We drove into town in Laura’s car. Outside the bakery was a queue, the latecomers getting in before lunchtime closing. ‘You need to come into town early for the best bread,’ I told Laura.
She craned her neck to see beyond the line of people. ‘There’s hardly anything left,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to another shop.’
‘This is the only one.’
She looked at me and laughed. ‘Really? Somebody needs to open another one. They’d make a fortune.’
‘There used to be another one.’
‘Don’t tell me it closed for lack of business.’
‘The people went away.’
She glanced at me and shrugged. ‘Oh well, nothing to do but wait. I expect you have things you need to do.’
In the Zodijak I drank an espresso. No Fabjan. After fifteen minutes I returned to the bakery where I found Laura at the counter talking loudly and pointing with fluttering hands. The woman behind the counter faced her squarely, blankly refusing to join in the game of sign language. I stepped past the waiting people.
‘Duro. Thank goodness.’
‘What would you like?’
‘I’d like a loaf of bread. Can you ask if there is any wholemeal?’
I doubted there would be such a thing but I translated anyway. The woman, who had been married to a cousin of mine for a while, replied in Cro. ‘No.’
‘No,’ I repeated. ‘There is only white bread.’
‘Can I order some wholemeal, maybe for tomorrow?’
I translated.
‘What do you think?’ replied my cousin’s ex-wife, again in Cro, which of course was all she spoke.
‘She apologises,’ I said to Laura. ‘Unfortunately they’re too busy to take special orders. You can only have what’s here. As you see, they have a lot of customers.’
‘OK, well I’ll take one of those.’ Laura pointed at a large loaf and the woman put it into a bag. ‘What’s in those pastries? Is it jam or chocolate?’
‘Gold coins,’ replied the woman. She pointed at the three types of pastries. ‘Gold coins in here. Lost treasure in this one. The last one’s chocolate, we ran out of treasure.’
Somebody behind tittered.
‘Custard,’ I told Laura. ‘Like sort of crème patissière. Not so good. The last one is chocolate. They’re the best.’
‘Then I’ll have three chocolate. What would you like, Duro? Have one on me.’
‘Thank you.’ I gave the order.
‘Lucky you,’ said the ex-wife. She raised an eyebrow. I ignored her.
‘How much?’ Laura asked, glancing between me and the woman.
‘800 kunas.’
Laura turned to me and shook her head slightly. ‘Sorry, what did she say?’
‘8 kunas,’ I said, and helped her with the coins.
We were back in the car. Laura apologised. ‘Thanks, Duro. I don’t think she was being very friendly.’
‘It’s just her way.’
‘I thought I’d offended her.’
I said, ‘She is an angry person; her husband left her.’
‘I’m not surprised. Is that the hardware shop?’ She slowed the car.
‘No, there’s another shop where the prices are better. Turn left here.’
We entered the shop and went to the back where the tiles were stored. I picked up two packs of ten. The prices in both shops were much the same, but Fabjan was part-owner of the other one and I had no interest in making any more money for him. I took a few other things we needed and said to Laura, ‘What colour paint do you want – for the windows and the door?’ When Laura hesitated I said, ‘Can I make a suggestion?’
‘Of course.’
‘Simplest if you choose the same colour. Makes the job easier. Where the wood is sound I rub it down, no need to burn the paint off.’
‘OK,’ agreed Laura. ‘It’s a beautiful colour. Almost the colour of cornflowers. You never see it in England, the sky’s too grey, I suppose. You need the sun to bring out hues like that.’
‘People say the colour keeps insects away, mosquitoes especially.’
‘That’s the second time I’ve heard that. In the southern states of America they have a very similar shade of blue, haint blue, it’s called. You see it everywhere, especially on verandas and porches. They say exactly the same thing, that it repels mosquitoes. Then in Savannah somebody told us that the real reason for the blue was that it kept away restless ghosts and spirits, an old slave superstition, apparently. That’s why it’s always on the outside of the house.’ She laughed.
I said, ‘Here in many villages we have a festival where the men dress up in masks and animal skins to chase the evil spirits from the woods. If you are here in February, you will be able to see it.’
Back at the house I spent twenty minutes sorting the tool shed and storing the things we had bought. When I went back inside Laura’s daughter Grace was cleaning the windows. ‘Dobar dan,’ I said and startled her. Her head jerked up, she glanced at me and quickly away.
‘Hi,’ she said. A tiny squeak accompanied the word and an odd little humming, like the sound of a tuning fork.
Outside I heaved the ladder into position and climbed onto the roof. To make each repair I had to slide the flat bars into position, descend to fetch a tile, climb back up to fit it. I threw the broken tiles down. It would have been a help to have somebody with me, to pass me the tiles, and the obvious candidate was Laura’s son, of whom there was no sign. Even with the hindrance of going up and down the ladder, I got on with the job. Solitude suits me. I am not given to the camaraderie of the building site with its undercurrent of aggression and where, if you choose to work rather than shirk, you are asking to be picked on by the others. I’d worked enough sites not to let it bother me; I got on with the job and I could take care of myself. But given the choice I’d rather work alone. I often thought I would like to be a writer, alone in a room. But for that I would have needed to go to college. I was good at history, languages. But my father dissuaded me: no jobs, unless you came from certain families and even then – did I know how people lived in the cities? So-called professionals, three generations in the same small apartment, endlessly partitioning rooms into smaller and smaller spaces. Work with your hands, he said. That way you will be your own master, hold onto your destiny and always eat. My father was right.
‘Where did you learn to speak such good English, Duro?’ Laura asked while we sat together over the kitchen table. She handed me a beer. Earlier in the afternoon a fridge had been delivered and now it was the end of the day the beer was almost cold enough.
‘I worked for a while on the coast,’ I said.
‘What did you do there?’
‘Many things. I was a waiter. Once I was a handyman in a hotel. Mostly I worked the boats.’
‘Did you travel?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It was not so easy then as it is now. And besides I had little money. What of you?’
‘A bit, yes – on holiday mostly. The furthest I ever went was to Pakistan, to visit a friend who was working there. People stared at me the whole time. We went to a restaurant one evening and I was the only woman in the whole place. Their women aren’t allowed out, and then even when they are they have to be covered, you know, their faces. White women attract a lot of attention.’
I didn’t know about Pakistan. I asked, ‘Is this your first time here?’
‘I came here when I was little. It must have been the late ’60s or maybe early ’70s. I came with my parents. I fell in love for the first time.’
I told Laura she looked too young to have been in love as long ago as that.
Laura laughed, a proper laugh, not the titter women give when they think they’re being flattered and which Laura produced every time she felt awkward. ‘I was just a kid.
Not much more than five or so. I know it sounds ridiculous, and of course it wasn’t really love – but it was the first time I felt that kind of emotion, something that was different from the way I loved my parents or my sister, something far more thrilling. I can remember the exact moment, the place, what it looked like, smelt like . . . rosemary, lavender and thyme – all those herbs that grow wild, mixed with dust and salt from the sea. The heat. Even what I was wearing, which was a swimsuit with a big yellow sun on it. I was standing on a beach with my sister, my parents were in a boat offshore. I don’t know how we came to be separated like that, but we were and probably it wasn’t that far to swim, but to me it seemed a very long way. Everyone in the boat was calling to me, even my sister tried to encourage me into the water, but I panicked and started crying. I’d only just learned to swim and I still used my rubber ring; trouble was the rubber ring was on the boat. I refused to get into the water without it.’
‘Didn’t one of your parents bring it to you?’
‘No. The boat boy, the son or nephew of the man who owned the boat, he’d come with us to help out for the day and was completely at one with the water, he grabbed it and dived in. I worshipped him for the rest of the holiday. I guess he’d have been about nine. I still remember the sight of him diving from the prow of the boat. It made me feel special. He was my hero.’ Laura laughed again, softly.
At sundown I walked the dogs on the hills. The lights of Gost separated me from a vast darkness: the sea, two hours’ drive away. Zeka picked up a scent and ran ahead with her nose to the ground, Kos behind. I left them for a short while, to see where they were headed, and then called them to heel before they could disappear into the pine plantation. Together we entered the trees. Inside it was closer to night. The pine needles were soft underfoot, soundless. There is a place where the deer gather on the other side of the plantation and the trees give way to a clearing. At about fifty metres from our destination I told the dogs to go down and wait for me, which they did, sinking slowly to their haunches. They liked to pretend they didn’t care, Kos and Zeka, but under the skin every nerve and muscle twitched. I moved slowly forward, balancing my weight on the outside edges of my feet; every ten steps I stopped and listened. In the silence of the forest I counted on hearing the deer before I saw them and so it happened: a group of eight grazing at the edge of the clearing. A young doe lifted her head at my approach. I froze. She glanced about nervously before she lowered her head again. Seven does, two bucks. The bucks were younger, less than a year old, probably. The doe who’d raised her head was closest to me and perhaps three years old. I lifted my rifle, set my sights on her and released the safety catch. She grazed on, her body angled away from me. I watched and waited. She might have sensed me, for she lifted her head a second time and looked to the left and right and then in my direction. An ear twitched. Neither of us moved. Then she relaxed and lowered her head; reaching for another morsel she shifted her footing and presented her broadside to me. I placed the cross hair at her temple, took a breath, exhaled, squeezed the trigger and watched her drop.
At the sound of the gun the rest of the deer fled. Kos and Zeka were at my side, ready to follow the blood trail if there was one. But I didn’t need them today: she’d fallen exactly where she’d stood. The sky had turned to a deep blue and it was too dark now to dress her in the woods, so I hoisted her onto my shoulder and headed in the direction of home. For two days my thoughts had been crowded by memories of Krešimir and of Anka. It felt as though I had been lifted up and set back in that time, the events of which I’d found a way to live with. I’d had no choice, none of us had, though some were better at it than others. Now I remembered how here, where the ravine meets the pine trees, we’d seen our first boar.
Anka, wearing yellow pop sox, stands upon a rock, showing off her balance: on tiptoe, her arms above her head, like a dancer in a musical box. Slowly she extends one leg behind her, an arm in front. She is wearing a yellow skirt which matches her socks and it ruffles in the breeze; otherwise she is impressively still. I have opened my mouth to cheer, when I see her expression and follow her line of sight to the first row of trees. There, in the no man’s land of shadows and sunlight, a boar: huge. Slowly I raise my gun and take aim. I miss, thank God, because the gun is a pea shooter and would doubtless only have made him mad. The bullet ricochets off a tree. The great beast shudders, regards us a moment longer and is gone. Anka jumps off the rock and into my arms.
We walk home exultant. Nobody bothers to mention that I really shot a tree and not a boar. Krešimir and I are fourteen and Anka is ten. The year is 1975.
I stood and inhaled the cold scent of the pine, the base note of leaf mould, made all the more powerful by the darkness. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine 1975 and then opened them before a picture could come. I whistled for Kos and Zeka and we returned by way of the road. Light flared between the shutters of the blue house. I stood on the road facing the house, the warm corpse of the deer over my shoulder, the dogs silent by my side. Somebody (Laura?) crossed in front of an upstairs window. I stood there for some minutes more until Kos spoke, a soft whine, and we turned towards home.
I lay awake, thinking about the past, things I hadn’t thought about for years. Somewhere nearby the vixen called, an awful sound. I’d seen her, she came some nights, circling the houses to search for scraps to take back to her half-grown cubs and drawn that night by the scent of the deer I’d dressed in the yard a couple of hours before. She taunted the dogs and the dogs answered, racing up and down their pen, barking and howling, clawing the wire mesh.
Next morning, the Tuesday, I arrived early at the blue house. In my hand I held a chisel. A few years after the house first became empty somebody had plastered and whitewashed a section of the façade. The job had been hastily done. I checked nobody was around and then I scraped at a layer of the plaster, loosening a portion, which I pulled away with my fingers. I stood there for a few minutes scraping and tossing lumps of plaster into the tall grass. I stopped and stood back. Now you could see a part of what lay beneath: a patchwork of small blue and green tiles made of glass and clay, the same as the ones lying on my windowsill.
Inside Laura was talking on her mobile phone. The day was clear and the sky pale blue. On many days the mountains blocked the reach of the mobile networks, but that day the invisible force field that seemed to surround Gost so much of the time had lifted. Laura pointed to the phone in her hand and mouthed something to me, then waved a hand at the coffee pot on the table next to a single cup. She left to finish her call upstairs. No sign of either the son or the daughter. I carried my coffee outside and set to work removing paint from the windowsills.
An hour on Laura came out to see how I was doing, then left to go into town. When she came back I set down my tools to help carry the groceries from the car. More coffee, which we carried outside again. Laura turned her face to the sun, closed her eyes for a few seconds and then opened them again to take a sip of her coffee; her eyes roamed the front of the house. When she noticed the place on the wall where I had scraped away the plaster she stood up and went over to inspect it, running her fingertips across the tiles. I watched her for a bit and then I said, ‘What is it?’
‘There’s something under here,’ she replied. ‘It looks like a mosaic.’
3
Gost lies upon a polje of karst limestone. Thousands of years of sediment made for good farming, and the soil is what kept Gost rich in grain all those years. They say that there are lost rivers, limestone caves and sink holes. I don’t know about that; I can only tell you that if you stand in the middle of Gost facing north and raise your head to look up into the hills, you will see how the river banks more steeply on one side than the other. The river starts as a spring outside a hamlet a few kilometres from Gost and it flows north, away from the sea, through our town, passing the old mills of Gost, cuts through the hills and eventually flows into a large lake some several hundred k
ilometres north-west of here. Visible from Gost is a scar of grey rock running through the green before the river divides into tributaries somewhere above the swimming hole: that is the ravine Gudura Uspomena.
Gudura Uspomena is Krešimir’s and my favourite place. The ravine is deep and we dare ourselves to climb down where the sides slope. A rock projects out beyond the others; we inch along it and lie on our bellies, peer over the edge at the dizzying drop, grow weak resisting the pull of the fall. We might climb down the slope and stay in the ravine for hours, a place nobody can find us. In the summer we swim in the swimming hole, leave our clothes in bundles to hop across the rocks, skinny and pale, and dive into the water, which is freezing all year round and leaves us gasping and winded. We dry off in the sun and then leap back into the water. Later we climb down to the waterfall below the swimming hole and hold our hairless dicks under the rushing water until our stomachs convulse with a strange new pleasure.
Other times we build encampments in the perpetual twilight of the pine forest, where we hoard stolen food and puff on cigarettes and later take turns drinking from bottles of rakija, with grimaces and coughs. Once we turn to alchemy and make our own: cheap grappa into which we stuff wild fennel, thyme and unknown berries we find in the ravine and which may or may not be poisonous. We bury the bottles and dig them up too soon and spend a night puking.
Once, under the influence, I challenge Krešimir to a dare. Stripped naked and on the count of three we race through the trees. You see we are hunters, fascinated by night vision, to which we attach great importance and as a consequence manliness. The naked race is to determine who possesses the greater night vision; the winner isn’t the fastest runner, although the whole point is to run as fast as you can, but rather the one who suffers the least damage: scratches, cuts and bruises, in other words who smashes into the fewest trees.
At other times we climb the hill to play in the old bunker, just above the tree line. Of course we’re not supposed to, the bunkers are there in case of a Soviet strike. Ours is cracked and covered in moss and the inside is dark and dank, with a dripping roof and smells of rot and pee, though who exactly would climb up there to empty their bladder, God only knows.
The Hired Man Page 3