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 Kamera for quite some time until he appeared on Ana’s afternoon talk show; he’d obviously come to Zagreb by train to be in the audience, and he got hold of the microphone and asked an unintelligible question.
I 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
