Our Man in Iraq (14 page)

I called Markatović and said, “My head hurts.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“Because I’m going to switch off my mobile, take one of those popular tablets, and go home for a bit of a kip. Just so you don’t think I’m trying to avoid you while your drama is going on.”

He mumbled absently.

“What’s happened? Is Dijana still there?”

“She’s locked herself in the bedroom. I looked through the keyhole. She’s writing. I guess she’s writing me a letter.” “Call me when you get it.”

Tits.

Darkness.

The end.

She’d done it. The palms of my hands were moist.

The applause was thunderous.

It’s rare to hear any critical opinions in the lobby after a play. But half an hour later, when the first discussions were taking place over drinks and canapés, things started to look different.

There are people whose mission it is to be the first to pass negative judgment. These are people who attend all cultural events, although they don’t like anything. Charly was one of them. I saw him coming up to me with an enigmatic smile as if to remind me that I was one of them too.

“The director botched things up a bit,” he said.

Charly had always wanted to study stage direction. “I wouldn’t have said so,” I replied.

“The actors are good but the director messed things up,” he pressed.

“And how was Sanja?”

“Excellent. But, really, you have to admit, the director messed things up a bit.”

Just then Ela appeared. Charly went all stiff as if he’d been jabbed with a needle. She nodded to Charly and gave me a kiss on each cheek. “Sanja was just phenomenal,” she gushed.

“And how are you?” she asked Charly in a gentle, almost maternal way.

A glance behind them showed Silva coming—complications
were in store. I said I had to go to the toilet and disappeared before Charly could do anything about it.

I waited at the bar until Sanja came. She hadn’t changed. That cheap costume really was sexy. I’d put on the suit I wear to weddings and funerals. I kissed her. She grabbed my ass, and I automatically looked around to see if anyone was watching.

“Look at you in that suit,” she said.

“Well, I thought I had to.”

“But it’s dashing.”

People around the bar looked at us. They had lots of reasons to look at us, but I got the impression it was mostly her butt in that white, vinyl miniskirt. Her belly button was showing beneath the blouse sewn together with the white push-up bra that enlarged her breasts. The little white glitter boots and the white cowboy hat made her look like the ultimate lady of the night. Even I couldn’t resist looking at her tits instead of her eyes.

“You were great,” I whispered in her ear. “You really turn me on.”

“You too,” she whispered back.

She seemed more flirtatious than usual. “Are you on something?” I asked.

“Doc brought some coke. We’ve just had a snort. Wanna leave this crowd?”

I followed her through the people. She stopped in front of the men’s bathroom.

“Check if anyone’s in there.”

I peeked in. A guy was washing his hands. When he left, we dashed inside. There was just one stall amidst the urinals. We went into the cubicle and locked the door.

I kissed her and grabbed her hard by the ass. I felt I was about to explode. She lowered the toilet lid, sat on it and
started to unbutton my pants. My dick bounced out. She looked me in the eyes from below, shook her head with a grin, and then took me in her mouth.

Her hat blocked my view of the action, so I took it off her and put it on my head. She let my dick out of her mouth for a second and in a mock naive voice said, “Are you some kind of cowboy?”

“Yeah, just passin’ through.”

The door squeaked. Someone started using one of the urinals. Sanja went back to sucking. I was terrified. The door squeaked again, and this time someone rattled the stall handle. I almost stopped breathing. Sanja licked me wickedly from below.

“And what do you say about the acting?” a voice muttered at the urinals. It sounded like Doc.

“She’s got a good pair of tits,” was the response.

That piece of theater critique in the men’s room obviously amused Sanja, and she nodded and made some grunts of consent as she was sucking away.

She’s mad, I thought, in a panic that in no way lessened my excitement. The coke had an interesting effect on her. The men were still talking. I fought off my orgasm but she didn’t stop, and I watched as she changed rhythm, without any sign of relenting; she took it deep, and mumbled quietly, which they probably didn’t hear out there, I hoped, but I wasn’t worrying about that any more because the situation obviously turned her on even more. I wouldn’t be able to hold on anyway. Yes, that was obvious, and now I shuddered as I came. She waited until the end, and then smiled up at me. I kissed her hair.

“OK then, let’s go,” she whispered when she heard the door slam.

Out in the corridor I saw Doc who’d stopped to talk to a girl, and he called out to us, “What are you up to here?”

“Just having a blow,” Sanja said in a shrill voice, pretending to be a bad fairy.

Doc burst out laughing. He was wearing a garish orange T-shirt with ANTI-DRUGS HOTLINE printed on it.

We headed toward the lobby.

At the abundant buffet, I helped myself to some white wine, had a few sips, and reached for a canapé with a lettuce leaf and a little turd on top; at least that’s what it looked like, but it tasted OK.

Suddenly, a flash went off in my face and Sanja was grabbing my arm. She’d been looking into the flash and didn’t notice that my mouth was full. I dodged her. By the time I finally swallowed that blasted canapé, Sanja was surrounded by journalists, flashes going off all around her. I considered rejoining her but didn’t want to be seen as the star’s boyfriend desperate to emerge from his anonymity.

I drank my wine and thought about how I’d have to cut out her photos when they came out in the papers so when she became a big star and left me, I’d always be able to look at the photos, those eyes, that smile, that mouth that still had my semen in it, and be able to wank over those photos.

The thought exhilarated me in a perverse way at first, but then I rejected it as depressive. She wasn’t going to leave me. Where did I get that idea? This isn’t Hollywood, I consoled myself. I was relieved when Sanja reappeared and kissed me. More flashes. I couldn’t believe this was really happening to us.

It always showed when guys were unable to live with the success of their wives. I’d seen guys lose their alpha roles and was sure it wouldn’t happen to me if Sanja made it big. But right there and then, at the very first step, I began to feel inferior. Was I really such a redneck?

Had she anticipated all this? Was the blowjob just
compensation? No, I told myself: it was proof that nothing would change. It was proof because she also needed it. Standing there in the white hat beside Sanja, the flashes fired at me, and I laughed at the way fame—even a tiny brush with it—accelerates your thoughts and opens up a new space in front of you, in which you can easily become lost.

I drank my wine too quickly and my glass was empty so I looked around to see how to get hold of another as fast as possible. Ela probably had the same problem, and we found ourselves at the table at the same time. We each took another glass.

“Hasn’t Sanja seen you?” I asked.

“You can see what bedlam there is,” she said. “There’ll be time.”

“How are things otherwise?”

“Fantastic.”

Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic, uh-huh, I thought. What are we going to talk about now? Should I say everything’s fantastic too and we wind down the show?

“And you?” she asked.

“Disaster.”

“You’re kidding? What’s happened?”

“Oh come on, Ela, we’re allowed to be fucked up—it’s not a crime.”

“What are you getting at?”

“You and I don’t have to get into that super-cool bullshit. We’ve known each other from back when I didn’t have a washing machine.”

Fortunately that made her laugh. Then Sanja came over to us. She and Ela kissed and exchanged a few lines of small talk, almost at a scream. But I could see that, after the initial enthusiasm, Sanja was at a bit of a loss with her. She was simply in a much more lively frame of mind than poor Ela, who'd
probably given up drugs and everything else fun because she was too busy dieting.

I wanted to leave the two of them before Sanja scampered off again leaving me alone with Ela. I didn’t want to be standing there with her like two outsiders. I glanced at Sanja and it seemed she was looking right through us.

Then Jerman turned up. We’d been inseparable during our Drama days at uni. I congratulated him on his performance, but I felt strangely tense seeing him there, that headline
OUR CHEMISTRY HAPPENED ON STAGE
going round and round in my head.

“Let’s go and have a drink,” he said.

“You can see we’re drinking already,” I said.

“But there’s no beer here. I’m going to the bar for a beer.”

“He’s all over the place,” Ela laughed.

“As mad as a cabbage,” Sanja said.

I stood there as if in the midst of opposing forces.

“I’m going out for some fresh air,” I said.

“Are you not feeling well?” Sanja was startled.

“No, everything’s fine.”

I gave back her hat.

“You’re sure you’re OK?”

“It’s just a bit stuffy.”

Just air, an ordinary Zagreb night, the sound of cars from the main road, kids rushing to the tram stop because they’d overshot their curfews. I needed some unpretentious damp pavement and the couple who shared a hot dog at the fast food stall and were taking bites in turn.

I looked at all this like someone who was sheltering from the rain, standing close to the tram stop, by a shop window with a mass of trendy sneakers.

I kept walking on along the street, aimlessly, till I reached the main square. Then I felt lost, like someone who’d dropped
out of their own story, so I started to head back down a different street, through Flower Square, and gradually I got myself together, as if I’d inhaled a dose of intimacy in those streets.

When I got back I finally took the infamous cocaine from my pocket.

“So that’s why you had to go out for some fresh air,” Sanja exclaimed.

I rounded up Charly and Silva. I also found Ela, who daintily declined, but came with us since Charly was there. Sanja took us backstage to a rehearsal room in the maze of corridors beneath the theater. After snorting a few lines we returned through the labyrinth like a squad ready for action and burst onto the small stage that had been made into an improvised disco. Some guy was already there, dancing—Markatović!

His tie flapped and he danced as if he was shaking off a dog that had bitten his leg. Silva and Sanja joined in with some sexy dance, Ela began to meditatively move her hips and neck, and Charly sort of hopped around mechanically and waved his arms in some arrhythmic techno style. I raised my arms like a footballer who’d just scored a goal and grinned at Markatović.

I screamed in his ear, “What happened with Dijana?”

“You won’t understand,” Markatović shrilled in a broken voice. “You just won’t understand.”

Afterward he told me in a voice dripping with sentimentality that he’d come because of Sanja and me. He was so glad we were happy.

The party was hotting up.

People were circulating through the foyer between the bar and the dance floor that had taken over the stage. Every hour
or so we went down into the labyrinth of corridors, and the conversations became ever more candid and stupid.

Markatović explained to me that Sanja and I were a perfect couple. He spoke of her as a sophisticated lady, at whose side my life would never become languid, while claiming in a devastated voice that Dijana had become a domestic bore. What did he expect when she was freighted with twins, I tried telling him.

But he wouldn’t listen: he said she was becoming more and more like her mother, and that horrified him because he hadn’t imagined life would be like this, what with loans and all that shit, with Dolina and bad shares on his back, and a wife who reminded him of his mother-in-law. He added that after the birth she’d even stopped enjoying sex—they’d had to cut her down there and now it hurt. He told me all this although I hadn’t asked. But he confessed to me in a terribly trusting tone and with the face of a drowning man. Dijana had left, taken the twins with her, and written a fourteen-page farewell letter, but he hadn’t got round to reading it yet because he had come here because he knew I’d be here.

Next, Silva came up to me and whispered that the Chief hadn’t been enthusiastic about her taking on the Niko Brkić topic; he’d told her to stick to covering showbiz because that was what she did best. She leaned her head on my shoulder and worried sadly that everyone considered her empty-headed. I told her she wasn’t. I looked around to see if this was going to make Sanja jealous, but she was dancing with her back to me. Ela was pressing Charly against the wall, writhing sensually in front of him, and he seemed to be gradually giving in to the pressure.

Charly came up to me a bit later. “Where’d Silva get to?” “She left,” I said.

He stayed beside me, pensive and fumbling around on his mobile. Someone had put on a remixed domestic folk song; Charly made an expression of disgust. Markatović, on the other hand, raised his arms, dancing recklessly.

“What am I, what are you, oh liiife,” he bellowed.

“Your friend seems a little unhappy,” Charly remarked, as if he didn’t know Markatović’s name.

He wasn’t the only one, I thought. But we were careful not to admit it. That was one of the codes of Zagreb society. We were pretty disciplined about that. I guess we felt that distinguished us from the hoi polloi of the Balkans.

“What am I, what are you, oh liiife,” Markatović continued—it must have been cathartic. He grabbed a bottle of water from a table and started pouring it over his head. A circle of people formed around him. Sanja and Ela were there too, killing themselves with laughter. Markatović’s face beamed with happiness.