The Hired Man

by Aminatta Forna

  ‘What if the tenants come back?’

  ‘Too bad,’ he shrugged.

  Luka was confident. He roasted a lamb; there was walnut cake. Beer. My mother drank cola and red wine, her beloved bambus. A goodbye dinner, though no one said so. Luka went first, Danica followed, my mother the last. There must have been suppers in-between, but I have forgotten them. I felt no particular sadness when they left: at that time I felt very little at all. Later I felt it. Later still, I got used to being alone.

  Every year Danica calls to wish me Happy Christmas and New Year and passes the phone to my mother. Soon enough she tells me there are still flats vacant in the building. Theirs has a view of the Sava. They sent me a photograph taken from the opposite shore of the river: a row of six or seven high-rise blocks: their image reflected in the steel water. The riverbank is straight, of soft, black earth. On either side there is what looks like a strip of no man’s land, though my mother insists it’s a park. There was a running track, she told me, as though she was thinking of taking up the sport. The first years were difficult. Danica had trouble finding work. My mother disliked leaving the apartment. Once she witnessed the trees being felled in Tomislav Square, some were one hundred years old. People gathered in front of the railway station to watch, cheering as each one toppled, though they were perfectly healthy trees. Sapling planes were planted in their place. These days Danica works as a tour guide and has introduced my mother to the city the way she does her tourists. For Mother’s birthday they visited the zoo, where my mother took a liking to the miniature hippopotamus. Then for a drink in Republica Square, I mean Jalačić Square, and then for supper on the terrace of the Hotel Dubrovnik. My mother liked the row of gift shops in the lobby, the restaurant with its red chairs and black-and-white-tiled floor, the buffet table covered in white cloths: my mother’s idea of glamour. Now she is in awe of the city and in love with the city at the same time. She rides the trams. Everything in Gost is small and far away and there are no trams. She never asks about the people she once knew.

  At the blue house Grace was setting the table, folding napkins. Laura came in with a bunch of sunflowers, their heads already lolling on the end of their narrow stalks. She set about searching for a vase, rejecting those too small for the giant flowers. In the end she took a pot from the windowsill and filled it with water. She picked up the flowers, exclaimed and dropped them. I picked them up. Hoards of glistening black beetles crawled through the stamens of the discs.

  ‘Gross!’ said Grace.

  ‘Weevils,’ I said. At the front door I shook the flowers and plunged the heads into a bucket of water that stood there until the remaining insects floated to the surface. I handed the flowers to Laura, who thanked me and told me (again) that she didn’t know what she’d do without me. Of Matthew there was no sign.

  ‘He’s upstairs,’ said Laura. ‘He’ll be down.’

  ‘He’s in his room. He’s been there all day,’ said Grace. ‘He’s sulking.’

  ‘Grace!’

  ‘I’m just saying.’ Grace widened her eyes at her mother and turned to me. ‘He’s been in a bad mood ever since we got here. Just because it’s not cool enough for him. And there’s no Internet, of course.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Matt’s enjoying the holiday just fine.’

  ‘Matt’s too cool to enjoy anything,’ said Grace. ‘He thinks enjoying things is for idiots. We’re all idiots apparently.’

  ‘That’s enough, Grace!’

  Grace flinched but said nothing, she twisted the dishcloth to wipe the inside of a glass, set it on the table and hummed a single note.

  We ate: pasta, tomatoes, local cured ham, good red wine in fine glasses. Grace was sent up to call Matthew, but she came down and said he wasn’t hungry. While her daughter was out of the room Laura had rearranged the settings, switching the position of the spoons. She undid and refolded two of the napkins. There was a carafe of water, not well water but fizzy, bottled water. New table mats and a tablecloth. Banished now to the windowsill: the sunflowers; candles in the middle of the table instead. The house had curtains, fastened with bows, even though I had yet to fix the patch of plaster on the wall. The order of things was wrong. Then Laura told me her husband was coming.

  ‘I hope he’ll be pleased.’

  ‘I’m sure he will be. To tell you the truth when I first saw the house I was a bit worried it wasn’t going to work out. Conor bought it without me, you see.’ What Laura told me next surprised me a great deal. She said she’d found the house on the Internet and her husband had flown over from Italy where he was on business to look at it. Imagine Krešimir having the wit to use the Internet. He must have found somebody to do it for him. That young wife of his, maybe? No, Krešimir would never let anyone be privy to his finances, let alone something like this.

  To Laura I said, ‘What made you want to buy this house?’ For surely it could not have been Gost. I wondered how Laura saw the town, the churches and the school, the hills and the swimming hole, the people who lived here. I tried to imagine seeing it all for the first time, not knowing anything.

  ‘Property here is cheap relative to the rest of Europe. Conor reckoned the coast had peaked or would soon and we should look inland, a little off the tourist track. It’s got to be a good thing. People investing in the country again, getting the economy moving? I’ve been looking for something to do now the kids are more or less off my hands. If this works out, we’ll keep going.’

  ‘What do you mean keep going?’

  ‘Buy another one and do it up.’

  ‘You mean you plan to sell this house?’

  ‘That’s the idea. I’ve been scouting around. There’s no shortage of empty houses, though some of them are in appalling condition and nobody seems very interested in repairing them.’

  ‘The people around here are peasants,’ I said. ‘They don’t see property the same way you do, they don’t see the value and so take no care.’

  ‘The odd thing is there don’t seem to be any estate agents.’

  ‘Most houses here belong to families. They stay in the family even after somebody dies.’

  Laura thought about that. ‘So how do you go about buying one?’

  ‘By private sale. The way you bought this one.’

  ‘They’re almost grown-up.’ Laura looked over at Grace petting Zeka, who stood with his head in her lap. Laura fell silent for a short time, drank more wine. She said, ‘We bought the house five years ago, but it’s only now I’ve really worked up the courage to come out and make it good. Mattie’s off to university next year. Grace takes care of herself, she doesn’t really need me.’ Laura spoke as if Grace couldn’t hear.

  Five years? I stared at the table, I only came back to myself when Grace said, ‘I think Zeka’s hurt?’

  I looked. The blood left by the exploding tick had matted in Zeka’s fur. ‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Just a tick.’

  ‘Oh, OK. Can I take them out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will they come with me?’ She stood up and went to the door.

  ‘Kos! Zeka!’ I waved my hand and the dogs rose as one and went to Grace.

  ‘They won’t get lost, will they?’

  ‘They’re hunting dogs. They know the area and they’ll do as you tell them.’ I thanked Laura for the dinner, suddenly I wanted to go home, to be alone. To think. My head was bursting with this new knowledge. But Laura brought a salad bowl and plates to the table, heaped the remaining pasta on a clean plate and placed it on a tray along with cutlery and a glass of water.

  ‘I’ll just take this up to poor Matt,’ she said. ‘He’s probably starving.’

  The sight of Laura carrying supper upstairs to her son, taking the steps carefully. I climbed those stairs holding a tray once. It was the year before the family moved to the house in town after Krešimir’s father
was promoted to his new job in the administrative offices of the Town Hall. An important job, more so than my father’s. It widened the space between me and Krešimir even more. But all that was to come. Back then the Pavićs still lived in the blue house. I had run up and down those stairs a thousand times. In Krešimir’s room we hung out of the window shooting wood pigeons with our first air rifles. One year Mr Pavić bought Krešimir a junior pool table and we played against each other for months. I owe it to Krešimir that I’ve never had to buy myself a drink in a bar where there’s a pool table.

  I’ve gone to the Pavić house, as I so often do. The door’s open, though the parlour and kitchen are empty. It’s after school so I expect to see Krešimir at least, and usually at this time of day Mrs Pavić is home. It is a clear autumn day; the house is without heating and cold inside. The kitchen bears all the appearance of a careful departure: sink wiped dry, dishcloths on their pegs, a pot at the back of the stove. The room smells of onions.

  A sound from upstairs: a cough, the flush of the toilet, a faint shuffle and creak. There is Anka, standing at the top of the stairs, wearing a nylon nightdress. Her hair is damp and stuck to her forehead in sharp points; at the back it forms a tangled halo. The lower part of her face is massively swollen and she sways so alarmingly I hold out my arms because I’m afraid she might fall down the stairs. She turns and stumbles away. By the time I reach the door to her room she has crawled back into bed.

  The air in the room is sweet and stale. I open the window. When I am ill my mother makes me rosehip tea, beef soup; but I’ve no idea where to begin, so I boil milk and pour into it some of the coffee from the pan on the stove, I fry an egg and carry it all upstairs on a tray. I straighten the bedclothes around Anka, making noises like my mother does. Anka sips the milky coffee, the skin sticks to her lower lip. She says swallowing the egg hurts.

  She has mumps. Where is everyone? I lie and say they have asked me to sit with her. I stay the whole afternoon and watch her sleep. I am too young to put my finger on the awfulness of it, but I feel it in my chest. Gone to town to buy new laces for Krešimir’s football boots, such a small thing. To leave your sick daughter for such a small thing.

  Sleepless in the dark later the same night I had dinner with Laura. The new knowledge that Krešimir had sold the house five years ago was like a rat gnawing at my gut. I clenched my fists beneath the sheets. All this time he’d been sitting smugly on his secret, making fools of us. The number of times I’d passed him on the street, he knew he had one over all of us. Fuck you, Krešimir, you cunt! The blue house was never yours to sell.

  There are some things in life you don’t set out to do. The arrival of Laura, Grace and Matthew was nothing to do with me. Krešimir sold the blue house to Laura’s husband. Five years ago, I now knew. I went there because I needed work. I’d no choice but to do the things I did. I knew the house better than anyone and it made sense that if somebody was going to work on restoring it then that person should be me. I led Laura to the mosaic in order to divert her from doing the jobs she could be paying me to do.

  So it irritated Krešimir to see the house looking as it once had? Fine. What did he expect? I enjoyed rattling the bars of the cage that was Krešimir’s heart. The truth is, I hated Krešimir, I loathed him, and the years of loathing far outnumbered those we’d ever been friends.

  7

  Krešimir waits for my approach, he slips out of the door and intercepts me halfway down the road, then he walks very fast until we are out of sight. I’ve told you how the pace would alter his gait: pitch his body forward and make his arse stick out. This time I laugh, which of course irritates him. He never explains what we are doing and at first I think the whole thing is a huge joke. It dawns on me only later that he was trying to leave Anka behind.

  On the way back from our hunt, which has been successful this time, Krešimir has me in a headlock as we stagger towards home. We pass the Tomislav house, a modern bungalow painted a strong shade of pink. Outside, tied to the revolving clothes dryer, is the Tomislavs’ dog, a shaggy black beast called Lujo, whom I made friends with when the Tomislavs first got him. When Lujo was little they let him run free, but now he’s older they leave him tied all day, whatever the weather. On a hot July day I’d found the dog tied to the revolving clothes dryer with a rope so short he couldn’t sit, or reach the shade or his water bowl. I untied him and took him home, and my father, when he returned the animal, had words with Tomislav. Our families hadn’t been on speaking terms too much since.

  ‘Hold on,’ says Krešimir. He slings the rabbits at me. ‘I need a piss.’

  I do too. I leave the rabbits on the roadside, turn to the hedge and unzip. Before I finish I hear the sound of Krešimir’s laughter. He has pissed all over the dog, which is shaking itself and wagging its tail at him. Krešimir still has his dick in his hand. I pick up the dog’s water bowl and douse it in cold water. Lujo retreats from me, making the clothes dryer spin; he barks.

  ‘He prefers piss,’ says Krešimir.

  I wonder if all this is because I laughed at him. He knows about me and the dog, Tomislav and my father.

  That was maybe two months on from the day we returned empty-handed from our early morning shoot and were caught in the rain; Krešimir walked so fast he left us both behind. At the corner by the bakery I gave a backward glance and saw Anka running to catch up with Krešimir. He was angry at the failure of the shoot, angry at the rain and the absent birds, angry at me, but most of all angry at Anka who’d become somehow responsible.

  That was a turning point, I saw it later, when I tried to remember the order of things. Even now it’s hard. How do you trace your way back to the place where a feeling changed, the course of a friendship turned a corner and became something else?

  – mumps

  – their father’s new job

  – move to the house in town

  – hunt birds in the rain

  – K pisses on the dog

  No, I have forgotten something. Their father died. Such a big thing. I don’t mean I have forgotten it, only the order of events. Some months before the bird shoot in the rain, I don’t remember, six, seven, eight months, their father had died: an aneurysm.

  Anka cries; Krešimir’s sorrow has a different texture. His relationship with his father had already changed and the change was sealed by old Pavić’s fate. The shift went back to an argument between his parents in the year before a blood vessel bloomed and burst in Pavić’s brain.

  The argument was over a Licitar heart. I remember seeing it on the kitchen table a day I came to visit. In an earlier time Krešimir and I had seen it as our seasonal duty to steal and consume as many of these festive items as possible. We stole from shop windows, from the communal Christmas tree outside St Mary’s Church, from school where every pupil was detailed to bring in a Licitar of their own making during the final week of the winter term. The hearts were used to decorate the school hall. They were never really meant to be eaten: the dough was rock hard and the icing was bitter with food dye. But for whatever reason we forced them down. So the sight of a heart there on the Pavićs’ kitchen table came with both the lure and the ghosts of sins past.

  That day the television in the room was showing an episode of Čkalja. Depending on how old you are, you might remember Čkalja, it was everybody’s favourite show. Čkalja wearing a beret and a huge, patterned tie was sitting at a table with a man with a Hitler moustache, a woman in a fur coat and another man with an accordion. He always wore funny hats, it was like a kind of trademark. Krešimir wanted to get out of the house. I wanted to watch the show. I took off my anorak. He told me his parents had argued over the Licitar heart, which sounded silly to me and not very serious. I went to turn the sound up, but Krešimir said we had to go and made me put my anorak back on.

  Anyway, the sum of it amounted to this: the heart had been bought by Vinka Pavić as a Christ
mas gift for Krešimir’s father’s boss in his job, which he had been in for a year or two by then. There’d recently been some disagreement between the two (the boss and Krešimir’s dad) and Mr Pavić thought the gift was overgenerous – amounting to an apology. The heart sat on the table for some days. I have no idea what became of it after that.

  Then one day, many months after Christmas, we sat upstairs in Krešimir’s room and listened to Krešimir’s parents argue. This time they were arguing over another promotion in the father’s office that had gone to someone else. A promotion Mrs Pavić was convinced belonged to her husband.

  Mrs Pavić thought her husband had let the family down through his naivety. Not deliberately, but because of a flaw, a flaw in his way of seeing. Too much faith in the world, said Vinka Pavić to Krešimir after her husband’s death. Mrs Pavić was a survivor, who survived by giving gifts of bright, brittle hearts to people in positions of influence. She kept up appearances on her widow’s pension, even though common sense might have suggested she rent out the town house and move back to the blue house, but Vinka Pavić couldn’t bring herself to do it. Wild boar couldn’t drag her back to the little blue house with all its rustic shame.

  And time and death changed nothing, only hardened the judgement on poor Pavić.

  So the order of events went like this:

  – mumps

  – their father’s new job

  – move to the house in town

  – Licitar heart

  – old P dead

  – hunt birds in the rain

  – K pisses on the dog

  There was more to come, of course. I have thought about it a lot, and I am still thinking about it. There must be a great deal I have forgotten.

  I was in the outbuilding looking over the Fićo when I saw Matthew pick his way across the courtyard: his hunched shoulders and loping gait. I watched him for a few seconds and then I said, ‘Matthew!’ quite loudly. It was perhaps the first time I had addressed him directly and he froze, then half turned as though in doubt that he had heard correctly. I said his name again. Cautiously he came to the door of the outbuilding and peered inside.