Our Man in Iraq. Robert Perisic
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That came out by itself because whenever I met someone she’d want to know: Did they ask about me? I know part of our conversations off by heart.
‘...and said to say hello,’ I added.
She swallowed and said: ‘I rang Ela today.’
‘Really?’ I wondered. ‘Why did you ask me then?’
‘I didn’t ask you anything.’
‘Didn’t you?’ I said, taking some more spag.
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Want any more?’
‘No,’ she answered.
‘All right,’ I said, helping myself to the rest.
‘I invited her to the première. She was very happy.’
‘Sure, you have to invite your old friend,’ I said.
‘How does she look?’ Sanja continued. ‘I haven’t seen her since... I don’t know when.’
My mouth was full and I made a face which meant I didn’t know what to say. Ela had been through periods of depression in recent years, and Sanja told me after I swore secrecy that she’d also been having clinical treatment.
‘Was she fat?’ Sanja asked.
‘She hasn’t lost weight,’ I said.
‘It’s a disaster,’ Sanja sighed. ‘First she punishes herself with diets, then she screws someone and falls unhappily in love, then she bingeeats again and ends up getting depressed.’
Sanja used to tell me this often, wondering at the way things with Ela kept repeating themselves.
I don’t know why we became such experts on Ela. We weren’t actually in touch with her any more. But we often talked about people that way; we harmonised our opinions and felt we were an organised entity.
‘In fact, I don’t know if she did say to say hello,’ I admitted. ‘Maybe she didn’t.’
‘Who knows if you saw her at all,’ Sanja said and looked at the TV, which was on with the volume down low.
I looked too: it was an afternoon talk show with a whole battery of columnists from women’s magazines.
‘Look, look, turn it up!’ I said.
I thought I’d seen him before. Yeah, it was him, Icho Kamera! He was in the audience, holding the microphone and asking a question.
‘The remote’s over there somewhere,’ Sanja said.
I zipped over to the couch, got the remote and turned up the volume, but Icho was already gone.
The popular compère Ana blinked charmingly as if wondering whether she’d missed a joke. Icho, a real country bumpkin, had obviously asked something out of context.
‘I can’t say, hmm,’ said one of the guests. ‘I wouldn’t want to judge at first glance,’ another columnist declined with a polite smile; Icho Kamera with his rugged Balkan face, moustache and grizzled sideburns looked at them with a parliamentarian’s earnestness, only to nod glumly at the end.
Who knows what Icho asked.
The compère quickly moved on to another question from the audience.
‘Stone the squids, who’da thought Icho Kamera would make it thru to Ana’s programme! I canny believe it!’ I said.
‘Is he one of your relatives?’
‘No. Have I told you about him?’
‘No, I just thought he might have been because you switched to dialect straight away.’
‘Uh?’ I hadn’t thought about that. I just wanted to make her laugh.
* * *
As kids we used to shout: ‘There’s Icho Kamera!’ We were happy to see him because he lived in the very next village. But our fathers commented: ‘Fools always rush in!’
Icho annoyed them; there was nothing at all special about him, but for decades he’d been chasing every opportunity to go on TV and radio and to get himself in the papers.
He had his system and invested a lot of energy. At Hajduk football matches he’d stand in an empty section of the grandstand so the camera would catch him for a moment, and then he’d wave. All the cameramen knew Icho Kamera; people said they were sick of him and insiders claimed he paid them to film him; he was a well-todo farmer who grew lettuce on an industrial scale but always went around wearing the same sombre old jumper and jacket, so people didn’t know if he was a miser or spent all his money travelling around after the cameras and bribing low-level media personnel. Football matches were his speciality because from there, doing a deal with the cameraman, he was best able to make it through to a mass audience. But Icho Kamera didn’t pick and choose; if he was caught in a traffic jam after a car accident he’d immediately set off for the scene of the accident and hassle the photographer. The local media’s crime news archives contain a vast number of photographs of Icho Kamera who, seemingly by chance, is at the edge of the image showing a mangled Lada and a Peugeot, or we see him walking in front of a foreign exchange office which had been robbed by two masked attackers, probably drug addicts, who stormed it in broad daylight, threatened the teller with a pistol and told her to ‘take all the money out of the safe and hand it over,’ according to the police report.
TAKE ALL THE MONEY OUT OF THE SAFE AND HAND IT OVER, the drug addicts roared, and Icho just happened to be passing by; that’s how I imagined turbulent city life as a village child.
Icho Kamera evoked certain emotions in me; after all, he was my first link to the outside world. Whether it was a vox pop by a fan leaving the stadium downhearted after the team had been knocked out in the UEFA Cup qualifying round or the opinion of a chance passer-by on German unification, Icho Kamera from the neighbouring village would come round the corner as an anonymous citizen who simply had a nose for surveys.
Later, when I planned to become an artist and developed an ironic distance to everything – and I mean everything – I intended to do some kind of ‘project’, as we called it, with Icho Kamera, that unsung hero of media culture; I got my younger sister to cut photographs out of the newspapers and video the appearances of Icho Kamera, tasks she willingly accepted, and she collected several video snippets as well as five or six photographs; no sooner had she got her friends from school to also keep an eye out than my mother found out what she was doing; she gave me a ferocious talking-to and explicitly forbade my sister from being involved, as if this was all something fiendish. Only afterwards, wondering what to do with the project, did I think of asking Icho Kamera personally to show me his archive; he was bound to have it all documented.
The summer the war began I once saw him from the bus; he was coming out of a shop; I got out at the next stop, rushed to catch up with him and introduced myself, but Icho Kamera just gave me a sullen look and continued on past as haughtily as a real star. I stopped for a moment before setting off after him again, like a paparazzo, to explain the project to him, going on about how great I found it that he’d been propelling himself into the quota of chance passers-by for so many years, and that it was a kind of deconstruction of the system; until he stopped and said: ‘Hop it or my boot’s gonna fin’ an arse to kick!’
That knucklehead! That loony – he really thought he was someone. I watched him from behind and realised he was not a likeable figure at all, but more the symptom of a disease.
I was irate because I knew that without his contribution I wouldn’t be able to carry out the project which I’d thought would make me famous.
That encounter dampened my enthusiasm for the project, one of the many I didn’t finish, and besides, the war began, and various chance passers-by began to die, becoming media heroes of the day, until there were too many of them. I stopped following the matches and reading the regional newspapers, and I hadn’t seen Icho