Our Man in Iraq. Robert Perisic
that academic year while the country hurtled towards war.
We were still dutiful sons of our parents and thought our elders knew where they were leading us. Then the war began in earnest. Although it’d been long in the brewing, it still caught us all by surprise. It was hard to muster the concentration to study. Moreover, both Markatović and I spent the end of that summer in uniform and missed the start of the third semester, but in the end we were able to present ourselves as even greater guys – heroes, almost. We enrolled in second year on the basis of those elastic wartime documents: we had army certificates, and the lecturers didn’t use us to set an example in exactitude.
During this period I saw the world fall apart. Nothing was permanent, authorities faded and people flinched before us. We realised that we belonged to a generation which had a moral advantage because it was defending all those old folk accustomed to the moulds and models of socialism. Lost as they were, they patted us on the shoulder as if they were thanking us for something. We vocally despised socialism and they agreed with us on that. We despised their life’s experience and they agreed with us on that too. We disdained all they’d done and stood for, and again they agreed with us. To leave no doubt that the future belonged to us, we disdained everything which until yesterday had been of any worth. They agreed with us on all that.
Markatović now came to uni wearing his camouflage jacket, and I wore mine when I needed a staff member’s signature. Our self-confidence grew, we despised everyone and everything at uni; basically we were up ourselves. We spent most of our time in the canteen, getting blotto like big, disappointed men racked by lovesickness early in life and on a mission to prove it. The war went on, and in the 1991-92 academic year we were allegedly still studying Economics, down in the canteen, drinking beer by the bottle and frightening the faculty staff with our subcultural rebellion, for which the war provided an unexpected pretext. We found it amusing that no one contradicted us, although we were just ordinary arseholes. Once I defined our situation in these terms, and Markatović laughed. He’d get sloshed in the canteen and then go up to people, wearing his uniform, and ask them: ‘Why does no one contradict me when I’m just an ordinary arsehole?’ He grinned like a loony after asking them.
We even tried out our crude humour on the girls to see if we could scare them. That was fun, in a strange way. But this lifestyle led to isolation. We no longer went to lectures at all: we felt we’d lose part of our libertine integrity if we sat there like good little sons of our parents and listened to those crusty lecturers while war profiteers and politicians privatised state firms, the poor butchered the poor, concentration camps sprang up all over Bosnia, and reports came in about mass rape.
If you looked closer, you could see we were barricading ourselves in the canteen to hide from the world.
Although we never would have admitted it to each other, we were shite like the others, rickety and rotten through and through, but we wore the masks of tough lads, not knowing how else to defend ourselves. We went to the canteen for a bit longer, purely out of habit; besides, there were none of the concerts we’d come to the metropolis for, and the bars around the city were full of guys like us, plus the occasional real psycho.
Summer was in the air again, the low-intensity war dragged on, the exam season began and students sat out on the terraces around the faculty building while we were still drinking down in the dark – isolated, like self-convicted felons. We stared into our academic records and realised we had no idea what that faculty was about. We were a bit surprised. Still, we never doubted that we’d be able to get into the swing of things when the deadlines drew close.
But we had no intention of admitting defeat. We simply concluded that uni was shit and not our thing. We belonged elsewhere, somewhere better – we were damn artists, after all! No one understood us. Everyone there was counting imaginary money in advance, what were we doing among those squares and yes-men anyway?! We spoke a different language. They say Croatian and Serbian are different, and back then everything was done to make them differ even more, but this gulf was incomparably greater! We’d entertained them for two years, wasting our talent, and they didn’t give a damn.
‘We’ll never make it good here!’ Markatović said.
‘Never make it good,’ I repeated, as if swearing an oath.
So it was that we found a new path when the right moment came – after the eighth beer in the canteen, when summer was in the air. Our rebellion, which had built up down in the cellar, finally exploded, and we decided to go to the university registry, pick up all our documents and devote ourselves to art. I remember us rolling up there drunk, the ladies from the registry looking at us strangely, and us cheerfully going out into the sunshine with all our papers. Markatović was so exhilarated that he flung them into the air, and we grabbed them as they fluttered down on the gentle breeze in the parking lot... The girls were wearing miniskirts, the war stretched out like chewing gum, and we were finally free.
We fell around laughing.
Marijuana
Later Markatović enrolled in first-year Literature and even published a book of poetry, which received several reviews. They said he was promising – if only he would modernise the manuscript a little. But not a single woman fell in love with him over his poetry, which was probably why something in him broke. His path to literary fame petered into endless procrastination, and then he met Dijana, who didn’t read poetry, and they had twins, two identical boys. Now he ‘had a family to feed’, so he founded his own company...
As I looked at him, puffy and bloated, a witness of my stupid biography, I realised I didn’t look so great myself. Anyway, after Economics I decided to switch to Drama. The competition was fierce – they were all kids from arty families, but I made it all the same.
My folks still placed all their hope in my Economics, especially under the new capitalist system, and pronounced the word for Drama – dramaturgija – in a mystic, tragic voice, like our neighbour Ivanka back in the early eighties when she found out her son was smoking hash. We all heard Ivanka going round and round their yard, holding her head in her hands and moaning: ‘Marijuaaana... Marijuaaana, oh my God... Marijuaaana...’
It sounded hair-raising; that long, undulating word was taboo under socialism; Ivanka swayed like a cobra mesmerised by a snake charmer, and that’s just how my mother behaved many years later...
‘Draaamaturgija... Draaamatuuurgija, oh my God... Draaamatuuurgijaaa,’ she wailed, holding her head in her hands.
When word got around that marijuana was a soft drug, everyone realised I’d moved on to harder stuff.
My parents, who until then had been disinterested in culture, now became its bitter enemies. When the culture programme began on TV they didn’t change the channel straight away any more. Now they glowered and slighted: ‘Huh!’, ‘Talk about a bunch of smart-arses!’, ‘And that’s s’posed to feed you?!’ and so on. It was hardly surprising: war had impoverished them, capitalism had deprived them of their rights, and culture had killed off their last hopes.
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 promotional event to vernissage; where I drank vermouth, which apparently is good for digestion; and in the evenings I’d eat canapés at exhibition openings and premières so I had something to digest after so much vermouth. That was a life full of ‘cultural highlights’. And then, unsuspectingly, I once mentioned in front of the chief editor that I’d studied Economics; he looked at me in disbelief which quickly turned to enthusiasm. 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 chief editor 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