Our Man in Iraq. Robert Perisic

told Sanja about it all. She laughed and shook her head, thinking I was exaggerating. And then, at the end of the programme, the camera panned over the audience again and Icho managed to wave.

      ‘What did I tell you!’ I said.

       Daughter Courage

      I’d dozed off a bit, and when I opened my eyes I saw her from behind, standing in front of the mirror: she was singing in a hushed, hoarse voice, playing a non-existent guitar.

       Once, in the flower of my youth,

       I thought I was a special bloom,

       Not like every farmer’s daughter,

       With my looks and talents,

       My aspiring for something higher.

      She was shaking her head and playing her air guitar; then she noticed me behind her and smiled bashfully.

      ‘Hi cutie,’ I said softly, like a paedophile, and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Ugh, ugh,’ she went. ‘I don’t want to be a cutie. I’m supposed to look... brassy.’

      ‘Sorry, wasn’t with you.’

      ‘OK, OK,’ she said. ‘But I have to go now.’

      ‘What, already?’

      ‘You slept for two hours.’

      ‘Uh?’

      ‘Tonight we’re rehearsing the whole piece for the first time,’ she explained.

      ‘It’ll be fine,’ I said and hugged her.

      For the last two months she’d been working on the play Daughter Courage and Her Children. Her first leading role in a major theatre. The East German director, Ingo Grinschgl, was doing a kind of free rendering of Brecht. Sanja was ‘Daughter Courage’, and her ‘Children’ were the band she performed with near the front lines. The piece was set during a ‘Thirty Years’ War’. It had time-warped from the seventeenth century into the twenty-first. Things were a bit jumbled, as they often are with avant-gardists. I hadn’t quite got my head around the story but it ‘had something going for it’.

      Daughter Courage was the singer, the frontwoman of the band. All the band wanted to do was to ‘live and play’; a certain ‘Council’ organised their concerts and saw to the overall image of the army and the war. Daughter Courage and Her Children was set on the ‘Eastern Front’; their enemies ‘didn’t like rock or the West’, so it looked like the band played a particular role in the clash of cultures. Impressions like this were required in higher spheres, in which the Council operated. The ‘Children’ had no idea about all this, of course, and the band performed in harsh environments in front of the troops, although the majority of the soldiers would have preferred to listen to cheerful music or sentimental songs ‘for the soul’ rather than their punk rock. Over time the band adapted itself to the audience and began to perform the songs they requested. Daughter Courage went along with it all just to keep the band together, since some of the band members wanted to join the army and get a taste of real fighting. She tried to get them to stay, even with sex, but the band fell apart, and in the end she remained alone with the drummer and performed a kind of punk striptease. At the end of the play she had to bare her breasts to a furious drum roll. And then everything drowned in darkness.

      Ingo chose Sanja at an audition, at which the candidates had to bare their boobs at the end, and prominent actresses boycotted this indignity. Only a handful of unestablished actresses and a few female exhibitionists turned up. So it was that Sanja received her first lead role, and from the very beginning there were witty comments that this was the only role officially given on account of an actress’s breasts. Sanja knew she’d have to act brilliantly to counteract that humour, otherwise her career would start off on the wrong foot in this small country and she’d become a metaphor for bare breasts in the main role.

      ‘It’ll be fine,’ I repeated.

      My hands rested on her shoulders.

      ‘Jerman and Doc and their horsing around – we’ve wasted so much time.’ She shook her head.

      She’d told me about that: Ingo didn’t speak Croatian, so Jerman and Doc were slack from the beginning with learning their lines. They goofed around at rehearsals and played Brecht in a rendition of their own: ‘Where’ll we go for a few after?’ ‘I can’t hack this no more!’ ‘Well, how ’bout Limited?’ ‘Why ya lookin’ at me like that?’ ‘Just look at that German – as if we were playing extra time!’

      Ingo barracked and gesticulated, he wanted them to dig their teeth in. He was convinced he was working with real professionals. But it just turned out that Jerman and Doc, in parallel, had both recently suffered marital shipwreck. Nursing their wounds, they spent whole nights dancing on a raft on the River Sava which had been declared a disco, and they came to rehearsals wasted. Somehow they managed the physical part of the acting, but they had no energy left for their lines. Sanja felt like a real nerd when she spoke her part to them: If he becomes a soldier he’ll end up beneath the grass so green, that much is clear. That will be the price of his bravery if he’s not sensible... Oh, will he be sensible? And she’d receive the answer: Don’t hassle me, OK? Just leave me, as of tomorrow I’ll be back to normal... Just keep going now, come on, just keep speaking as if I’d given you the proper answer.

      Things went on like this for a while until Jerman and Doc let things slide just a bit too far and started slipping in modern and slang words like ‘debacle’, ‘no-brainer’ and ‘aspirin’; Ingo probably just twigged to the word ‘aspirin’ and started following the script. Although he didn’t know a single word of Croatian, he quickly realised something was amiss. From then on, he came to the rehearsals with an assistant to check the spoken text, and work proceeded properly to make up for what had been let slip.

      Ingo had now lost faith in all of them, Sanja said. He’d become paranoid and considered her part of the conspiracy. He was growing a beard and had declared a dictatorship.

      ‘It’s a disaster,’ she groaned.

      ‘You do your bit and everything’ll be OK. Doc and Jerman are mental, but when the panic hits them they’ll get down to work.’

      I knew them well from my student days.

      ‘OK, I’m off,’ she said.

      * * *

      Private Jason Maple removes his mask. He’s 20 years old and says he’s happy the war has finally started.

      Everyone who’s squatted around in a dusty trench for months can hardly wait for something to happen, of course, it’s normal, since they’ve come here, otherwise nothing makes any sense, and sense is the most important thing. Even in war – sense is the most important thing. It’s incredibly important. Sense. You have to grasp for every scrap of sense, you just have to, for every propaganda of sense, for every lie of sense, cos... When there’s no sense, and there isn’t, you go round the bend, madness comes out of your ears, so you have to believe in sense, particularly in war, you have to believe in sense fervently, and even after the war you have to believe with the faith of a fanatic if you want it to make any sense, otherwise it doesn’t.

      Jason Maple, twenty years old – I watch as the dust flies up around him, whirls up, but all that has fuckin’ sense, everything is infused with the power of sense. It’s the worst - nothing is crazier than sense and the wish to be imbued with it.

      You have to have strong nerves, I said to Jason, I’ve got some experience, war has begun, and war is boring, boring, you have no idea how boring it can be, it’s never as concentrated as it is in a film, here you’re constantly on hold, and then when it happens you whack your helmet on and you can’t see, you can’t see even when you’re hit, you can’t see it at all, once when it was all over I looked at my wound, it was under my arm, and when I raised my arm it opened up, that was it, the most interesting sight of the war, cos war is boring, it’s not at all like a film, it’s so boring