The Hired Man

by Aminatta Forna

  Next to old Pavić is a place for Vinka, and next to it is Krešimir’s grave. The date of his birth is carved into the granite. September 1961 to 20–. Two blank places waiting to announce the year of his death. The graves are in one of the better parts of the graveyard, though perhaps not the best. Still, a long way from the eastern wall where the explosion took place three years back. The police said it was an abandoned grenade and dropped the case. The blast wrecked a number of headstones, but they were only headstones belonging to the dead of those families who’d already left Gost.

  10

  Conor stepped out of the house. He was carrying a holdall, which he placed on the back seat of his rental car. This was now Monday, I’d been at work no more than two hours. He came and stood at the bottom of the ladder. ‘Good job you’re doing, Duro. Can’t thank you enough,’ he said and extended his hand. I climbed down the ladder, laid the saw I was using on the windowsill and we shook hands. Conor shaded his eyes as he looked up at the dead tree. ‘Good luck with that. I wish I could stay to help. Maybe Matthew could give you a hand. You could ask him. Never know. You did teach him to shoot, after all.’

  I nodded.

  Conor half shook his head and seemed about to say something more, changed his mind and went inside. I climbed back up the ladder and continued what I’d been doing: removing the dead tree’s limbs, ready to bring the whole lot down. Ten minutes later the family came out. Grace and Laura kissed Conor, Matthew shook his hand and muttered goodbye. As soon as the car moved off Matthew turned away and went back inside. Laura and Grace stood waving until the car was gone from view. That was the first and last I saw of Conor the whole summer.

  An hour later when I went to the field at the back of the house, easier to piss there than in the family’s bathroom upstairs, I found Laura sitting against the walnut tree; she was smoking a cigarette, jabbing with the forefinger of her other hand at the root of the tree. She started when she saw me and then said, ‘Oh Duro, thank God it’s only you. I thought it might be one of the kids.’

  I said nothing. Laura stood up, took a last puff of the cigarette, threw it to the ground and dusted off her hands. I walked over and ground it out. I glanced at the place on the tree she’d been jabbing with her finger; there was a line of ants coming from the loose earth around the base up the trunk of the tree, now a line of dead ants, their living companions racing around them in panic. I said, ‘I didn’t know you smoked.’

  ‘I don’t. Well obviously I do. Occasionally. It’s no big deal. I just don’t need Grace on my back about it. Frankly I’m a bit out of sorts right now.’

  ‘Out of sorts?’

  ‘You know: annoyed. Well no,’ and she continued, ‘more like – disappointed, fed up even. I just didn’t imagine when we bought this house that it would be me and the kids out here on our own.’

  ‘Your husband had to go back for work?’

  ‘I just wanted a family holiday for once. So Conor and Matt might have a chance to work things through. I thought if they had some time together . . . oh well,’ she said. ‘Fuck that.’

  I didn’t reply, I felt sad for Laura, but then I thought I understood why Conor found so much in his work to occupy him. Laura allowed him a place by her side as her husband, but not as father to her children. Matthew was a teenage boy and needed a firm hand. What was Conor to do? But I didn’t say any of that, instead I said, ‘Let me show you something.’ I stepped forward, opened the double doors to the outbuilding and pushed them both back, positioning a couple of bricks to stop them closing again. Light filled the space. I went forward and lifted the cover of the Fićo. I’d managed to put in a good few hours here and there and so far I was pleased with my progress. The car’s mechanics were simple and because it had been stored inside had survived the sixteen years remarkably. I’d given the bodywork a polish even though I still had plenty of work to do on the engine. I did it because I liked to see the car looking as it once had and because I knew Laura would be impressed. I’ve worked on enough houses to know that it’s the first coat of paint or plaster that makes the difference.

  I said, ‘Not ready yet, but soon. First I must change the cables and hoses and then we test it. Maybe you can drive.’

  Laura turned to me and smiled.

  Kos lies on the floor by a cold stove. Her eyes are open, though she is fast asleep. Eighteen years ago she was a pup of five months tied to a tree, waiting for her owner’s return. That was how she came to me. I’d already brought her home when I realised why someone had left her to die: she was blind. They thought a blind dog would never be any good for hunting, but they were wrong. At the top of her game Kos was the best tracker I ever knew. Now take Zeka, her son, he’s a great hunting companion but differently so. He loves the chase and races through the woods with his nose high. He’s best at the start, at locating the herd. But Kos could track a single animal, hunt it down all night, long after Zeka grew bored with the whole game. It’s the difference between the sexes, some say: the sensory system of the male designed to catch the scent of a bitch in the wind, and the female who can follow the trail of a lost puppy. And Kos’s useless eyes made her sense of smell doubly good.

  This is as I told Grace. She’d seen us coming up the road for our evening exercise and walked with us part of the way. A farmer’s trailer had been left at the side of the lane; I called a warning to Kos who slowed down, swinging her head from left to right in the way she did, until she located the obstacle. When I told her, Grace couldn’t believe Kos was blind, so I called Kos to me, held up my index finger and moved it in front of her eyes. Kos never blinked and nor did her eyes move.

  ‘But how does she find her way around?’

  ‘She knows the roads, the fields and the hills. She has lived here since before you were born.’ At that moment Kos jumped a ditch and ducked the wire into a field. I explained to Grace, ‘For instance, she knows that there, right after the bend in the road, there is a good place to cross into the field where she might pick up the scent of a rabbit. She’d never catch one, but it makes life more interesting. And further ahead where there’s loose gravel on the road, that means we’re nearly home. She relies on what she feels and smells. Sometimes on Zeka, who she follows. Sometimes on me.’

  At the next bend Grace said, ‘I’d better go home. Mum’s made lasagne.’

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ I said.

  Grace turned to go and then turned back. ‘Why don’t you come and have supper with us? I bet Mum won’t mind.’

  ‘Another day,’ I told her. ‘Kos and Zeka want their run.’

  ‘You can come on the way back.’ Despite her insistence, I shook my head. The last few days, Conor’s visit, had changed things. I wanted my own company again.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Yeah, sure . . .’ She rubbed the toe of her shoe on the surface of the road, her head bent.

  ‘Are you OK, Grace?’

  She looked up, shrugged. ‘Yes,’ she said and made the strange little humming sound which meant she was unhappy. I watched her go, I called her name. She stopped and turned.

  ‘Maybe we go to the coast soon to find tiles for your fountain, yes?’

  She nodded, smiled briefly and ran on.

  Kos came to me after I returned home from the islands. I’d been gone ten years by then. I’d missed my last two years of technical school and my chance for college, if I’d ever wanted it. A year working on my uncle’s boat and then military service. The first year I was based in Vojvodina. Flat fields of corn and wheat, where the snow covered the ground many months of the year. We trained shirtless and the barracks had little heating. For R&R we went to Novi Sad, where there was a theatre that played entirely in Hungarian, and where I once spent an evening escaping the cold and my drunken comrades. That’s what I remember most. When that was over I reapplied to stay in the Army three years more. I exchanged the p
lains of the north for the fruit groves of the south. After that I didn’t go back to live in Gost, instead I went to the islands, of which I had heard so much. People had told me there was a good life to be had there and besides I no longer felt any desire for Gost, I’d changed that much.

  The Army changed me.

  In that place strength was everything: if you lacked backbone you faked it, and if you couldn’t do that you made sure never to catch anyone’s eye in case they chose to make something of it. I’d always had some degree of self-control, but now I gained a new command of myself. Restraint was the way. There were bullies and their victims, and then there were the rest of us. In the Army there was nothing you could do to help the ones who were picked on. Some of them even seemed to enjoy the humiliation. A few learned to stand up for themselves. That worked if it happened soon enough, before the pack had its claws into you. Or you could go your own way. One guy spent the entire time playing a little tin flute. When it was stolen he produced another one. When someone took that one, he came up with another, like a magician (he had a box full of them somewhere). He never said a word, never commented that they kept disappearing and in the end whoever had it in for him decided to leave him alone. One or two guys managed to pull on whatever strings they had on the outside. The rest of us waited it out. You did what you had to to survive.

  I wrote to Anka through Danica, but Krešimir rifled Anka’s belongings and showed my letters to Vinka. There was trouble. Danica wrote saying things were impossible. For Danica’s sake, for Anka’s sake, for my own sake, I stopped writing. The last letter from Anka came several months later, a bundle of letters in her round schoolgirl hand, written over the weeks. I kept them the whole year I was in Vojvodina and then when the time came to move on, I burned them. That’s how much I had changed.

  I changed in order to survive. You could even say I did well. I stayed on in the Army. And yet, even in those years, Krešimir infected things. The one part of me I failed to suppress was still at war with Krešimir. I couldn’t stand to give him the satisfaction of knowing I grieved and I went on this way for years: joining the Army, staying away. I did it to spite Krešimir; he retained his grip on my imagination and in that way I’d become his creation.

  Sage and rosemary, boat diesel, decayed fish, cooking oil, a salt breeze: the coast smelled of these. Work was easy to find. For a while I waited tables where I learned English, also Italian and French. I discovered a talent for languages. I made extra money translating menus, advertisements and brochures. I could have made more money doing that kind of work, but I enjoyed café life, the foreigners, the comings and the goings. The boss asked me to give his son English lessons and I did. We read English books together, books left on tables by the tourists. Most were trash, some were good. After a while I grew bored. I moved islands and went back to the boats.

  Anka no longer wrote, or if she did the letters went to an address from which I’d long gone. Nothing was forwarded.

  Life on the boats suited me. I liked the early mornings, the silence, the days that passed in a blaze of light, the purity of the blue skies and of the darkness that followed, summer storms, the sound of rain on the sea. At one point I worked an old ketch – I told you – in Hvar; we used to take the tourists on a tour of the smaller islands and stop for swimming and snorkelling. Mornings I rose ahead of the others to ready the boat, hose down the decks, prepare the ropes and the rig although the skipper rarely bothered with anything but the motor. After one season I’d had enough of that life, too. I craved my own company. I spent my savings on a small boat and joined the water taxis ferrying passengers to the various beaches. This way of being suited me. If I didn’t want to talk I pretended I didn’t understand what my passengers were saying. The tourists forgot their books, suntan oil and sunglasses just as they did in the restaurants and in my lunch hour I read. I motored up and down the same stretch of water and dreamed of a life: a shepherd’s hut, cliffs. I sold the boat, hitched to Zadar and took a ferry over to the island of Pag. Pag was everything I had been searching for. I found a cottage surrounded by sandy, salt-soaked, barren earth with no road leading to it, only a small slipway and a boat. Salt corroded everything, even the rocks. I planted basins of tomatoes, made a pair of beehives and kept bees; they feasted on the sage, which grew everywhere.

  Tuesday I raised my fist to knock on the door of the blue house: inside I heard Grace and Laura.

  ‘Nowhere near here, darling.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘Much further away. Where there were Muslims. It’s not even the same country any more. None of those sorts of things happened here, or we would never have bought this house. Think about it. Anyway, it was for ever ago. You were only just born, it’s all long forgotten now.’

  I knocked. Laura turned round. ‘Here’s Duro. Ask him if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Grace has been filling her head with all sorts of things. I’m just saying there was never any fighting here, it was all far, far away. In another country. These are decent, good people, you’ve met them yourself.’

  Grace didn’t reply. She looked at me. I said without hesitation, ‘Gost is a safe place. You have nothing to worry about.’

  ‘There you go, darling. Straight from the horse’s mouth. Now you can stop worrying. Good heavens, this isn’t Africa.’

  ‘I never said I was worried,’ Grace replied. Then to me, ‘Where then?’

  ‘East,’ I said. ‘A long way away, as your mother says.’

  Grace nodded, she trusted my answer.

  ‘Sorry, Duro, did you want something?’ asked Laura.

  ‘The tree.’

  Laura stood up. ‘Come on, Grace, let’s go and watch.’

  The dead tree came down without so much as a groan, the earth beneath us shook with the impact. I’d secured it with a guide rope and, having done most of the work with a chainsaw, gave Matthew the final strike of the axe. He pushed his baseball cap back from his forehead and grinned. The tree lay across the verge, its crown in the road. I hadn’t wanted it to come down too near the house, but now it was blocking the road. ‘Come on,’ I said to Matthew.

  ‘What will you do with all that wood?’ asked Laura.

  ‘Firewood,’ I replied. ‘We can store it in the outbuilding.’

  ‘You take it, or at least as much as you need.’

  I nodded. I turned to the boy. ‘Shall we deal with it?’ As well as workman’s gloves I gave him a pair of goggles and ear muffs, though in fact I was the one who’d be working the saw. I put another pair of muffs on my own head, erasing the sound of birdsong, of Laura and Grace’s voices. I pulled the cord on the chainsaw and the motor started up; the howl of the saw filled the air and the space inside my head. I ordered Matthew to stand back while I worked, bending, twisting, moving all the time, holding the dangerous chain well away from my body. The possibilities of what a chainsaw can do are never far from the mind. But I enjoy the bite of the teeth into wood, the flying yellow sawdust and the antiseptic smell of wood resin, the satisfying pace of work. First I cut the branches away near the trunk and then cut them into lengths, those of a size I could use for firewood, the rest, the smaller branches, twigs and leaves to be turned into a bonfire sometime in the winter when the family was gone. After the first branches were off I waved Matthew forward to haul them away into the field behind the house. He was enjoying himself, you could see. Then I cut the trunk itself into sections. After a while I turned the chainsaw off and the peace of the day resumed around us: pale blue sky and the hum of insects, the flap of a woodpigeon’s wings, the laughter of a magpie mocking our hard work. Finally we rolled and heaved the giant logs to the side of the road, where we sat on them and drank a glass of water, after which I patted Matthew on the shoulder.

  ‘Shall we finish?’ I said.

  And the boy replied, ‘Let�
��s go for it.’

  Early next morning we drove to Zadar. The thought of Zadar had made me want to see the city again. I used to travel to and from Zadar when I lived on Pag, sometimes when I needed nothing but a break from my own company, to sit outside a café and be served a coffee. The inside of the car smelled of leather. We took the road west out of Gost, which leads directly to the coast and then follows the water’s edge down to Zadar. Laura handled the wheel confidently through the twists and turns of the road, past the saw mill where I once worked, up to the summit of the mountain. There you pass through a short tunnel beyond which comes the first view of the sea, and of Pag: smooth, pale and elongated, half submerged in the turquoise water. There is a place where you can park and look at the scenery, which is what we did. Laura read aloud from the signboard there, about the Karrens and sinter-pools, the sink holes, caves and pits which lay below us. I took myself off a small distance and gazed at Pag. So many years since I had laid eyes on her, I had wondered what I would feel when this moment came, but it was not as I imagined. The feelings did not come.

  We climbed back into the car and drove on to Zadar. The green of the mountains turned to rock and wild rosemary. Villages clung to the base of the cliffs like swallows’ nests. At the side of the road people sold jars of honey and lavender oil.

  At Zadar harbour we stopped for coffee and ate burek walking along the front looking at the boats. The smell of diesel, salt and fish was the same as it had always been and my stomach tightened with the odour of the memories it brought with it. There was a pressure in my bowels. I wondered if I would see anyone I knew, and if I did if they would be the same or changed: missing an arm, a leg, or maybe just some part of their soul.

  Lumbering, steep-sided ferries headed for the islands. The old Italianate buildings on the harbour front had been painted and restored; the trees were trimmed, flowers bloomed beneath them. The old town was another story: football slogans defaced the old stone of the entrance. From somewhere came the wail of a car alarm. From an open window music: the voice of an American crooner from the 1950s. Inside the city walls the streets were littered, building façades chalky and chipped, the fountains ran dry. Strings of washing fluttered like banners from high windows. Some shops had their windows papered over, a few gift shops were open. Cats. Bony and scarred, they slunk and stared dangerously up from beneath the cars, watched us from high windowsills. I threw the paper from my burek into a skip and found it full of strays picking over the rotting garbage. One leapt out right past my shoulder. I have always had a faint unease around cats, especially numbers of them: something in their sliding movements, voices like a baby’s cry.