside him, looking at the tire, as if I’m going to help, but I don’t.

When he started to send me his psychedelics, I called him by satellite phone. He acted as if he didn’t hear me well, a bad connection. Since then he hadn’t been in touch by phone. He wrote that it’s dangerous, they can be located, but he continued to send emails every day.

Then I cursed at him in an email, telling him to come back. No answer.

I parked near our apartment block in front of the Last Minute Travel Agency. In the window big letters advertised
THAILAND, NEW YORK, CUBA, TIBET, MALAGA, KENYA.
Every day you could decide at the last minute.

Would I go to Cuba? Or to New York—the center of the universe? Or to Tibet, to have a revelation and come back a new person?

That wouldn’t be bad, I thought.

I saw straight away how he looked at me when we met a month ago in Zagreb after years of not seeing each other.

The layout guy Zlatko had had a baby daughter that day and treated us to a round of drinks; afterward I went and sat in the bar close to the office to wait for Boris. Cuz was over half an hour late.

I expected he’d got lost. But then I saw him coming along the street, glancing around cautiously. His gait took me back to when we were teenagers and greeted each other loudly with a clap on the shoulder and a yell of “Hey, old chum.” We learned a rakish swagger: walking broad-legged with our hands in our pockets as it if was cold. We put on a show of enthusiasm when we met in bars and clubs because we were relying on each other in the event of a fight, I guess.