The Hired Man

by Aminatta Forna

  After a week I went to see her parents, but they knew nothing, or would tell me nothing and did not invite me inside but stood together on one side of the stone wall that surrounded their house and their front garden planted with cabbages, shrugged and shook their heads, regarding me through black eyes, like a pair of trolls.

  I waited for a whole winter for her to come back. The winter was a cold one. When it was over I went out to check the hives and found the bees were dead. I went for a long walk around the island. Once I stopped and looked up at the mountains on the mainland, the white rock and dark trees. I realised that for ten years there’d been a pebble in my shoe, and the word engraved on it was Gost.

  ‘She went back to her husband,’ I said to Laura. ‘Then I couldn’t believe it. Now I know this kind of thing happens all the time.’

  ‘She went back for the child,’ said Laura. She smiled sadly and that irritated me; I wished I’d never spoken. She poured more wine into her glass and mine. We were sitting at the kitchen table at the end of the day. My hands were white, chalky cement dust filled the creases; I’d just finished grouting the fountain mosaic. I had never told anybody except Anka about Pag, even now I’m not sure what made me tell Laura. I suppose because Laura asked me questions. She could be very persistent and anyway, Pag had been on my mind since our trip to Zadar. My mind had been running along all sorts of lines it hadn’t run on for years. Most of these memories I’d put safely away, as we all had, then something or someone comes along, like a plough through a fallow field in which all kinds of things lie buried under the crust of earth.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. Laura wanted to spare my feelings, but she probably wanted to believe it, too. The truth is the woman I loved went back to the life that suited her better, as the wife of the deputy manager of a shoe factory, a man who also smelled of leather, but of a more expensive kind. I went once to the town where she lived and found her house. It wasn’t difficult. I followed her to work and then, in the afternoon, I followed her from her place of work to the school. She wore make-up and heels and a suit made of a synthetic fabric, she smoked as she walked along the street. The kid had a crew cut and a bit of a belly. When he jumped in a puddle she smacked him over the back of the head with the hand that held the cigarette. I wondered some years later what became of her, whether she survived or died, whether she was widowed. It never occurred to me to look for her.

  Laura patted my hand, which lay on the table. Her fingers were cool and soft. Somewhere inside me, a nerve twitched.

  In the space of nearly ten years everything and nothing has changed in Gost. My parents and sisters give a party to welcome me. My mother drinks bambus, lines like sun-rays spread from the corners of her eyes. My father has been occupied for several years building sheds so that the back yard has begun to resemble a small shanty town, as though a family of refugees have toiled across the continent and moved in. Talk of the sheds makes my mother puff and roll her eyes. The house is full so I sleep in one of them, wrapped in an old quilt with the smell of cut pine in my nostrils; it reminds me of the den I shared with Anka in the pine plantation. In the morning I draw water from the well to shave. At the party I am introduced to children I hadn’t even known existed, who blink, squirm and are pressed to kiss me. One boy refuses, breaks free of his mother and hides. In ten years I had been back perhaps two or three times, never staying for more than a night or leaving my parents’ house. My father had come to visit me several times, once when I first moved to Pag. He had loved the island almost as much as I did; he brought me a motor for my boat, understood why I was there.

  The next morning, in the glare of our hangovers, Daniela and I walk to Gudura Uspomena. Anka is married, Daniela tells me, to Javor the son of my father’s boss at the post office. Javor runs a bar in town called the Zodijak, it’s very popular. Daniela and I are walking side by side, she puts her hand on my arm, stops and turns to face me, trying to find my gaze while I try to avoid hers. Later, I return to Gudura Uspomena without Daniela but with my old rifle, kept good by my father, who beams when he hands it over. It had belonged to him for three decades, before that to his father, who had been issued it on his first day as an infantryman in the war and had held onto it after he came down from months of fighting and hiding in the hills to be demobilised.

  Just as they’ve been doing every evening of the last decade the deer drift out of the woods, camouflaged by the play of a pale green light. A long time since I’ve been out hunting. I wonder about my aim, whether to risk a head shot. I have no dog. The does are cautious as ever, holding their heads high and flicking their ears back as if they’ve already scented me. A young buck, maybe four seasons old, suddenly trots forward ahead of the herd. Old enough to know better, and so I fell him with a shot to the temple. My father claps me on the back and laughs until he has a coughing fit. He hangs the carcass in one of the sheds.

  The next day I go looking for Anka. She’d moved into the blue house, left to her by her father. All over the country people lived together, generations in the same house. Life in the cities had become unbearable: apartments cross-hatched, divided and subdivided, with flimsy walls and curtains each time a baby came. Not so bad in the country, but even where there was space, building a house wasn’t easy: materials were expensive. So there was Anka, with a house of her own, a small house of her own. Perhaps old Pavić had decided to give his daughter a way out of her mother’s and brother’s reach. Who knows? Or maybe he just thought it was fair: after all Krešimir would one day inherit the town house. Pavić never counted on dying. On the other hand, he had the foresight to make a will. That said something about Pavić. He’d died when Anka was a child, so Vinka Pavić must have known for years that Anka would inherit the blue house and yet kept it from her daughter until Anka was more than twenty. That said something about Vinka. I wondered too how long Krešimir had known.

  The knowledge must have simmered.

  But when I round the corner whatever words I have in mind to say to Anka when we meet disappear. On the wall of the house a great bird rises, wings outspread, beak pointed to the sky. Glorious. Alive. A bird with blue wings, tipped with azure. A red-bodied bird, golden-plumed, dragging a golden tail. The bird’s head is turned to the left, as though it’s looking at me with a haughty stare. Its breath is exhaled in curls. Green hands outstretched below, trying to catch the bird or having just released it, who knows? I stand in the road and stare for a long time. I know nothing about these things, but I know Anka made it, this beautiful bird, because she is there in every detail of it, her joy. There is a fountain in the courtyard too, with brilliantly coloured fish swimming in the water. The house looks like something from a children’s story. It looks like no other house in Gost.

  When she opens the door Anka is wearing a cotton dress and has her hair tied up in a scarf. I stand with my back to the fountain and to the sun. At first she doesn’t recognise me (though later she denies this). She blinks and pushes her hair back, finally says, ‘Duro? Duro! Duro!’ more loudly each time, she throws her arms around me, presses the length of her body to mine and her nose into my neck. Her hair smells of vinegar. She kisses me hard and loud on each cheek.

  Afterwards she steps back, puts her hands on her hips, cocks her head and looks at me, grins. She blows her fringe up from her forehead; to see her do so, the way I had seen her do so so many times, goes straight to my heart.

  She doesn’t blame me, has never forgotten me. And she has forgiven me. Why? Because now she is ten years older, just as I am, and now the contours of her face are made up of hollows as well as curves, just as there are new straight lines and shadows in mine.

  Because now she is ten years older.

  Because now she loves another man.

  There’s nothing new about this story of ours, such things happen. Love misses its mark, arrives too early or too late. Nobody dies, except in novels.

  Most people in Gost never kne
w why I left; those who did have forgotten, even my parents seem to have forgotten, because neither my mother nor my father makes any mention of Anka. My father is only occupied with his sheds, and my mother is occupied with my father and his sheds. But this is a small town and so Anka and I reconfigure our love into a friendship, broad enough to include Anka’s husband Javor. I remember him. He’s a decent sort. I pretend to be more pleased than I am for them both. I don’t think Anka has told Javor about us, but then why would she? Ours was a calf love from a time long gone, from the days when we were children.

  Of this I persuade myself.

  With Javor and Anka, the summer following my return, back at the house from an evening at the Zodijak where we have celebrated the third anniversary of the bar’s opening. We are all drunk, but some are drunker than others. Javor, for instance. Times are lean for everyone, except Fabjan and Javor. The Zodijak thrives: misery likes company and beer. Javor has bought Anka a kiln and a car. He has installed the kiln in one of the outbuildings and Anka has been working hard these last weeks: the tiny back seat of her new red Fićo is crammed full of boxes of brightly painted ceramic ashtrays, bowls and plates, brooches, wrapped in newspaper. She wears one of her brooches, the imprint of a walnut in blue ceramic. I still have the little heart she gave me years ago, found again among those belongings of mine my father had stored in one of his sheds. I put it in my pocket. Every Wednesday or Thursday Anka takes the road down to the coast, to Zadar, where she sells the things she makes to the owners of tourist shops. Sometimes Javor goes with her to buy supplies for the bar and they drive the Fićo back rattling with bottles.

  With the start of winter it became too cold to carry on sleeping in the shed. My father had a solution, which was to fix up the old pig house in the lower field. The field belonged to our family, it was used for grazing from time to time. The house had been abandoned years ago, but when I pushed open the broken door I saw my father wasn’t wrong.

  For two days I shovelled shit and stinking, rotten hay, washed down the floors. While I worked I thought of nothing except hosing walls, scrubbing stains from the stone floors and spraying the whole place three times with diluted disinfectant. I ripped the rotten door from its hinges and threw it on a bonfire. Hard work took my mind far away from Pag. I was building myself a future in Gost. After his work at the post office my father came to lend a hand; having a project made him happy and it made my mother happy because he’d stopped building sheds in the yard. Working side by side, within a week we had the place weather-proofed and in another week we’d installed a new floor where the bedroom would be. Within a month I’d moved in and I added improvements all winter. My new home was even closer to the blue house than my parents’ place.

  Then in November I found Kos tied to a tree and left to die and I took her home with me.

  Anka puts plates on the table, Javor wants to help, but he is too drunk, he stumbles and catches his hip on the edge of the table. The plate flies from his hand and Javor tries to catch it, grasps it fleetingly. The plate breaks on the floor. Javor himself overtopples. He has removed his trousers and is wearing a T-shirt over a pair of blue Y-fronts. On his knees on the floor he begins to collect pieces of the plate, holding each one close to his face and examining it as if it is evidence of some immense crime. Anka pulls him to his feet. He sways and puts his arms around her. ‘I’m sorry, baby.’ Anka pushes him into a chair and returns to laying the table.

  Once, they had an argument and Anka came over to my place and stayed a few hours. I cooked, she talked but not about Javor. While we were eating Javor telephoned, but Anka refused to speak to him. ‘OK,’ said Javor. ‘Tell her I’m sorry.’ I told Anka he sounded miserable and then Anka changed her mind and called him back, but Javor had accidentally left the receiver off the hook, she could hear him humming to himself and the sound of him biting into an apple, she shouted into the receiver but he didn’t hear her and then he must have stubbed his toe, she began to laugh and passed me the phone so I could listen to Javor stumble and curse. Javor never knew why she showed up at the house minutes later, her face stained with tears of laughter.

  The door is open to the tepid night air. Fabjan arrives, accompanied by his wife, then a taut, blonde Venus with plastic hoops in her ears, her gaze permanently narrowed against the smoke of her own cigarettes. Javor levers himself to his feet and goes out of the back door, returns with a bottle of rakija. He puts a tape into the player on the windowsill, picks out a tune on an air guitar and makes a twanging sound to imitate the sound of the instrument. Three ascending notes, then down, up, down. Then the same three ascending notes. Da, da, da-da. He spins with surprising grace, as drunks sometimes do.

  ‘What the fuck is this crap?’

  ‘The greatest song ever written.’

  ‘By a coke head.’

  ‘Acid head. Anyway Lucy was a girl his son had a crush on so he made a painting of her. It was a kid’s painting, that’s all it was. “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”.’

  Fabjan moves over to the recorder and jabs a stubby forefinger at the row of buttons. The music stops, leaving a ringing in the air. Javor puts an arm around Fabjan’s neck and kisses him, waves at Fabjan’s wife. ‘Fabjan, Fabjan! My good friend,’ he slurs, locates the rakija bottle and pours drinks all round. Javor is an excellent drunk. Fabjan has brought beer and a bottle of Stock 84. He refuses Javor’s rakija and pours himself a brandy which he knocks back in one and pours another. In between brandies he takes long draughts from the beer bottle. He lights a cigarette of a local brand, Morava, which smell strongly. In between draughts of beer and puffs on his cigarette his eyes follow Anka: his gaze slides down her back and comes to rest on her buttocks as she reaches for plates. The way Fabjan looks at every woman, but especially the way he looks at Anka, pisses me off. I move to insert myself in-between Fabjan’s gaze and Anka’s body.

  ‘I’ll help you,’ I say, and take the plates from her hand.

  We eat: grilled pork and cabbage salad. A piece of food flies down Javor’s gullet and lodges there. Anka bangs him on the back; he reddens and coughs it up. Afterwards she kisses him on the back of the head. I see her do these things and know how she loves him. And I love Javor too, everyone does except maybe Fabjan, but then Fabjan only loves himself.

  As for me, I have taken a few women out since I came to Gost, but somehow nothing lasts. I’ve come to depend on Javor and Anka, the door to their house is always open to me. I’ve been given the privileges couples in love bestow upon hopeless bachelors. Namely: the right to eat at their table without an invitation, the right to get drunk, the right to spend the night on the couch when I am too drunk to go home. In return I bring venison to their table, sometimes a partridge or a quail. And I make them a table, a belated wedding present. I use wood from my father’s stash in the sheds. I work on it in secret and my father helps me carry it to the blue house one day when the house is empty. Tricky getting it inside with just the two of us.

  Among my privileges as a frequent guest, bachelor, supplier of fresh game, is the right to be alone with Anka. It’s something I am careful not to do too often. I am bruised by Pag and a year after my return I am haunted by the ghost of an emotion for which I have no name. It rises to the surface in odd moments, sometimes when I am alone with Anka, is submerged by Javor’s dogged goodwill, his neck-locks and jokes, his rakija.

  Anka is the only person I tell about Pag. Not my mother, who is unsentimental, and not my father, because he is far too sentimental. Daniela would have been upset for me. Anka listens without interrupting; when I am finished she stretches out her hand and holds my wrist lightly with her fingers, like a doctor taking a patient’s pulse. We are quiet for some time. Then she lets go of my wrist and leans across the table to take my head into her hands and shakes it, the way a child does a piggy bank. Eventually she says, ‘Silly bitch. She’ll never be happy with that attitude.’

  When any
thing happens to me, good or bad, Anka becomes the first person I tell. I love her, but it’s a chaste love, bleached by time and familiarity, like a long marriage. In my love for Anka, even when we were teenagers and lay on a quilt under the pine trees, there was none of the hurt of Pag. If Javor ever left her, I would look after her, perhaps even ask her to marry me. But more than that, more than anything, I want to protect Anka, can’t bear the idea of her ever being hurt. I would sleep all night across the doorstep of the house if she asked me. In some strange way I fear for her. Because she has forgiven Krešimir and Vinka, you see. Something I cannot bring myself to do, but Anka has reworked the whole episode in her mind, rubbed away the stains, the malice and jealousy, painting on new, less wounding reasons.

  Fabjan tips brandy down his throat and begins to outline his new plans for the Zodijak: folk night, karaoke, girls. Why not? Once a month. Javor slaps him on the back, grins. ‘Fabjan’s plans for world domination.’ Fabjan ignores him and carries on. The two men are so unalike, it is hard to think how they can be friends. Fabjan has thick hair on his forearms and his head. Javor looks like a fledgling fallen from the nest: his neck is long, his nose is prominent, his pale brown hair stands up to form a soft fuzz around his head.

  Javor starts to sing, quietly at first and then louder. One by one the rest of us join in and Fabjan gives up. The song has been played on the radio all year. ‘Hajde Da Ludujemo.’ That was 1990, the year we hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in Zagreb. Fabjan organised a Eurovision evening in the bar. His wife kind of looks like the singer, at least she dressed the same in a pink dress with a short skirt. I’ve forgotten the singer’s name. Anyway, now it has become a standing joke between us, to begin to sing the song and for the rest of us to join in. What Javor likes best is to start this at the worst possible time, under his breath: last week during his cousin’s wedding vows.