Vladić, who there’s no need to describe, looked at me from the other end of the table and said, “Yes, yes, Toni is a real himbo.” He chuckled maliciously.
I started to feel uncomfortable. Was it the gel? I’d only put on a touch, what could be the problem? I made a face as if I didn’t get what he was on about, and Silva kept looking at me cheerfully, with an expectant air. She was the entertainment editor, so she could always be relied on to look frivolous through even the gravest situation, even before a Session of the Supreme Soviet. She represented our lightheartedness. The rest of us, immersed precariously in the state of the nation, could summon no cheer. Our aura was tainted by the prevailing socio-political gloom, while Silva vibrated in the bright and lively colors of the boutiques she shopped in every day.
“Shall we do coffee afterward?” Charly asked me.
“No,” I said. “I have to go and look at a flat with Sanja.”
The Chief looked around as if he was counting his troops. We were all present. All ten of us. We sat there, aware of the conundrum our Objective was in—and the company in general. Today, our sister daily paper started producing losses. Or that’s what the powerful Global Euro Press, known to us as GEP, had triumphantly published yesterday.
Our paper, which we fondly called a corporation, went under the name of Press Euro Global, PEG. It’d been set up by disaffected editors who had split from GEP, and as such we weren’t just a backroom club of feckless malcontents. We had a mission: to fight for truth and justice, and to hold the last line of defense against GEP’s media monopoly.
The Chief muted the TV as he stood up and said, “I don’t need to outline the situation for you—you’ve all got heads on your shoulders. We need to make a move.” Taking us in with his gaze, he continued. “That’s nothing new to you, right? Because what are we? We’re prime movers. We make the world go round! If there were no media everything would have ground to a halt long ago. Nothing would have happened because there wouldn’t have been anywhere for it to happen!”
He was putting on a dramatic performance.
“What I want to say is that nothing is going to happen by itself. Well, granted, there are things like 9/11—you can’t really say that was a media-produced event.”
“Some say it was,” I interjected.
“Like bloody hell it was! People flew the planes up and people crashed them. But every newspaper, even the stupidest, is going to cover an attack like that, right?” He pointed to the muted television. “We can’t cover what’s visible, do you understand? That’s what TV does, and then the dailies gnaw the bones—that’s not for us!”
He’d really put some preparation into this. Months ago he used to bullshit around in the pubs. Just look what a position makes of a man! As film critics say, he’s grown into his role.
“So what do we cover?”
We all looked at the Chief.
“We cover the invisible! The imperceptible!” he thundered.
This baffled me. Where did he get this theory?
“I want you to be investigative, to reflect, to come up with things! Devise and concoct story angles, show me something new. Turbo-politics was yesterday. There are no more massacres, Tudjman is dead, Milošević is finished. There’s no real drama anymore. You have to turn things over. Search for new hysterias. Where’s the old paranoia gone? It must still be around somewhere. It was easy in the ’90s. OK, we were under attack and that wasn’t easy. But the war provided information. That was our contribution to global media: we were breaking news. The world took note of us. But not anymore. Now we’re ordinary. Now you have to make stories out of ordinary things. We have to shape and mold this new reality. You’re all still searching for the old stories, but what’s happening now is that reality is amorphous. Because you haven’t shaped it yet. It’s natural that our circulation is falling. That simply means: I want new creations. That’s what I want. Otherwise there’ll be some swift sackings.”
We’d had a crisis fire-drill with every new editor. Pero, like the others, came to us as a savior. In the name of justifying the savior, ruin always has to be nigh—all religions are based on that. Permanent crisis. We can’t do without ruin and the abyss. We ourselves piled high the doom-laden headlines to jolt people to life.
Young Dario responded best to the shock treatment: he was wide awake now and his eyes gleamed like a cheetah’s, although he was lanky and looked more like an antelope.
After a pause the Chief said, “And then there’s GEP too, as you all know.”
His gaze landed on Secretary, the old status seeker, who acted the sphinx at editorial meetings.
He was no ordinary secretary, not of the clerical caste at all, in fact. He once traveled with me to Moscow, where I interviewed the oligarch Teofilakovsky because he was buying up hotels and sponsoring operas in Croatia. Wherever we went, I introduced myself as “Toni, journalist,” and Russians scorned me as a busybody, but Secretary introduced himself as “the Secretary” and was accorded immediate deep respect. I still hadn’t fully grasped his function, but the Russians figured him out straight away. He was a vital remnant of the old system, except that he’d shed all ideology in the cataclysmic system change.
He told me in vodka-induced elation that he’d once been a Communist, only later to try out all of the parliamentary parties. He’d finally come to rest in the Croatian Peasant Party. He discovered they were the best when he first went out to a rural event—there was real hospitality in the country. Afterward you needed at least one day of sick leave. The Peasant Party was probably a double-edged sword, he said, because since being a member his cholesterol had gone up and his gout had returned with a vengeance, like in the good old days.
“Secretary will brief someone on the GEP issue,” the Chief explained.
We were constantly exposing GEP’s covert attempts to monopolize the market. GEP had secret subsidiaries and false fronts. They were at us from all sides; they stole stories from us and featured them first. We suspected they had a mole among the editorial staff. In order to demoralize us, they cherry-picked our journalists with extravagant salaries. Every so often a colleague would disappear, never to be mentioned again. The PEG management responded to these dastardly attacks by preemptively burning the bridges: all PEG staff had to produce several anti-GEP pieces, engaging in heated polemics with them, calling them criminals and foreign spies, in the hopes that they’d be unable to go over to those they’d so zealously abused. We didn’t need trust falls or paintball—newspaper warfare was our team building exercise.
I’d distinguished myself early in the newspaper war before appreciating the finer nuances of burning bridges. And as a result, I was attached to PEG permanently. That’s how it is in small countries: the room to maneuver is abominably narrow.
Secretary held a note in his hand and looked around through his glasses.
“Any volunteers?” the Chief asked.
I saw Dario fidgeting in his chair—you could tell he was about to volunteer, but he didn’t know if the others had precedence. His instincts told him it was a great honor to take on an anti-GEP topic.
I was probably like that once, too, before I caught on—around the time the current owner bought us. He was a fallen tennis player who had parlayed his fame into owning newspapers. During the war he played recreationally with the former president and let him win points, for which he was rewarded discount shares in several state firms. At that time the president personally edited the daily current-affairs program, The Evening News, and we reporters became official “fighters for the truth.” Circulation rose. The ex tennis player was our chief shareholder. Now it was just a job.
The democratic processes brought the interest rates down.
I applied for the loan.
In the end, Dario was the lucky volunteer.
From: Boris
To: Toni
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
To: Toni
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 th
e 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
To: Toni
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.
Our Man in Iraq Page 4
