The Hired Man

by Aminatta Forna

  A movement. A man’s hand stroked Laura’s hair. Laura flinched and leaned away, she put her own hand up over her hair to cover it, but the man’s hand pushed Laura’s out of the way and carried on stroking, picking up strands of her hair and letting them fall. Laura skewed her neck away, I saw her mouth open in protest, but if she said anything I couldn’t hear her.

  I pushed down on the handle of the back door and stepped inside. Laura turned to me, clearly with no idea what to expect; when she saw me she closed her eyes, breathed out and let her shoulders drop. I walked into the room.

  Fabjan.

  Sitting next to Laura on the sofa. At the sight of me his hand froze. He lowered it, though only as far as Laura’s shoulder where he let it rest, like a man with his hand on a dog’s head. He sat with his legs apart, looking like he did every day, wearing his butter-coloured suede jacket, a pair of jeans (the belt cutting into his gut, faded patch around his balls), loafers without socks. His eyes were narrow and puffy, his lips moist and red, a day’s growth of stubble shaded the lower part of his face. He’d been drinking, though he was far from drunk, just drunk enough to be dangerous. He smiled and said in English, ‘Ah, Duro. The hero. Welcome. Come in.’ I took a few steps forward. His eyes darted to the gun. ‘So you’ve come armed. What are you going to do, shoot me?’

  ‘If I have to,’ I said in Cro. ‘Take your hand off her.’

  Fabjan lowered his hand with a slow insolence.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said, again in Cro.

  ‘Well – and not that it’s got anything to do with you – I’m paying a visit to this lady, who’s a friend of mine. Right?’ He looked at Laura, who didn’t answer. Her hand was back at her throat and her eyes fixed on a spot on the floor.

  ‘Speak Cro,’ I said.

  ‘Fuck off.’

  I jerked the shotgun upwards. Fabjan’s eyes followed it, so did Laura’s. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I told you. I’m visiting a friend.’ He leered at Laura a second time, let his eyes travel down the front of her body. She lowered her hand from her neck and pulled her dressing gown further across her breasts. Fabjan pushed his face close to hers and flicked his tongue against the back of his teeth in a suggestive manner. ‘What’s it to you? Unless you’re fucking her. Or maybe you just want to.’ He no longer spoke in English, he turned towards me.

  ‘She doesn’t want you,’ I said. ‘So what are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve come to find out what the fuck’s going on.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I want to know who’s playing games.’

  ‘No one’s playing games.’

  ‘Yes, they are. And people are talking. And they’re talking now about this house, about the red car. About this stupid bitch. Because of this stupid bitch.’ He swung his head round to look at Laura. This time she flinched and looked at him and then immediately back at the spot on the floor.

  ‘Don’t look at her,’ I said. Then in English, ‘Laura, go to my house. Grace is there.’

  Laura rose and left the room, pulling her dressing gown tightly around her, her head down. She went without a word, as though she was afraid of being called back. Once outside she began to run, I listened until her footsteps faded. I reached for one of the kitchen chairs and sat down, the gun between my knees.

  ‘Put that thing away, would you?’ said Fabjan. ‘You’re not going to shoot anyone.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not if I don’t have to. But I’m close enough here to take your foot off. Or blow away your face. Have you ever seen a gunshot wound? Probably not. I forget you don’t hunt. You were never in the Army either, of course. Well, at close range the pellets haven’t yet fanned out, they enter the flesh in a wad. The cartridge opens like a flower, it’s made of plastic, you know. The cartridge follows the shot into the flesh and it leaves a wound the shape of a flower. Very pretty. It would kill you of course. But then I wouldn’t shoot you at close range, nothing to make it worth going to hospital for – what with all the explanations about what you were doing here. No, you’d prefer to ask your wife to pick pellets out of you for the next week.’

  He looked me in the eye, some seconds passed. ‘This is crap,’ he said after a bit. ‘I’m fucked if I know what’s going on.’

  ‘You know.’

  I didn’t say anything else. The years of silence spoke. Fabjan half opened his mouth and stopped, his narrowed eyes held my gaze. He didn’t want to risk saying anything else. He shrugged as if nothing mattered. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Go,’ I said. ‘Don’t come back.’

  Fabjan rose and walked towards the door, stopped, his hand on the door knob, and turned to me. ‘What do you want anyway?’

  ‘Krešimir says he’s leaving Gost.’

  Fabjan was silent. He pursed his lips. ‘So?’

  ‘I’ll miss him,’ I said. ‘And so would you.’

  For a few seconds Fabjan considered my words. He didn’t add anything. We understood each other.

  When Fabjan had gone I sat for a few minutes and thought about what to tell Laura. A sound made me turn. Matthew: standing on the stairs. I’d completely forgotten about him. ‘Duro.’ He rubbed an eye. ‘What are you doing here?’

  We walked over to my house. I boiled water, made coffee. I told Laura that Fabjan was a businessman with many interests in Gost, a thug who operated outside the law. He and Krešimir had a falling out over money, I said. Krešimir owed Fabjan money and Fabjan wanted to be repaid from the sale of the house. I said I didn’t know more details but I supposed that’s what it had been about. Fabjan was used to getting what he wanted with threats. Laura didn’t pretend to understand; she was still stunned. If she had questions they’d come later, by which time I would have thought up more answers. For the time being the explanation I’d given was good enough. Matthew had slept through everything and his questions about what had happened prevented the need for further analysis, rehearsing the sequence of events from Grace being surprised by Fabjan when he walked in without knocking, frightening the life out of her where she stood in the kitchen, to Laura coming down the stairs in answer to her daughter’s call, Grace running to fetch me.

  I walked them back to the blue house and stayed there the night. I lay on my back on the couch. I thought about Fabjan’s question. He asked me what I wanted, a question to which he already knew the answer and had known it for many years. It was why we were still here, we three in Gost, when so many had left.

  I wanted everything the way it had always been.

  Along the edge of the field: a dense scattering of pink pimpernel, the flowers came up at this time of the year in the farmers’ fields. The day was hot, cloudless, the trees shimmered behind currents of air in which a pair of kestrels hovered. The heron passed overhead on its way to the river. No wind. Dust in the air. The darkness of the trees came abruptly and I had to slow down until my eyes adjusted to the change. I’m getting old, I thought. Once or twice I heard the sound of other living things in the woods, but I hadn’t come to hunt, I’d come to escape the house. I carried nothing and had left with no particular destination in mind, but now I found myself headed for Gudura Uspomena.

  In Gost talk about the blue house continued. People knew about the paint attack, though not about Fabjan’s visit. I imagined eyes following Krešimir wherever he went. I didn’t go to the Zodijak, I thought I’d give Fabjan a day or two. Anyway his car wasn’t parked outside. When I went back to the blue house the doors, which had stood open so much of the summer, were closed and Laura answered my knock warily, her hand at her throat as it had been last night. Inside the house was slightly altered: no vase of flowers on the table, the throws on the chairs, the cushions, these things were missing. Put away, I supposed. Laura was preparing to leave. We drank coffee at the kitchen table and she said she’d spoken to Conor who’d offered to fly out,
but she’d told him they were OK. He’d asked her to give me his thanks. It seemed to me the full extent of what had happened the night before was just beginning to be felt.

  ‘What about the police?’ I asked Laura.

  ‘Conor says we might have to stay on if there’s an investigation.’

  I told her that was likely to be true, that I was there if she needed me. ‘But he won’t be back,’ I’d promised her. ‘He was drunk. It’s over.’

  Below me the water level in the swimming hole was low and the water barely moved. Shades of green, white rocks visible beneath the surface. Downstream the waterfall had narrowed to a spout, which spilled evenly into the pool below. The sound rode upwards through the still air. For twenty minutes I stood and stared at the view. I’d known it all my life and it changed every hour of every day.

  A noise behind me made me turn. Something moved in the trees. The footfall, too heavy for a deer, belonged to a person. I waited with my back to the ravine. A figure appeared: Grace. She walked towards me, the sweat shone on her forehead and she was breathing heavily. A few metres out of the trees she stopped, looked at the sky and then out across the ravine, shading her eyes. She came over to where I was standing. ‘Isn’t it amazing? You never brought us up here. I found it by myself.’

  I turned away, to look out over the ravine. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about the man who came last night.’

  ‘His name is Fabjan.’

  ‘And he runs the café where Matt went to use the Internet. Mum told me. She couldn’t remember his name. Is he a friend of yours?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Do you have any friends?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Grace was quiet. She chewed her top lip. ‘But you used to.’ She said it as a statement, not a question.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘So what happened to them?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘You knew the people who lived in our house before, didn’t you?’

  ‘Gost is a small place. I live a few hundred metres away. How could I not know them?’

  ‘Yeah but.’ She raised her hand to shade her eyes as she turned to look at me, I had my back to the sun. ‘I think you knew them quite well.’

  ‘So I did. So what?’

  ‘Mum hasn’t figured it out because she doesn’t care to look. It’s how she is. She sees the world the way she wants to see it, and then she believes that’s the way the world actually is, if that makes sense. And Matt, well you know Matt.’ She stopped and smiled at me: a sweet, small smile. ‘But it’s not that hard. Remember you told me how Kos found her way around? The places she knew by heart, you’d never know she was blind. Then other places, I remember you said she’d rely on Zeka or sometimes you’d have to call to her.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘So Kos knows our house . . . I mean, she knew it.’ Grace paused. ‘She knew where the doors were and where to lie down so she was out of the way without anyone having to tell her.’

  I shrugged again.

  Grace went on, ‘Also the way you touch the table. I’ve seen you do it. Of course, you knew the mosaic was there all along. I worked that out ages ago . . .’ She stopped talking and bent to pick a blade of grass and smoothed it between her fingers. ‘So I think you knew the people well and you used to visit there a lot. Before us.’ She sat down on the ground and began to chew the end of the blade of grass. ‘It’s OK. You can tell me. I want to know.’

  20

  I discovered the bodies at the ravine.

  On the way down the hill my head and heart pound, there’s a metallic taste in my mouth, also bitter bile. I am suddenly cold. And thirsty, desperately thirsty. I find a stream and drink from it, the water tastes of rotten leaves, I gulp it down like a man who has been lost at sea. The stink of the corpses is in my nostrils, my clothes, my hair. When I begin to move again I don’t run, I drag myself through the woods. What slows my pace is the immensity of the crime and of what it required for those bodies to be there: dumped in the ravine and raked over. How many people did it take? Who else knows about this? How many people in Gost are part of it? At times I imagine I’m being followed or watched and that somebody will challenge me. Once or twice I stop and listen. The further I get the more the idea of the bodies being up there, carelessly buried, nobody to guard over them and left to the animals, seems impossible: the baker and his family and their Mongol daughter. Who else has been killed and discarded? I think of the others who have gone, the empty houses. I think of my father’s colleague from the post office, whose boss is Javor’s father – walking along with his pockets stuffed with envelopes. What was it he knew or imagined? He was a man in his sixties, who’d seen more than I ever had, who may even have fought a war. I wonder at the fate of Javor’s father. I walk on, my mind becomes clearer. First, Javor. Javor must get out of Gost. I start to think how this might happen, I don’t trust the roads: full of checkpoints, militiamen and soldiers. Maybe through the mountains. Javor is no outdoorsman but I could go with him. Winter, when the passes became snowbound, is still some way off. There is fighting further north, which is where it moved after it left Gost. To the coast then. Across the plains, by foot. The hardest thing would be to stay out of sight. My thoughts loop back to leaving by road, of what it would take to smuggle Javor. Who could I rely upon? Now and with this new knowledge, how do I know who to trust?

  I pass nobody. The light is going. At this hour people are at home, especially these days when people spend a lot more time shuttered indoors. I think about them, huddled over their plates of food: cans of potatoes and meat taken from their neighbours’ larders, wearing their neighbours’ clothes, maybe even burning wood from their neighbours’ woodsheds in their stoves. No sight of the moon. A wind from the north brings more wind and with it a light rain, which as I walk begins to fall more heavily, gusting across the road. I wipe the water from my eyes and carry on. At the bend in the road I take the short cut which leads to the back of my parents’ property, behind my father’s shanty town. There, standing at the back door of the house, I see my mother. She isn’t wearing a coat or holding an umbrella, she’s just standing holding herself, allowing the rain to soak through her clothes, looking in the direction of the road. On the road, just pulling away, is the grey van. I recognise it immediately: the grey van with the old-fashioned shape, I last saw it parked outside the school. I’ve only had the knowledge for a short while and I’m already too late. Javor! Do I shout his name? I don’t know. I see my mother turn in my direction and raise both her hands, one in my direction and one in the direction of the van.

  I thought I had seen the worst, but worse is to come. I have been wasting time.

  Now I run. I cut back out to the road and follow the van. Like a delivery van which has collected a package it isn’t moving especially fast then after a short while it begins to gather speed. It’s headed downhill towards the blue house. I can think only: Anka. I keep running. Briefly I’m aware of my mother’s call. I run through the long field, slash through wheat ready for harvest, releasing clouds of insects. To my left I can see the headlights of the grey van sweeping away from and then back towards me as the van rounds the bend and even though I have been able to cut the corner, moving as fast as I can, I am being left behind. The van is gathering pace. This gives me hope and sure enough the van passes the blue house. I begin to slow down. Saliva floods my mouth, and again the aftertaste of copper. I have sprinted for almost a kilometre. A pain in my side makes me twist. I bend over, my knees crease and I go down. For a few seconds I remain on all fours; I smell flowers, wet soil.

  I walk the rest of the way. I think they must be taking Javor to the school building. There may be time yet, something we can do. My mind races through possibilities, turns again to who might help, but no names come to mind. In the last few months everything an
d everybody has changed. People you thought you knew. There’s Danica and Luka, I trust them, of course. Anka and me. But what can any of us do? Fabjan is the only person I know who might have influence. Fabjan knows the militiamen, they drink in his bar, he buys them rounds. They supply him with black market whisky. I reach the blue house. Fabjan’s car is parked outside. For a fraction of a second I am relieved because Fabjan is already there, ahead of me, but before the whole thought is even formed I know I’m wrong.

  Fabjan has known about this all along. He is part of it.

  The door of the blue house opens. There is Fabjan now. And there is Anka. He is holding her, fingers closed tight around her upper arm, hurrying her towards the car. Holding the back door open is a man in uniform, one of the new arrivals. Next to him is the young man I spoke to at the school; he wipes his nose with his fingers, his head low while he watches Fabjan with Anka. There is something feral about his posture, that stare. Anka is tying a scarf around her head, she is hurrying. What is she thinking? That Fabjan has come to help her, take her somewhere safe, or maybe somewhere where she can talk to someone who might be persuaded to let Javor go? She has put her trust in him and there’s urgency in her movements, such that she doesn’t seem to notice the grip of Fabjan’s hand on her upper arm.

  I’m running again. With two hundred metres between us, I call Anka’s name but the wind, the rain, the cloth of the scarf she is tying around her head blot out the sound. Fabjan, though, hears something. He raises his head sharply and peers into the gathering darkness. I can see him, but he can’t see me. He gestures to the two men, says something to Anka, pushes her along. Now they’re getting into the car. The doors slam. Fabjan guns the engine.