Our Man in Iraq. Robert Perisic

now Markatović was trying to persuade me to write a blasted stock-market guide. We fought over it, you can’t say we didn’t... But the economy was lurking in the shadows and, after a dramatic pause, would surely tear us apart.

      Markatović and I didn’t talk about that. I think I was waiting for him to mention that guide during his eighth beer; but I was waiting to point it out to him nicely, despite him never officially admitting defeat, because he still considered himself a writer based on that youthful debut, which is probably only possible with writers. On the outside, he was a has-been, but there was still always the possibility of him publishing something again, and in order to preserve that illusion Markatović occasionally mentioned a novel in our conversations at the pub (he’d switched from poetry to prose, the drunkard); it was coming along ‘slowly but solidly’, he said, and bandied around enigmatic, incomplete sentences as if he was chicken to reveal any details, maybe so that no one would steal his idea or because he had nothing to say; still, technically speaking that endless prevarication allowed him to survive as a writer because no one can deny with one-hundredpercent certainty that he perhaps had some rudimentary jottings in a deep drawer. He looked at me glassy-eyed and said: ‘Sooner or later people will flock to the stock market, like the Chinese, you’ll see.’

      ‘Oh, let’s change the topic,’ I groaned.

      We ordered another round.

      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 was going on in the world.

      The war’s begun, man, I said, were you born yesterday?

      A long column of camouflaged bulldozers passed by.

      2. DAY TWO

       The pain of transformation

      The editorial office. The staff entered in dribs and drabs. I settled down in an office chair, one of the better ones, and reclined against the headrest.

      I felt my persona change as he started to emerge: Mr Journo, morphing out of nothing, mastering the rational mindset, tensing his facial muscles... The mask of the working man demands a lot of energy. It ‘demands your all’, as they say. That’s really the main part of the work. The night before, after the Churchill Bar, I’d been with Markatović to a few other places. We ended up at a bar, boasting in front of some girls, and Markatović kept ordering expensive drinks for them.

      In the morning, the working man differs sharply from the night owl. Thus the hangover. The pain of transformation.

      The chief editor, my ex-friend Pero – thirty-seven years old, married, with two children, a lover and two loans – had even greater problems. He held his temples with the tips of his fingers and stared at his computer keyboard.

      He was silent like fathers are in difficult times.

      He produced silence. You could have heard a pin drop, but no one dropped a pin.

      This was an editorial meeting, nothing special, but Pero had recently been promoted and now he showed a surplus of seriousness to remind us of his role. He’d been one of us before, but then they launched him into orbit, to a place where it’s normal to call the prime minister’s office every now and again and ask to be put through.

      He was still reeling a bit from the jolt.

      I kept him at the edge of my field of vision. He couldn’t behave like the old Pero now, and the new one hadn’t yet gelled.

      He wiped away parts of his old persona like 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 abruptly terminated the silence: the TV up in the corner of the office droned into life.

      Now you 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 the fact that Baghdad was on TV all day and that there was no electricity there would make a good basis for a witticism. Because – oh my woes – I considered it part of my role to be witty.

      Check this: people in Baghdad have no electricity but they’re on television all the time. Just think: they can’t even watch themselves.

      At least we could during the war here. I felt that was a point worth making, but then I remembered it wouldn’t be so clever for me to mention Baghdad.

      I looked through the glass door and saw Silva and ‘Charly’ coming, both smiling.

      When he sat down, Charly sobered up and asked me in the kind of voice which has finally moved on to proper topics: ‘How are you?’

      ‘Yeah, OK. You?’

      ‘Oh, today is one big hassle,’ he answered, as if he’d just got sick of life.

      I thought of asking Charly what sort of hassle it was, though I knew it could only be an everyday annoyance, a minor problem like bureaucratic bother; his tone of voice gave that away, and his complaints about life felt fake, invented solely to make the conversation serious. 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 looked at me with her unfailing and meaningless coquetry, and chirruped: ‘Hey Toni, your hairdo is awesome.’

      ‘Great, thanks,’ I said.

      She was a woman who readily paid compliments yet meted out ironic remarks. I received only compliments from her, which helped me relax; Silva instinctively reflected the corporation’s relations of power in her coquetry. 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 firm.

      Now 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 to himself maliciously.

      I started to feel uncomfortable in my chair because of my hairdo. I’d only put in a bit of gel...

      So I made a face as if I didn’t get what he was on about, and Silva kept looking at me cheerfully as if she expected something more we could leave open.

      She was the entertainment editor, so she could always sit there and look frivolous, even in situations like this before the session of the supreme soviet. She was the representative of our light-hearted side. The rest of us, who dealt with the precarious state of the nation, had no right to be cheerful. Our aura was tainted by the prevailing sociopolitical gloom, while Silva vibrated in the bright and lively colours she shopped for in the boutiques every day.

      ‘Shall we do coffee afterwards?’ 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 firm in general: Today, the sister daily to us, seemed to have started producing losses. That’s what the powerful Global Euro Press, known to us as GEP, damn their eyes, had triumphantly published yesterday.

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

      A little quiet, please.

      Pero the Chief stood up and said: ‘I don’t need to outline the situation for you – you’ve all got heads on your