Our Man in Iraq. Robert Perisic

in front of me, so she kept contradicting her mother all the time we there – and not just about the wall. You couldn’t really call it an argument, more a mutual show of disrespect which seemed to keep them cheerful and create a special closeness... In fact, I felt their taunting and teasing actually showed how much they were at home.

      I couldn’t talk with her mother like that – I respected her – so I was condemned to silence. Also, my future mother-in-law kept her jabs and wise-talk exclusively for Sanja, not me – because she respected me.

      Having fallen silent about the wall, I found it hard to talk at all... Our people are like that, I meditated: they’d always prefer to build a wall than knock one down. They always liked having two rooms rather than one. They loved to count rooms. Now why wasn’t I sensible like them?

      I spoke very cautiously with Sanja’s dad, of course. He had disappointment written on his brow. Politics was his particular chagrin, all the parties were a let-down. He watched the news avidly, read the newspaper and was disappointed time and time again. That seemed to be his main occupation. He wanted to know if we journalists were disappointed too. ‘Oh yes!’ I exclaimed and mentioned a few practical examples. I felt a kind of need to join him in disappointment, but maybe he thought I even wanted to outdo him in that because I was a journalist of sorts in Zagreb and had the opportunity to get disappointed first-hand, so in a way he didn’t want to listen; whenever I opened my mouth he’d start explaining how much Zagreb was out of step with the situation on the ground, which was one of the things which disappointed him most.

      I sipped beer, relaxed and watched the news. The mass of empty beer cans grew, all rattling in the rubbish bin until they were crushed down into a smaller pile.

      We frenetically waved goodbye from the car. I thought of telling Sanja that one actually didn’t look so lost among all the ‘practical’ little tables at my parent’s place, after a drink or two. ‘My folks have got a nice courtyard and a garden, you’ll see,’ I said cheerfully.

      Then we arrived and I saw the garage.

      They’d told me about the new garage and were pleased with themselves for fitting it perfectly into the courtyard. But I saw straight away that the courtyard was gone. A small amount of space remained but you could see it was unused space.

      They proudly opened up the garage for us by remote control as if they were officially opening a new production line, and I parked inside.

      ‘Oh my God,’ I said to Sanja.

      Yep, my folks had become bourgeois, so to speak, and we sat there like we had at Sanja’s folks’. The new edifice in the courtyard stuck out like a sore thumb. And you couldn’t say anything against it. I was about to say a word and they came down on me like a ton of bricks: How dare I cruise in from Zagreb and lecture them – from Zagreb, mind you! Zagreb with its holier-than-thouness was like a red rag to a bull. They needed that new addition: Our garage is our castle.

      My mum whispered to Sanja on that occasion, forging a female alliance, that she didn’t need to listen to me all the time because men were stupid: let them have their whims. My father generally followed her remarks with a smile, and here and there heckled his old lady just for fun, which Sanja was supposed to find amusing. I tried to mediate these conversations as far as possible by drawing attention to myself, but my parents only had eyes for their daughter-in-law because, seeing as I’d brought her, it was clear to them that we were going to get married.

      Then there we were again, back in our rented flat. Things had stopped developing just by themselves and I didn’t know exactly what we’d think up, what lifestyle, we just had to avoid repeating the same old patterns, I told Sanja. We had to break through in a new direction, bore a tunnel, build a bold viaduct, whatever.

      But then Boris had popped up, and now he was a feature in the landscape like my parents’ garage.

      I simply couldn’t explain her the whole depth of the problem, so I turned the laptop towards her: ‘Read some of his stuff and tell me what you think.’

      She looked at me quizzically.

      ‘Open one of his mails, any one,’ I said.

      * * *