Our Man in Iraq

by Robert Perisic

  Nine in the evening, it felt like coming out of a darkened cinema. The story is over and you’re outside again. I stood in front of the building and put my bags on the ground. I took off my sunglasses. The neighbors were out walking their dogs. I hailed a taxi, gave the address, and said nothing more.

  I paid the driver and entered the small building. I went up the stairs with my bags and stood on the second-floor landing at the door with someone else’s surname written on it. I opened up the bedsitter I’d rented two days earlier, just to tide me over. It smelled like rancid walnuts. I put down my bags in the middle of the room and just stood there, then pointlessly raised my arms as if I was about to say something.

  Here the film should have ended. It was high time for the credits.

  I turned on the radio. Chi-ki-chi-kaa—the old jingle of Radio 101. Youth Radio. At least that’s what they used to call it back when I listened to it alone in my room soon after arriving in the city, with that great emptiness in front of me. I didn’t have a TV set back then. I took the ashtray out of my suitcase and lit a cigarette.

  A small ’80s shelf along the wall. Kitchen the color of milky coffee. A brown fold-out couch. Traces of pictures on the walls. A window with a view of a car mechanic’s workshop, judging by the cars in the lot the mechanic specialized in old Opels. A round table that I now sat at—like at an aborted meeting.

  This was Tosho’s neighborhood. Everyone here was known by the name of Joe. I ought to go into the nearest bar and say, “Hi Joe,” to check if the trick worked. But I didn’t feel like going there.

  I called Tosho to tell him we were now neighbors. It rang somewhere in the vicinity. He didn’t answer; he probably didn’t have my new number. I thought of texting him that it was me.

  Me.

  Chi-ki-chi-kaa. News on the radio. Casualties in Iraq.

  It wasn’t over.

  After my television appearance, there were various theories about Boris’s fate: that he’d died, that the Americans had killed him during a disturbance, that he’d fallen prey to the Baghdad gangs that attacked foreigners, that he’d been kidnapped and was being held by Islamists, and even that he’d gone over to the Islamists, because the public had somehow got hold of his original reports and allegedly discovered anti-American positions. Psychiatrists specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder joined in the debate and detected a paranoia in his sentences, as well as a shattered sense of his own worth, suicidal tendencies, a schizoid imagination, and a feeling of impairment and guilt. There also seemed to be confused traces of the recent ex-Yugoslav wars as well as the war in Iraq, because war was war and for him they fused together and became one.

  Fifteen days after I got the sack, GEP’s Daily News started publishing Boris’s original reports in installments. I don’t know who handed Boris’s original reports to GEP. Objective wrote that it was me. I, for my part, suspected Pero—his revenge on both PEG and me.

  Now it all was out: Objective had been publishing phony reports from Iraq. Dario wrote a piece in defense of PEG, laying out his discoveries about my role in GEP’s plan to monopolize the newspaper market. He confirmed that I’d threatened to kill him if he revealed I’d been in touch with Rabar and that I had doubtless been working against my own newspaper the whole time. Maybe, he wrote, even Boris’s supposed disappearance had been a sham. Only time would tell. I consoled myself with this last bit: if Boris’s disappearance was part of the plan, then at least I wasn’t a murderer.

  As it continued, and while Sanja and I were still together, I pined away in the flat with the blinds down. She urged me to see a shrink and said she would pay for it, but I refused.

  It was one literary columnist’s belief that Boris’s reports were actually very original works of literary worth, which I’d interfered with and disfigured; publishers later came along and expressed an interest in issuing them as a book. Editors hadn’t figured out who was whom because they rang me to inquire about the rights. I referred them to Milka.

  And just when all that madness, like every rejected hot topic, was starting to sink into oblivion, Milka began calling me again. I didn’t answer.

  Then my mother called me: Boris had called Milka from Baghdad.

  “Why didn’t he get in touch, the stupid asshole?”

  “Milka said ’e’d kinda got depressed and couldn’a be in touch with anyone, an’ now ’e was takin’ American tablets, she canny explain it ’erself.”

  “American tablets?”

  “Milka said he got depressed an’ lost his mobile, conpewter and all, or else they stole it from ’im; ’e dunno ’imself.”

  “American tablets,” I repeated. The story went on: Boris had been saved by an Englishman who took him in and looked after him, and that he was bedridden. But now he was on the mend. He’d be staying in Iraq and working for some British TV channel, Milka said.

  “She told me, ’e’ll be scoutin’ out things they wanna film. Out in the field, like. I forget what they call it—oh yeah, field producer. ’E goes round and asks about everythin’, ‘cause he knows Arabic,” my old ma said.

  “I know! All because he knows Arabic.”

  “Well, it cert’nly seems to ’ave been of use to ’im,” she continued. “You know, I really let Milka ’ave it in the end! I told ’er: ‘All right, now your son’s got work. An’ ’e’s bound to get good pay, too, what with workin’ for the British an’ all. But my son lost ’is job because of your hullabaloo.’ And you know what she said? ‘So what! I’d like to see you in my position. Boris could’a died there in Iraq,’ she said. Well, you know ’er, she’s not gonna apologize. She really rubbed me the wrong way. But I told ’er: now she should ’ave the gumption to apologize, like, in the newspapers and on telly. That’s ’ow she attacked, so that’s ’ow she should . . .”

  “Stop talking about her. It’s driving me mad.”

  “Don’t you go mad too, sonny. It’s good that ’e’s alive an’ you don’t ’ave ’im on yer conscience. But I’m not givin’ your number to no one no more. Not that anyone’s askin’.”

  I put down the receiver. He’s gotten in touch—it’s all over, I repeated to myself, like I was announcing it to someone approaching from afar. But my words resounded emptily, like the voice from a loudspeaker in a large, forgotten hall. All I heard was the thudding of my heart. If only he’d been killed it’d all make more sense. Should I go to Baghdad and kill him? Everything would look more logical that way.

  “But Boris is alive, after all, and everything could’ve been a lot worse,” Sanja said, trying to believe that everything could be like it used to.

  I just needed to return to the game, find a new job, and be who I was before. I just needed to assume my old face, light up a fag like Clint Eastwood and ride into a new film.

  When she started being silent with me I asked her what was gnawing at her, but she wasn’t able to say. She couldn’t talk about that with me anymore. She waved her hands in frustration, complained about other things, and her voice had a tired, dead-endish ring. She said she was tense and took tablets to help her sleep. And then I started being silent with her. It seemed she’d had enough of my problems.

  Jobs, flats, expectations, status, successes, the public, relatives, invoices . . . That whole construction was founded on love; everything else built up on top of it until love gave way. That was love’s rebellion, I guess.

  Today I tell everyone: we didn’t get on anymore. But I don’t know in what way we weren’t getting on. It’s just that an image that had once held us together had fallen apart.

  She was now in a league of big-timers, all those characters were courting her and I had to compete with them.

  There’s something humiliating in the abrupt transformation in a change of status. There’s something cruel in it because it looks like you’re not yourself but more of a social construct—it’s a nasty message that says what you are doesn’t depend on you. I know it well.

  “Are you cheating on me?” I had asked one
evening when she came back from the theater later than usual.

  “We just stayed back for drinks.”

  I asked her the same question again.

  “What’s got into you? And no, I’m not cheating on you.”

  “Do you still love me?”

  “You could’ve asked nicely.”

  “You just need to say yes or no.”

  “Yes, dammit, I love you!”

  “Good. I want to be sure of that.”

  In the beginning, it’d been a pleasure to appear in public with an eye-catcher of a girlfriend; you enjoy that, her good looks are your pride. But now, with her growing reputation, I was starting to feel like a minder. The cretins stared at her as if they had nothing better to do than to test and provoke me. They looked at her, and I at them, and we sized each other up. That tedious game kept repeating itself. I couldn’t enjoy a bloody drink in peace.

  In the Balkans you get wrinkles early from the eternal habit of sizing each other up. That mask was driving me mad. It was fortunate that no one ever beat me up in front of her. I was paranoid about that, I did push-ups and lifted weights every day. At one stage my shoulder began to hurt. I took painkillers. I went to the doctor and he said the pain was coming from my spine, but I kept on training and taking pills. I went around with my face, my spine, and my muscles. She enjoyed herself, while I had to drink to kill the stress. I thought of getting myself a pistol so I could stop the training.

  My back really was giving me a hard time. I didn’t feel like going out anywhere. I tried to find excuses. I criticized the aggressive social situation, cursed the war that had led to such a macho society in the long term, imprecated the media and their fascination with violence, railed about hardly being able to breathe because of the packs of frustrated dudes who hated the women they couldn’t get.

  We went out around town less and less, so we had to visit people at home. And we—or rather she—had lots of new friends who invited us to their places for dinner. They were mostly elite sorts, well informed, and they knew about my professional debacle.

  Finding work turned out to be impossible. With my fucked-up reputation I could only start from scratch. Should I accept an inferior job and completely destroy every illusion about myself? It was better to be a domestic philosopher than an errand boy for someone else, right? That’s why I preferred to stay at home and watch programs glorifying the nation, drink beer, smoke, and complain about capitalism, which has been truly weird and wonderful in Eastern Europe.

  We have capitalists here who’ve never engaged in what Marx called the “original accumulation of capital,” I said, watching TV. Instead of accumulation, they only did a redistribution of capital. The capital already existed, it’s just that its owner was suddenly gone. The capital was social, and the society it belonged to disappeared. The people disappeared from the economy and went off to war, all of them; they thought only about the border because they saw the state as a border to be defended. The state was then empty inside, there was no one around, and the capital roamed around looking for an owner. You only needed to lie in wait in the deep, dark forest of the law and waylay it like Hansel and Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood.

  I made excuses. Told Sanja I refused to work in a capitalism that was made during the war from melted-down socialism. That was wartime magic, a magic full of dead souls. Dead Souls, Gogol, The Inspector-General and other plays, I said. You can’t work in it or even exist in it without being cursed by dead souls—the souls of dead proletarians. Here even generals became capitalists. How could you have losses at the front yet profit behind the lines?

  “You watch too much TV and get too worked up,” Sanja would tell me. “You think you’re participating, but you might as well be watching things from Space Station Mir. Then at least you’d realize how far away you are.”

  “But I’m here.”

  “Where?”

  “Here! On the edge of ruin here at the edge of Europe—the very brink of disaster. Can’t you see it?”

  “Toni, stop.”

  “Without politics we’d die of boredom, especially us unemployed. What would we talk about if the political system functioned?”

  She didn’t reply anymore.

  Thinking about ourselves is the greatest horror in entertainment society, I pointed out, so if there was no “politainment” we’d have to become a different kind of society—one which reflected on itself and its emptiness and realized that we lack real, human-scale politics. Then perhaps we’d disintegrate. Groups and factions would fall apart from too much thinking and everyone would start thinking for themselves. But would that be good for the nation? No, we have to stay united. We have to be thinking about the same thing at the same time.

  In front of the TV I felt like a real man, immersing himself in the political programs of the season. If I was a stereotypical girl I’d be shouting at Oprah and following the travails of Hollywood marriages. That’d be healthier, after all. But instead I watched TV, drank beer, and smoked. One way or another, our fantasy is the most important.

  “You were right,” I told Sanja. “Boris was right, too. He didn’t falsify his existence, and I have to give him credit for that. He was a remnant of something real, he came from down south and knocked me off my chair and out of my world—a world I thought was mine. Really, it’s stupid to lie that we’re standing on solid ground. Now I’m outside, nowhere, floating in a limbo beyond lies; everything is clear to me now, but that doesn't mean I can make sense of it; I’m just talking, like he talked, it’s as if he’s infected me with it, so now I can’t control the sense of what I’m saying, I just speak,” I told her as I watched TV, drank beer, and smoked.

  “You remind me of my dad,” she said. “You just sit in front of the TV and get disappointed with everything.”

  “Maybe I’ll protest out on the street.”

  “With who? Who do you have left?”

  That was how I wasted our last days together.

  I was sitting alone in that run-down bedsit, without a TV, when Markatović called. “Have you heard? They’ve suspended!”

  “What?”

  “The shares in Rijeka Bank. The state agency for financial supervision has suspended trading until further notice. They just announced it now.”

  “Are they allowed to do that?”

  “To prevent manipulation, they say. The Germans have finally left. Trading in the shares will be suspended until it’s decided whether to save the bank or send it into receivership.”

  They assured us that global capital would save us here in Eastern Europe and that we had to attract it like a new lover, break down the barriers, deregulate the labor market, and reduce welfare expenditure. Capital needed air to breathe so it’d feel comfortable. A lot was done to make capital feel welcomed, but in the end it made off.

  Now I was borrowing dough from Markatović. I don’t know whom he borrowed from.

  One day I was waiting for Markatović. He wanted to discuss a business matter with me, over a beer in his bedsitter. Dijana had long since returned with the children. When she came back, Markatović was happy at first. But recently he rented a place near mine “until things got sorted out,” as he put it. He intended to sell the big apartment and buy two smaller ones if he managed to reach an agreement with Dijana.

  The bars with cigars had become too expensive for him, so he was going to collect me near an ice cream parlor on Gajeva Street. Then Silva called, which surprised me since no one from the paper had rung me for a long time.

  “Listen, sorry, I just thought of you now. I’m at the hospital in the emergency room. My son’s here with a very high temperature. They don’t know what he’s got.”

  “Can I do anything to help?”

  “Have you noticed the game?”she asked.

  “Which game?”

  “‘It Takes Two to Tango’,” she said. She explained that she worked on the side producing games and sweepstakes for Today. GEP’s daily paper was full of things like that, so PEG
had to counteract in Today. One of the games that had recently got off the ground was “It Takes Two to Tango.”

  “I really haven’t noticed.”

  “You must have—it runs to a whole page. Part of the game is a competition for the best true love story. I came up with that idea.”

  I stared at an oil stain on the road.

  “Are you with me?” she asked.

  “I’m with you.”

  “But few stories come in, and they’re not romantic enough.”

  “Not romantic enough?”

  “That’s right. So if you want to help, could you perhaps write one—by tomorrow morning?”

  “You want me to write a romantic true love story?”

  “Otherwise I’ll have to write it.”

  “So now you’re treating me like a renowned counterfeiter.”

  “No, no. Who cares? They’re just stupid letters from readers. Their love stories. No one can check whether they’re genuine or not. I’ll pay you cash in hand. Otherwise I’ll lose my side job.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to make that up.”

  “Of course you do. It’s pulp. Soupy genre stuff, cheap romance. You know: te quiero, te amo, te this, te that. It’s always the same. Look at mine and copy.” She spoke quickly. I imagined her standing near the entrance to the emergency room with her mobile, smoking neurotically.

  “Come on, please. It’s ten to fifteen sentences. I won’t manage to do it, I have to stay here.”

  I spotted Markatović’s Volvo coming up the street and started waving like a drowning man. He stopped; I opened the door, slumped into the seat like a sack of potatoes and nodded to him.

  “Will you write it then?” Silva asked.

  “All right.”

  “Thanks so much, Toni.”

  “I just hope your little guy gets better.”

  “What’s up?” Markatović looked at me askance.

  “Silva’s son is in the hospital.”