The Hired Man

by Aminatta Forna

  I gave her directions for a drive I said would take her past some pleasant views and through a couple of villages. Forty minutes later and I was still up the ladder when Matthew came out of the back of the house and picked his way through the yard out into the field. The pace of his walk, the rounded back and shoulders, the trousers hanging low on his hips, the thumb of his left hand hooked into his front pocket and the way his skull rocked slightly back in the cradle of his top vertebrae, all advertised his utter boredom. Where he was going I didn’t know, but I knew what he was going to do because he was carrying a wine bottle in his right hand.

  In the evening I fried sausages, peeled and boiled potatoes and chopped some chard, which I’d pulled from the neglected vegetable beds at the blue house. I poured a glass of wine (enough rakija!) and carried my plate of food into the main room where I set it on the table. I fetched the bag of mail I had taken from the outbuilding and began to sift through the contents as I ate.

  Utility bills. I opened one at random. A demand for payment of several hundred dinara for electricity and warning of the consequences of non-payment. The next bill, dated a few months later, had been adjusted by the addition of several noughts. There was a time inflation ran wild. A letter from the publisher of the car magazine regretted the non-renewal of a subscription. Several copies of the same magazine still inside their plastic covers. There were no letters or postcards, no envelopes full of old photographs, not even a shopping list or an old chequebook bristling with scribbled stubs, no note left for the plumber, no scrap of paper bearing a scrawled address, directions. There was nothing except official letters and circulars. It was as though somebody had been through all of it before me and removed anything personal. I stuffed everything back into the bag and slung it aside. I thought: Is this all that remains? When I look back to that night I see that the idea for writing this seeded then. Would I take it all with me? Who would tell my story? So many people have left Gost, not like the old days when they stayed away for a few years and came back wearing Italian clothes and carting German fridges. Now they never come back. Of the old crowd, there are just three of us left: Krešimir, Fabjan and me.

  Laura arrived and took over the blue house and things began to change. In a very short time it seemed certain people forgot what had been agreed for so long, or perhaps they thought it no longer applied, or no longer applied to them, that the pact we had held to for sixteen years was somehow over.

  Some days I wondered what would happen to my own house when I was gone. I’ve lived here for eighteen years, and maybe with luck I’ll live twice as long again. More than likely I shall die alone, as I live now, and as I have no executor a person or persons will be appointed to come and deal with my estates, sort my belongings into piles to sell and throw. They will go through my papers and when they do they will find this.

  Maybe that person is you. Or at least, I have to tell this story and I must tell it to somebody, so it may as well be you, come to sort through my belongings. You are young and you don’t know or don’t remember the things that happened. Nobody seems to remember, even those who are old enough, those who were there. But I remember it all, every grinding minute, hour and day, how things unfolded.

  Our story doesn’t show us in a very good light. I wish it were different, but there it is. This story is not the story of the whole of the past, just the story of a single summer.

  As I said, somebody must stand guard over the past.

  In Gost, that somebody is me.

  The only person I can trust.

  I imagine myself with the body of a bird, a raven. Outstretched wings and neck, rigid beak and shining eye, I swoop over the ravine and hover over the town. Turning my head from side to side, I follow the pattern of the roads, left and right until I find the house. Hop through an open window, a dark shadow moving up the stairs and into the bedroom where a couple sleep without touching each other. The woman opens her eyes and looks straight at me, but she sees nothing except a shadow in the shape of a cross. A silent wing beat. In the room next door a stinking old woman breathes the same foul air over and over. Back in the sky, following the streets. A second house where the window is left open on a hot summer’s night. A man and a woman and two strong boys. House to house. Room to room. Night upon night.

  4

  The next day I arrived at the blue house wearing a pair of overalls I’d kept from the days I worked at the timber yard. I’d been hired as casual labour and though the work didn’t last for more than a few months they let us keep the overalls. Dressed like this I looked more like the hired man I was and sure enough Laura soon relaxed back into the same degree of informality we’d shared only a few days ago.

  Meanwhile more of the mosaic was being revealed. Grace had brought a combination of zeal and patience to the job. She smiled when I complimented her on her handiwork and then looked down quickly, as if surprised by the sight of her own feet.

  A green hand, reaching upwards. Two lines of yellow tiles either side of a single, narrow line of red tiles: deep, dark red tiles. These tiles were made of glass. On the far right of the mosaic the thumb and forefinger of another hand was in the process of being uncovered to match the one on the left; they were two hands reaching into the air. The three downward-pointed blue shapes remained as they had been. All of this against a white background. The tiles were different shapes and sizes, fitted each to the other accordingly. Here and there were gaps where tiles had been lost, some in the process of the mosaic being uncovered. Grace had saved them in a bowl.

  ‘Plus we’ve got the ones we found in the outbuilding,’ she said. ‘I’m going to put them back. Like, restore it.’

  ‘Good,’ I replied.

  ‘Hey, Duro, can I show you something?’ She led me a short distance to an indentation in the ground, obviously the outline of a shallow pond, up to this point concealed by the long grass. An edging of concrete gave way to tiled sides and a tiled base: a second mosaic. Grace crouched down and pulled at the grass to reveal more. ‘I think it’s an old fountain.’

  I squatted down next to her and felt around for the water pipe that had once fed it. ‘You’re right,’ I said.

  ‘Do you think you can help me get it going? If I clean it out, that is?’

  ‘Why not? I think it will be simple.’

  ‘Awesome,’ said Grace. She chewed her bottom lip as though she had something else to say. In the end she said, ‘Do you think we can go to the place you told me about, the swimming hole?’

  ‘Sure. When do you want to go?’

  At that Grace’s eyes widened slightly. ‘Like maybe this weekend?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘That would be cool.’

  My life has been a sequence of temporary jobs and I enjoyed the sense of independence that came from it. Work is harder to come by in these parts but gratitude made Laura generous and we settled on a weekly sum. I considered what to do with the money. My house didn’t need any repairs as I was always there to do whatever was needed. I didn’t want to travel. My needs, which had always been few, were even fewer now. Perhaps I could go away for a weekend, meet a girl in a bar, one who’d agree to spend a night with me. How long since I spent the night with a woman? Nobody here in Gost, the town was too small. There were bars you could go to in some of the larger towns, and from time to time I’d visited them. But even then I’d never let myself stay the night; at some point before the light came up, and usually while the woman was sleeping, I’d slip out of the bed, pull my trousers on and leave quietly. There were times I would have liked to wake up next to a warm body, in a bed smelling of sex, fuck again and then fall into the streets looking for something to eat. But these things didn’t happen that way any more. These days the women clung to you and cried in their sleep; some were angry with you in the morning. And so I left.

  One night I picked up a working girl; I didn’t know it at the time. Whore
s never sleep, they keep one eye on the clock and the other alert to the possibility of a dishonest customer. At the door she leapt spitting onto my back. I explained my mistake, that I hadn’t realised her profession. Immediately I offered to pay. Her face grew soft and she sighed. She took my cash, counted it, kissed a 100 kuna note and handed it back to me. She told me Monday was her day off. I walked away through the emptied streets. Bar owners were hosing down the pavements. Cats everywhere, glinting eyes watching the barmen and me, waiting for us to go so that they could claim the night for themselves. With every step I wondered if I should return to her.

  I applied the first layers of new paint to the windowsills; nurturing the house back into being gave me pleasure. With these old buildings you can’t be too careful: few builders are up to the task. Owners prefer to knock them down and use their government grants to put up modern chalets: everywhere now, most of them less than ten years old. Yellow-painted stucco fronts are all the fashion, with wooden balustrades. It makes the place look like a ski resort. In some countries people love the past. I guessed Laura loved the past, one because she bought this house and two because the English love the past more than anyone else. To Laura’s way of thinking the past is a place of happiness, of safety and order, where fires, floods and wars were only ever sent to challenge the human spirit. There the sun shines when it should and the fields are full of wheat, in winter comes the snow. I know because of the tourists who came to stay in the hotel I once worked in, some of whom liked to talk to me while I fixed the shower or the cistern and in turn I’d ask them questions about where they were from and they’d tell me about their country, how it used to be and how it was now. The way the English saw it, the past was always better. But in this country our love of the past is a great deal less, unless it is a very distant past indeed, the kind nobody alive can remember, a past transformed into a song or a poem. We tolerate the present, but what we love is the future, which is about as far away from the past as it is possible to be.

  By the middle of the day Grace had uncovered most of the mosaic. She showed me her work and I, in turn, made a show of being impressed. ‘It’s a bird,’ said Grace, unnecessarily.

  The bird rose, neck outstretched, trailing a tail of red and yellow. The body of the bird was red, the outspread wings were blue, very close to the blue of the paintwork of the house, except for the feathered ends which were the blue of azure, like the sky an evening before. The bird wore a crown of gold, and from its uplifted beak came curls of gold breath. It flew straight upwards into a white sky, the tiles arranged in cloud-like whorls. And below the bird, two hands outstretched. They might be trying vainly to touch the beautiful bird, or equally they could belong to the person who had just released it.

  ‘I think it’s beautiful,’ said Grace.

  I said, ‘It is.’

  ‘Weird that someone would cover it up.’

  ‘Maybe they thought it wouldn’t appeal to everyone and they wanted to sell the house.’

  ‘There’s more on the bottom of the fountain.’

  Just as I had returned to work at the back of the house a car came down the lane. The road led to nothing except a collection of farm buildings a half-kilometre or so on and it could also be used as a cut through to a small hamlet four or five kilometres away, but that was it. Have I mentioned that? I don’t think so. The point is that there was very little traffic down it and the few cars there were tended to speed. This one, an old Vauxhall, cruised slowly past much as the car driven by the woman who worked in the supermarket had the day before.

  I finished work, stowed my brushes and stood before the pile of things pulled from the outbuilding. This time I helped myself to two of the paperbacks. I tend to eat early and after I’d cooked I settled down with the remainder of the bottle of wine. Reading has always been a pleasure, but after the first few pages I felt the wind change and got up to close the shutters just as the rain started. It rained hard for twenty minutes and then stopped and when it did some of the light had returned to the day. My mood had changed with the wind: a restlessness. I collected my shotgun, called the dogs and set off to the hills to scout for rabbits.

  Whenever I think back to that time it is with the taste of rabbit flesh in my mouth. Anka must have been about eight years old when she first started to come with us. She was impressive from the start with none of the squeamishness, real or fake, of girls of our own age, nor though did she have any of the fascination with death which Krešimir and I shared. We would return to the scene of a carcass over and over again, watching as it dropped through the stages from rigor mortis to bones, the sweet stink of putrefaction. I remember once deformed piglets born to one of the farmers: Siamese twins, they didn’t live long, but every day they lived we ran straight from school to see them. They were joined at the belly and the chest and looked like they were dancing. They snuffled around, the stronger one unable to right itself because of the weaker sibling attached to it. The farmer sometimes helped them onto the teat, prodding them with a stick; he had no intention of keeping them alive but was enjoying the attention for a while. I remember the thrill it gave me to see them: a tightening in my balls.

  By then Anka was ten and we tolerated her on our expeditions knowing it was the only way she could escape the eye of her mother, a chain-smoking beauty who’d outgrown her husband and viewed Anka not as a child but a miniature version of herself: a miniature, slower, stupider version of herself.

  Anka liked to carry Krešimir’s gun. Normally Krešimir didn’t like anyone to touch his gun (any of his belongings), but he enjoyed her devotion. When he was ready, he’d silently extend his arm behind him and snap his fingers. Anka would run quickly forward and lay the gun across his palm.

  Twenty minutes we’d been out, climbing the slope above the tree line below the old bunker, where that year we’d had most success. A rabbit broke cover fifty metres or so ahead of us. Anka, carrying Krešimir’s gun, lifted it to her shoulder and fired. The animal tumbled twice and lay still. Krešimir and I stopped talking mid-sentence and stood with our mouths hanging open. The shot had practically whistled through our hair. Krešimir was proud of her, you could see it in his face. Anka’s father bought her a shotgun of her own against the wishes of his wife. A 410 with a clover leaf engraved on the stock.

  I was fourteen that year and had taught myself how to cure rabbit skins. In the loft at home I had eight or ten skins, from which I’d scraped the fat and which I had stretched out on wooden frames. When the skins were ready I made them into hats like the ones Canadian trappers wore. I made quite a bit of money that way. So Anka’s first rabbit I turned into a hat for her and that winter she wore it all the time, though Krešimir told her she’d catch fleas from it.

  ‘He seemed very excitable,’ Laura told me. ‘At first I had no idea who he was, then I recognised him as the man we collected the keys from the day we arrived. He parked on the other side of the road and Grace said he gave her the fright of her life coming right up behind her. He seemed to be saying something about the mosaic. She started to call for me, but he banged on the door so I invited him in for a cup of coffee. I assumed he’d come to see how we’d settled in, but the next time I looked round he wasn’t there. He was outside standing in front of the mosaic, waving his arms about. I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. I almost sent Grace to run and fetch you.’ I imagined Laura smiling at Krešimir, a smile full of warmth, as though she was waiting, with immense patience, for him to learn to speak English. ‘I tried to explain how delighted we’d been to find it. It’s a beautiful mosaic. Then suddenly he calmed down and we shook hands, he climbed back into his car and that was it. Do you have any idea what it might have been about?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Perhaps it’s very valuable and he didn’t know it was there, so now he wants the house back.’

  Grace snorted and Laura laughed and looked at me in surprise. ‘Dear Duro, I do believe that’s the fi
rst time I’ve heard you tell a joke.’

  After that Laura seemed to forget about Krešimir. His visit had taken place on Friday evening. I’d not been expected to work at Laura’s house on Saturday, but I’d promised Grace I would show her the swimming hole. Laura said she would come too and told me Matthew was certain to want to join us. I brought Kos and Zeka because they have a love of the water and I’d neglected them this past week.

  ‘Will we really have it all to ourselves?’ asked Grace.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Most people don’t know the swimming hole is there. Those who did have forgotten.’

  ‘Why would they forget?’

  ‘My English is very bad, forgive me. What I mean is that we went to this place as children. That was a long time ago. The children of Gost no longer go there. Times are different and it is a long way to walk, maybe thirty minutes.’

  In the event it took us nearly an hour. I’d measured the time according to my own pace. Laura brought towels, an ice box of drinks and a basket full of sun-creams and magazines. We followed the marks of a tractor through the grass: sun-hardened chevrons of soil, and when the tracks ended we fanned out, sending up small clouds of butterflies from the flowers. Ahead of us stood a single row of trees: sentries to the hills, behind the trees a solitary hill stood to the fore, tightly forested with steep, sloping and almost perfectly symmetrical sides, which coupled with its isolation made it look almost man-made. We reached it in twenty minutes, skirted the base and entered the woods beyond and began to climb. Laura and Grace kept up the conversation most of the way, though with the uphill work the silences grew. Matthew had come along, though he walked a little apart from the rest of us, minding his own business. Zeka and Kos ran ahead, seeking quarry but noisily, without any real conviction because we never hunted at this time of day.