The Hired Man

by Aminatta Forna

  A meeting at the Crisis HQ, months, it seems to us, after our part of the crisis is over. Those of us who were in the territorials turn up at the Mayor’s office to be told we’re not needed and so we go away again. Fabjan though is invited, I pass him on his way in. The man with pale eyebrows and his cohorts are there too. I am on my way to the Zodijak when I see eight or so of the lads appear, the ones I told you about, who tinker with the engines of their motorbikes in the car park behind the supermarket and hang out by the pinball machine in the Zodijak. They’re a bit like we used to be though Andro, Goran, Miro and I are thirty now. These guys are ten years younger. They look up to Fabjan. The meeting lasts three hours, I know because even though I have things to do I wait in the Zodijak the whole time and I’m there when Fabjan comes in and goes straight to the back room. A few minutes later the pinball boys turn up, only this time they don’t stand around the pinball machine with their hands in their pockets, taking turns, comparing scores and sharing beers. No, this time they go straight to the bar where a few lean with their backs to the counter, facing the room and the street with a new assurance. When Fabjan comes out of the back room he pours drinks for the whole lot of them. In the days that follow I see them in the Zodijak a lot. Suddenly there’s money about.

  The National Guard leave. The boys from the Zodijak take over the checkpoints. There’s one on the road between Gost and my house. The guys never check my ID, they always wave me through. Javor stops coming into town even the few times he did.

  Days pass, not much changes. On roofs throughout the town the red of the new tiles stands out alongside the old faded red. The post starts again, letters from relatives in the city and overseas, some containing money. There are no new death notices, except of the very elderly, for whose hearts the whole thing had been too much.

  The official start of boar hunting season. Usually that means visitors, men arriving from the city, groups of them, who stay for the weekend. This year that doesn’t happen. On one of those October days Anka and I go up to the hills. We are alone. During the conversation on the way up to the pine forest she frowns and chooses her words carefully, as if she’s worried about their effect, as if this thing, whatever it is that she’s afraid of, which right now is made of smoke and dust, will crystallise and harden by being put into words, be made real, like an illness or a death pronounced by a doctor. There will be no going back. She chooses her phrases carefully: ‘just a matter of time’, and ‘for now’, and ‘when things get back to normal’. A lot of people in Gost talk this way, if they talk about what’s happening at all, but Anka does it because she’s afraid she and Javor might need to leave, like the baker and his daughters, and she doesn’t want to leave Gost because like all of us, like Javor, this town, these hills, the ravine and the pine forest are all she knows.

  Later, alone on my bed, I think of Javor’s cousin coming into the Zodijak on that day, which is now some weeks ago. I think of the sign on the door of the baker’s, the hleb crossed out and replaced, in thick black marker pen, with kruh, how that word kruh, written in that way, takes on the weight of an obscenity. I think of the thieving couple and the baker’s rug, of how the man stared me down, daring me to challenge him and call him a thief. I don’t know what it all means. I think about the pattern on the round rug on the baker’s floor and how I used to stare at it as I sat in the front room of the baker’s house, so that first the black and then the red stood to the fore, how shapes appeared and then receded, and how (if you stared for a very long time) the lines and dots seemed to shimmer and dissolve. Familiar patterns faded away, new patterns appeared where none existed before, only to disappear in the blink of an eye.

  For three hours that afternoon all of this is forgotten as we hunt together for the first time since we were children. The air is warm, the trees heavy with fruit. Kos is with us and she picks up a scent almost immediately. By the time we reach the trees we’ve stopped talking, to give Kos a chance of course, and also because the conversation, so full of pitfalls and quicksand, frightens us both. So we let Kos take the lead.

  Anka carries the smaller of the two rifles. I carry the one I once used to hunt soldiers of the National Army only a few months before. Anka is kneeling and I stand behind her. Kos has led us to a small bachelor herd of no more than ten. They are playing, making practice charges and trying to lock antlers. In a few years they’ll be fighting for the herd and sometimes their lives. I remember once, out hunting with my father and his friends, we came across a big bull dragging the carcass of a second bull, almost as large as he was. Their antlers had locked during a fight, the dead buck’s neck was twisted and broken; his opponent, unable to free himself, was faced with his own death. We watched as he pushed, dragged and tossed the lifeless body, finally standing still in exhausted bewilderment. The bullet, when it came from one of our group (it may even have been my father), must have been almost welcome.

  Now there’s a young buck whose antlers don’t amount to much, no spread to the branches, each antler little more than a couple of spikes, the longer of the pair about fifty centimetres, enough to do damage without victory. In the long run he is more use to us than to the herd. I keep an eye on him and, when I look down at Anka, I see she’s doing the same, waiting for him to come into range. Slowly she raises the rifle to her shoulder, she waits another minute, closes her right eye (I remember that little peculiarity of hers) and takes the shot. She is as good as she ever was, and briefly I wonder in that moment if she had been a boy, what would have happened then? Would Krešimir still have been Vinka’s favourite?

  We dress the buck there and then. Anka shares the work, pulling on the rope to hoist the carcass, which weighs about as much as she does. Unhesitatingly she draws her knife and slits the animal open from breastbone to belly. She is enjoying it, the physical work, the freedom which follows the months of confinement. With the back of her hand she wipes her brow and leaves a faint smear of blood above an eyebrow. She is smiling. I bury the spilled guts and wrap the heart and liver for Kos, cut the animal down and carry it on my shoulder. The three of us head back down the hill.

  Anka sings.

  From the blue house I head up to my mother’s house, carrying a haunch. Tonight we eat. My mother is pleased and begins to search her larder for what she might cook with the meat. Tomorrow, I say, as I kiss her. Tomorrow all of us, here for dinner. Me, you, Danica, Luka. She reaches up and places a hand on each cheek, kisses my forehead. I am not tall, but I feel tall next to her, who was never tall and now without my father seems smaller still. Her hands smell of roses and when I leave I carry the scent with me, in my nostrils, on the skin of my face. In the moment I decide to go into town and so I turn right and, as I cross the bridge into Gost, I see a man I recognise, he is an old colleague of my father’s. I remember him from my visits to the post office and also from the funeral. He’s a stocky man with muscular forearms and the rolling gait of the bandy-legged. He’s walking along the road, quite fast, rolling a little which might be his legs or might be because he has been drinking, because behind him along the pavement there is a trail of letters leading back to town. The strange thing is that he doesn’t seem to know they’re there, or maybe he just doesn’t care. He’s walking along with his head tilted back; in his arms are bundles of letters, his pockets are stuffed with letters, his trouser pocket and the pockets of his post office uniform jacket, too. Every now and again one or several of the letters escapes at a time, adding to the paper trail behind him.

  ‘Hoi,’ I yell from the other side of the road. ‘Mr Buneta!’ (For that is his name.) I run and begin to collect the letters for him. What is he doing? What’s he thinking? The man must be mad. I run back maybe one hundred, maybe two hundred metres, I don’t know, gathering up letters. But he doesn’t seem to notice my efforts, certainly he doesn’t acknowledge them, he doesn’t even slow up so I can hand them back to him. I must pick twenty letters up off the pavements and even though I am the
younger man by thirty years, what with so much stopping and bending the distance between us lengthens. Between letters I jog to catch up and flick through the letters I have in my hand. They are letters for people in Gost, with their names and addresses, postmarked and ready for delivery. But surely this guy doesn’t think he’s delivering them. There are a few for people I know. The baker, who has moved on, anyway, so there’s no point delivering it. And Javor. Javor and the baker. Surely this is no coincidence.

  Now I sprint to catch him up. ‘Hoi!’ I yell again, waving the letters. This time he stops and when I reach him, I see the man is crying, more than crying, bawling like a child. A big, bandy-legged, red-faced child. He drops all the letters he is carrying, balls his hands into fists and holds his arms stiffly down at his sides. He sniffs and sobs and speaks haltingly and I discover this: that the head of the post office, Javor’s father, has been taken away by the men newly arrived in Gost. Buneta saw it, he jabs a finger at his own red and teary eye. He saw him being put into a grey van, inside which were other men: a restaurant owner, the director of the hospital, the bloke who ran the hardware stores. He saw what was happening, so when they wanted the post office records for the addresses of the others whose names were on their list, he had the idea of taking the letters, so they wouldn’t be able to find them. His plan, as far as he has got, is to take as many letters as he can home and burn them.

  All the people to whom the names belong are people who worship at the Orthodox church; the priest’s name is on one of the letters. People who use the word hleb for bread. I bend down and pick up the letters, as many as I can. I force them into every one of my pockets and when they are full I gather an armful, run to the side of the bridge and throw them over the metal railing into the river. I have caught the man’s madness and when I turn round I see him moving slowly away, with the air of a lost toddler.

  And then I start to run. I run. Towards the blue house.

  I shook my head. I turned away from the window. It was dark now, in my stomach a knot of foreboding tightened. I’d felt it all summer, but now, seeing Fabjan there outside the blue house in the half-darkness, I thought: It’s already happening, things are changing. I am not a religious man, but it seemed to me Laura had been sent here for a reason. I’m not saying that was the case, I’m just saying that was how it seemed at the time, standing there on that particular night, in the place where Fabjan had stood. I could smell burned grass from his cigarette.

  17

  Laura arrived in Gost and opened a trapdoor. Beneath the trapdoor was an infinite tunnel and that tunnel led to the past. In the last days of the family’s stay in Gost I seemed to have become trapped in the tunnel, somewhere between a time sixteen years ago and now. When I was a child I had, for a while, been fascinated by Greek myths as it seems to me every boy at some point is. The Minotaur, the monstrous beast created by one betrayal followed by another. Two betrayals: the King of Crete’s betrayal of his god, when he refused to sacrifice the bull sent by Poseidon; the betrayal of the King by his own wife with the same bull, a betrayal which produced the Minotaur himself. So to hide their shame and guilt they built a labyrinth into which they confined the Minotaur. Sometimes I imagined myself as the Minotaur, roaming a maze of tunnels below Gost, the echo of my roars reaching the ears of those who lived under the sun.

  I reckoned I had only a few more days’ work on the blue house, it all depended on what Laura decided she wanted to do. A wasps’ nest in the attic would have to come out. The dead tree needed to be cut into logs and they would see me through the winter, but I could do that anytime. Beyond that, the last remaining job was to fix the wall in the front room, everything else could wait. Matthew came by when I was on the ladder and asked if he could help, so I gave him a job preparing the wall, tearing out the crumbling and broken plaster. Meanwhile I wandered out into the yard. Today was Friday, tomorrow it would be exactly four weeks since the family arrived in the last week of July. Such a short time. I stood at the outbuilding door and thought back to the day I’d first seen their car drive into Gost on the road that led from the coast, the way the vehicle seemed to hesitate before the turn, then later finding Laura in the road in front of the house looking for the water mains, our trips together to the swimming hole and to Zadar. The restoration of the mural and the fountain. Krešimir’s rage. So much had changed over those weeks, and yet in many ways the change felt like a return to a past, as though Laura, Matthew and Grace weren’t strangers newly arrived in Gost, but had in some way been here for a long time. They’d be going soon, in a week and a day to be exact. Laura had already begun to talk about how to secure the house when it was empty; I told her she needn’t worry, I’d keep an eye on it. Laura leaned across the table and squeezed my arm and said something she’d said many times: ‘What would we do without you, Duro?’ She told me Matthew and Grace had to get back to school, both of them had important exams in the next year. For Matthew this would be his last year in school and then he’d be leaving home. She had talked about him taking a year off before university or college, to travel, maybe to Africa or India to help the poor.

  Inside the outbuilding: the Fićo. The week before I’d managed a good number of hours on it. Then with the death of Kos I had briefly lost interest, but now I made up my mind to have the car working before the family left; I thought of it as my gift to Laura, and in the last few days I’d spent a lot of time thinking about this car and what it would mean to see her drive it.

  I heaved open the double doors of the outbuilding. While Laura was out, I wanted to see if I could get the engine running. I’d given the car a thorough going over: cleaning the carburettor and the fuel system, I’d replaced the water pipe, the brake hoses and pads as well as the clutch cable and all the tyres. A new battery, that went without saying. I leaned through the window and released the hand-brake and pushed the car backwards into the sun. I slipped into the driver’s seat, felt for the choke and pulled it out a little. I’d taken the key for the car from the hook beneath the shelf and I slipped it into the ignition lock and turned. A surge of life passed through the car and died. I tried again, pumping lightly on the accelerator, and this time the engine started up, the familiar sound all Fićos shared, the same pitch and whine as a coffee grinder. I gave the engine time to warm up and sat listening until Matthew rapped on the window.

  ‘How cool is this fucking car?’ he mouthed through the glass.

  I wound down the window. ‘Get in,’ I said. ‘Careful with the door.’ I hadn’t got round to oiling them yet. I reversed the car over the grass towards the track at the side of the house which led to the road. I took the car up the road, the one that led away from the main road towards the old farm buildings. It drove OK, the engine sounded a little rough and juddered slightly, a couple of things still to smooth out, but I was pretty pleased. At the end of the track I stopped and turned to Matthew. ‘Do you want to drive?’

  ‘I don’t know how.’

  ‘Time you learned. I’ll show you.’ I climbed out and Matthew scrambled over into the driver’s seat. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Remember how I asked you to put it into gear the last time.’ I talked him through the rest. He stalled three times before he got going. We drove in second gear towards the farm buildings; before we reached the hamlet four or so kilometres on we switched places and I turned the car round. I let Matthew drive back to the blue house. ‘Drive into the yard. I need to check something and then we will put it back. We can make it a surprise for your mother if you don’t tell her.’

  With Matthew’s help I put the car back in the outbuilding, covered it up and closed the doors. I needed a little time to tune the engine, check the contact breakers which I thought were probably the source of the shuddering, after that the car would drive perfectly. By tomorrow, I thought. I lowered the bucket into the well, drew it up and took a long drink of water. The next day was Saturday. A good day, Gost would be full.

  Next morning as soon as
I’d eaten and exercised, I went over to the blue house. As usual the family were sitting outside over coffee and the remains of breakfast, sleek as a family of otters basking in the sun. Laura was still in her night-clothes, Matthew was bare-chested, wearing a pair of pyjama bottoms, only Grace was dressed.

  ‘Hello, Duro,’ said Laura, shielding her eyes from the sun as she looked up at me. ‘Have a coffee, there’s more in the pot.’ She hadn’t yet brushed her hair (her newly dark hair) and her face was bare of make-up, her slanted eyes were half closed against the sun and her robe had slipped to reveal the strap of her nightdress, her bare legs were stretched, toes pushed deep into the grass.

  I sat down. ‘Thank you.’

  As soon as I appeared Matthew slipped away. When he returned he’d changed into a T-shirt and jeans, in his hand he carried Laura’s blue shawl. He winked at me as he slipped it over her eyes. ‘What’s this? Matthew?’ Laura put her hand up to the blindfold, patted her son’s fingers.

  ‘We’ve got something to show you.’

  Laura, completely obedient to her son, offered no resistance. Instead she held up her hand for him to take. That Matthew hadn’t said anything to Grace either was obvious by her expression as she stood up to follow; she looked from Matthew and Laura to me and back. I shrugged as though I had no idea what was happening either. Matthew led his mother through the house and into the courtyard. She said, ‘Hold on, I don’t have any shoes.’ Grace kicked off the pair of flip-flops she was wearing and slipped them onto her mother’s feet. Pretty feet with painted nails, the second toe slightly longer than the first. Laura felt for the step, Grace picked up her mother’s foot and placed it so she could feel the edge. ‘Hold on! Don’t move. Stay there.’

  Matthew and I opened the door to the outbuilding, which swung open with a great deal of creaking.