The Hired Man

by Aminatta Forna

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I need a hand. Do you mind helping me for a moment?’

  ‘What is it?’ He continued to peer into the half-light of the outbuilding as though I had something hidden there.

  I indicated the car. ‘The engine,’ I said. ‘Needs two people.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about cars.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I can’t drive, either.’

  ‘No need to drive. Just do what I say.’

  We stood and regarded each other. Matthew dropped his gaze first, he shrugged. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘In a minute, I just need to get something from the house.’

  ‘You can put it on the shelf.’ I turned back to the Fićo and opened the boot. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Matthew hesitate and then unwrap the bottle of wine from the shirt where he had it hidden and place it on the shelf, in as normal a way as he could manage. He turned round, looked at the car and said with some surprise, ‘The engine’s in the back?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s how they made them in those days. Get into the driver’s seat. Key’s in the ignition.’

  ‘I told you, I can’t drive.’

  ‘Just turn the key in the lock when I say so. One second only. Turn it back.’

  I’d fitted the new battery. Now I attached the leads. ‘OK,’ I said.

  ‘You want me to turn the key?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  A click.

  ‘One moment,’ I told him. I tightened the battery connections. ‘OK, again!’

  Another click. I said, ‘Put it into fourth gear.’

  A short silence. I waited and then looked up. Matthew was fumbling with the gear knob. I moved to lean into the window and put my hand over his. ‘Press the clutch down. OK, feel the gear, right and up. Good. Release the hand-brake. You know where that is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I returned to the front of the car and rocked it back and forth. ‘Now put it back into neutral and apply the hand-brake.’ I cast around the outbuilding.

  Matthew watched me and waited; after a minute he levered himself out of the driver’s seat and asked, ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘A hammer,’ I said. ‘Or a piece of wood will do.’

  He went outside and came back. ‘How about this?’

  ‘Thank you. OK, let’s have one more go.’ I hit the starter motor with the piece of wood.

  Matthew laughed. ‘Is that all you wanted it for?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  This time the engine whined. Matthew was twisted round in the driver’s seat looking at me. I waved to give it another go. The engine coughed and turned over. I gave a thumbs-up. ‘OK, let’s leave it now.’

  Matthew climbed out of the car, he came round to where I was standing at the engine. ‘What was that all about?’

  ‘To see if the engine was locked. Fortunately it’s just the starter motor.’

  He blinked. ‘What does that mean?’

  I explained as best I could. My English, some words were difficult – more technical words. I said, ‘It means it will be quite easy to get the car going.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Matthew and nodded his head slowly several times while continuing to look at the engine as if he now understood something that he’d been pondering for a long time. He hung around for a while, watching me, not saying much. I’d finished what I planned for the day. I wanted to flush the fuel system before I took it much further and I needed to set the time aside for that. All I’d been doing was establishing how much work there was and I had the answer. I picked up a cloth and began to wipe my hands, which Matthew took as his cue. At the door he raised his hand.

  ‘Thanks for your help.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. He lingered a moment longer as though he still had something to say, then he turned and went, not quite able to summon the nerve to take his bottle of wine with him.

  The house was empty, Laura and Grace had headed off after lunch, Laura said they planned to be back by early evening. I stood in the doorway, alone in the place for the first time. The house was much like all the older houses around here. The lower floor basically comprised one large room: kitchen area, dining table, fireplace and sitting area were all one. It meant that in winter the heat from the fire reached further; my house is exactly the same. The walls of the blue house had been washed down and cleared of cobwebs, though I’d yet to fix the patch of rotten plaster. I needed to get to a certain point with the outside jobs before I began on the inside. The walls around the kitchen area were cladded with pine and Laura wanted it removed. The wall around the fireplace alcove was stone, which Laura liked. She asked if all the walls were the same underneath the pine, or plaster and paint. I told her it was a stone house, and so the answer was yes. Could we remove the plaster and have all the walls stone? I said we could, only it would make the house very cold in the winter. Laura said it didn’t matter. The house was a summer house and nobody would come here in the winter.

  I remember this house in the winter. A couch and an old chair in front of the fire; there were lace cloths thrown over their backs and later, in another time, shawls and a crocheted blanket. A long, dark wood dresser covered the entire back wall. Gone along with the things that stood on it. Now I try to recover them one by one, like a game show contestant who’s been given a glimpse of the goods he might win if he can remember them one by one. Invitations to christenings, weddings and funerals in the Church of Annunciation. A photograph of Krešimir and Anka’s grandfather and grandmother when they married. She wears a long veil and a headdress, the points of which radiate outwards framing her head. Her dress is a good fifteen centimetres from the ground. On her feet a pair of large, flat lace-up shoes. All around is mud. A programme from the national theatre: a musical evening. A votive candle from the cathedral in Zagreb. A wooden Eiffel Tower and a model of a church also made in wood, complete with graves. A reproduction of a painting of a woman with naked shoulders and huge dark eyes. Vinka Pavić’s collection of coloured glass animals with nubby little antlers. A boxed bottle of Stock 84 brandy, for which no occasion was special enough.

  Laura had bought new furniture; she complained about the styles. No antique shops and yet there must be plenty of lovely old pieces, she said. What do people do with them? They burn them for firewood, I replied. When they have finished with them, which takes a very long time. Laura had bought some large cushions to sit on, with a design of blue and green whorls. Only the old dining table remains.

  The floor was tiled, the tiles were brown with a pattern of falling leaves. Marbles used to skitter across them and never halt. Laura didn’t like the tiles either. I told her everyone had tiles; they were easy to clean. I said put rugs on top.

  I stood in the middle of the room. From upstairs the sound of a tune. Three ascending notes, then down, up, down. Then the same three ascending notes. Then da, da, da-da. For a moment I thought Matthew had found his way back to the house without me noticing. I’d been listening to this song only the other day and before that I must have heard it a hundred or more times, here in this house. People said it was a song about drugs, but John Lennon said the name came from a picture his son painted of a girl at school. I waited for Lennon’s voice but it never came. The notes simply repeated themselves and after a short while I realised I was listening to the ring tone of a mobile phone.

  ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’.

  I followed the sound.

  ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’.

  I put my hand on the banister and mounted the steps, automatically skipping the fourth, the one that creaked. I paused, went back and tested it. It still creaked. The same vinyl flooring made to look like wood.

  The phone stopped ringing.

  The door of the room at the top of the stairs where the parents had slept was
solidly shut. At the end of the corridor was Krešimir’s old room, which Matthew now used. The door was open and I stepped inside. Empty except for a new pine chest of drawers and a pine bed. A suitcase lay open. Matthew’s belongings scattered across every surface, the bed unmade, the window tight shut and a smell of unwashed clothing.

  Krešimir had been exactly the opposite. Every object had its place, exact to the millimetre. If you moved anything, he grew mad. He even stored his records alphabetically. Like most of us he had a collection of porn, though his was ordered by date and hidden on top of the cupboard in a briefcase given to him by his father. Covers so pristine, hard to believe he used them for their intended purpose. The rest of us swapped magazines, but Krešimir would never lend his, just the way he never brought his Springsteen album to parties but only let you listen to it in his room. Do you know that in the top drawer of his dresser he kept a list of items he had loaned to his friends? A list of names written out in his crabbed, very neat and yet curiously almost illegible writing. If you ever broke something of his he’d make you pay for it.

  I had forgotten these things about Krešimir. For some reason we all put up with it, I more than anyone, because back then I was his friend. We became friends, I suppose, because we lived close to each other and it suited us and because when you are young friendships go unquestioned.

  The Pavićs’ old bedroom smelt of Laura’s perfume and the skin cream she used. A vase of wild flowers sat on the dressing table. Laura liked flowers. So many fields and fields, she said one day, left for the wild flowers to grow. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’ Nor, in fact, had I. All the time I grew up here those same fields were planted with crops. The flowers were recent, a matter of years. These were some of the things I didn’t tell Laura. Instead I showed her which fields she might walk in and which she should not, I hinted at difficult owners. She thanked me and I knew I’d been right. For somebody who spends as much time alone as I do, sometimes I can tell a lot about people. I guessed that Laura was one of those people who preferred the music of a lie to the discordance of truth.

  A chair with some clothes draped on the back. A small heap of unwashed clothes and a screwed-up tissue on the floor. On the bedside table: a tube of Vitamin C, the effervescent kind, hand cream (I unscrewed the top and tried a little), two design magazines, a spiral-bound notepad. I picked it up: shopping lists for the house as well as the kitchen, a list of the names of towns and villages in the area. Some had ticks against them. A hairband.

  Anyway I never lied to Laura. I simply let Laura believe what she wanted to believe. I told you I can’t imagine coming to Gost and seeing the town and the people for the first time and it’s true, I can’t. But I knew Laura had a story about us, this place, the house she’d just bought. It was her story, one she told herself long before she came here. And if her story brought me work, then I’d help her hold onto it.

  Never ask a question you don’t need to, my father told me. To which he may as well have added: and never answer a question that hasn’t been asked.

  ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’. Once.

  From the side table next to the bed Laura’s mobile phone flashed. I pressed the button. Are you getting my messages? Laura’s husband. It’s ironic the network reception around Gost is so bad. The man who invented radio waves and three-phase electricity was born right near here. There’s a big centre with wooden huts containing reproductions of all his equipment and showing the experiments he conducted, although all that’s a bit of a lie. Most of his work was done in New York, where he died penniless while Thomas Edison walked away with all the credit.

  They say it’s the mountains; sometimes the clouds clear and messages arrive, arrows out of the blue.

  Scrolled back through the other messages. Conor. Conor. Conor. Sorry, darling. Doesn’t look like it’s going to happen any time soon. Know more Friday. Sorry again. Going to have to hold off travelling. More later. I scrolled forward. Sounds like you’re doing a wonderful job. Can’t wait to see it. Once I wrap this up. Miss you. The most recent said: Looking at flights.

  Laura’s messages to Conor. Missing you. More to do on house than we thought. Try to get here soon. Several saying more or less the same thing. All swam in the river. Cold. She didn’t mention me. Only one text contained my name. Hired man. Duro. Wonderful find. Absolutely all local info.

  From the window I saw Matthew walking down the road towards the house. I replaced the phone and went back down the stairs, picking up my tools from where they stood by the door. I waved to him from my ladder as he entered the courtyard.

  Seventeen years old.

  A wall, near the railway; from there you can watch the trains pass by on their way from Bihać to Split and from Split to Bihać. Six trains an hour. They carry grain and people. Now there are far fewer trains, Luka was right. And borders where there didn’t use to be borders, so now the trains only carry grain. They travel through fields that used to be ploughed, but are now full of wild flowers because nobody dares to walk in them in case they put their foot on a mine and are blown to pieces.

  We sit on the wall: Krešimir and I, Andro, Goran and Miro. We hold cigarette stubs pinched between freezing fingers, blow smoke rings without ever inhaling. Sometimes we share a beer between us. We have no trouble getting served in the bars, because around here nobody cares if you’re underage, our trouble is we have no money. Girls walking alone cross the street rather than pass us by. Sometimes we throw comments, timed to coincide with the exact moment of passing, so that if she’s to answer a girl has to turn round and confront us, which hardly any of them dare.

  Because we are all virgins we talk about sex all the time, covering our ignorance with stories about other people caught doing it. We swap magazines and trophies.

  A photograph of a blonde sprawled across an unmade bed. Pubic hair on her thighs. In the corner of the frame is a drying rack covered in kids’ clothes. A pink bath mat on the floor by the bed, an overturned shoe. Miro says the woman is his aunt who lives in Split. We are appalled by the stretch marks across her stomach and joke about having sex with her. Someone makes a crack. What do you call a woman’s twat after she’s had kids? A manhole. Andro asks if he can borrow the picture, promises Miro he’ll bring it back tomorrow.

  Another day Miro’s brother holds his right hand under the nose of each of us in turn. Faint, sweet, briny. Pussy juice, he says. He laughs and walks away, waving his right hand in the air like a politician.

  Miro’s brother is older than us. He has his own car, a Fićo of course, like everyone else, except his is painted with stripes down the sides. Another day Miro’s brother produces, with a flourish, a pair of panties he claims to have removed the night before. In front of us he sniffs them deeply. Andro grabs the panties, rubs them in Goran’s face. Goran lunges at him and misses, grabs the waistband of Andro’s jeans and slaps him on the back of the head, too hard. Goran gets angry and tells Andro to go fuck his mother. Then Andro gets angry and walks away. At the corner he turns round and rushes towards Goran with his head lowered, straight into Goran’s gut. Goran is winded; bent double he sucks the air and dry-heaves. A passing car blows its horn; a couple walking towards us cross over.

  Andro brings a stolen love letter, from one of the girls in our class to a boy we hate, and he reads parts of it out in a high-pitched voice. We see her in the street and run behind her calling out phrases from the letter.

  A pack of three rubbers.

  A bra, once. Stolen from somebody’s washing line or perhaps from an older sister.

  Dumb stuff. Until the day Krešimir brings Anka’s diary.

  Red leatherette, brassy little lock, easily picked. Small, round letters, crabbed to fit into the space for each day. Some are left blank and some are full. Dear Sonja, Sorry I missed you yesterday. Sonja had been the name of her best friend from primary school, who left to live in Sarajevo. Anka named her f
avourite doll Sonja, then a kitten. In her diary she wrote to Sonja.

  Dear Sonja, Sorry I missed you yesterday.

  We wear faded blue jeans and anoraks and our hair as long as we can get away with. Miro has a feather-cut he is proud of. Krešimir a leather jacket that once belonged to his father. Makes him look older. Everyone crowds around to listen.

  Dear Sonja, Sorry I missed you yesterday. I was too tired by the time I got to bed to write to you. I had to go shopping with my mother and then do my homework. In school I read about something called astral flight, which is when your spirit leaves your body and flies to another country. Two people can meet like that. I am going to try it tonight and see how far I get. Then I’ll write you a letter and you can practise, and then maybe we can meet.

  The lads hoot. Andro drains the last of his bottle of beer, drop-kicks the bottle over the wall. Encouraged, Krešimir continues, works us like a street performer works a crowd, but I see that only later.

  Dear Sonja, Dear Sonja, Dear Sonja.

  Dear Sonja, Horrible day. All my friends at school have bras, but when I went to Vinka (my mother) and tried to talk to her she laughed and told me I didn’t need one yet. But my chest really hurts. Do you wear a bra?

  Here was the genuine thing, a beam of light shone through the darkness of female thought, like looking up the skirt of a sleeping woman. Someone makes to snatch the diary out of Krešimir’s hand, but he holds it up out of reach. Someone else, Andro, I think, climbs up on the wall and grabs it from behind. For ten minutes they pass it around, reading sections out loud. Andro throws the diary to Goran, who throws it to Miro, who misses. Goran snatches it up again. A page flutters free.

  Krešimir stands and watches, watches and smiles.

  At the end of it, the diary lies in the road, on the edge of a puddle, face down like a fallen bird. I pick it up. ‘What are you going to do with it?’ I ask Krešimir. I am angry, too late. He knows it. I am ashamed and he knows that too.