The Hired Man

by Aminatta Forna

‘Fine,’ I replied when Matthew didn’t answer.

  ‘What have you got there?’

  I handed Conor the .243.

  Conor weighed the rifle in his hand. He stepped forward and raised the barrel and set his eye to the sight. ‘Mind if I give it a go?’

  I passed him the full magazine.

  ‘Safety catch?’

  I showed him and he pressed the butt into his shoulder, moved around, making himself comfortable with the gun. Finally he squeezed the trigger. The shot was wide, but not far off. He squeezed off three more rounds, then flicked the safety catch back on. ‘Let’s see what you can do then, Duro?’

  ‘Matthew was about to shoot,’ I said, passing the gun to the boy.

  But Matthew had heard the base note of a challenge in Conor’s voice. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said. ‘Go on, Duro.’

  ‘What do you say? Best of three?’ said Conor.

  ‘Then you must go first.’ I handed the gun back to him. ‘As my guest.’ I turned and strode away from the target, putting another seventy-five metres between it and me. ‘We shoot from here.’

  Conor followed and took up a position beside me. Two shots were slightly wide: a four pretty much on the inside line and a three. The last one he placed in the centre. He shrugged as he handed the rifle to me, but he looked pretty satisfied all the same. ‘Bit rusty still,’ he said.

  I placed three shots in the centre. Behind me Matthew clapped. I could feel the heat of his excitement. Conor ignored him, instead he said, ‘What do you say, Duro? Three more?’

  ‘If you like.’

  The first of Conor’s shots was a five, it lay towards the outside of the centre ring. A four at eleven o’clock. Another four at five

  o’clock. He remained with his eye to the sight, assessing his score. Matthew snorted. Conor passed me the gun. Behind me Matthew willed his stepfather’s defeat, it was almost audible, vibrating through the air. I aimed, fired three times and lowered the rifle. Matthew ran forward to fetch the target.

  Six shots. Conor’s three: one in the centre, the two fours at eleven and five. My score was the same: a five and two fours. One o’clock and seven o’clock. Even my five sat at exactly the same distance from the centre point as Conor’s, though on the opposite side of the small ring. All my three shots were the perfect mirror image of Conor’s. He peered disbelievingly at the target. He pushed his hair back off his forehead. ‘Would you look at that? Never seen the like. Some kind of fluke. Guess we call it a tie.’ Conor extended his hand.

  I’ve had enough of Krešimir. When it comes, the end is a small thing, as endings often are. You have to look back to spot them, to see where things changed for good, the before and the after. I challenge him to a shooting match.

  He makes jokes about my size, something he has never done before, the crossing of a line which has lain invisible and undeclared. During those years we ribbed each other about many things and not others, which surely is the nature of friendship. Now he does it in front of Andro, Miro and Goran. He enjoys it all, especially the way I have to endure it, suck it up, the only possible way to make them stop. When they give up trying to get a rise out of me, there is Krešimir with another joke, to set them off again.

  Another day he brings up the wild boar from so long ago I have forgotten. He tells them I once pretended to have shot a boar, when all I’d shot was a tree. I feel myself get mad. I tell him to fuck off, I tell him I can outshoot him with my eyes closed.

  Between Krešimir and me: dark channels of resentment. We are awkward around each other and act like we’re not; Krešimir watches me and I avoid his gaze. I spend as little time with him as possible, wonder if he knows about me and Anka and, if he does, how much. Surely it is no coincidence he has chosen to resurrect that particular incident from so long ago. I shot at the boar. Anka, practising ballet upon a rock, had jumped off and into my arms.

  On the grass slope below the pine forest, the place where I shot my first deer. Alone because no one else is interested. I bring a home-made target. Five shots. If Krešimir’s nervous it doesn’t show, a pitying smile rests on his lips. What had seemed noble to me when I challenged him now seems pathetic. But condescension is an old trick of his.

  I lose the toss. Krešimir shoots first and takes his time over it, repositioning himself between shots, deliberately making me wait. The five shots are good. Krešimir lays down his gun, folds his arms across his chest, pleased with himself. Mine is an old bolt-action rifle without a magazine. Four beats to expel the cartridge, insert and slide the bolt on a new bullet. The fifth to fire. I count each beat, a habit of mine. I reach twenty-five in as many seconds.

  We walk towards the target and the nearer we get the greater Krešimir’s puzzlement grows: there should be ten bullet holes but there are only five.

  In a moment he realises what I have done, which is to place every one of my five shots on each of his. A moment of stillness and then rage consumes Krešimir. He has a temper, it can break – just like that. He hides it well, so most people don’t see it coming, but over the years I’ve developed a sense for it, learned the triggers – so to speak. He hates to lose, to be made a fool of even more. I knew what I was doing.

  Krešimir, being Krešimir, goes for the softest target: Anka’s old primary-school friend Sonja, come back to Gost on a visit with her family. Frizzy hair, a small waist and breasts, heavy thighs. She has the lips of an angel and thick-lashed hazel eyes, which contain the hint of something knowing. On the cusp of becoming a beauty and she knows it. Krešimir hangs around the house during her visits.

  There was a time I suspected Krešimir was a closet queer. When we were younger it was his favourite taunt: fag, poof, gay. Now I think he simply despises women, as he despises all living creatures. Hard to imagine Krešimir tolerating the soiling nature of sex, the need to pleasure a woman. It’s true though that Krešimir enjoyed a certain success with women, or rather success with a certain kind of woman, the ones who were impressed by his air of superiority and scornful smile, even when he belittled them. Sonja is that kind. Krešimir makes an assignation with her. Imagine the girl’s delight, the edge it gives her over her friend Anka. He takes her to a café, buys her hot chocolate and reaches out his hand to play with her golden curls. When Anka and her mother are out one afternoon, he brings Sonja to their house and fucks her on Anka’s bed. Anka notices the smear of blood on the bedspread and puzzles over it, because she doesn’t have her period. She washes the cover when nobody is looking and hangs it out to dry. Afterwards, whenever Sonja comes to visit, Krešimir leaves the house; he ignores her in the street.

  Sonja leaves without saying goodbye; she never writes again.

  Gost cemetery: row upon row of the dead, asleep under the cypress trees. It’s the size of a football pitch, nearly full: the town authorities are searching for another site and trying to persuade people to be cremated. But we are the kind of people who love to mourn and anyway, who wants to prostrate themselves before an urn or throw themselves upon a vase? What we like is to build colossal black granite tombs, adorn them with votive candles and statues of the Virgin, plant them with carnations. The stone engraver in town advertises himself with an outsize gravestone in his front garden, that reaches up to the height of the first-floor windows. He’s done all right for himself. In Gost cemetery the old heroes have golden stars carved on their graves, though these days a great many stars have been scratched away or else are hidden behind a vase, strategically placed by the visiting widows. There are new heroes now. Some relatives have paid a vast sum to have the likeness engraved on the black granite itself, but mostly there are photographs of the young men, in their uniforms and caps, mounted on the gravestones. The photos are all retouched in exactly the same way, most likely in the same photographic studio, so the heroes all have very rosy cheeks and lips and light hair.

  To the east of the cemetery, the Ortho
dox end, there are a few stars, but no other heroes, pink-lipped or otherwise. The graves here are untended. The grass is cut by the men who take care of the graveyard, probably the same ones who removed the old vases and faded flowers years back. The graveyard is just like Gost, with rows of tombs instead of houses and paths in the place of streets. There are different neighbourhoods for the rich and the poor and for people who worship in one church and people who worship in another. Everything you need to know about Gost is here in the cemetery.

  That Sunday in August women were in the graveyard scrubbing the headstones and arranging flowers. I filled the vase I’d brought and went straight to Daniela and my father. Some mould had grown in the crevices of the lettering and I pulled a cloth from my pocket and worked on it until the inscription was as new. Dejan Kolak. 1.2.35 – 5.7.91. Daniela Kolak. 6.4.59 – 5.7.91. My mother wanted more. Danica and I resisted. Now I don’t really remember why, but it had something to do with the excess, the excess of funerals and weeping, the excess of loss. Also my father, unlike almost everyone else in Gost, hated funerals: the deliberateness of the mourners and the prurience of the onlookers, the piety of the widows. Whenever he was asked what somebody had died of he’d reply (with immense gravity), ‘Lack of breath.’ But his favourite joke was this: ‘A woman goes to a fortune teller who tells her she will become a widow within the year. Her husband will die a violent death. The woman is shaken. She puts her hand on her heart, takes a deep breath and asks, “Will I be acquitted?” ’

  We posted death notices on electricity poles and lamp posts throughout Gost and after we buried them went home and drank a bottle of Chivas Regal, brought by my father’s boss at the post office. In the corner of the room the television silently relayed a live football match from the other side of the world; mourners slid sideways glances at it. A near miss made one person shout out loud and stop to watch and soon he was joined by another man and then another: a silent vigil, not to death but to sport.

  Nobody asked what my father had died of, denying Danica and me the opportunity to answer, ‘Lack of breath.’ People kept dying. In the year that followed funerals grew less and less lavish. My father would have approved.

  On my way out I passed other graves of people I had known: a boy in my class who’d died of meningitis in 1970. The class accepted the fact of it with dry eyes; he’d not been especially popular: a habit of showing off his boils. The school janitor who electrocuted himself trying to fix the generator during a blackout. A friend of my father’s who drowned in a freezing pond (dead drunk, said my father). Old Pavić’s grave, where once a month many years ago Vinka Pavić, Krešimir and Anka would be seen laying flowers. Yellow carnations, orange stargazer lilies. Vinka Pavić’s choice: bright, practical and plastic. A pair of lolling sunflowers in a glass jar, daisy chains looped over the headstone, a bunch of wilted cornflowers – that meant that Anka had visited alone. She took to reading there, sitting on the grass with her back against her father’s tomb, sucking the end of her thumb, her nose in a book.

  That year, the first and last year of my happiness, the summer months slid over us. Anka and I met often. No repeat of the fire in the woods, but sometimes I felt we were being watched. I did not speak of it to Anka. Whenever I passed Krešimir in the street he would stare at me hard but say nothing. In front of other people he behaved as though nothing had happened and sometimes I managed to persuade myself that we were all right with each other, then a day later we’d pass in the street and he’d give me the same unsmiling stare. After a while it ceased to matter: I told myself Krešimir couldn’t hurt me.

  That year a drought visited Gost as I told you; if you’re old enough you might even remember it for yourself as all of us do; it began in April and stretched the summer by weeks at either end. The sky was a brilliant blue, the heat weighed heavily upon the town and people moved slowly. The deer came down from the hills in search of water. Anka and I claimed the swimming hole as our own. There the dry air of the ravine came scented with rosemary and fennel. On the riverbed trout and dace moved slowly around each other in an ever-shrinking space from which I took fish after fish with my bare hands. We’d cook them and eat with our fingers, pulling apart the charred skin and seared flesh, the crumbling bones. An afternoon as we sat by the swimming hole a snake, desperate to escape the heat of the scorching rocks on its underside, came down the hill and slithered up Anka’s back and down over her breast, at such a speed neither of us had time to react. We watched it enter the water and swim away, head held high above the surface: a small, dark question mark.

  Anka likes to model things in clay, things she gives away or arranges on her dressing table: small coloured hearts, discs imprinted with the pattern left by a walnut shell, a button, or scored with the whorl of a snail’s shell, an open flower. Later she glues fittings on the back and makes them into brooches. One of the hearts she gives to me and I carry it in my pocket.

  Anka’s hair smells of vinegar. She says it makes her hair shine. Anka’s hair is deep brown, the colour of good earth. I lift a hank of it and let it fall from my fingers, like dark water. She wears it in a pageboy and has a habit of blowing her fringe upwards when she’s too hot. She’s lying on her back with her arm raised writing my name upon the sky. That day she showed me a picture of her father when he was a young man, found in the dresser drawer. Old Pavić – who was at least fifteen years older than his wife – standing on a grassy lakeside wearing black swimming trunks, the remains of a picnic laid out on the grass just behind him. I know this place well, near Šibenik, where lakes rise, linked by rapids and waterfalls. Syndicates of workers from the city holiday there in lake-shore cabins, sit on deckchairs submerged in the water and fish, drink beer and gorge on liver sausage.

  In the centre of one of the lakes, behind a screen of cypresses, lies an island monastery. The monks there keep an ancient copy of Aesop’s fables, which they show to visitors. Some years ago I went on a pilgrimage to see the monks’ book. I rowed myself over and wandered across the lawns. The monks were still there, they’d been protected from the madness by their circle of water, and, I suppose, by their vocation. I waited for a challenge; when none came I found the main door of the building. All was quiet: the time for prayer. A monk detailed to welcome visitors guided me to the library where the manuscript was stored. He put on a pair of white cotton gloves and one by one he turned the pages to reveal each illustration. The avaricious man and the envious man, each of whom prays to Jupiter for his heart’s desire. To punish them Jupiter agrees, only if the other receives double the gift. The avaricious man, dwarf-like and dressed in dark robes, asks for a room filled with gold, is grief-stricken when his enemy receives twice the amount. But the envious man, thin and long-nosed, has already been overcome by the sight of the first man gazing at his room of gold. So he asks to be made blind in one eye, that the other may be blinded in both. ‘There are people like that,’ I said to the monk. ‘God doesn’t punish them.’ He walked me down to where I had tied my hired boat and threw the line to me. As I rowed away, counting the oar strokes, I watched him disappear back through the cypress trees.

  In the photograph old Pavić leans against a wooden drinks kiosk, flexing his muscles for the camera. His dark hair is oiled and parted in the middle, you can see the tracks of the comb. A handsome man. There’s something uncomfortable about looking at pictures of your parents at a time when they made each other happy. This is a photograph Anka and I should never have seen, because it tells of what Vinka had once seen in her husband and of which she doesn’t want to be reminded. No wonder she hid it away in a drawer. Theirs was an ordinarily unhappy marriage. Pavić had done well enough, but Vinka blamed him for her unhappiness. Once a beauty, she could have married any man she wanted, but she squandered her worth (as she saw it) on Pavić and then he died, leaving her a young widow in a town where widows are shuffling shadows. And because now money is short Vinka takes a job doing the books at the fertiliser factory. Sh
e has a diploma in accounting, talks of leaving for the city, to Split or Sarajevo, and she drinks. I have known drinkers, some of my father’s friends are drinkers. It is there in the carefulness of her movements, the sudden rages, the bruises on Anka’s upper arm.

  Vinka Pavić is an angry woman and her anger shows in the set of her teeth, the lines around her mouth into which her lipstick bleeds, the way she folds her arms. When she laughs it is to mock and in this she finds an ally in her son. But Anka, Anka was born with joy in her soul, to which they feel she has no right. Behind it all, as with so many things in life and in death, lies envy. In the end it gets the better of them.

  Vinka in one of her rages: a letter sent to her place of work, a letter about me and Anka. Anka pleads, ‘But nobody knows.’

  Vinka twists her mouth and holds the letter in front of Anka’s face. ‘Somebody knows! Somebody knows! Everybody knows!’ With her free hand she reaches out, but instead of slapping Anka she scratches, scoring the skin of Anka’s neck. And Krešimir, watching silently from the top of the stairs, turns away.

  My mother works at the fertiliser factory, not in the management offices but on the shop floor. Vinka rarely speaks to her, but on this day, when my mother’s shift is over, there is Vinka waiting. Vinka has brought Krešimir. My mother doesn’t know what it can be about, but dares not ask and walks them home to see my father. All the way her varicose veins hurt. In the hills high above the house Anka shows me the scratches on her neck.

  My father is not angry, still something must be done. When the talking is over he says, ‘Go to the coast. Find work until the end of the summer.’ He even offers to call his estranged brother. Danica has married Luka and moved out. Daniela’s tears leave dark streaks of mascara down her cheeks. My mother’s nature is to accept what she sees in front of her. Some things have consequences. Danica and Luka come over. Luka agrees with my father. ‘The girl is underage. If they want they can make it bad for you.’ The living on the coast is good, Luka knows many things. ‘Forget her, for two years at least, my friend.’ He winks. ‘Come back and marry her if you still care.’