The Hired Man

by Aminatta Forna

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Hey, I said don’t move,’ called Matthew. He took the key to the car from the hook and went over to his mother, lifted her hand and pressed it into the palm. She fingered it, like a contestant in a game show.

  ‘Well that’s easy enough. It’s a key.’

  ‘You can look now,’ said Matthew.

  Laura pulled the shawl down from her eyes, frowned and peered into the darkness of the outbuilding. Matthew and I each took hold of one end of the cover of the car and slid it off. Grace clapped a hand over her mouth. Laura took a pace forward. ‘You mean to say it’s ready?’

  I said, ‘Yes, it’s ready to drive.’

  The three of us stood back and watched her as she walked towards the car very slowly, as though it might just disappear in a puff of smoke. Carefully she opened the driver’s door and stroked the cover of the seat; she climbed in, felt for the ignition and slotted the key inside. When she hesitated Matthew said, ‘Go on. I’ve driven it.’

  ‘Have you?’ She looked up at him.

  ‘Sure, Duro let me. Yesterday.’

  ‘You two have been planning this?’

  Matthew smiled.

  ‘Well, come on!’ Laura patted the seat next to her and Matthew opened the door and was about to swing himself inside but stopped. He stood back.

  ‘No, take Duro first.’

  ‘Of course. Come on, Duro,’ called Laura.

  I sat in the passenger seat. Laura turned the key in the ignition and the engine started. I would have preferred to warm it myself beforehand, but that would have spoiled the surprise. She eased the car out into the courtyard and the sunlight and then into the track at the side of the house. Matthew whooped and ran after the car for a short distance, to be left behind as we picked up speed. I listened to the engine, and was satisfied. I wound down my window and dipped my hand into the wind, I turned to look at Laura as she adjusted the driver’s mirror and she caught my glance and smiled. ‘Are we going for a spin, then?’

  I nodded. ‘Turn right here.’ I directed her out towards the main road, the one that heads north. A blue butterfly flew in through the open window and danced for a few moments in front of the windscreen and our faces. Laura slowed until I had time to catch and release it; she said it was beautiful. She began to sing and tapped the steering wheel lightly. She drove well, without hesitation, except once to look for the location of the indicators, and so I leaned across to show her. And she drove barefoot, Grace’s flip-flops kicked under the seat, feeling the pedals with her toes, like she was pushing them into sand, down on the accelerator. We were out on the main road, the warm wind on our faces.

  ‘How fast can I go?’

  I didn’t answer the question. I leaned back and closed my eyes. Not so easy to relax in a car this size, you can imagine, all the same I did feel relaxed. I listened to the whine of the engine as it responded. I remembered the smell of the car, the way you could feel each rut and wrinkle in the road. Everything felt good. For the first time in many years I felt something like happiness. We did not speak, until Laura said, ‘Duro, I think we’re going to have to go back.’

  I opened my eyes. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m still wearing my night-clothes.’ And she looked into my eyes and laughed.

  Later, after Laura had dressed, and after first Matthew and then Grace, and then Matthew again but driving Laura this time, had all ridden in the car, Grace and I were left alone in the yard. I turned to Grace. ‘Where’s the hat your mother bought in Zadar?’

  ‘Dunno. Why?’

  I said, ‘Isn’t it the same colour as the car?’

  ‘Oh yes it is. Red hat, red car. Hang on. I’ll go and find it. Good idea. Mum will love that.’

  That evening (because I had an idea about what might happen) I went to town for a drink. I’ve told you people no longer walk out in the evening, things have changed, but still there are a good many people around on a Saturday evening in Gost. Women doing last-minute shopping before the shops close on Sunday. Men sitting outside bars. Lads riding their scooters around the supermarket car park.

  Plenty of people in the Zodijak. Fabjan was there. I nodded to him and said hello to the girl who took my order; I noticed she no longer greeted every customer with a smile. After she’d delivered my drink she went back to playing with her hair at the bar, pulling it out strand by strand from a patch at the back of her neck. I went to sit at Fabjan’s table; I wanted a ringside seat. Last time I’d seen him he’d been standing outside the blue house looking over the hedge at the family inside. He barely greeted me and nor did he offer me a seat (not that he ever does). He was smoking and reading a paper. I sat with my back to the bar and stretched out my legs, watching the street, and when I finished my drink I called for another one. Today I had all the time in the world.

  Some time ago Fabjan had installed a satellite dish, quite likely illegally. Since the days of the pinball machine there had been continual upgrades at the Zodijak. On big-match days the place was packed. Today CNN was on: fires in Greece, the government has declared a state of emergency. Fifty-three people missing. Pictures of burned-out villages, burned-out cars, all of which looked very familiar. Evacuation helicopters. A statue of a winged god or perhaps an angel, blurred by smoke, flames visible in the near distance. There followed a feature about a member of the Ku Klux Klan convicted by a Mississippi jury of kidnapping and killing two black teenagers. The murders took place back in 1964, when the state was segregated, three years after I was born. James Ford Seale. On the screen a photograph of him as a young man, movie star handsome. Pictures of him being led into court: orange jumpsuit, wire-framed glasses, age spots. Happy black folk outside the court waving a placard: Forty Years On. The brother of one of the murder victims, according to the words running below the pictures, was the one who had tracked the old man down.

  I sipped my wine and checked the football scores on the back of Fabjan’s newspaper until he put it down, possibly to spite me. I made some conversation about the football. He was no more in the mood for talking than on any other day. He answered me in monosyllables as he went through receipts in his wallet. I sipped more of my wine and counted the minutes.

  This is what happened:

  Some time between six thirty and seven Laura drove by in the Fićo. One or two people noticed the car, I’ve already told you they are quite rare these days. Even I can’t remember when I last saw one on the road. You see them dumped outside people’s houses, all rusted up. But also, and I’ve told you this too, in some quarters the cars were gaining a little cachet. So when Laura drove right through the middle of town in the Fićo some people’s attention was caught by the small red car. In the Zodijak a man at the table behind me said to his companion, ‘Would you look at that?’ (The guy from the municipal offices again.) His companion twisted round to see what he was talking about.

  ‘Now I had one of those. My first car. Loved it like my life.’

  ‘I had one. My brother’s first. He gave it to me when he went abroad.’

  ‘Mine was white, I put black stripes on the bonnet, like in that film The Italian Job.’

  ‘Those were Minis.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Had to keep the back open to stop the engine overheating.’

  ‘Drove it everywhere. Reinforced the roof to take more weight.’

  The girl, who was serving them beer, said, ‘My uncle had a car just like that. He lived in Novigrad.’ Some of the other drinkers started talking about the cars: the limited choice of colours, advantages over the Fiat 600 and vice versa, the eighty kilometres per hour top speed. Someone claimed to have made eighty-six in theirs. Not a single person had not, at one time or another, owned or known one of these cars.

  Fabjan looked up from the contents in his wallet. He turned his head to see what people were looking
at, his great bull neck made it a slow movement. Laura was parking the car on the opposite side of the road. I kept a silent eye on Fabjan who watched with nothing more than casual interest much in the same way the two men and the waitress did.

  Maybe if it had not been for what happened in K— just a couple of weeks before, which had everybody talking, already thinking the thoughts they tried not to think, that and the restoration of the mosaic and the fountain. Word had got around. The nerves of the town were close to the surface. The waitress was the only person to whom none of this meant anything and I wonder to this day what she thought about the way all the men around her went silent and stared at this woman in a red hat, stepping out of a small red car. This woman who was at least twenty years older than her, with short dark hair, the men were staring at her as if they’d never seen the like. The waitress, pretty and blonde, glanced around at the men and at Fabjan who was sitting with his hand (holding a receipt) frozen in mid-air and flounced back inside to the bar. Finally, Fabjan swallowed.

  What stillness that evening, it lay over the town. All that moved was Laura, trailing a storm in her wake. Imagine: Laura in her red hat and the sunglasses she wore against the low evening sun, moving through the town, visiting shops to pick up whatever she’d come into town for. Did she even notice the long looks? The exchanged glances? And if she did, did she ask herself what it was all about? I don’t imagine so: knowing Laura, she would have swung through the town thinking only about what she had to do, crossing the errands off her list and enjoying the evening sun on her face.

  In the bakery (which opens for a few hours on a Sunday) all talk was of the night before. I’d made sure to stop by for a pastry for my breakfast, something I did occasionally. Those who had seen the woman in the red hat who drove the little Fićo told those who hadn’t all about it. Details were added: the woman wore a necklace made of pottery beads, she spoke English but something in her accent made it sound as if this wasn’t her native tongue; it was as if she understood what people around her were saying. It was the same woman who took over the blue house a month ago now; it wasn’t the woman who had taken over the blue house, though she looked like her, this was a different woman. The woman was in her thirties; the woman was in her forties. It was claimed she asked directions to a house in Gost. Descriptions of her outfit varied: some said she was wearing a smock, others jeans. I know that Laura was wearing her denim skirt, a blouse tied at the waist and espadrilles, because it is my favourite outfit of hers.

  Three details remained consistent: that the woman had short dark hair and wore a red hat. That the car was a red Fićo.

  Later that day I was having a drink in the Zodijak. Perhaps I should have avoided the place for a while, but I was enjoying the atmosphere in town since Laura’s jaunt and I wanted to savour it. Anyway, it was Sunday and Fabjan was with his family, at least I assume he was. I bought a glass of wine and sat at the front of the bar; the evening was pleasant, cooler than it had been. The sky was filled with starlings the way it had been the evening of the day I first met Laura. You remember I’d stopped for a drink there and then seen Krešimir passing by with his shopping and invited him for a drink. I mention the starlings for no reason except that they were there, carving patterns in the sky as they so often did. It meant a hawk or a kestrel was somewhere around. I was watching them much the way I did the time before and when I looked down I again saw Krešimir, only this time he wasn’t walking past on the other side of the road carrying his shopping home, this time he was storming across the road towards me. It gave me a thrill to see him so angry; my heart quickened because Krešimir in a rage is capable of anything. I curled my fingers around my glass of wine.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

  I stayed calm. The stakes we were playing for were rising and I needed to keep sight of the end game. I looked at him, I didn’t answer, though I may have blinked, with a kind of surprise. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?’ He was practically foaming at the mouth. Nobody looked up. Around us the other drinkers stared into their glasses, or at the street ahead, or up at the tele­vision above the bar.

  I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You’d better put a stop to this shit, all this shit. I’m warning you.’

  ‘What shit are you talking about?’

  ‘That fucking woman, that fucking house.’

  I said, ‘You mean the blue house, the one you sold to the woman from England?’

  You’ll guess that the way I said woman from England and not Englishwoman, Engleskinja, was deliberate. Woman from England – the words left space for doubt to creep in and where doubt existed there was the possibility of something else: the dark child, scratching against the walls. Now I had the attention of everyone in the bar. They were all listening, even though some of them were still pretending not to. I stood up to face Krešimir because he was towering over me where I sat and I felt disadvantaged. I considered putting my glass of wine down. ‘What is it you think I am doing?’

  ‘You know exactly.’

  ‘I’ve done work on the house. I need the money. So what?’

  ‘Trying to stir things up, cause trouble.’

  I raised my voice to be sure I was heard. ‘You’re the one who is causing trouble, you did it the day you sold the house. You had no right. No right. That house was never yours to sell. It’s you who has brought the strangers here and you who brought this whole thing down on our heads.’

  By now the other drinkers were listening, making no pretence at deafness. Hardly a person in Gost didn’t know what we were talking about. This was good, but I’d had a bellyful of Krešimir. I said, ‘I think you need to calm down, Krešimir,’ and took a step back when he lunged for my throat. One of the men who had been watching stood up and put himself between us. He was broader than Krešimir by a hand-span. He didn’t say a word, he looked at Krešimir and tilted his head towards the street, showing him the door so to speak, obvious too from the way he stood he was confident he had the rest of the bar at his back. Krešimir, for all his bluff, is a coward. He took a step back, shook himself off and disappeared. I nodded to the man who’d just saved my skin and he nodded back. We did not speak, we resumed our places. I took a sip of my glass of wine and returned to watching the street and the patterns of the birds in the sky.

  18

  We were petty thieves, smugglers and black-marketeers. We kept illicit stills, we hunted out of season because we could. We hated to pay tax, we did deals on the side and took cash whenever we could; we were the kind of people governments don’t like: bullet-headed, obstinate, as hard to control as it is to herd cats. It turned out we were the sort of people who would steal from the houses of those who had fled, which we did, without shame.

  I see Goran’s wife in the street and she is wearing a long leather coat I’ve never seen her in before. Bicycles for Andro’s two boys, there’s a swing chair on the front veranda that wasn’t there before. Miro drives a different car, a car I recognise and I know doesn’t belong to him. So, he shrugs and asks me what’s the difference? If they come back he will give them their car, of course he will, otherwise it just sits there outside the house or somebody else takes it. He used to sell dirty videos to make a bit of cash, but he doesn’t bother with that any more. He has a house full of second-hand items for sale: everything from kitchen clocks to candlesticks.

  Yes, we are petty thieves, smugglers, black-marketeers, we are makers of moonshine and tax dodgers, we fiddle the books of our businesses and peddle porn, and when our neighbours’ houses are empty we steal from them.

  One thing we are not is killers. We hate to be governed, we are unruly, headstrong, we govern ourselves and all that governs us is the weather, the changing of the seasons, the land.

  So what we lack they send to us.

  They arrive and what they find is a bunch of petty crook
s and boys who race their scooters up and down the supermarket car park, with moustaches of soft sparse hair, bitten fingernails and acne scars: boys in love with their cocks, who think themselves men.

  Soon there is a list of names, drawn up from the post office records. People are told to report to the Crisis HQ. There are arrests, the new authorities insist these are not arrests but detentions in the name of security. Two students shop their teacher, who gave them poor grades. A farmer, mad with jealousy for ten years, exacts revenge on his wife’s old lover. Grudges are reckoned. Greed grows. People denounce their neighbours to the new authorities on the quiet, with an eye on the couch, chest freezer, televisions always. Others give names in exchange for cash. ‘Daddy’s hiding in the attic,’ says a small boy to the men who have come to take his father into custody.

  The grey van does the rounds. Around and around.

  Javor moves into my father’s sheds at the bottom of my mother’s garden. The people who know he is there are: my mother, Anka, me. Anka visits him every day and sometimes stays over; the nights are still warm. They eat with us in the house and at night retire to the shed. One day the grey van visits their house. Anka is there. She tells the men Javor has gone hunting, it’s the best she can come up with. They tell her to ask him to come down to Crisis HQ, nothing serious – in regard to his father. For a moment we forget and laugh about this, because Javor is a terrible hunter. I feel sorry for Javor, he is scared, he asks me to find out what has happened to his father.

  I ask Fabjan, because Fabjan knows everything and everybody. I don’t trust him, but he is Javor’s partner and friend. He promises to investigate and he acts like he’s taking it seriously. A day later he tells me not to worry, to tell Javor not to worry: his father will be released in a few days once the authorities are convinced of his loyalty. It’s all connected with his job, which is after all an important one, a lot of people with his kind of background are going through the same thing. There won’t be any problem. He even tells me where the detainees are being kept: in our old school. ‘I mean,’ he says, ‘they’re keeping them in kids’ classrooms, not the police station. A baby could break out of there.’ He shrugs and picks up a glass to begin polishing it. ‘The whole thing’s fucking crap, but tell Javor I’m here minding both our interests. The only thing to do at a time like this is make money. People turn into arseholes. Fortunately they turn into hard-drinking arseholes.’ He puts the glass down. ‘So where is Javor?’ he asks, picking up another glass.