The Hired Man

by Aminatta Forna

  Once, for a while, Gost was overrun with stray cats and dogs. People abandoned their pets; the animals turned feral. The cats fucked, bred, survived. The dogs mourned their masters, begged from strangers, grew thin. Then after a while the dogs found each other and joined to form packs: they turned on the cats.

  I saw a cat once, cornered by a pair of dogs, a German shepherd and another dog, a spaniel whose golden hair was matted with filth. A cat, when it is angry or frightened, simply looks ridiculous. The ears of the cat were flattened against its scalp, its eyes were narrowed and its teeth bared; it warned the dogs with a throaty, high-pitched whine that rose and fell like a piece of faulty machinery. The dogs were growing bolder, taking turns to run at it. One had a bleeding muzzle.

  Laura was relaxed, enjoying the day. She stopped to admire a courtyard, painted a deep red. Columns and stone stairs, in the centre stood a monument like an urn. Someone had drawn a penis on the red wall. I stopped to ask a waiter who was serving tables in a square where we might find a shop selling tiles and he issued directions in a grave manner which encouraged my confidence. In a street behind one of the smaller squares, between two shops selling ceramics and souvenirs, we found a tile shop. From her pocket Grace brought the red quartz and the glass tiles, but we couldn’t find a match on any of the shelves. I spoke to the young attendant. She told me to give her a minute, made a telephone call during which she nodded a lot. Da. Da. She replaced the receiver and led us out to the storerooms at the back where she tapped on the boxes of discontinued lines. Beneath layers of dust, we found what we were looking for.

  On the harbour front Laura found an upmarket pizzeria she liked: chairs and tables set out under a yellow-striped awning and with a view of the harbour. I had waited tables in a place like this, though not in Zadar. On the table Grace arranged and rearranged tiles upon the tablecloth. Matthew read the menu through a pair of dark glasses.

  ‘Do you know Zadar well, Duro?’ Laura asked after we’d ordered.

  ‘I used to come here.’

  ‘It’s a long drive from Gost.’

  ‘I didn’t live in Gost, I lived over there.’ I pointed out to sea.

  ‘On one of the islands? What took you there?’

  ‘Nothing, an idea.’ I shrugged. ‘I had a cottage close to the water.’

  ‘Sounds wonderful. And you came here on the ferry?’

  ‘Yes, there isn’t much to do on the islands, in winter even less. And some things you need to come here to buy. In fact there is a bridge. The time I lived here it was in a bad way, but it has been renovated recently. So once you could drive there and now the same again. Takes about a half an hour.’

  ‘We should go.’

  ‘Another day.’ To change the subject I began to talk about the bridge, how salt and wind ate the concrete and steel until the whole edifice nearly collapsed into the straits. On the table Grace had arranged the tiles into the shape of a bird, while Matthew, whose mood had generally improved since Conor’s departure, seemed sulky and had barely spoken. On our walk through town he’d spent most of the time hunched over his mobile phone and now during the meal he brought it out again and carried on playing with it. He ignored Laura’s suggestion to put it down while we ate and I saw her hesitate, afraid to ask him for a second time. Matthew’s mood was faintly dangerous, as if he was spoiling for an argument. After a while Matthew stood up and walked to the harbour edge where he threw pieces of a bread roll to the fish.

  Three giant pizzas were placed in the middle of the table. We helped ourselves. Grace ate with gusto, keeping an eye on the food, ready to pounce in case it scuttled away. In between mouthfuls she sucked her drink noisily through the straw. Otherwise she was silent, totally absorbed in the act of eating, she never looked up from her plate. When we were all full she helped herself to the last slice of pizza.

  After coffee we took a walk around to the other side of the harbour. Sheets from a magazine floated on the surface of the water: a naked woman, open-legged. Out of a cloudless sky the sun beat down and the blood in the veins of my scalp throbbed. The air was dry and filled with colourless fumes, and I felt a little nauseous after the meal and the coffee, which had been too strong. At a stand outside a shop Laura and Grace tried on hats while I sat on a bollard to wait. They switched and swapped hats, looked at their reflections in the small mirror on top of the stand. Grace picked a red straw hat with a brim that dipped down at the front and gave it to her mother to try on. Laura, who was standing with her back to me, put the hat on her head and at that moment chose to turn round. Maybe she was looking for Matthew, but it was me she found watching her. She smiled and opened her arms and tilted her head to one side, as if to ask, ‘What do you think?’

  I couldn’t speak: something about the gesture, the cast of the sunlight, most of all the red hat. I drew a sharp breath and then breathed out again, hard. My mouth was dry and, for several seconds or so it seemed, my heart stopped. Then both my heart and breathing started up again violently. I could hear everything: the cry of a gull overhead, the grinding of gravel under the feet of passers-by, the whine of a winch somewhere and the sound of the blood rushing to my brain. I stood up and walked towards Laura, my legs were practically shaking. I said without thinking, ‘Please let me buy it for you.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Yes,’ I insisted, maybe too firmly because Laura blinked with surprise, so I added, ‘To say thank you for lunch and this very nice day. It’s only 50 kunas. If you like you can buy the ice cream.’

  Laura smiled and shrugged. ‘Well in that case, what can I say?’

  ‘You can say yes.’

  ‘OK, then yes and thank you.’

  It’s interesting what you remember and what you forget and what gets hauled up from the past when you aren’t expecting it. How does it work? I don’t know. So many years and I’d never once thought of Anka’s red hat, the one she owned in the last year she lived in the blue house. She’d worn it through two summers, it had been her favourite thing. When Laura turned, for a moment, for just one moment – it might have been Anka standing there.

  After I’d paid for the hat we walked on along the harbour front. A scattering of clouds appeared from nowhere and the sun disappeared, so instead of wearing the hat Laura carried it in her basket for which I was suddenly grateful. Matthew walked behind us kicking a plastic bottle along in front of him; it rattled on the cobblestones and lay still, he kicked it again. Another car alarm screamed, this time from the car park on the opposite side of the harbour, and the noise carried and magnified across the water. We walked with no particular idea where we were going.

  We’d stopped for ice cream and walked on, each holding a cone, except Laura who said she was still full from lunch, she spotted something she liked and went into a shop, we waited outside. Something happened between Grace and Matthew. Grace was enjoying her ice cream, swaying slightly, licking steadily at the head of it, oblivious to everything around her. A man in a black jacket tried to pass Grace to go into a shop. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, but Grace, so absorbed in the act of eating her ice cream, didn’t hear him. The man repeated himself. Grace didn’t move. Matthew said, ‘For fuck’s sake, fatso, get out of the way.’ Grace’s head snapped up as if she’d been hit, her eyes widened with hurt, automatically she stepped aside to let the man pass. Before I even had time to think I was behind Matthew, holding him by his arm and neck. Somewhere on the periphery of my narrowed vision I saw the man glance at us and then away as he stepped into the shop.

  ‘Apologise to your sister!’

  ‘Christ, man! You’re hurting me. Let me go.’

  ‘I said apologise.’ I tightened my grip, felt the pulse of his veins beneath my fingers. I shook him.

  ‘Sorry,’ Matthew said to Grace, who stood watching with her mouth open.

  I let him go and pushed him away. It was over in an instant. Laura
stepped out of the shop. We walked on. I was breathing hard and my heart was still racing. I clenched and unclenched my fists and forced myself to calm down. Matthew flung his ice cream into a dustbin. He rubbed his neck, but kept his eyes on the ground. Grace followed slowly, I could feel her staring at me, then at Matthew and back. Laura walked ahead of us, looking into the windows of the gift shops.

  We drove back on the motorway, towards the ridge of the mountains and through the sequence of tunnels, into which the cars disappeared like boats into an enchanted grotto. Beyond the first two tunnels lies another ridge and then another; after the third you are in the mountains proper, you leave the heat of the coast behind, skirt a single peak of rock and then come the wheat fields, the bridge over the river and the first neat pink and blue houses on the outskirts of Gost. The journey home took place more or less in silence though Laura talked some of the time, I can’t remember now about what, but I made the effort of answering her. She appeared to think nothing of the silence; I suppose she was used to teenagers and their behaviour. At one point she asked me to take over the driving, which gave me an excuse not to talk. I was angry with myself for the loss of control, though it’s hard to say I was sorry. Matthew was a brat who’d been begging for a slap for a long time. Plus, I had a feeling he wasn’t going to tell his mother.

  Carefully Grace fitted tiles to the mosaic of the bird. She held her breath as she pressed each tile into place, the tip of her tongue pushed at her top lip. Her face was moist with sweat and her hair stuck to her forehead, her cheeks and shoulders were pink. When enough time had passed for the glue to take, she carefully released the pressure. I sat at the table shaping tiles for her with a knife. With each success Grace looked triumphantly over at me.

  Within the hour the restoration of the mosaic was complete. Then we began on the fountain, where the damage was much worse. Grace had already cleared the grass and weeds, but a great many of the tiles were loose and quite a few were damaged. Some days ago we’d lifted them all up so I could resurface the cement bed. Before we moved the tiles Grace fetched her camera and took several photographs. Afterwards she fitted the pieces back one by one, working from the digital image on the back of her camera to recreate the fish and the ribbons of weed exactly as they’d been. It had taken her hours. Now, once we fitted the tiles we’d bought in Zadar all that remained was the grouting.

  Something else I should mention. The way it all fitted together, as I have said, that summer, with the sale of the blue house and the arrival of Laura who brought with her Matthew and Grace. I went to work for Laura: I needed the money and I knew the house. Small things happened, things that didn’t surprise me. Krešimir seeing the mosaics uncovered, for example. His rage. I didn’t care, in fact if anything it encouraged me, pleased to get his goat. The red hat, though, that was quite by chance; I bought it for Laura on an impulse, because I couldn’t do anything else.

  The evening of the day I helped Grace with the repairs to the mosaics I saw Laura in town; she was carrying a basket, out shopping for groceries. The sun was at its lowest and struck over the rooftops and between the buildings. Laura wore a pair of sunglasses and, brim pulled down low over her forehead, the red hat. She walked alone, in a leisurely way, not at all self-conscious. I don’t know why I mention it, she’d nothing to be self-conscious about, except that she was a foreigner in a small town and other people in the same position might have been, I suppose. Laura never seemed to be able to see herself from the outside, to have an idea of what other people might think of her, or even that they might be thinking at all. She didn’t notice what happened next.

  A woman walked towards her, an older woman, the kind who wore a housecoat to do her cleaning and sometimes her shopping, the same kind of woman as my mother. Head bent, trotting from one chore to the next. She looked up, saw Laura and almost stopped in her tracks. She looked down, up again, down again, nodding madly for a few moments. She slowed her pace and turned her head, following Laura’s progress; she shook her head, raised a hand and sort of tapped herself on the chest, then she bowed her head and walked quickly on.

  I walked home. I relived the moment Laura turned to face me on the harbour front in Zadar: the stop it put to my heart. And just now, the woman in the street.

  I thought: I am not the only one who sees it.

  11

  I want to tell you about Pag. Not that I want to dwell on it, but simply because it needs telling. Pag is part of my story, because in the end what happened on Pag brought me back to Gost. So today I’ll tell you all about Pag. I went to Pag looking for something. I was a young man, I had a dream of how life might be. I found an island surrounded by still water, an island of salt beds, upon which practically nothing grew except sage, of white churches standing alone in an empty landscape and slim, black snakes. I found the house I had been looking for, facing the sea with a stone wall around a patch of land and a slipway for a boat. The first few weeks I spent repairing the stone wall, fitting the rocks against each other, building my new life piece by piece. Inside the stone walls I built the hives that would house my bees. Each day brought something new: a pair of juvenile seagulls waiting for their mother under the broken hull of an upturned boat; she never came, I fed them and in less than a week they treated me as their step-parent and began to shriek at the sound of my tread. Another day, picking my way along the rocks on the shore, I found a pair of women’s shoes. They must have been there for a very long time: the soles were curled and the leather cracked and broken. That there were two was strange. They couldn’t have been washed up, but must have been left there, as though the owner had removed them and set them there, walked into the sea.

  Then after six months of solitude, sleeping and waking with the light and darkness, with only an occasional candle, the only female in my life my queen, I met a woman and she became everything to me.

  The way I met her was quite comic. In the tourist season, in Zadar, I sat in a café with my back to the wall and drank a beer. The room was full of men, it was that time of the day. A woman appeared. She wore white sandals with high cork soles and walked on strong legs and with deliberate strides across the room where she pulled out a chair, smoothed her skirt and joined me at my table. She sat with her handbag on her lap and her fingers on the clasp and nodded briskly in my direction as if she was now ready for me to say something. Because I was confused, I offered her a beer. When it came, she drank some of it and continued to look at me in the same expectant manner and so I asked her name and she told me; in return I told her mine and I made some conversation, I forget about what. I wondered if she was a very well-mannered hooker. Something I said flustered her and she gathered up her belongings, apologised, said she’d made a mistake and was gone. Her beer sat unfinished on the table. A case of mistaken identity. When I saw her in the same bar a fortnight later I introduced myself. She remembered me and blushed, but accepted another beer. In the time we were together she never did tell me who the man was she was supposed to meet, only that it had something to do with work.

  She was older than me and separated from her husband. That’s why she’d been looking for work. Her ex-husband was deputy manager of a shoe factory. Her family came from Pag, and it was to Pag she returned at the end of her marriage. Her parents didn’t approve of me because there was a child who now lived with his father. They wanted their daughter to go back to the shoe factory deputy manager and the child. But she didn’t, instead she moved into my cottage. By then I’d begun to cure skins: sheep’s, goats’, rabbits’. Some I used to cover the floor of the house, some I sold and used the money to buy things, things I hadn’t given much thought to before, but came to want because she wanted them and I wanted to give them to her: patterned dishes, new chairs, aluminium pots.

  She loved me, she said so. At times she was as playful as a child and at other times she would withdraw her affection for days. I didn’t ask why. It was my first adult relationship. You’d think I mi
ght know better, being raised with women, but sisters are different to lovers. Because I loved her, I let her be. But her melancholy grew. I didn’t understand, because the life I thought we had was good. And because I didn’t understand, I thought it must be sadness for her child, who lived with his father in a distant town.

  The smell of the cured leather reminded her of the shoe factory, she said. So I took away the skins and bought wool rugs instead. Another day she asked me where the skins were, and wanted them put back.

  One day, after we had been together for three months and the good weather had gone, I went to Zadar with a bundle of freshly cured skins. We motored in our small boat to the village near by where I could catch a lift across the small stretch of water to Karlobag, and from there hitch to Zadar. I turned to wave as she motored away from me (I had taught her to manage the boat, so she wouldn’t be stranded on days when I wasn’t there), saw her lift her hand and wave to me. The next day I stood in the same place, the money from the sale of the skins in my pocket. I found the boat moored by the jetty, but no sign of her. I knocked on the doors of the houses and learned she had gone away, on the ferry. I went home to an empty house. I wondered whether she had left straight away, or whether we had passed somewhere upon the straits. I wondered whether she stood out on the deck in the wind, with Pag behind her, whether she followed the progress of every oncoming boat and wondered if I was on it, or whether she hid below deck.