stood before him now with that whole paragraph in my mind.
He looked at me as if he was pondering the inscrutable. Then he said:
‘The guy covered it, although it’s a bit all over the place... But OK.
When’s he coming back?’
A bit all over the place – just a bit? Ha, ha. Not in my wildest dreams had I intended to show the Chief what the original pieces looked like. Fortunately they only came to my email address. I edited as I’d never edited before, filleted the reports of foreign correspondents, pilfered passages from the internet, soaked up CNN like a sponge and rewrote everything again. I didn’t feel I’d be able to make anything decent out of them. And now, to top it all off, I had to somehow get the idiot back from Iraq.
* * *
The Yanks took out some Brits. They downed a helicopter with their friends in it. Poor coordination, ‘Identify yourself’, ‘Identify yourself’ – and blam! That’s friendly fire for you!
But it’s all logical.
We’re fighting for the Iraqis, for their democracy, for their well-being. We all love each other. Every victim is an accident. It’s all friendly fire.
Friendly fire has been around ever since the notion of humanity has existed. Christianity too, of course, and crusading Christianity and missionary Christianity faced with pagan tribes, where they killed half so the others would understand, everything is friendly, baby, get that, it’s only us in the Balkans who still kill each other with hatred, without real ambitions. The rest is friendly fire. The Brits got stroppy, but they shouldn’t have. The Yanks don’t have it easy either. It’s all the same: Brits, Iraqis, civilians – wherever you fire you hit a friend. I don’t know what more to say about that.
Accounts
I called Sanja. It turned out that she couldn’t come and see the flat.
I sat down to have a coffee with Charly and now he was telling me about a woman he’d ‘screwed because he was smashed’.
With his receding chin and wandering eye, he was less than an Adonis himself, but he said ‘the woman was ugly’; besides, ‘she really thought it was something’.
The poor thing, I thought; she didn’t know that Charly despised all women he managed to end up in bed with and only fell in love with blondes beyond his reach.
But he was tenacious: he became best friends with those blondes, masochistically went out with them and tried, at least in public, to give the impression of being a couple. Silva was one of those blondes; she gave up modelling, with an extramarital baby in arms, and joined the editorial staff via Charly.
If she’d been sitting with us he definitely wouldn’t have been telling me about that woman, although it wouldn’t have bothered Silva. She, for a joke, often mentioned hot young things keen on him. She evidently aimed to divert his erotic attention from herself.
‘But, man, when the morning light filtered in through the blinds –,’
Charly described the horrific moment.
I listened to him. He could only screw a chick when he forgot his high standards. When he woke up in the morning and realised that the hot young things in the porn videos were much better, he got a shock.
‘And now the woman keeps calling me and wants to go out for coffee.’
I wanted to tell him: Well, go out for coffee then – your masochistic friendships with models have gone on long enough. But that didn’t match the image he’d made of himself.
‘The craziest thing is that I splurged on her. We drank probably twenty cocktails and I overdrafted my account,’ he was surprised at himself. Of course, I thought: Charly had sunk all his savings into an eighteenyear- old Jaguar and spent every bit of spare cash on repairs. And with what he has left he buys extra-virgin olive oil for three hundred kunas a bottle from an Istrian farmer ‘because it’s the only sort that’s any good’. The truth is the truth – he suffered from high standards in every respect. He even made a kind of career out of it; he began to write gastronomic columns, recommended the most expensive wines, reviewed restaurants and created a sophisticated image in the midst of our post-revolution hangover, while driving around in his fat Jag. You could always find out from Charly what was trendy and what you weren’t allowed to ridicule: sailing, diving and headhunters had recently enjoyed immunity, as well as Asian films, gardening, slow food and you name it. I wasn’t quite up to date.
‘But the truth is the truth, she’s a good shag.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, she’s a maniac,’ Charly said. ‘She does everything.’
‘Uh?’
‘www perversion dot com.’
He laughed.
I realised he must see himself in those women, yet he had no sympathy for those similar to himself.
‘But what can you do,’ Charly sighed. ‘Shit happens.’
I looked around, waiting for all this to blow over.
‘You know her, in fact, ‘ Charly said.
‘What? Who?’
‘The woman. She knows you.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Ela,’ he said. I recoiled.
‘Fuck, man, you really are an arsehole!’
Charly laughed and nodded with a cheesy grin.
‘Just look at him!’ I said, glancing around as if addressing a jury.
‘What’s so damn funny? She’s a friend of my girlfriend’s.’
Something was amusing him, but I couldn’t tell what.
‘Hey, take it easy!’ he said. ‘She’s not your girlfriend!’
He was right – technically speaking I had no right to object. ‘She’s not ugly. If she lost a few kilos she’d be cool,’ I admitted.
‘Well, sort of, yeah,’ Charly agreed, as if he’d suddenly become serious.
‘The girl’s OK!’ I declared.
‘Sure she’s OK, I never claimed otherwise,’ he defended himself.
‘What are you getting so hung up about?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘What is there to get hung up about?!’
At that moment Silva came along.
‘But maybe it’s not right to, kind of, talk around like that, y’know –,’
I continued.
I intentionally didn’t fall silent when Silva sat
