Our Man in Iraq. Robert Perisic

those reports from Iraq are fantastic!’

      I twitched. Talking about that was the last thing I wanted. And, in particular, I didn’t want him praising it. As soon as someone praises an article there’ll always be someone to sling mud at it.

      ‘It’s a standard piece,’ I said. ‘But there’s a lot of work in it.’

      ‘Sure, but I think it’s fantastic,’ Dario went on.

      Stop bloody well going on about it, I thought.

      ‘I don’t know, I’ve had enough of wars,’ Silva joined in.

      Me too, I said to myself, me too.

      ‘I think it’s brilliant because –,’ Dario continued.

      ‘Don’t be such a slimebag!’ I snapped.

      I was losing my nerves. That was an overreaction, I knew straight away. He looked at me in embarrassment and blushed.

      I tried to turn it into a joke: ‘Sorry, just kidding. Hey, it was a joke, OK?’

      His gaze wandered.

      ‘Hey, it’s not because of you,’ I said. ‘It’s just that the guy drives me nuts.’

      ‘Uh-huh,’ Dario muttered.

      ‘Who drives you nuts?’ asked Charly.

      This is going fundamentally wrong, I thought. I stood up.

      ‘I’m off!’ I said.

      They looked at me like a runaway train.

       There’s fire

      I parked near our tower block in front of the shop window of the ‘last minute’ agency where big letters advertised THAILAND, NEW YORK, CUBA, TIBET, MALAGA, KENYA. Every day you could decide at the last minute.

      That wouldn’t be bad, I thought.

      I looked in the shop window as I was locking the car. Should I go to Cuba? Or to New York – the centre of the universe? Or to Tibet, to have a revelation and come back a new person?

      But I went up to the flat, checked my mails and saw that Boris hadn’t sent anything, let alone mentioned when he was coming back. I read his old mails again, trying to fathom his psyche.

      * * *

      Saddam is a young villager from the outskirts of Basra, he was named after the President, what can he do, he spreads his hands, spreads his hands wide like a scarecrow, and I spread mine too, spread mine wide, and we chat like two scarecrows in the field, except there are no crops, no plants, no grass and no birds for us to scare away, only sand and scrap iron, and his village, said Saddam, is in a bad place, he spreads his hands, a very bad place, there’s fire there, he says, a lot of fire, so he stuck all his goats in a crazy film pick-up truck and took to the road like Kerouac, except there’s no literature, no Neal Cassady, no poetry, no shade under the vine, as they say here, and his tyre burst, and Saddam the goatherd was out on the Basra-Baghdad highway, his tyre burst and there was no spare, gaaawd, so Saddam is patching his tyre, the goats are bleating in the pick-up, an idyllic scene, Abrams tanks pass by, all looking ahead, amassed forces around Saddam’s goats, I crouch beside him, looking at the tyre, you know, as if I’m going to help, but I don’t.

      * * *

      I read this as if I was monitoring him like they monitor malingerers in the army; I could hardly reach him but, damn, he sure got under my skin. I kept thinking of his folksy phrases; it was like when you hear a cheap but catchy song and the melody sticks in your head... No shade under the vine, imagine!

      I felt he was doing this to me on purpose. I saw straight away how he looked at me when we met a month ago in Zagreb after the nice, long years of not seeing each other.

      The layout guy Zlatko had had a baby daughter that day and treated us to a round of drinks; afterwards I went and sat in the bar close to the firm to wait for Boris. Cuz was over half an hour late. I expected he’d got lost. But then I saw him coming along the street, glancing around cautiously.

      I waved.

      I watched him as he came up: his gait took me back to when we were teenagers and greeted each other loudly with a clap on the shoulder and a yell of Hey, old chum. We learned a rakish swagger: walking broad-legged with our hands in our pockets as it if was cold. We put on a show of enthusiasm when we met in bars and clubs because we were relying on each other in the event of a fight, I guess.

      As I watched him now I saw he still walked that way.

      I got up: ‘Hey, old chum, how are things?’ and patted him on the shoulder.

      ‘Is it you?’ he offered me a flabby hand.

      He sat down.

      He was wearing orange-tinted shades and smiled like a mafioso pretending to be a Buddhist; De Niro wore that ‘mask’ in several films and since then streetwise guys have taken to using it.

      Sinewy, with a longish face. We’d always been similar. He’s even got a streak of colour in his hair, a yellowish stripe behind his ear. He looked quite urbane, as they say. You could tell he didn’t live in our village, which incidentally has expanded quite a bit but still isn’t a city, so we called it a ‘town’... Could there be any notion more non-committal than ‘town’? A multi-purpose whatever, an amalgam of dilapidated houses and holiday flats strung out along the road...

      But Boris lived in Split – cuz was urbane, a city boy, good on him. I wouldn’t need to feel embarrassed if anyone I knew passed by.

      He sat down at the table so sluggishly that I thought he was smacked out. But he said he’d been clean for a long time. Now he told me he’d come to the big smoke cos, like, there’s no perspective back ’ome and grinned as if he wanted to make fun of that hackneyed word perspective.

      He wore his underdoggery in a slightly high-handed way like victims of the system do. Soon he took out some sheets of paper and handed them to me: ‘So ya can see ’ow I write.’

      The pages were densely typed from top to bottom with a worn ribbon – you could hardly see the words, but I tried... and read a little longer than I wanted. He just stared straight ahead, smiling at the fruit juice he’d ordered, smoking Ronhill and blithely blowing rings.

      What he’d given me were poems in prose on some intangible topic.Never mind, I thought, he’s bound to be unrecognised in his neighbourhood. I could see he was literate, and that was something. His filmstar smile which put me on edge was simply a defensive stance in case I told him his writing was crud.

      ‘You need to take this to a literary magazine and let them have a look,’

      I said

      ‘It doesn’t matter. I can do any kind of writing.’ He started tapping with his leg. His smile faded.

      ‘Look, this is literature of sorts, it’s special in its own right,’ I stated cautiously. ‘For newspapers you need to write concisely and...’

      ‘That’s even easier,’ he interrupted.

      I ought to have seen straight away that this wasn’t a promising debut.

      Well, actually, I did see.

      ‘I really don’t know just now,’ I told him. ‘If there’s an opening, I’ll let you know...’

      ‘Fine,’ he said in a descending tone as if I was abandoning a little puppy.

      I felt those pangs of conscience again. Why? Was it guilt for me having become estranged? Fear of having become conceited? When he asked me what my girlfriend did and I told him she was an actress, I felt like I was boasting. But what should I have said – that she’s a toll-booth cashier?!

      Whatever I said looked like bragging to a provincial audience, a milieu dominated by rough-and-ready Gastarbeiter types. So I spoke in a blasé voice as if none of it mattered, which probably sounded like I was