He really was putting on a dramatic performance.
He continued: ‘What I want to say is that nothing is going to happen by itself! Well, granted, there are things like 9/11 – you can’t really say that was a media-produced event...’
‘Some say it was,’ I interjected.
‘Like bloody hell it was,’ he snubbed me. ‘People flew the planes up and crashed them. But every newspaper, even the stupidest, is going to cover an attack like that, right? That means there’s no bread to be earned there for us. Nor in this attack on Iraq, although we sent someone there. That’s not it. It all goes too fast, troops tear along the road through the desert. We’re a weekly and we can’t cover that. It goes too fast.’ He pointed to the telly: ‘That’s for TV.’
He waited so we could follow him.
‘We can’t cover what’s visible, do you understand? That’s what TV does, and then the dailies gnaw the bones – that’s not for us!’
He really has prepared for this, I thought. Once he used to bullshit around in the pubs. Just look what a position makes of a man! You could feel that the old Pero had finally ebbed away. As actors say: he’s grown into his role: the lead role.
‘So what do we cover?’
We all looked at Pero the Chief.
‘We cover the invisible! The imperceptible!’ he thundered.
This left me baffled. I started to wonder where he got this theory from.
‘I want you to be investigative, to reflect, to come up with things! Devise and concoct things, show me something new! Turbo-politics was yesterday. There are no more massacres, Tudjman is dead, Milošević is finished! There’s no real drama any more. You have to turn things around. Search for new hysteria. Where’s the old hysteria gone? It must still be around somewhere. You have to search for it where you haven’t searched before.’
Especially in the Gorski Kotar and Lika regions, I thought. (I’d heard those words in the morning weather forecast.)
‘It was easy in the nineties,’ the Chief continued. ‘OK, we were under attack and that wasn’t easy. But the war provided information. That was our contribution to global information: we made breaking news.
The world took note of us. But not any more. Now we’re ordinary.’ He was right: we were simply stagnating. Vegetating. But things had to go on.
‘Now you have to make stories out of ordinary things. We have to shape this new reality. You’re still searching for the old stories, but what’s happening now is amorphous! Because you haven’t shaped it yet! It’s natural that our circulation is falling! That means: I want creation!’
Hmm, that didn’t sound bad at all...
‘That’s what I want. Otherwise there’ll be some swift sackings,’ he concluded, with all the sympathy he could muster.
Hmm, that did sound bad.
Pero the Chief fell silent. It seemed the poetic part of the programme was over.
I get it, the boss has told him to give people a ‘short sharp shock’: a flurry of redundancy notices, scapegoating, fear, motivation... Hell, we had a crisis with every new editor. Why else did we have a new editor? He came as a saviour. In the name of the saviour, ruin always has to be nigh – all religions are based on that.
We can’t do without ruin and the abyss.
People in Croatia were constantly going on about crisis and ruin and shouted it from the rooftops. We ourselves hyped up our headlines with doom and gloom to jolt people into life.
It seemed I needed a jolt, to be sure.
Zap! OK. I’d got my arse into gear now.
I glanced around. The others had come to their senses too.
Young Dario responded best to the shock therapy: he was jolted wide awake and his eyes gleamed like a cheetah’s although he was so lanky that he looked more like an antelope.
After a pause Pero said: ‘And there’s GEP too, as you all know.’
For some reason he looked around at that ‘as you all know’ as if he was searching for an intruder. Then he rested his gaze on Secretary, the old status seeker, who acted the Sphinx at editorial meetings.
He was no ordinary secretary. Once he travelled with me to Moscow, where I interviewed the oligarch Teofilakovsky who was buying up hotels and sponsoring operas in Croatia. I introduced myself as ‘Toni, journalist’, and the Russians scorned me as a busybody, but Secretary introduced himself as ‘the secretary’ and was accorded deep respect. I still hadn’t fully understood his function, but the Russians figured him out straight away: he was a vital remnant of the old system, except that he’d shed all ideology in the cataclysmic system change.
He told me there in vodka-induced elation that he’d once been a Communist, only later to try out all of the parliamentary parties. He’d finally come to rest in the Croatian Peasant Party. He’d discovered they were the best when he first went out to a rural event – there was real hospitality in the country, he told me. Afterwards you needed at least one day of sick leave. The Peasant Party was probably a doubleedged sword, he said, because since being a member his cholesterol had gone up and his gout had come back, like in the good old days.
‘Secretary will brief someone on the GEP topic,’ Pero the Chief explained.
We were constantly exposing GEP’s covert attempts to monopolise the market. Damn GEP had secret firms. They were at us from all sides; they stole topics from us and featured them first. We suspected they had a mole among the editorial staff who leaked our sensations to them. In order to demoralise us, they bought off our journalists by offering them extravagant salaries. Every little while someone would disappear and we’d never mention him again. The PEG management responded to these low-down attacks by burning bridges: all PEG’s journalists had to produce several anti-GEP pieces, engaging in heated polemics with them, calling them criminals and foreign spies, so that in future they’d be unable to go over to those they’d so zealously abused. We didn’t need rafting and paintball – newspaper warfare was our team building exercise.
Before I understood the tactics of burning bridges I’d already distinguished myself in the newspaper war. Now I was attached to PEG. That’s how it is in small countries: the room to manoeuvre is abominably narrow.
Secretary held a note in his hand and looked around through his glasses.
‘Any volunteers?’ the Chief asked, a little surprised.
I saw Dario fidgeting on his chair – you could tell he was about to volunteer, but he didn’t know if the others had precedence. He knew it was a great honour to take on an anti-GEP topic. In the end he raised two fingers and was the lucky one.
I was probably like that once, too, before I cottoned on – basically until the current boss bought us. A fallen tennis star. During the war he played recreationally with the former president and let him win points, for which Mr President rewarded him with discount shares in several state firms.
At that time the president personally edited the daily current-affairs programme, The Evening News, forcing us to be fighters for the truth, and the circulation of the free media rose. But after we won democracy the truth became more accessible. The circulation fell and recently a preferential investor, the ex-tennis star, had moved in to become our chief shareholder. I was naively surprised; it wasn’t logical to me, probably because, according to emotive logic, I’d thought we were fighting against... against something. But in economic terms the situation was clear: we had no dough, but he did.
Now, finally, I was only working here because it was a job.
I took out the