Our Man in Iraq (5 page)

I couldn’t count on their financial support, obviously, so I started freelancing for newspapers while still studying. I covered the infamous culture scene, dashed around all day from one promotional event to another, where I drank vermouth and in the evenings I’d eat canapés at exhibition openings and premieres. That was a life full of cultural highlights. And then, unsuspectingly, I once mentioned in front of the editor in chief that I’d studied Economics. The paper was full of Arts dropouts, as it turned out, and Economics dropouts were “as rare as hen’s teeth.” He didn’t want to listen to my complaints, but instantly promoted me, although many thought undeservedly, to economics editor. I had a whole page to fill with “boring news,” as the editor in chief put it, and if I found out about any scams I was to report them to him so they could be written up separately because that was exclusively what he and our readers were interested in as far as the economy was concerned. They put me on the payroll, which saved me from my vermouth diet, but my mother’s “See, didn’ we tell ya to stick to Economics?” never failed to annoy me.

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

   If it weren’t for Jason I’d’ve died of boredom.

   He asked me things, he said that since they’d been out in the field they hadn’t had any information, they’d
been in an information blockade for weeks, so he asked me, What is the news?

   The war’s begun, man, I said, you are the news.

   A long column of camouflaged bulldozers passed by.

The staff entered the editorial office in dribs and drabs. I was settling into a chair, one of the better ones, reclining against the headrest. My other persona, “Mr. Journo,” morphed out of nothing, master of the rational mindset. My facial muscles tensed. Wearing this mask of the salaryman demands a lot of energy. It takes your “all,” as they say. And that’s really the main part of the work.

The night before, after Churchill Bar, I’d been to a slew of other places with Markatović. I boast in front of women, while Markatović tends to order expensive cocktails for them. In the morning light, the salaryman differs sharply from the night owl. It’s simply the pain of transformation that we call the hangover.

The editor in chief is my former friend Pero—thirty-seven years old, married, with two kids, an affair, and two loans. His
problems were bigger than mine. He held his temples with the tips of his fingers and stared at his computer keyboard, silent like a father going through a difficult time.

This was an editorial meeting, nothing special, but Pero had recently been promoted so I surmised he now showed a surplus of seriousness to remind us of his new role. He’d been one of us before, but then was chosen to be launched into orbit, to a job where it’s normal to call the Prime Minister’s office every now and again and expect to be put through. He was still reeling a bit from the jolt. He couldn't behave like the old Pero now, and the new one hadn't yet gelled.

He wiped sweat from his brow, with difficulty, and gathered himself into what was supposed to be a whole. Chairs and rollers squeaked on the carpet. Pero took the remote and terminated the silence: the TV up in the corner of the office droned to life. Now we could see what was happening in Baghdad, where the Americans had entered a week and a half earlier. CNN talked about restoring order and electricity.

I thought, people in Baghdad have no electricity but they’re constantly on television. They can’t even watch themselves. And yet, at least we could during the war here. I felt that was a point worth making, but then I remembered it would be best not to mention Baghdad.

Silva and Charly came in through the glass door, both smiling. When he sat down, Charly sombered up.

“Today is one big hassle,” he said.

I had a brief impulse to ask what sort of hassle, though it passed. Usually it was nothing but an everyday annoyance, something ministerial, minor, bureaucratic in nature. His complaints about life felt forced, invented solely to give the conversation weight. Charly had always wanted to have a serious chat with me, who knows why. With Silva, on the other hand, he only ever giggled.

I didn’t manage to ask anything because Silva directed her unflappable, vapid coquetry at me and chirruped, “Hey Toni, your hairdo is awesome.”

“Great, thanks,” I said.

I received only compliments from her, which generally helped me relax, because Silva instinctively reflected the company’s power dynamics in her flirting. As long as she was paying you compliments things were on an even keel, but if she told you your hair was a mess you had to think about your standing in the office.

Vladić, who there’s no need to describe, looked at me from the other end of the table and said, “Yes, yes, Toni is a real himbo.” He chuckled maliciously.

I started to feel uncomfortable. Was it the gel? I’d only put on a touch, what could be the problem? I made a face as if I didn’t get what he was on about, and Silva kept looking at me cheerfully, with an expectant air. She was the entertainment editor, so she could always be relied on to look frivolous through even the gravest situation, even before a Session of the Supreme Soviet. She represented our lightheartedness. The rest of us, immersed precariously in the state of the nation, could summon no cheer. Our aura was tainted by the prevailing socio-political gloom, while Silva vibrated in the bright and lively colors of the boutiques she shopped in every day.

“Shall we do coffee afterward?” Charly asked me.

“No,” I said. “I have to go and look at a flat with Sanja.”

The Chief looked around as if he was counting his troops. We were all present. All ten of us. We sat there, aware of the conundrum our
Objective
was in—and the company in general. Today, our sister daily paper started producing losses. Or that’s what the powerful
Global Euro Press
, known to us as GEP, had triumphantly published yesterday.

Our paper, which we fondly called a corporation, went
under the name of
Press Euro Global
, PEG. It’d been set up by disaffected editors who had split from GEP, and as such we weren’t just a backroom club of feckless malcontents. We had a mission: to fight for truth and justice, and to hold the last line of defense against GEP’s media monopoly.

The Chief muted the TV as he stood up and said, “I don’t need to outline the situation for you—you’ve all got heads on your shoulders. We need to make a move.” Taking us in with his gaze, he continued. “That’s nothing new to you, right? Because what are we? We’re prime movers. We make the world go round! If there were no media everything would have ground to a halt long ago. Nothing would have happened because there wouldn’t have been anywhere for it to happen!”

He was putting on a dramatic performance.

“What I want to say is that nothing is going to happen by itself. Well, granted, there are things like 9/11—you can’t really say that was a media-produced event.”

“Some say it was,” I interjected.

“Like bloody hell it was! People flew the planes up and people crashed them. But every newspaper, even the stupidest, is going to cover an attack like that, right?” He pointed to the muted television. “We can’t cover what’s visible, do you understand? That’s what TV does, and then the dailies gnaw the bones—that’s not for us!”

He’d really put some preparation into this. Months ago he used to bullshit around in the pubs. Just look what a position makes of a man! As film critics say, he’s grown into his role.

“So what do we cover?”

We all looked at the Chief.

“We cover the invisible! The imperceptible!” he thundered.

This baffled me. Where did he get this theory?

“I want you to be investigative, to reflect, to come up with things! Devise and concoct story angles, show me something
new. Turbo-politics was yesterday. There are no more massacres, Tudjman is dead, Milošević is finished. There’s no real drama anymore. You have to turn things over. Search for new hysterias. Where’s the old paranoia gone? It must still be around somewhere. It was easy in the ’90s. OK, we were under attack and that wasn’t easy. But the war provided information. That was our contribution to global media: we were breaking news. The world took note of us. But not anymore. Now we’re ordinary. Now you have to make stories out of ordinary things. We have to shape and mold this new reality. You’re all still searching for the old stories, but what’s happening now is that reality is amorphous. Because you haven’t shaped it yet. It’s natural that our circulation is falling. That simply means: I want new creations. That’s what I want. Otherwise there’ll be some swift sackings.”

We’d had a crisis fire-drill with every new editor. Pero, like the others, came to us as a savior. In the name of justifying the savior, ruin always has to be nigh—all religions are based on that. Permanent crisis. We can’t do without ruin and the abyss. We ourselves piled high the doom-laden headlines to jolt people to life.

Young Dario responded best to the shock treatment: he was wide awake now and his eyes gleamed like a cheetah’s, although he was lanky and looked more like an antelope.

After a pause the Chief said, “And then there’s GEP too, as you all know.”

His gaze landed on Secretary, the old status seeker, who acted the sphinx at editorial meetings.

He was no ordinary secretary, not of the clerical caste at all, in fact. He once traveled with me to Moscow, where I interviewed the oligarch Teofilakovsky because he was buying up hotels and sponsoring operas in Croatia. Wherever we went, I introduced myself as “Toni, journalist,” and Russians
scorned me as a busybody, but Secretary introduced himself as “the Secretary” and was accorded immediate deep respect. I still hadn’t fully grasped his function, but the Russians figured him out straight away. He was a vital remnant of the old system, except that he’d shed all ideology in the cataclysmic system change.

He told me in vodka-induced elation that he’d once been a Communist, only later to try out all of the parliamentary parties. He’d finally come to rest in the Croatian Peasant Party. He discovered they were the best when he first went out to a rural event—there was real hospitality in the country. Afterward you needed at least one day of sick leave. The Peasant Party was probably a double-edged sword, he said, because since being a member his cholesterol had gone up and his gout had returned with a vengeance, like in the good old days.

“Secretary will brief someone on the GEP issue,” the Chief explained.

We were constantly exposing GEP’s covert attempts to monopolize the market. GEP had secret subsidiaries and false fronts. They were at us from all sides; they stole stories from us and featured them first. We suspected they had a mole among the editorial staff. In order to demoralize us, they cherry-picked our journalists with extravagant salaries. Every so often a colleague would disappear, never to be mentioned again. The PEG management responded to these dastardly attacks by preemptively burning the bridges: all PEG staff had to produce several anti-GEP pieces, engaging in heated polemics with them, calling them criminals and foreign spies, in the hopes that they’d be unable to go over to those they’d so zealously abused. We didn’t need trust falls or paintball—newspaper warfare was our team building exercise.

I’d distinguished myself early in the newspaper war before appreciating the finer nuances of burning bridges. And as a
result, I was attached to PEG permanently. That’s how it is in small countries: the room to maneuver is abominably narrow.

Secretary held a note in his hand and looked around through his glasses.

“Any volunteers?” the Chief asked.

I saw Dario fidgeting in his chair—you could tell he was about to volunteer, but he didn’t know if the others had precedence. His instincts told him it was a great honor to take on an anti-GEP topic.

I was probably like that once, too, before I caught on—around the time the current owner bought us. He was a fallen tennis player who had parlayed his fame into owning newspapers. During the war he played recreationally with the former president and let him win points, for which he was rewarded discount shares in several state firms. At that time the president personally edited the daily current-affairs program,
The Evening News
, and we reporters became official “fighters for the truth.” Circulation rose. The ex tennis player was our chief shareholder. Now it was just a job.

The democratic processes brought the interest rates down.

I applied for the loan.

In the end, Dario was the lucky volunteer.