Our Man in Iraq

by Robert Perisic

  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.

  He was wearing orange-tinted shades and smiled like a mafioso pretending to be a Buddhist. Sinewy, with a longish face, we’d always been similar. He even had a streak of color in his hair, a yellowish stripe behind his ear. He looked quite urbane. You could tell he didn’t live in our village, which incidentally has expanded quite a bit but still isn’t a city, so we called it a “settlement.”

  But Boris lived in Split—cuz was a city boy, good on him. I wouldn’t need to feel embarrassed if anyone I knew passed by.

  He acted so sluggishly that I thought he was smacked out. But he said he’d been clean for a long time. Now he told me he’d come to the big smoke because, like, there’s no perspective back ’ome. He wore his underdoggery in a slightly high-handed way like victims of the system do. Soon he took out some sheets of paper and handed them to me.

  The pages were densely typed with a worn ribbon—you could hardly see the words, but I made them out best I could as he just stared straight ahead, smiling at the fruit juice he’d ordered, smoking Ronhills and blithely blowing rings.

  He’d given me poems in prose on some intangible topic. Never mind, I thought, at least he was literate, and that was something.

  “You need to take this to a literary magazine and let them have a look,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter. I can do any kind of writing.” He started tapping with his leg. His smile faded.

  “Look, this is literature of sorts, it’s special in its own right. For newspapers you need to write concisely.”

  “That’s even easier.”

  “If there’s an opening, I’ll let you know.”

  “Fine,” he said, as if I was abandoning him.

  When he asked me what my girlfriend did I felt like I was boasting.

  Once, long ago, we listened to the same records and were so alike in dress and behavior that old grandma Lucija could hardly tell us apart; and now look at us. I recognized myself in him but watching him now I seemed to remind him of some form of injustice. He looked at me like an apparition that had been magically beamed from the summertime shallows where we played “keepy-uppy” in our swimming trunks, into the actors’ jet set, and from there had skydived down into a newspaper office overflowing with cash.

  “I could write what no one else will,” Boris said “It’s no sweat for me.”

  “Shall we have another drink?”

  “I’ve only got 20 kunas.”

  “It’s on me.”

  I ordered another beer and he—I couldn’t believe it—another juice. The conversation wasn’t going to get more fluid.

  “Don’t you drink?” I asked.

  “Now and then.”

  I launched into a spiel about my drinking habits—an inane, incoherent story. But I had to say something so we wouldn’t sit there like two logs. We sat there for a little longer and finally he mentioned his degree, which he hadn’t been able to finish.

  “Sorry, what was it that you studied again? I just remember it was pretty exotic.”

  “Arabic.”

  “Iraq,” I said, thinking, thinking. Rabar, the only true go-getter on the staff, had defected to GEP a month earlier, and now he was reporting for the competitors in Kuwait. Here was a job in the offing.

  “Morocco,” he said sadly.

  “What about Morocco?”

  “Dad was chief engineer; we had servants and a pool. Then—wham!—the old man had a heart attack. Right there by the pool.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  He’d gone to the international school, but they also learned Arabic. Every time he thought of something in Arabic he’d remember his old man. Once he’d overheard two Arabs talking in the street; he followed them to a café, sat at the next table, and listened to them. He understood everything they said. After that he enrolled in Arabic in Sarajevo but couldn’t finish uni because the war began.

  “OK, and now have a think about this,” I said. “Would you go to Iraq? The Yanks are going to attack any day.”

  “Sure!”

  “Now, our guy who went to war zones had his ways of doing things. I don’t know how, but he always coped. He sent things by mail—the photos and the texts. There are also these satellite phones.”

  “No probs, I’ll get the hang of it.”

  “Have a good think. It’s war.”

  “No sweat.”

  “Sure?”

  “Peace has become a problem for me.”

  He’d been there for a month.

  When Sanja entered the apartment I was pretending to read a Jimi Hendrix biography. I must have looked even more dejected than I felt.

  “Are you angry? Listen, I really couldn’t go and see the flat,” she said straight away. “I ran into a journalist from The Daily News.”

  “You’re joking, from GEP? How long did you talk for?”

  “An hour maybe. Plus the photo shoot.”

  “That’s more than a little statement. Was it a proper interview?”

  “Don’t worry, I was careful not to let any cats out of the bag,” she smiled, noticing the remnants of the pizza on the table.

  “I’ve already eaten, I couldn’t wait,” I said.

  “No trouble. We ordered a whole pile of kebabs. Do I stink?” She imitated a naughty child and fumigated me with her onion breath, trying to kiss me while I kept trying to evade her.

  In the end I let her kiss me, but then it wasn’t fun for her anymore.

  “Have Jerman and Doc been cramming their lines?”

  “Ingo has moved the dress rehearsal to eleven in the evening. He has to work with them before that. But the craziest thing is he gives me more shit than he does to any of the others. I mean, they disrupt me too, but he comes down on me to assert his authority.”

  “Well well, the progressive vents his fury on the girls!”

  “All he tells me is that I have to act like a punk. His spiel is, like, I have to rebel against how others see that role.” She imitated his way of smoking while constantly looking up at the ceiling. “He shouts at me all day.”

  “He’s obviously panicking. You all are.”

  “I know. But today I was about to tell him where he could stick it. If punk’s what you want, punk’s what you’ll get.”

  I adored her like this: her pugnacity, her independence, her attitude.

  “Well, tell him where he can shove it!” I said.

  “I will!”

  “He should think twice, it’s too late to throw you out now!”

  I wanted her to feel my support. She h
ad to act with conviction and show she was prepared to defend herself. She wasn’t going to swear at the director, but she should at least feel that she could.

  Sanja was against Boris going to Iraq, against the war, against anyone writing about such a spectacle, against infotainment, and I had an inkling she wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about my relatives either. OK, neither am I, but I always defended them.

  I assured her that it wasn’t because he was a relative of mine but because he was the right person for the job—he knew Arabic, he was literate, and war wasn’t a problem for him. I’d spared her all the details but I had to talk to someone so I gave her a quick rundown of the situation and, of course, it all sounded like a confirmation that she was right.

  “A mistake,” I concluded.

  “You’re too sentimental. Your relatives are just using you.”

  “Can we talk about something else?”

  “I had a kind of premonition, but you were so enthusiastic about him.”

  “Who me? Enthusiastic?”

  “Don’t get angry. You’re just a bit naive, you misjudge people.”

  She waited for me to say something.

  I waited too.

  It was the same silence that followed us during our third summer together when we did set off on an official tour to meet the in-laws: several days with hers, several days with mine.

  It felt a bit like an actor’s workshop: we watched each other fine-tune our performance, took care that the other didn’t put their foot in their mouth, sat at the table stiffly and respectably and exchanged pleasantries in regional slang. I didn’t exactly know my lines. But I talked about the high price of living, various ailments, and car accidents.

  They asked us about our life in Zagreb in a well-intentioned, worried tone and suspected we were living the wrong way; we tried to stick to factual matters and somehow extricate ourselves because we couldn’t openly admit that we aimed to live a life diametrically opposed to theirs.

  It was interesting that we weren’t able to tell them anything about our life as it really happened. When you looked at it, there was hardly anything to say. Our life barely existed, as if it had been left behind in some secret argot, where I had also left my real being, while this impostor sat at the table, enumerated bland facts, nattered about traffic, and introduced himself to her parents as me. His gaze wandered around the flat. At Sanja’s parents’ there was nowhere to look—there was no empty space. Her mother had a morbid fear of open spaces and the flat was so crammed that there was hardly any air to breathe.

  On our second morning there, Sanja suggested to her mother that they knock down the wall between the kitchen and the living room to gain more space, and I made the mistake of seconding the idea. Her mother glanced at me in consternation. She was used to her daughter having strange ideas but was disappointed that Sanja had found the same sort of guy. She immediately ridiculed the idea with her Mediterranean temperament. She spoke exclusively to Sanja—you could tell that she couldn’t discuss such intimate topics as knocking down the wall with me. Probably Sanja wanted to appear a mature adult in front of me, so she kept contradicting her mother, and not just about the wall. You couldn’t really call it an argument, more a mutual show of disrespect, which seemed to keep them cheerful in a way and create a special closeness. Their taunting and teasing actually showed how much they were at home.

  I couldn’t talk with her mother like that—I respected her—so I was condemned to silence. Also, my future mother-in-law kept her jabs and wise-talk exclusively for Sanja, not me, because she respected me.

  Having fallen silent about the wall, I found it hard to talk at all. Our people are like that: they’d always prefer to build a wall than knock one down. They always liked having two rooms rather than one.

  I spoke very cautiously with Sanja’s dad, of course. He had disappointment written on his brow. Politics was his particular chagrin; all the parties were a letdown. He watched the news avidly, read the newspaper, and was disappointed time and time again. That seemed to be his main occupation. He wanted to know if we journalists were disappointed too. “Oh yes!” I exclaimed and mentioned a few practical examples. I felt a kind of need to join him in disappointment, but maybe he thought I even wanted to outdo him in that because I was a journalist in Zagreb and had the opportunity to get disappointed firsthand, so in a way he didn’t want to listen. Whenever I opened my mouth he’d start explaining how much Zagreb was out of step with the situation on the ground, which was one of the things that disappointed him most.

  I sipped beer, slowly, and watched the news. The mass of empty beer cans grew, rattling in the rubbish bin until they were crushed down into a smaller pile.

  I thought of telling Sanja that one actually didn’t look so lost among all the little tables at my parents’ place, after a drink or two.

  “My folks have got a nice courtyard and a garden, you’ll see,” I said cheerfully.

  Then we arrived and I saw the garage. They’d told me about the new garage and were pleased with themselves for fitting it perfectly into the courtyard. Using a remote control, they proudly opened up the garage as if they were officially opening a new production line.

  Yep, my folks had become bourgeois, so to speak, and we sat there like we had at Sanja’s folks’. The new edifice that had replaced the courtyard stuck out like a sore thumb. And you couldn’t say anything against it. I was about to say a word and they came down on me like a ton of bricks. How dare I cruise in from Zagreb and lecture them—from Zagreb, mind you. Zagreb with its holier-than-thouness was like a red rag to a bull. They needed that new addition: our garage is our castle.

  My mom whispered to Sanja, forging a female alliance, that she didn’t need to listen to me all the time because men were stupid: let them have their whims. My father generally followed her remarks with a smile, and here and there heckled his old lady just for fun, which Sanja was supposed to find amusing. I tried to mediate these conversations as far as possible by drawing attention to myself, but my parents only had eyes for their daughter-in-law because, seeing as I’d brought her, it was clear to them that we were going to get married.

  Then we were back in our rented flat. Things had stopped evolving and I didn’t know exactly what we’d think up next, what lifestyle. We just had to avoid repeating the same old patterns, I told Sanja. We had to break through in a new direction, bore a tunnel, build a bold viaduct, whatever.

  But then Boris had popped up, a feature in the landscape like my parents’ garage. I simply couldn’t explain to her the whole depth of the problem, so I turned the laptop toward her. “Read some of his stuff and tell me what you think.”

  From: Boris

  To: Toni

  Resistance is removed like a wart with a laser. I guess all this looks like a film when you see it on TV, the desert is just the right backdrop, as if you were colonizing Mars, you have no idea if there’s any life there, you search for it, move on, there has to be something, at least bacteria or remains, fossils, fossil fuels, who knows what, you never know if the aliens have weapons of mass destruction, what level of technology they’re at. Here’s an embedded journalist, a Bush, Tudjman, or Miloševic man, someone’s fan, please circle the correct answer, and he asked me what I thought about weapons of mass destruction, if there were any, and would they be used in the Battle for Baghdad. He provoked me because everyone somehow realizes that I’m an amateur, no idea how those pros tick, but of course Saddam’s boys don’t have weapons of mass destruction because you definitely wouldn’t attack them if they did, so never fear, we can be calm, I said optimistically, and we toasted with alcohol-free beer. The people love me. What more can I say? I feel accepted, but then the storm begins, a wind from the south brings eddies of dust and fine, fine sand, it fills your mouth, nose and eyes, so we fled to the cars and sat in those closed cars all day, sweating, you can’t see a thing, you don’t dare to open a window, not in your wildest dreams, not in your wildest fucking d
reams. The sand will make its way in, into your brain. Inside it’s unbearably hot, brain waves, frequencies, bro, I wanted to call you just now to see what the weather’s like there, but they told us to be careful with the Thuraya numbers because they could be located, rocketed, and there’s no point in me getting charcoaled here just because of the weather.

  Sanja smiled as she read. “He’s just having fun.”

  “I don’t know if he’s gone crazy or not.”

  “I think it’s tongue-in-cheek,” she said.

  “He’s messing me around, the dickhead! If anyone’s the object of that humor, it’s me.”

  “I don’t find it all that weird, you know. He has no training in your language. I think if someone sent me to tag along behind the Yanks as if I was reporting on a sports event, I think I’d kind of want to muck up too.”

  “OK, I know you’re against the war.”

  “And why shouldn’t I be? At least this guy is saying something; your paper doesn’t have any position on the war.”

  “So basically you mean he’s being subversive?”

  “Consciously or not.”

  So they were the subversive ones, and I represented the system; they were on the side of freedom, and me—of repression. Sanja laughed as she read more. So he’s witty, and I have no sense of humor? And I have to rack away at the crud he’s written to patch it up while the young ’uns could let it all hang out.