Our Man in Iraq by Robert Perisic

Author:Robert Perisic [Perisic, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9781936787067
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 16449037
Publisher: Black Balloon Publishing
Published: 2007-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

That was too long for an anecdote in the newspaper, I figured as I left Olenić’s building. The rain was easing up and I was hungry, almost like Vasil, so I retro-ed into a dank diner left over from the previous system. I had the old waitress in orthopedic work shoes bring me tripe soup. Usually I found backwaters like this relaxing, but today I remembered that I had ignored Milka’s calls.

I felt that I couldn’t beat around the bush with Milka. She a mother and I just a journalist. Provincial women know their area of operation: family and extended-family concerns. They leave politics and other foreign affairs to the menfolk, but as far as extended-family matters are concerned—if someone happens to need supervising, keeping tabs on, or brainwashing, if a confession and an expression of penitence have to be elicited—they’re on deck. I’d always known that Milka was the informal boss of the extended-family ministry of the interior. She went to visit everyone, called up regularly, inquired, and interrogated. She even kept in touch with distant relatives on other continents.

When she came to our place she always complained about her son, and she provoked my old ma to complain about me too. So in my presence they complained together, about my unfinished studies, about me not yet being married, not having children, not having a flat of my own, and guzzling beer by the gallon. This yammering was their medium, and it devastated everything around them. Milka very quickly made me feel miserable even when I thought things were going wonderfully. I was glad not to have seen Milka since she had that falling-out with my ma. That was where the conflict began. Milka was the elder and acted like an authority and couldn’t forgive my ma for aligning herself contrary to caucus instructions. But my old ma persisted bravely in her mutiny.

The downside was that she had to endure the long-term consequences. Milka had done thorough groundwork to turn the whole extended family against my ma and make her a kind of dissident, isolating our family from the rest of the clan. As a consequence, my mother became embittered, as edgy as a Soviet defector with the KGB on her heels.

Since we didn’t have anything else to talk about, my mother continually informed me about the development of the conflict, which from here in Zagreb looked like a soap opera. I sometimes recounted that colorful Mediterranean imbroglio with a smile at parties. All the same, my ma carried out her dissident struggle and it kept her alive; otherwise, life as a pensioner would have killed her.

Yet I hadn’t thought about that in depth, the way Olenić thought about the economy. From my perspective, the whole thing seemed unreal and unrelated to me. But thinking about it now it was clear that my old ma had one ace up her sleeve: me. She gave everyone my number to prove the modern power of our faction. Perhaps we didn’t have any real support on the ground, but we held the capital and the media.

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