Our Man in Iraq (4 page)

I had no idea what they were talking about, but straight away Markatović said that I was a genius at those sorts of things. He introduced me as an editor of the weekly
Objective
and an image specialist, and languid Dolina sized me up suspiciously.

“What’s this all about?” I asked.

“A new image,” Markatović answered with an air of importance. For some reason my presence made the bodyguards twitch; now they kept a cautious eye on me as if looking to see if I’d brought the new image along.

After a dramatic pause, Markatović explained to me what I already knew: this gentleman with millions of euros to his name had recently left his party, which was generally inclined toward the heavy hitters and had allowed him to amass wealth and take over his valley during the war. Markatović was therefore trying to persuade him that, without the backing of the party, he could no longer keep the same old image.

“He’s in new circumstances now, politically speaking, and can’t use the old image anymore,” Markatović told me, although his words were intended more for Dolina.

“Yes, yes, he needs a new image,” I said gruffly.

I helped out Markatović now and then. War and capitalism in the ’90s had been a nasty shock to my system, and penury made me develop the habit of taking on any work, even if that meant doing three or four jobs at the same time. I actually wanted to slow down a bit now. I tried to explain to Markatović that panic was on the decline these days, but he claimed the situation now was even worse. Besides, business meant growth: you had to pay off old loans with new ones—if you didn’t rush forward, the masses would catch up with you from behind. As soon as you stood still you were done for. That was Markatović’s motto.

“That means the new image needs to be tailored to suit the
new situation,” Markatović said to me, actually speaking to Dolina.

“That’s right, the new situation,” I mumbled. “Redesign is fundamental.”

Dolina nodded after some difficult thinking. “Y’mean you can take care of that?”

Markatović glanced at me. But Dolina was still looking at Markatović. I suppose I wasn’t making much of an impression.

It had been easy for the former goth to switch into career mode: black polo shirt, black suit, black coat, shiny black shoes. For me, an ordinary old rebel, there was no painless transition. I tried the bright, bold, and stylish. I even bought woolen jumpers, only to take off all that stuff a minute before leaving and put on my standard gear: T-shirt, leather jacket, sneakers or boots, jeans.

Markatović now explained that, with my help, he was planning to profile Dolina as a dissident who’d clashed with the powers-that-be in the capital; now he was a regionalist. Only, Dolina’s valley wasn’t the size of a region.

“I think he should be a microregionalist,” Markatović said. “How does that sound?”

“Not quite right,” I said.

“Minor detail,” Markatović continued. “The task is to cast him as a dissident, a regionalist, an individualist. That's the logical conclusion since he left the party. And a liberal.”

Dolina’s comment? He had to go to the bathroom, so off he went, accompanied by his bodyguards.

If there were no real liberals in those backwoods we had to invent them, Markatović told me. This meant we were onto something big, because if we presented him as a liberal maybe someone sensible would join him.

“I get you,” I said, “but count me out.”

“All right, but just stay for a bit longer, please.”

Dolina lumbered back from the toilet and sat down, breathing heavily. He looked like a good-natured alligator, smiling at me as if he were looking at a newborn baby. He hadn’t just had a snort, had he?

“We’ve got work to do,” he creaked in his thick southern dialect, patting us on the backs. “I got the councillors to walk out with me. Nice political crisis, y’know, and then elections and all that. Microregional elections. Ha, ha. Fuckin’ elections.”

His bodyguards smiled too.

“Just get the advert done for me and we’ll move on from there,” he said to Markatović. “You’ll have the money tomorrow.”

“Don’t do that to me anymore!” I growled at Markatović when they’d gone.

“Hey, I’ll devise the campaign for him in half an hour,” he said. “I can’t be the owner of the firm, line up the job, and then do it myself too. That’d look dilettantish. I have to bring someone else in so he sees that I’ve got workers.”

“Thanks a million. I’d downright forgotten that I belong to the working class.”

“I’ve worked out everything already. I just need to hire someone to do the design.”

“The designer is a worker, and you’ll need a photographer too—he’s also a worker.”

“If you want, you could travel down south and tour the area. We can pay for all that. I don’t have the time. Besides, it’s better that someone else goes so they think a whole team is involved.”

Markatović’s mobile phone rang. It was his wife, Dijana, and he told her that he was negotiating things with me—business matters. He tried to sound soothing as if he was rocking her on waves of optimism. Suddenly he looked at the mobile in surprise.

“I think she hung up on me. I’m going to the can.”

He was there for a while, and when he came back he spoke softly. “Want some coke?”

There hadn’t been any coke in our circles until recently. But now, it seemed, we were making progress, and the whole country was under development. It could be a treat for Sanja and her mob after the premiere and I could show off. He handed me a packet under the table and I stuck it in my pocket.

“How long have you been into that for?” I asked.

“Just recently, when the atmosphere’s right.”

I looked around. Not exactly what you’d call atmosphere.

Markatović leaned toward me. I could write a guide for stock-market beginners for his publishing house, he said—he knew I played around with shares a bit. He tried to persuade me; he said we lacked a reference book in Croatia because people still had socialism in their heads.

“I’ll think it over.”

A waitress, young and wasp-waisted, came up to the table. I ordered a beer. Markatović ordered coffee, then abruptly changed his order to a beer, and whiskey.

His face was puffy. He’d developed a beer belly. I’d say he looked quite a bit older than I although we were the same age. We’d first met at uni when we’d both just left the Yugoslav People’s Army, a long time ago.

We had sniffed each other out back at the entrance exam for Economics and discovered that we’d both been cajoled into that line of study, despite our inclinations toward philosophy and art. To get me to enroll in Economics, my folks bribed me with a Sony hi-fi, a state-of-the-art system back then with a double cassette deck, and Markatović’s folks bought him nothing less than a Yugo 45. But for us the most important thing was to come to the big city with all its concerts, clubs, and the vibrant social scene.

The rest of the group at the entrance exam were already discussing where they’d work after graduating. The majority were counting on government jobs, while the more avant-gardist advocated entrepreneurship and risk, which there would be more and more of in our country, they said. We sided with the pro-riskers. But we were hardly accepted into their ranks because we seemed too much of a risk. Compared with the crowd from Economics, Markatović and I looked like outright vagabonds. The crack corps of sex, drugs, and rock’n’rollists didn’t make it to uni—those first rebels get bogged down early on, cannon fodder of the subculture.

Now we, in turn, advocated creative business. We pretended to admire Bill Gates and his ilk, came out with their quotes and generally sowed confusion among the straight-and-narrow Economics students. Markatović claimed to have read in
The Economist
that Gates was working on a combination of a computer and a washing machine and as such would bring a computer to every home. He was inspired by that idea throughout the 1990-91 academic year and acquired several disciples, particularly among female students.

To tell the truth, our debauched lifestyle was only accepted to a limited degree during the first semester. The nerds soon closed ranks and we were declared wastoids, especially seeing as the girls liked to sit around with us in the cellar canteen. We enjoyed that dubious reveler’s reputation, and the professors’ pets whispered with schadenfreude that we had no future. But somehow we managed to scrape through that academic year while the country hurtled toward war.

We were still dutiful sons and thought our elders knew where they were leading us. Then the war began in earnest. Although it’d been long brewing, it still caught us all by surprise. It was hard to muster the concentration to study. Moreover, both Markatović and I spent the end of that
summer in uniform and missed the start of the third semester, but in the end we were able to present ourselves as even greater guys—heroes, almost. We enrolled for our second year on the basis of those elastic wartime documents: we had army certificates, and the lecturers didn’t use us to set an example in exactitude.

During this period the world fell apart. Nothing was permanent, authorities faded and people flinched before us. We realized that we belonged to a generation that had a moral advantage because it was defending all those old folks accustomed to the molds and models of socialism. Lost as they were, they patted us on the shoulder as if they were thanking us for something. We vocally despised socialism and they agreed with us on that. We despised their life’s experience and they agreed with us on that too. We disdained all they’d done and stood for, and again they agreed with us. To leave no doubt that the future belonged to us, we rejected everything that until yesterday had been of any worth. They agreed with us on all that.

Markatović now came to class wearing his camouflage jacket, and I wore mine when I needed a staff member’s signature. Our self-confidence grew. We despised everyone and everything at uni. We spent most of our time in the canteen, getting blotto like big, disappointed men racked by the blues too early in life. The war went on, and in the 1991-92 academic year we were allegedly still studying Economics, down in the canteen, drinking beer and frightening the faculty with our subculture rebellion, for which the war provided an unexpected pretext. We found it amusing that no one contradicted us, although we were just ordinary assholes. Markatović would get sloshed in the canteen and then go up to people, wearing his uniform, and ask: Why does no one contradict me when I’m just an ordinary asshole? But this
lifestyle led to isolation. We no longer went to lectures at all; we felt we’d lose part of our libertine integrity if we sat there like good little sons of our parents and listened to those crusty lecturers while war profiteers and politicians privatized state firms, the poor butchered the poor, concentration camps sprang up all over Bosnia, and reports came in about mass rape.

Although we never would have admitted it to each other, we were shit like the others, rickety and rotten through and through, but we wore the masks of tough lads, not knowing how else to defend ourselves. In the canteen we barricaded ourselves from the world. Besides, there were none of the concerts we’d come to the metropolis for, and the bars around the city were full of guys like us, plus the occasional real psycho.

The low-intensity war dragged on through summer, the exam season began, and students sat out on the terraces around the campus while we were still drinking down in the dark—isolated, like self-convicted felons.

We had no intention of admitting defeat. We simply concluded that uni was shit. We belonged elsewhere, somewhere better—we were artists, after all! No one understood us. Everyone there was counting imaginary money in advance. What were we doing among those squares and yes-men anyway? We spoke a different language. They say Croatian and Serbian are different, and back then everything was done to make them differ even more, but this gulf was incomparably greater. Our rebellion, which had built up down in the cellar, finally exploded, and we decided to go to the university registry, pick up all our documents and devote ourselves to art. I remember us rolling up there drunk, the ladies from the registry looking at us strangely, and us cheerfully going out into the sunshine with all our papers. Markatović was so exhilarated that in the parking lot he flung them into the air and we watched them flutter down on the gentle breeze.
The girls were wearing miniskirts, the war stretched out like chewing gum, and we were finally free.

Later, Markatović enrolled in first-year Literature and even published a book of poetry. The reviews said he was promising. But not a single woman fell in love with him because of his poetry, which was probably why something in him broke. His path to literary fame petered into endless procrastination, and then he met Dijana, who didn’t read poetry, and they had twins, identical boys. Now he had a family to feed, so he founded his own company.

As I looked at him, puffy and bloated, a witness of my stupid biography, I realized I didn’t look so great myself. After Economics I decided to switch to Drama. The competition was fierce—they were all kids from arty families, but I made it all the same.

My folks still placed all their hope in Economics, especially under the new capitalist system, and pronounced the word for Drama—
dramaturgija
—in a mystic, tragic voice, like our neighbor Ivanka back in the early ’80s when she found out her son was smoking hash. The whole neighborhood heard Ivanka going round and round their yard, holding her head in her hands and moaning: “Marijuaaana. Marijuaaana. Oh my God, marijuaaana.”

Under socialism, that long, undulating word was taboo; Ivanka swayed like a cobra mesmerized by a snake charmer, and that’s just how my mother behaved many years later: “Draaamaturgija. Draaamatuuurgija. Oh my God, draaamatuuurgijaaa.” When word got around that marijuana was a soft drug, everyone realized I’d moved on to harder stuff.

My parents, who until then had been disinterested in culture, now became its bitter enemies. When the culture program began on TV they didn’t change the channel straight away anymore. Now they glowered and slighted: “Talk about
a bunch of smart asses,” and “That’s s’posed to feed you?” It was hardly surprising: war had impoverished them, capitalism had deprived them of their rights, and culture had killed off their last hopes.