Our Man in Iraq (10 page)

“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 wait 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 <
[email protected]
>
To: Toni <
[email protected]
>

   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.”

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 Hendrix.

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.

“What’s up? What are you thinking about?” Sanja said as we both sat there looking at the page.

“It’s really strange to read the interview and see the photos. But I’ll get used to it.”

“You think it’s a disaster?”

Waiting for me to answer, she turned the pages, excited by that light and bouncy image of her.

“No, not a disaster. That’s the nature of the light interview. That’s what it is. Are you happy?”

“I don’t know now. I thought you’d be glad.”

“I just find it a bit strange, that’s all.”

“Same here.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“Two whole pages,” she seemed surprised.

“Not bad for starters.”

She read on, alternately beaming and frowning.

I told myself all that mattered was that I knew who she was. What did I care about how the public saw her, what they’d say about her down at the pub?

She sang a line from a popular song: “Life is mad but I’m no quitter / Make me coffee, black and bitter . . .”

   From: Boris <
[email protected]
>
To: Toni <
[email protected]
>

   Nothing for me to fuck here in bloody Iraq. There was a Lebanese girl, a reporter, who bestowed on me two or three female glances, the first in ages, but then she left abruptly with her team as if muvver had called her to lunch. Those Lebanese girls are my only hope, they’re liberal by desert standards, but the mirage shattered as her jeep drove away, a leaden mirage in my dusty desert heart, and I, wretch that I am, just stood and watched.

On the way to work I passed by the Last Minute Travel Agency. Past Thailand, Kenya, Cuba and the rest, thinking I should buy a trip somewhere far away and disappear like Boris. But I’d just decided to settle down—to buy a flat and put down roots! That is what I want, isn't it?

Anymore, no one knew how to live.

We’ve been through communism, war, and dictatorship. Constant brain-ironing. Your circumstances adjust miraculously when you live in systems like that and you don’t have the dough for big experiments. Your life shrink-wraps around you and you tread a narrow path; you hold course and wait for the storm to blow over.

I knew the ones in power were to blame for everything. That was my alibi. I wasn’t responsible for their mess. I was trying to live my life while bogged down in that shit. So I sat
in front of the TV and cursed every single one of them for having kept me on a short leash for so long. But now things had slackened dangerously.