Our Man in Iraq

by Robert Perisic

  I read these emails on my laptop and kept things to myself. Sanja concluded another conversation and hung up the phone.

  “Renovated attic, in the city center, 55 square meters. Now he mentioned there are sloping walls. I don’t know, we have to see it. I told him we’d come tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow is your dress rehearsal,” I reminded her.

  “I have a break, and it’ll do me good to get out and stretch my legs.”

  “OK,” I said.

  In those days, guys who cook were coming into fashion so I bought a book by an English cook who had his own television show. I opened it on the counter as if I was about to chop it up. I read and leafed through the pages with knife in hand: so many recipes, so much food. I put down the knife because I’d decided to make spaghetti.

  But, all the same, I kept muttering in a nasal-twanged English while I spun around the kitchen. “Itts veri fasst. Veri fasst. Naw wee edd sum beens.”

  The spoken instructions didn’t match the cooking of spaghetti carbonara but helped create atmosphere.

  “Itts not big filosofi. Poteitous, poteitou chipps. Itts simpl, itts fantastik.”

  I left a mess wherever I went.

  “It’s a disaster,” Sanja said through a laugh.

  She joined me and made light work where I’d been clumsy; then I hovered around her like an overeager apprentice. Although she took over everything, I kept playing the part of the guy who was cooking. I liked it when we were a good team, when we supported each other, regardless of the reality.

  “I bumped into Ela today,” I said.

  She looked at me quizzically. “Really,” she said, forking spaghetti into her mouth.

  “Nothing special,” I continued, “she just asked how you are.”

  “Actually, I rang Ela today.”

  “Really? Why did you ask me then?”

  “I didn’t ask you anything.”

  “Didn’t you?” I said, taking some more spag.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Want any more?”

  “No. I invited her to the premiere. She was very happy.”

  “Sure, you have to invite your old friend.”

  “How does she look? I haven’t seen her since I don’t know when.”

  Ela had been through periods of depression in recent years, and Sanja told me, after I swore secrecy, that she’d also been having clinical treatment.

  “Was she fat?” Sanja asked.

  “She hasn’t lost weight.”

  “It’s a disaster,” Sanja sighed. “First she punishes herself with diets, then she screws someone and falls unhappily in love, then she binge eats again and ends up getting depressed.”

  I don’t know why we became such Ela experts. We weren’t actually in touch with her anymore. But we often talked about people that way; we harmonized our opinions and felt we were an organized entity.

  Sanja turned her focus to the TV, which was on with the volume down low. I looked too: it was an afternoon talk show with a whole battery of columnists from women’s magazines.

  “Look, look, turn it up!” I said. “Icho Kamera!”

  Icho Kamera, with his rugged Balkan face, his dark moustache and grizzled sideburns, was in the audience, holding the microphone and asking a question. The popular host blinked charmingly as if wondering whether she’d missed a joke. The columnists were all looking at one another.

  “The remote, Sanja, the remote!”

  “Over there somewhere,” Sanja said.

  By the time I climbed over the couch and found it, Icho had already sat down.

  “Stone the squids!” I said, dropping back into the couch.

  “Do you know him from back home?”

  “Haven’t I told you about him?”

  “No, I just thought you might know him from down there because you switched to dialect straight away.”

  I hadn’t thought about that. I was just trying to make her laugh.

  As kids we used to run after him when he came to our village. We’d shout: “Icho Icho Icho!”

  Our father would mutter, “Fools rush in.”

  At Hajduk football matches he’d stand in an empty section of the grandstand so the camera would catch him for a moment, and then he’d wave. All the cameramen knew Icho Kamera; people said they were sick of him and insiders claimed he paid them to film him. He was a well-to-do farmer who grew lettuce on an industrial scale but always went around wearing the same somber old jumper and jacket, so people didn’t know if he was a miser or spent all his money traveling around after the cameras and bribing low-level media personnel. Football matches were his specialty because from there, doing a deal with the cameraman, he was best able to make it through to a mass audience.

  But Icho Kamera didn’t pick and choose; if he was caught in a traffic jam after a car accident he’d immediately set off for the scene of the accident and hassle the photographer. The local media’s crime news archives contain a vast number of photographs of Icho Kamera who, seemingly by chance, is at the edge of the image showing a mangled Lada and a Peugeot, or we see him walking in front of a foreign exchange office that had been robbed by two masked attackers, probable drug addicts, who stormed it in broad daylight, threatening the teller with a pistol, roaring: Take all the money out of the safe and hand it over! Icho would just happen to be passing by. As a village child that’s how I imagined turbulent city life.

  Icho Kamera evoked certain emotions in me; after all, he was my first link to the outside world. Whether downhearted as he left the stadium after the team had been knocked out of the UEFA Cup qualifying round or sharing his opinion on German unification with a chance passerby, Icho Kamera from the neighboring village was an anonymous citizen of the globally mediatized world.

  Later, when I planned to become an artist and developed an ironic distance to everything—and I mean everything—I intended to do some kind of “project” with Icho Kamera, the unsung hero of media culture. I enlisted my younger sister to cut out newspaper photographs of all Icho Kamera’s appearances, a task she accepted willingly. My mother caught wind and of it and gave me a ferocious talking-to and explicitly forbade my sister from being involved, as if this was all something fiendish. Only afterward, as I wondered what to do with the project material we’d managed to amass, did I think of asking Icho Kamera to show me his archive; he was bound to have it all documented.

  The summer the war began I once saw him from the bus; he was coming out of a shop. I got out at the next stop, rushed to catch up with him, and introduced myself, but Icho Kamera just gave me a sullen look and continued on, as haughtily as a real star. I stopped for a moment before setting off after him, like an undaunted paparazzo, to explain the project to him. I was going on about how what he did was a great deconstruction of the system when he stopped short, turned, and said, “Hop it or my boot’s gonna fin’ an ass to kick!”

  I watched him go. He wasn’t likeable at all, I realized, more like the symptom of a disease—one I dimly understood.

  That encounter dampened my enthusiasm for the project, one of the many I didn’t finish. The war had begun and numerous chance passersby were dying, becoming media heroes of the day, as it were, until there were too many of them. I stopped following the soccer matches and reading the regional papers so I hadn’t seen Icho Kamera for quite some time—until he appeared on the afternoon talk show. He’d obviously come to Zagreb by train to be in the audience, and then managed to get hold of the microphone to ask his unintelligible question.

  And then, at the end of the program, the camera panned over the audience and Icho Kamera managed to fire off a last wave.

  I’d dozed off a bit, and when I opened my eyes I saw Sanja from behind, standing in front of the mirror, singing her own interpretation of Brecht in a hushed, hoarse voice, playing a non-existent guitar.

  Once, in the flower of my youth,

  I thought I was a special bloom,

  Not like every farmer’s daughter,

  With
my looks and talents,

  My aspiring for something higher.

  When she noticed me watching she smiled bashfully.

  “Hi cutie,” I said softly, like a pedophile.

  “I don’t want to be a cutie. I’m supposed to look brassy.”

  “Sorry, wasn’t with you.”

  “I have to go now.”

  “Already?”

  “Tonight we’re rehearsing the whole play for the first time.”

  For the last two months she’d been working on Daughter Courage and Her Children. Her first leading role in a major theater. The East German director Ingo Grinschgl was doing a kind of free rendering of Brecht. Sanja was Daughter Courage, and her Children were the band she performed with near the front lines. The piece was set during the Thirty Years’ War. It had time-warped from the seventeenth century into the twenty-first. Things were a bit jumbled, as they often are with avant-gardists.

  Daughter Courage was the band’s lead singer. All the band wanted to do was live and play; a certain Council organized their concerts and saw to the overall image of the army and the war. Daughter Courage and Her Children was set on the Eastern Front and their enemies didn’t like rock music or the West, so it looked like the band played a particular role in the clash of cultures. Impressions like this were required in higher spheres, in which the Council operated. The Children had no idea about all this, of course, and the band performed in harsh environments in front of the troops, although the majority of the soldiers would have preferred to listen to cheerful music or sentimental songs rather than their punk rock. Over time the band adapted itself to the audience and began to perform the songs they requested. Daughter Courage went along with it all just to keep the band together, since some of the band members wanted to join the army and get a taste of real fighting. She tried to get them to stay, even using sex, but the band fell apart, and in the end she remained alone with the drummer. At the end of the play she had to bare her breasts to a furious drum roll. And then everything drowned in darkness.

  Ingo chose Sanja at an audition during which the candidates had to bare their boobs at the end, and prominent actresses boycotted this indignity. Only a handful of unestablished actresses and a few female exhibitionists turned up. So it was that Sanja received her first lead role, and from the very beginning there were witty comments that this was the only role officially given on account of an actress’s breasts. Sanja knew she’d have to act brilliantly to counteract that humor, otherwise her career would start off on the wrong foot in this small country.

  “It will all be fine tonight,” I told her as she prepared to leave for the dress rehearsal.

  “Jerman and Doc and their horsing around—we’ve wasted so much time.”

  Ingo didn’t speak Croatian, so Jerman and Doc were slack from the beginning with learning their lines. They goofed around at rehearsals and played Brecht in a rendition of their own. Ingo was convinced he was working with real professionals. But Jerman and Doc had both recently suffered marital shipwreck. Nursing their wounds, they spent whole nights on the River Sava, dancing on a raft that had been declared a disco, and they came to rehearsals wasted. Somehow they managed the physical part of the acting, but they had no energy left for their lines.

  Things went on like this for a while until Jerman and Doc let things slide just a bit too far and started slipping in modern slang, like “debacle,” “no-brainer,” and “aspirin”; Ingo probably just twigged to the word “aspirin” and started following the script. Although he didn’t know a single word of Croatian, he quickly realized something was amiss. From then on, he came to rehearsal with an assistant to check the spoken text.

  Ingo had lost faith in all of them, Sanja said. He’d become paranoid and considered her part of the conspiracy. He was growing a beard and had declared a dictatorship.

  “It’s a disaster.”

  “You do your bit and everything’ll be OK. Doc and Jerman are mental, but when the panic hits them they’ll get down to work.”

  I knew them well from my student days.

  From: Boris

  To: Toni

  Private Jason Maple removes his mask. He’s 20 years old and says he’s happy the war has finally started. Everyone who’s squatted around in a dusty trench for months can hardly wait for something to happen. It’s normal, since they’ve come here, otherwise nothing makes any sense, and sense is the most important thing. Even in war. It’s incredibly important. Sense. You have to grasp for every scrap of sense, you just have to, for every propaganda of sense, for every lie of sense. When there’s no sense, you go round the bend, madness comes out of your ears, so you have to believe in sense, particularly in war, you have to believe in sense fervently, and even after the war you have to believe with the faith of a fanatic if you want it to make any sense, otherwise it doesn’t. Jason Maple, 20 years old—I watch as the dust whirls up around him, but all that has fuckin’ sense, everything is infused with the power of sense. It’s the worst—nothing is crazier than sense and the wish to be imbued with it.

  You need strong nerves, I say to Jason, I’ve got some experience, war has begun, and war is boring, boring, you have no idea how boring it can be, it’s never as concentrated as it is in a film, here you’re constantly on hold, and then when it happens you whack your helmet on and you can’t see, you can’t see even when you’re hit, you can’t see it at all. When it was all over I looked at my wound, it was under my arm, and when I raised my arm it opened up, that was it, the most interesting sight of the war. War is boring, it’s so boring that it drives you to other things, to the fun of war, to all those things you didn’t think of doing, not in your wildest dreams, but now you want to, it’ll make you become someone else, and that someone else will make sense, you’ll know that it’s not you, that you’re not the one who enjoys it, but, in real terms, you will be the one, and you’ll be a no-one when it starts to be fun, and then ask me: Where were you and what did you do?

  Jason Maple is happy, he says, because it’s started, and that happiness is an incredible thing: you’re dirty, exposed to diseases, the air is full of hot lead, you have to salute idiots, a whole pyramid of idiots sitting on your shoulders, but you’re happy. OK, you’re not happy all the time, you’re temporarily happy, but that too is incredible.

  I was so happy when we were cleansing villages. And now I’m unhappy when I leave the flat, and I go back to check I haven’t left anything switched on, so nothing catches fire, because I don’t trust myself and I know what it’s like when there’s a fire.

  I was happy when we were cleansing those villages, and that’s why I don’t trust myself. Today when someone talks about it, you wouldn’t believe what stories there are, today when they just tell me how it was—they just need to mention it—I get unhappy, madly unhappy, aggressively unhappy. It’s enough for me just to remember why I was happy back then, and I’m unhappy now, and that’s why I don’t trust myself. I don’t trust myself, and being like that I’ve come to see you guys, to see your happiness, I tell Jason. He didn’t understand me at all.

  I read those pieces again, they got under my skin and made me feel strangely uncomfortable; I tried to relax my shoulders and kept stretching my arms. My joints cracked. Fortunately I was interrupted by a call.

  “Excuse me, did you put in the advert: Former rebel, tall and swarthy, needs a guarantor for a loan?”

  It was Markatović.

  “OK, former goth,” I replied, “I’ll remember you’re interested.”

  “Listen, have you got time for coffee?”

  “You drink too much of the stuff.”

  Markatović was always asking me to go for coffee, and always with a business motive. He wasn’t one of those guys who vanishes when they have kids. With him it was the opposite. He had a registered firm for marketing, publishing, and all sorts of things, and he drank too much coffee all over town; he handled a million pieces of information from all sorts of different departments. He like
d to say he knew half the country, and he presented himself as a link to everything.

  “Come on please, I need your help—it’s important.”

  I hadn’t been to the Churchill Bar before. It was a posh place by any standards: full of fancy leather armchairs and little glass cases loaded with fat cigars. Markatović greeted me with outstretched arms as if I was just the man they had been waiting for.

  Here, unhoped-for, I saw the notorious sheriff of a small town in a valley, surrounded by several bodyguards. I’d never seen the fellows before but I could tell straight away that they were bodyguards because of the way they glanced around like children looking out of a car. They were redundant, of course, because this tycoon, who went by the nickname Dolina, was himself an intimidating hulk; clearly he only kept bodyguards so as to make an even worse impression.

  I had no idea what they were talking about, but straight away Markatović said that I was a genius at those sorts of things. He introduced me as an editor of the weekly Objective and an image specialist, and languid Dolina sized me up suspiciously.

  “What’s this all about?” I asked.

  “A new image,” Markatović answered with an air of importance. For some reason my presence made the bodyguards twitch; now they kept a cautious eye on me as if looking to see if I’d brought the new image along.

  After a dramatic pause, Markatović explained to me what I already knew: this gentleman with millions of euros to his name had recently left his party, which was generally inclined toward the heavy hitters and had allowed him to amass wealth and take over his valley during the war. Markatović was therefore trying to persuade him that, without the backing of the party, he could no longer keep the same old image.