The Serbs, for example, the losers, were warring for all of the ‘90s, but they don’t have a fiscal plan. They fight and fight and get more and more fucked up. That can’t happen to the advanced nations. Our Serbian bros blam away their resources, run up huge losses, and then they don’t know what to do. They seize half of Bosnia and then sit there doing nothing.
You know, all that stuff ruins people mentally as well. After the war and all that wretched stress a man wants to have a bit of a rest. And not, fucking hell, drudge away to make up for the damage. Who’ll force a warrior to work? That’s an old Indian question. You can’t stick him in a reservation to sow corn. Geronimo and his braves would rot there—as soon as it was time for a scrap they’d have to go to the shrink. As long as the shit is going on, as long as you’re taking rock after rock, hill after hill, ditch after ditch, thicket after thicket, as long as you’re pushing back the borders, it all looks like you’re going somewhere, like things are evolving, like there’s some perspective.
That’s a serious problem for us pauper warriors! We have no idea what to do when the war is over. Be a philosopher? A priest? Who? What?
“You called?” I said to Markatović in place of a greeting.
“Have you got time for coffee? It’s important.”
Why couldn’t he invite me out for a beer like normal people do? Why were we constantly meeting like two over-important businessmen?
“Are you going to drag me into another scheme?” I asked.
“Now Dijana’s calling, I have to get that. I’ll call you back in a minute.”
When the phone rang again it was the landline. It couldn’t be Markatović, he always called me on my mobile. I stood above the phone and looked at it. Finally it fell silent—and then started again. It was still ringing as I left the flat, slamming the door as if I’d just had a falling-out with someone.
By the time Markatović called I was already in the car.
“Meet me at Limited,” I told him.
“That’s not exactly on my route.”
“Too bad, I’ve just found somewhere to park.”
“Man, I’m in a suit, with a tie too,” he complained.
“Well, take it off then. If it’s that important, I’m here.”
I worked my way through the crowd, checking to see if I knew anyone. Old lounge lizards used to hang out here, but our generation of fighters and survivors was becoming fewer and fewer. We’d suffered heavy casualties, no doubt about it. In spite of the crowd, if someone from the old guard had rung up and asked me who was there, I’d have said, “There’s no one here.”
There was nothing else to do but watch the girls, wait for Markatović, and wonder what he’d come up with now. It seemed he feverishly thought up jobs just to keep people at the table and delay going home. He loved Dijana, he said, but he just couldn’t bring himself to go home.
Still, I was glad when the old goth came in.
“Anyone here?” He winked to me after glancing around.
He ordered a double whiskey with lots of ice. When his drink came he suggested moving to a table in the back, so we could talk.
“How’s work then?” he asked.
“I’m waiting to see what happens. And you? How’s your poetry coming along?”
“Slowly. I work on it when I have time.” He glanced around furtively. “Did you see what happened today on the stock market?”
“Don’t mention the stock market. Is that too much to ask? Same with Dolina. I don’t want to hear about him.”
I was on the verge of telling him that it’d be best for him to go home. I was sick of watching him turn into a workaholic, while running away from his wife and constantly talking about other things. More, it annoyed me that we had to seclude ourselves at a corner table. I didn’t like the static view; I wanted things to be moving in front of me. That was the Mediterranean in me. Everywhere in the Mediterranean, from North Africa to Venice to Istanbul, people are used to watching the waves coming in, they’re accustomed to that rhythm. In the Mediterranean you can sit anywhere—on stairs, a stone wall, or the ground, and aimlessly watch the pulsing of the sea. Markatović was a continental guy and had no feel for that.
“What’s up with you?” he said.
“Either go home or let’s drink like men.”
“Have I done something to offend you?” he asked.
“I’m a bit tense.”
Markatović knocked back his whiskey and waved for another round.
“Everything’s fucked,” he griped.
“Tell me about it.”
“You, too? What’s up?”
“I recommended a blockhead to be our correspondent in Iraq. He’s gone there, and now I can't reach him, he's not answering.”
“So what are you going to do now?”
“I’ll wait. It’s not too late, he could still get in touch. Luckily, we are a weekly newspaper, not that he knows it.”
“You shouldn’t get worked up in advance. Look, one day a guy came back, some kind of cameraman, and get this, he’d smuggled golden pipes out of Saddam’s house in Tikrit. I heard that from an antique dealer.”
His mobile rang again. It was Dijana.
If I’d had to describe his voice, I’d have said he was trying to sound soporific. It sounded like a ballad about the wide, blue sea.
“Really, I’m with Toni. In Limited. We’re just finishing something.” A blast of music: You gotta fight for your right to paaarty.
He put down the phone and blew out a tired plume of smoke.
“She’s been so nervous recently,” he said.
“You work too much.”
“I have to,” he sighed and became pensive. “Have you heard the news about Rijeka Bank?”
“Yes, dammit.”
“It’s serious,” he muttered.
I rolled my eyes. “How wonderful it is when people use media events to flee from themselves! All those affairs sound so important and no one can stop you from talking about them, even if you’re fucked up for a completely different reason.”
“Someone knew before the others and sold up. Someone from the bank for sure.”
“And now what? Do you want me to write a book about it?”
“The shares will plummet,” he predicted.
“Yes,” I said, grinning, clinking my glass against his. “Probably to zero.”
“Think so?” He sighed like the loneliest man in the world. “I’m in it in a big way.”
“Do you have shares in Rijeka Bank, RIJB-R-A?”
“Heaps.”
“When did you put your money in?”
“This morning,” he said, staring at his glass as if he was going to smash it against his head.
“Shit, you were still on that coke from last night. Did you sleep at all?”
“I went into it quite rationally. It’s a bank that was bought by the Germans, fucking hell.”
There you go: even the Germans were no longer what they used to be. As soon as they came here they got corrupted.
“I stuck in a heap of cash, even the lump I got from Dolina this morning. I’ve been following the shares. My computer has a live feed and I saw it all happen. The trading was strong. I thought of catching the wave and exiting again as soon as the share went up a little; I withdrew some dough like that two months ago, but a smaller amount. I wanted to take advantage of having cash in my account.”
“Hang on, you mean the share went up this morning?”
“Yes, but then I twigged what was happening. The bank’s management had artificially created demand so they could get rid of their investment. Obviously the bank itself bought their shares, and we others joined them. The shitheads knew about the losses. It was a diversion, like Tito’s at the Battle of the Neretva.”
“Talk about getting screwed!”
“Now, I can try and sell in the morning. But that will be such a loss.”
There goes my guarantor, I thought.
“The other solution would be to wa
it for them to come in and overhaul things,” he continued. “Bayerische Landesbank is prominent.”
“In Germany, yes,” I said soberly. “But I think you’ll find it’s a different ball game here. They could just get up and go.”
“Then the Croatian government has to intervene—someone has to.”
“But it’s no longer government-owned.”
“True, but heaps of firms in the Rijeka region are attached to the bank, so I reckon the government can’t afford to let all of them go down the plughole together with me.”
“Sounds logical enough,” I said sympathetically.
“Should I wait or not?” he asked.
I saw how much he trusted me. It was awful.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What does your instinct tell you?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard when you lose so much. I don’t know—I’d probably wait. But that’s just a gut feeling.”
“You’d wait?” The shine returned to his eyes.
He rummaged in his pockets.
“Have you tried that coke?” he asked.
“I’m saving it for tomorrow.”
“I’m going to freshen up a bit,” Markatović announced and headed for the bathroom.
From: Boris
To: Toni
There’s nothing here to buy, smoked my last two cigarettes, no kiosk anywhere, only tanks, APCs, and the desert, no one sells ice cream, nor is there that Muvver Courage driving a cart. I’d like to call and hear more about your girlfriend the actress, but they told us to be careful with Thuraya numbers because we can be located, and I don’t want to get frazzled just because of theater, though I respect it, I really do.
When Markatović came back from the toilet he said, “What were you saying? Your guy in Iraq isn’t getting back to you?”
“The idiot also happens to be a cousin of mine,” I said.
“I had fun like that with my dad. After his firm was bought up by a crook I tried to employ the old man so he wouldn’t wallow around in depression. But he drove me completely nuts. He has no idea, meddles in everything, and is constantly calling me and giving me advice, like, fatherly stuff. And he’s begun to drink in a big way. I’m not giving him anything more to do. But I can’t just sack him.”
“What are you going to do with him?”
“Wait until he retires. He’s got two more years.”
DAY THREE
There were Eskimos all around me, doing me a great service by burying me in ice so one day someone would be able to dig out my preserved body when my ailment had a remedy. Once their job was complete, the Eskimos left, singing, and that Coca-Cola drinking polar bear lumbered up. He was followed by a whole family of polar bears, who sat on my frozen tomb.
“Hmm, maybe I’m not quite dead after all,” I thought.
Their furry bums were hot and the ice melted beneath them. I lay there waiting for them. At that point the alarm went off.
While brushing my teeth I checked my email. I was still half-asleep. I’d won £206,000 in the British National Lottery. There was email from Kofi Edwards, manager of Fidelity Bank in Nigeria, where $20,000,000 US had got stuck in an account, and old Kofi was asking me to do him a favor and withdraw the money for him. Good news all round. But nothing from Boris.
Sanja came in. She always used to laugh at the toothpaste foam dribbling down my chin, but I could see she didn’t want to laugh. She was carrying a newspaper and I twigged straight away that she was in it.
She’d probably been practicing that nothing doing expression on the walk back from the kiosk.
“Wow, that wouldn’t be our first interview, would it?”
She laughed at her own awkwardness. This opening up of vanity—that’s intimacy for you, I thought.
Beneath the headline OUR CHEMISTRY HAPPENED ON STAGE sat a photo of Sanja and Jerman at rehearsal. His arm was around her waist. OK, calm down, I said to myself, it’s only his arm around her waist. But the GEP guys had really done it with that title; my heart hummed like a diesel on a winter morning.
“It seems the chemistry also worked between you and Jerman.”
“Don’t be crazy.”
Bloody gutter press—the male chauvinism of the media had never repelled me as much as now. There were two more photos: stilted studies showing her alone. Over the past four years she’d developed some fine feminine curves. The caption said she had the stuff to be a star. They were obviously thinking of a sex symbol and a vamp.
In her everyday appearance Sanja rebelled against such an image of herself. She was a proponent of unisex youth fashion: jeans and sneakers. But now that defensive stance was crumbling before my eyes.
She was wearing her costume from the play—cheap and raunchy. That was her role, that’s the way it was. But that feline look, that bare waist, that perky breast peeking out through the scanty blouse, that thigh. And there you go: I felt the stirrings of an erection. I grabbed her bum, kissed her neck.
She pushed me aside. “The photos are all that count, is that it? All the reactions are going to be like that, I know it.”
In the interview they did begrudgingly mention Brecht in the introduction, and asked about the play in the very first question, just to be polite. And then: “How do you get on with Leo Jerman, your main acting partner?” She said they got on great. “You have one nude scene and quite a few skin-on-skin situations in the play. Is it hard for you to act them?” That was her job, she said, and she approached it professionally. “Do you practice those love scenes, and if so how?”
Here the interview descended into soft erotica and didn’t return to drama. Somehow they arrived at her “current relationship.” She said she wanted to preserve her privacy, and I fully supported her in that. But I was just a tiny bit disappointed that she didn’t mention me. Then they asked if she’d appear completely nude if she had the offer and if the film so required. “For a good film, a good role, and good money—yes.” Then they asked her how important sex was in her life and if rehearsals affected her sex life. “Ha, ha, ha, a bit.”
It was all like that: nothing about anti-globalism, nothing about George Bush, nothing about what we philosophize about at home. My little Sanja didn’t even notice that she’d been sucked into the interview-with-a-blonde genre. She walked into it like Eastern Europeans into capitalism. Why, only yesterday she’d been lecturing me about the media, how they’re the hand that shapes you. If you’re a young actress who has to show her tits in a renowned theater on the periphery of Europe—not even Brecht will get you out of the shit!
Let’s be realistic, I didn’t know how she could have been careful except by giving no interviews at all. Actresses are at the mercy of gossip-mongering journalists—if she’d waited to be interviewed by a theater critic she could end up waiting until she was a pensioner. Critics have never interviewed actresses because they don’t know a thing about acting. No one knows a thing about acting, although it is ubiquitous.
Maybe that’s exactly the reason, I thought. Acting is a paradigm of our age: it’s the quintessence of freedom of choice. No one is obliged to inherit an identity now, everyone can invent themselves and imitate Kurt Cobain, Madonna, or Bill Gates. There were times when you were born a serf and died a serf.
Just yesterday I’d been reading about Jimi Hendrix: how he tried to find himself and how he invented himself. Even in the summer of 1966 when he played at Café Wha? in New York, Hendrix wanted to look like Bob Dylan. He always had curlers in his suitcase and he straightened his hair to try and create a Dylanish hairdo.
No one in America thought a black could be a rock musician. Essentially there was no Hendrix at all until he arrived in London and was received as a marvel, an exotic species. So he chucked the curlers and tried to look as eccentric as possible; he adopted an afro and began to buy stupid clothes in secondhand shops like Granny Takes a Trip and I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet. He got a bit carried away with the attention and became Jimi He
ndrix.
That was a revolution. When you come up with a new role, a new persona, you change the culture. If the pieces of your mosaic fit together right you can really take off like Hendrix.
But I wonder if his father recognized him after it all came together for Hendrix.
There’s no heredity. A son doesn’t want to be like his father, a daughter doesn’t want to be like her mother but like Madonna. When a daughter realizes at a certain age that she’s behaving like her mother and not like Madonna, the battle is lost. But one part of the personality refuses to accept defeat. A parallel identity is in our dreams.
Acting is a fundamental survival technique. It’s always been that way. But now the choice of roles is bigger—democratic. The range on the identity market is broad. That’s why socialism failed. It didn’t offer people enough options, enough masks, enough subcultures, or enough films. There were too few roles, too few images, too few shoes and sneakers. The range was almost medieval. There were even too few nations. Too few states. Too few variations and petty, narcissistic differences. Too few media outlets.
We’re all actors now. We wear our costumes and perform in the wide world. The actor is the idol of our time, a symbol of freedom—freedom of choice. But every idol has to pay for being an idol. So why was I surprised? Actresses were the rightful prey of gossip-mongering journalists, just like the infantry is free to plunder in war.
Our Man in Iraq Page 7
