The Hired Man

by Aminatta Forna

  ‘Fuck head,’ says Fabjan.

  So that’s Javor for you.

  You’re wondering about Krešimir.

  According to Anka her brother was doing fine, living in the town house with their mother, decent job and all the rest. At first I raised the subject of Krešimir carefully, but Anka talked like everything that happened in the past had been left there. She’d forgiven him, as she forgave everybody. You must remember, Krešimir and her mother were family, the only family she had, and we always say blood and water aren’t the same.

  At Christmas the first year of my return there was a reunion party, in the old school hall where the Licitar hearts still hung. The old gang were there: Andro, Goran, Miro. I’d seen them about in the last few months, of course. All married, to wives who fell pregnant as soon as they were up the aisle. Still cracking terrible jokes. Miro had brought a stash of porn videos and was trying to sell them for a few thousand dinara each. That was before the currency was revalued. The only person I hadn’t seen was Krešimir, though I’d seen Vinka Pavić. She’d finally given in to widow’s black, dyed her hair red, walking down the street with the careful, erratic gait of the habitual drunk. She greeted me as though the alcohol had rubbed her mind clean.

  A billow of air through the double doors carried the smell of wood polish, rubber and feet. Tables covered in paper cloths, plates of food brought by the women, cups of cheap wine and home-made streamers. A band: some of the guys from school, not bad. Later, a DJ. Not much had changed, except that it was no longer the 1970s, instead it was the last year of the 1980s. We wore our hair shorter: Goran’s cut close to reveal the great swell of his head; he’d become a warehouse foreman. Andro had put on weight, he’d joined his father’s business as an electrician. Nobody had left Gost for the simple reason nobody wanted to. They were afraid if they did they’d lose their place in the ranking of second-hand cars and motorbikes, drinking bouts and blowjobs. A few of the guys gave me a slap on the back and they seemed really pleased to see me, but interest in what I’d been doing didn’t last long because people were only really interested in what happened in Gost: even the coast was another country.

  Krešimir leant apart from the others, his back to the wall. I saw he was still wearing his father’s leather jacket. It gave me a jolt to see him, but I was relaxed, coming home had been good, I’d found my place again. The one time we talked about any of it, helping my father move things around his shed while we looked for wood to make a table for Anka and Javor, my father stopped and placed his hand on my shoulder. ‘The past is the past,’ he’d said to me, and I’d caught his meaning straight away, he was telling me, warning me to let it go. I thought: Yes, my father is right. Hadn’t Mrs Pavić greeted me in the street, hadn’t Anka found happiness with Javor? ‘Things happen. Forget about it.’ He touched my cheek, he looked tired. Time had passed. Now my father preferred to build sheds in his yard rather than drink with his old friends. My mother said he was becoming tender-hearted. So I walked towards Krešimir and extended my hand. And Krešimir looked at me and then looked away. He pushed off the wall and walked past me, as if I were never there.

  The next day I told my father he was wrong: the past is never passed.

  In the bakery, a man and a woman ahead of me in a short line.

  ‘After all this time. Now he comes back. The neighbours thought they were seeing a ghost.’

  The man behind her gave a snort.

  ‘Everyone knew it was him,’ she continued. ‘He had a harelip. And they say the daughter was with him, a grown woman.’

  ‘They’ve moved back into the old place?’

  ‘Yes. And a row with the neighbours, over their tractor.’

  The man grunted.

  Every few months a newspaper article or something else kicked something off, put people on edge, set them talking. The same could happen anywhere. The knowledge was a shivering child locked in an upstairs room. The dark child haunted our dreams, invaded the places in our minds even we didn’t dare go. The couple in front of me stopped talking, having gone as far as they dared. They collected their loaves and left. I asked my cousin’s ex-wife. ‘Where?’

  ‘K–’ She gave the name of a town forty kilometres to the east, larger than Gost. Nothing more was said. People were becoming mindful of what could happen here. Another plough had broken the crust of the fallow field of memories.

  I left the bakery and I thought I might go by the Zodijak for a beer. It was still early, the sky a pale blue and heat left in the sun. I reached the road and was about to cross, when I got a shock. There was Laura. Sitting at an outside table with Fabjan. Laura laughing – as though Fabjan had just said something really funny.

  Yes, Tatjana something. The papers called her Tajči – she sang the Eurovision song the year we hosted the contest. I remembered it later that night as I got ready for bed. I cut my nails: they grow fast in the summer. I had a callus on my thumb. I picked up a jar of rose hand cream; just as the smell of lime hair oil reminds me of my father, the scent of rose hand cream reminds me of my mother. She made it herself, as people did in those days, out of rose water and glycerine which she bought from the chemist’s, or better still beeswax, when she could get hold of it. Simmering pans of petals. An aunt swore by olive oil and sugar. Every so often my father bought her a pot of Atrixo from the men in the market. I like to use the cream from time to time, never obviously when I am going hunting, for then it would give me away. The smell of the cream brought back the past, as it always did, and with it the name of the singer. Tajči. We didn’t win. And anyway the memory is a useless one, but it was part of a time.

  Out of curiosity I went a few days ago to Gost library and looked on the Internet. Tatjana Matejaš is her full name. She lives in Cincinnati and sings in churches.

  I went to bed. I thought about Laura sitting with Fabjan. Later that night I dreamt of Laura and woke suddenly in the dark with a warm, wet belly. I lay and thought about her for a while. I’d never been able to imagine her any other way than the way she was, never imagined her angry or aroused, or even sweaty for that matter. And in the dream too nothing had happened, except that she’d lain on her back and let me fuck her.

  12

  Laura asked if I could recommend a hairdresser. I rubbed my hand over my cropped hair and gave her the address of the salon belonging to Fabjan’s wife. I said, ‘Her husband owns the Zodijak.’

  Laura frowned.

  ‘On the same street as the bakery.’ I couldn’t help it. I asked, ‘What were you doing in there?’

  Laura laughed. ‘Is there a law against it?’

  ‘No, of course there isn’t. I just wondered. I mean, not many women go to the Zodijak.’

  ‘Oh I see, and you were worried I’d fallen into bad company. It was you who told us about it, don’t you remember? Matthew wanted to use the Internet. We stopped by there yesterday. I met the owner. Wouldn’t think of letting me pay. He was absurdly charming.’

  I’d forgotten and now I remembered – the day Matthew had let his exasperation with the holiday show, the day I’d shown them the double rainbow. Yes, the Zodijak had Internet access, one of the first places in town to do so. ‘That’s Fabjan for you,’ I said. Matthew must have been sitting at the back where the computer was, while Fabjan flirted with Laura.

  ‘Do you think she’d be able to do highlights?’

  Laura’s fair hair, when you looked closely, was composed of strands of hair each a slightly different shade from gold, through red to brown. It looked complicated. I remembered my sister Daniela, who trained to be a beautician. She might have known where to go. ‘Maybe Zadar is better,’ I said. ‘The salon here is small. They only know one or two styles.’

  ‘Oh well.’ Laura picked up a strand of her hair and examined it; she shrugged lightly. ‘I don’t think I want to go all the way back to Zadar for a hair appointment. Maybe I’ll
leave it.’

  ‘Or maybe something simple. I think they could do that.’

  ‘Do you know what I’ve always wanted? A bob. Neat, short, dark. Chic.’ She flicked the back of her hair and let it fall. ‘My real hair colour is actually much darker than this. I’ve often thought about going back to it.’

  ‘I believe dark hair would suit you, Laura,’ I said deliberately. ‘It would make you look younger.’

  The fountain was almost completely restored. Grace planned some kind of grand opening when we would turn on the water and asked me to help. I ripped out and replaced the pump and added a centrepiece to the fountain: a stone ball resting on a plain dais, which I paid for myself as a gift. In-between I worked on the house and occasionally on the Fićo. I should mention that what happened between Matthew and me in Zadar seemed to have passed: he was respectful, you could even say pleasant. From time to time he offered to help; once he asked if we could go shooting again.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Any time.’

  ‘When can we go hunting?’

  I still hadn’t decided if I liked him, but I said, ‘The season starts a few weeks from now. If you’re still here we can go.’

  ‘Awesome,’ said Matthew.

  The day was Saturday, the grand opening of the fountain planned for the evening. I’d guessed Grace wanted it to be a surprise so I didn’t say anything to Laura. Mid-morning I found Grace at work in the kitchen baking a cake.

  ‘For tonight,’ she said. ‘Do you like cake?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Coffee cake especially.’

  For some reason this statement made Grace blush and return with a furious vigour to beating her cake mixture into submission.

  In town to take coffee earlier that morning I sat outside the Zodijak where I was served by the girl who worked there. Afterwards she went back and sat at the bar, her chin low, her hair hiding her face. She was certainly a great deal less cheerful than she’d been two or three weeks ago. I doubted she would last. Not many people come to Gost and want to stay.

  The bar was busy as always at that time on a Saturday. Fabjan’s folk music played. Men drank coffee and rakija. Fabjan was there; the girl sent him looks through her hair. Fabjan ignored her. When he saw me he nodded and redirected his stare to the street. I passed him and had a waft of his odour, which no amount of cologne will disguise: sweat and cooked meats. Fabjan’s fingers are swollen and red. A wedding ring cuts into the flesh of his third finger, like a corset on an obese woman. His lips are virgin pink and shine with saliva. A family of hairs peeps from his nostrils and his ears, while a crowd of hairs seems to strain upwards, out of his open collar, as if they’re trying to catch a glimpse of their upstairs cousins.

  If you listen you can hear him breathing.

  That day he sat with crossed arms, his mouth set into a down-turned line, his brow dark and low. Fabjan has the ability to sit like that for hours. Watch him and you’ll see that every now and again he frowns, as though bothered by some fly of a thought risen from the swamp of his subconscious. Seeing him like that, I had an impulse to goad him. I said, ‘Did you hear of this thing in K–?’

  On the surface of Fabjan’s face nothing stirred, his grunt was non-committal. I left it a few minutes and sipped my coffee. Of course Fabjan would have heard the talk, so would the whole of Gost; they would discuss it just like the pair in the bakery, stopping before they took a step too far and betrayed themselves. I pressed on. ‘They thought he was dead. And then he turns up. They say his daughter was with him. Maybe it was the first time she had been there. I wonder how much he told her.’

  Fabjan licked his lips, a slow sweep of the thick tip of his tongue across the top lip in one direction and back the other way across the bottom. He sniffed deeply.

  I said, ‘I wonder if they’ll stay.’

  Fabjan turned his head slowly in my direction. ‘Do you want something?’ he snapped. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’

  Back at the blue house I satisfied myself the fountain would do all that was required of it in the evening. Late afternoon I walked the hills with the dogs, counted roe buck and some deer. I thought about Matthew and my promise to take him hunting. I used to take businessmen hunting from time to time, to make a bit of extra money. Some people, when they come to it, can’t bring themselves to pull the trigger. Nothing wrong with that, the hunt teaches you about yourself. They never come again. Others come only wanting to kill; they don’t have any patience for the work of tracking, the long waits and the cold. When the chance comes, they’ll shoot anything, even a doe with a fawn. I’ve seen it happen. Over the years I’ve learned to recognise the type. Now I prefer to hunt alone. But Matthew – I couldn’t imagine a boy like him waiting motionless as dusk fell, not making a sound. And though he had done well enough out with the targets, I still couldn’t see him holding his nerve steady enough to take the final shot.

  By eight o’clock I was back at the blue house wearing a fresh shirt. To make more of the occasion I’d strung up some lights which made Grace very happy. There was something strange about her appearance and after a minute or two I put my finger on it. She had pasted a heavy layer of blue eyeshadow onto her eyelids, otherwise her face was bare: no mascara or lipstick. It gave her face a clownish look.

  Matthew came down. ‘Hey, man, Grace says there’s going to be a surprise. Do you know what it is?’ He fetched two beers and handed me one. Laura appeared with a glass of wine in her hand; she wore a touch of pale pink lipstick and her lashes were dark with mascara. It seemed strange that she didn’t take her daughter aside and show her how to fix herself properly. When I was young I sometimes watched my sisters transform themselves. Once I’d even sat alone at the dressing table in the room they shared – lair of scents and secrets, where I loved to spy and eavesdrop – and brushed rouge onto my cheeks, found a stub of lipstick and applied it to my lips. I must have been eight or nine. Later I forgot this and when my mother called me for my tea I ran downstairs. ‘Eh, Duro!’ My mother clapped a hand over her mouth. My father looked up from the newspaper and began to laugh. Daniela – she had left school at sixteen and was already training to become a beautician – turned me around in my chair. With her thumb she blended the edges of my eyeshadow, pinched my cheeks and said, ‘There, you look beautiful. Eat your food.’

  ‘Grace said you were coming,’ said Laura. She came up to me and, for the first time, kissed me on each cheek. She turned those slanted eyes of hers on me and narrowed them so they wrinkled at the corners. The overall effect was extremely attractive. ‘I wonder what it is. But I bet you can keep a secret, Duro. Don’t worry, I shan’t bully you. I love surprises.’

  Salad and pizza, made by Grace during her kitchen frenzy. Laura opened a bottle of red wine. In the quiet you could hear the sound of cars on the main road.

  ‘Something must be going on,’ said Laura.

  ‘Wedding reception,’ I said. ‘The season has begun. From now every Saturday there will be a big party at the hotel. It will go on late and everyone will be drunk. Then they’ll fight.’

  We ate and drank. Coffee cake for dessert. When it was nearly dark I nodded to Grace and she slipped into the house and put on a CD. There was music. ‘Ah,’ smiled Laura. ‘Handel. Now I wonder what that could possibly mean.’ I stood up and threw the switch on the fountain. Water bubbled up and rippled down the sides of the sphere of stone. This part of the display lasted about a minute. Then from the sides of the pool frothy plumes of water shot up into the air, dropped down and rose again. Next I turned on the lights to reveal the mosaic. Underneath the water the fish appeared to move, the weeds ripple. What a spectacle! Cheering and clapping. More drink, we popped a cork and toasted the fountain. Laura allowed Grace a glass and Matthew helped himself freely. Grace sneezed and hiccuped. We sang ‘Jailhouse Rock’, which was being played on the radio a lot for some reason. Our singing subsided into chatter.
Grace and Matthew began some kind of guessing game I had no hope of entering, as it seemed to rely on knowing a great deal about famous people. Laura joined in and then withdrew. Grace complained the game couldn’t be played with two people, but somehow she and Matthew carried on. Matthew changed the music. In this way it grew late.

  Around midnight a car cruised by. It drove neither fast nor slowly. I watched it pass. Laura sat, her head tilted back, looking at the stars. At the end of the road the beam of headlights swept the field opposite as the driver turned, the fractious whine of the engine, tyres slipping on the gravel, whorls of dust rose in the cones of light. After a pause the car began heading back. Laura noticed nothing, sighed and drew her shawl round her shoulders. The headlights of the car switched to full beam. Now I rose from my chair. The vehicle picked up speed and as it drew parallel to the house slowed. The sound of a woman’s coarse laughter. The driver gunned the engine. A gobbet of spit caught the light as it flew through the air, an obscenity hurled in English was left echoing in the darkness and something else – a glowing arc which landed in the grass in front of the table and exploded with a sharp crack. Laura jumped and screamed. The car drove on.

  At first nobody moved. Laura stood, her hands across her mouth. All of us stared in the direction of the car: the tail lights could just be seen dipping in and out of view as the car rounded the bends of the road.

  Matthew said, ‘Fucking hell!’

  ‘Matthew!’ said Laura automatically.

  ‘Drunks,’ I said. ‘From town, probably looking for somewhere to smoke weed. Nothing to worry about. They’re not coming back.’