The Hired Man

14

The first shell lands on a house near the playground. No one is killed. The kids who were playing scream and flee, then return to stare in silence at the damage, as if they are worried they’ll somehow get the blame. In the second week a shell blows one of my father’s huts apart. My father is inside. Daniela is standing at the door delivering a meat paste sandwich sent by my mother. My father is fixing the roof, which will be blown away a few minutes later. Afterwards, in the other huts (where none of us had been allowed) we find broken coffee grinders, an inflatable paddling pool, electric bar heaters, a wooden clothes horse, pots without handles, a box of my old toys, two beehives and many pairs of old rubber boots. In the smallest of the sheds we find cardboard boxes of tinned food, mainly green beans, and sauerkraut. In another hut: car batteries, still serviceable. The last shed is stacked with wood: planks, sawn logs and kindling.

My father, who unknown to us was in the earliest stages of dementia, will thus spare us the worst of the siege weeks.

A Wednesday, I think, the days have begun to blend. All those things that once helped make one day different from the next: school, church, work, newspapers, the opening of a new film at the cinema, basketball games and football matches — these things can’t be relied on any more. I am on the far side of the ravine. On the other side, above the woods, is the soldiers’ camp. It is close to five o’clock in the morning and still pretty dark. At this time the soldiers are asleep in their tents. In a few hours: awake, shaved and breakfasted, they’ll begin to lob shells at us, and we, on the cue of the first whistled warning, will run home to dive into our cellars. When I was a kid I kicked an anthill once and watched the ants, each carrying a glistening torpedo, scrambling to carry their eggs to safety. I watched and wondered if they could see me, the giant in the sky who’d just wrecked their world. These days whenever I see a woman running down a road with her child in her arms, I remember the ants.

Two pigeons tied to my belt. I must be back before the soldiers wake up. The sound of the shotgun doesn’t bother them; so far Gost has offered little resistance, because all we have are shotguns and hunting rifles and they have 120 millimetre mortars, and because they are out of range and out of view, hidden in the trees in the old concrete bunker at the top of the hill.

A colony of crows is rousing, stirring and squabbling in the branches, a convention gathers on the grass below, thirty birds or more, facing west into the wind. I wait, wanting to make the best of a single cartridge. When one of the crows on the ground crosses in front of another, I fire. The flock take to the sky, two birds remain on the ground. Ten minutes later I leave the pigeons in a bag at my mother’s door and head to the blue house. These days the door is sometimes locked, so I knock and after some minutes Anka appears. ‘Hey, Duro.’ She makes coffee as I set to work on the birds. She wears an old cardigan and has pulled a crocheted shawl from the back of one of the chairs around her shoulders; flat-footed, her face sleep-smudged, the imprint of the pillow on one side of it. She fetches two cups and sits at the table to watch me. I split the breast of each bird and pull out medallions of meat. The remainder of the carcasses I toss into the bucket by the door to boil for Kos. Meat is scarce. People trap rabbits, but the deer are too far up the hill, too close to where the soldiers camp.

‘Only two pigeons today,’ I said. ‘I gave them to my mother. I’ll bring you the next one.’

Anka smiles. ‘Give your mother the pigeons. Don’t worry about us.’

‘She can only eat so much pigeon.’

‘But we like crow. We love crow. Come over later. We’ll have it with thyme and tomatoes. I don’t understand why it doesn’t catch on.’

‘In Paris they ate elephant.’

‘Who did?’

‘The Parisians, during the siege. They ate elephant. They ate rats and cats, too. And dined on elephant steaks.’

‘Liar. Where would they get elephants from?’

‘From the zoo.’

‘They ate the exhibits? What did it taste like?’

‘I have no idea. Like pork, maybe.’

Anka pulls her chin in and tilts her head to one side. She draws the shawl around her shoulder and shakes her head slowly in disbelief.

‘Where’s Javor?’ I ask.

She jerks her head towards the staircase. ‘Asleep,’ she says. ‘We’re only being bombed every day. Not enough to lose sleep over. I’m the one who doesn’t sleep.’ She laughs and I do, too. Javor always loved his sleep. At that moment he appears rubbing his head and sits down at the table. ‘Talk of the devil,’ says Anka.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘Nothing,’ she says and helps him to coffee, leaning into him as she does so, pressing her belly against his back.

‘Hey, Duro, heard the one about the refugees and the dumper truck?’ says Javor. He tells a story about a group of refugees from the east who fled in the back of a dumper truck. One of them was a pretty girl and the driver of the truck invited her to sit in the cab with him. The two got along very nicely. The driver impressed the girl with details about his truck, its size and load capacity, the purpose of various levers and buttons. At some point the driver made a piss-stop. He went to the back of the truck to open the tailgate so the people could get out. But he must have failed to apply the hand-brake properly because the truck began to creep forward. He called to the girl still sitting in the cabin. The girl, who had been paying only slight attention to the driver’s talk, pulled the wrong lever: the one that operated the hydraulics to raise the dumping bed. She dumped the refugees on top of the driver.

You see, even then we could laugh, though my father and sister were already dead.

Anka says, ‘I want grapes and cheese. Green grapes and Greek cheese.’

‘Feta,’ says Javor.

‘Feta,’ repeats Anka softly.

‘Maybe I can get you some cheese, it will be just like feta, you’ll never know the difference. We can ask Fabjan.’

‘And grapes?’

‘That might take longer.’

Anka throws her head back and groans. ‘I’m sick of eating everything from a jar.’ By now we’ve eaten the contents of our kitchen gardens, we are eating the bottled fruit and vegetables we have put aside for the winter. They’ll last a good while, because in this part of the world we treat every winter as though it is the last.

In the evening I return with a bag of cherries. Anka is in the outbuilding removing a pot from the kiln. It is a deep bowl with an inwardly curving rim. The road south has been closed for weeks now; the trips she used to make to the coast in her Ficó to fill her orders with the tourist shops are no longer possible. There are no tourists. The coast is another country again. Behind me: stacks of wooden crates stuffed with decorated dishes, ashtrays, fridge magnets, all packed in straw. Anka has given up making these things. War has given her a kind of freedom and her work provides a place of refuge from the craziness. She sets the bowl on an old lead-topped table. When she sees me, or rather the cherries, she squeals and swoops, grabs a handful and rams it into her mouth. Juice spills from the corner of her lips; she looks like a young and healthy vampire.

‘Oh Duro, where did you get these?’

‘A wild tree.’

She stops and eyes me sideways with suspicion. ‘No, Duro. I don’t want them.’ She picks up the bag and pushes it into my chest.

‘Take them, it’s fine.’ I push the bag back at her.

‘I know where they come from.’ Takes a step back and wags a finger at me.

‘Well then don’t tell my mother.’

Anka laughs. She steps forward and snatches the bag, stuffs more cherries into her mouth. Afterwards she wipes her mouth and grows serious. ‘You can’t do this, Duro. You think I don’t remember where the tree is? This is the last time.’ Suddenly she hugs me. She smells of ceramic dust, vinegar and sweat.

‘Where’s Javor?’ I say when she lets me go. Along with the other men of Gost we have joined the territorial defence forces. So far all we’ve done is show up in the school gym for nightly meetings. A representative from the Crisis HQ in the Town Hall informed us the new National Guard was handling the situation. They have taken up a position south of the town opposite the army in the north. In between lies Gost. The army want to reach the coast but we stand in their way. Each side has roadblocks you have to pass through, on the road north and on the roads south out of Gost. Same questions, but different answers for each.

‘He’ll catch you up.’

‘Don’t bother. We only want people who can shoot straight.’

This makes her smile. ‘He’s not so bad.’

‘You were better.’ I point to the bowl. ‘This is good.’

‘I’m going to decorate it.’

‘I like it this way.’

‘What does it matter? Nobody’s going to buy it.’

‘One day.’

‘One day, sure.’

Duration, after all, is the whole point of a siege.

The storm over the town rumbles day after day. Some people have already left Gost. They left before dawn and after dusk, without telling their neighbours and they left their pets behind. How did they know? The rest of us didn’t see it coming. Now it’s impossible to leave. Too many refugees. There are the roadblocks and checkpoints. Both sides are happy to shoot you. A dog or a cat in the car is a sure sign you’re getting out and that means trouble. The abandoned dogs sit outside their old homes waiting to be let in.

I borrow books from the library on the days it is open. I read about sieges. Constantinople. Delhi. Mafeking. Paris. Dien Bien Phu. Leningrad.

The siege of French forces by the Viet Minh in their garrison Dien Bien Phu took place in 1954 and lasted for exactly fifty-four days. In the middle of that fifty-fourth night the brigadier general in Dien Bien Phu radioed his commander and asked permission to surrender. You’ve done magnificently. Don’t spoil it now by hoisting the white flag, said his commander, three hundred kilometres away. OK, replied the besieged man from his valley hole surrounded and overlooked by tens of thousands of enemy soldiers. I was only thinking to save the wounded. There were five thousand at that time, you understand. Well, see you soon, replied his commander.

French soldiers named their strong-points after women: Beatrice, Gabrielle, Isabelle, Elaine. The men decided to hold off the enemy as long as possible and allow the men in Isabelle to make a run for it — they had the best chance, you see, but only seventy made it anyway, so it was for nothing. Ten thousand were taken captive, force-marched to prison camps across the country. Most of them died on the way.

Nobody had expected the Viet Minh to use nineteenth-century tactics.

In Dien Bien Phu planes dropped rations and the men crept out under the barbed wire into no man’s land to fetch them and were shot to bits. The citizens of Paris ate the animals in the zoo: Castor and Pollux, the elephant pair, were shot through the eyes as nobody could lay hands at the time upon an elephant gun. Only the zoo’s big cats were spared because of the difficulty of approaching them, also the monkeys: people thought they looked too much like humans. Parisians developed a taste for horse meat, which continues, as well as dog, cat and rat meat, which does not. Photographs of Paris during the great siege: people sitting in restaurants with napkins tucked round their necks, munching on rat blanquette accompanied by the last bottles of decent wine.

A heavy mist slides between the trees and across the sloping ground. The tree trunks are slick and black, thick odour of rotting leaves, and — mingled with the cold morning air and the sharp scent of pine — the snap of cordite. A deadly hush. I am alone. I tread with care, weight on the outside of my foot. The dampness helps, softens the ground; the heavy air smothers small sounds. The deer are nowhere to be seen, but I sense them behind the mist, smell their moist breath, see the flash of a liquid gaze and feel a trembling footfall, twitching hide and hair, the quiver of a haunch. They are watching the shape-shifting patterns of mist. At the first tree I pause, wait and listen. I peer through the trees into the almost darkness. Forward, forward, step by step.

Minutes pass and still no sight of the deer. They must be retreating ahead of me, herding uphill. I stop and look the way I have come. The mist is beginning to clear in patches, here and there shafts of sunlight reach the forest bed freeing curls of vapour. Underfoot the ground is soft, springy and damp. The upper tree line is several hundred metres away. I’m closer to the soldiers’ camp than I have ever been though still a good kilometre away and the wind is in my favour.

Out of nowhere a deer barrels across my path: a young male on the edge of panic, the smell of musk and fright all about him. He’s there and gone. It gives me a jolt, a squeeze to the heart. I wait a minute or two before I begin to move steadily in the direction he went. A mature doe comes racing towards me, passing within metres, fleeing some threat, or she’d never come so close. Only a few times in all my years have I been so close to a live animal. Seconds later a group comes racing through the trees, a second group bolt past going the other way. I am caught in the middle of a stampede. There’s something comic about it: the deer, their sudden leaps and graceless crashings, and when they stop they stand around as if they’re embarrassed at their own behaviour, before the madness goes to their heads again and they’re off, ricocheting through the trees.

Something has spooked them — not me, though by now they’ve surely scented me, which is no doubt adding to the general confusion. I wait in the shadow of a tree. There’s no longer any point being here. Nothing can happen now, the deers’ blood is up — I won’t get close to the herd today.

Movement. There’s another animal in these woods. Smaller, nearly as fast as a deer, a softer footfall. It scatters a group of deer and lurches round in a circle before heading back towards them. A dog: a youngster of two or so with huge paws, ears streaming behind him, tongue lolling, the thrill of the chase gone to his head; he races straight past me, the deer have his eye and he’s heady with the scent of them. I don’t recognise him as belonging to anyone in Gost and he doesn’t look like a stray. A hunting breed, well fed, well cared for, totally undisciplined.

The sound of voices. Singing and shouting. Soldiers singing drunken songs. A late-night session has turned into an early morning hunt, but none of them is sober enough for it. The dog is out of control. This is bad for me. The big problem is the dog. At the moment he’s too bound up chasing deer, but the minute I start to run or even move that will all change. If I stay where I am, which I don’t have any choice but to do, he could still come back. I’m pretty sure he’s seen me, he’s just not that interested while there are deer to chase. I stand still and count my breaths.

Three, four minutes pass. I hear the hooves of the panicked deer, catch glimpses of them through the trees. The men’s voices rise with the power of the song, fade and start over. There are two, no, three of them, their singing so tuneless it’s only on the second run I recognise the song as ‘Hajde Da Ludujemo’. Last time I sang it was at Javor and Anka’s place after the party at the Zodijak. I think of how we used to all join in. I think about what would happen if I did so now. I smile.

And then the dog comes back.

This time he sees me, he’s bored of deer he can’t catch, he comes over. A nice dog, glossy and fit. I imagine one of them found him, or stole him somewhere along the front line, from one of the villages where some guy, who may be dead now for all I know, bred him and the rest of his litter.

I put out a hand to him, which is what he wants. Just to say hello. So long as I keep him quiet it can still be OK. Ignoring him will only make him more interested; anything as foolish as trying to hide would have started him barking. I stroke his muzzle and ears. In a quiet voice I tell him to sit. He sits and looks at me expectantly. I order him to lie down. He does. He waits, looking for his reward. When he figures it isn’t coming, he looks around for an escape and then rises slowly, hoping I won’t call him back. When he thinks he’s clear he bounds away to look for his master.

The singing grows fainter. There are only two of them at it. Another song. They’re moving away, heading to the camp, needing to get back in time to sober up, with a long day murdering civilians ahead of them.

When I judge it safe enough I move. I don’t head back the way I came, but move diagonally downhill, taking advantage of the cover of the trees for as long as possible. It is later than I would like and there’s too much light in the sky. This is a new danger. I have to get out of the woods and across no man’s land without being seen. I start to jog, slowly enough to keep an eye out, fast enough to cover the ground.

I am still in the woods when I come across him. I stop and take cover behind a tree. Standing with his legs apart and his flies undone, pissing against a tree, unsteady on his feet, he sways forward and then back, holding onto his cock as if for balance and staring at the jet of piss. This guy is one of the drunk hunters who’s been left behind by his friends. Only two voices where there had been three. My mistake. I’d assumed they were all still together, but no — here he is, number three, in my way, taking a leak while the sun climbs higher and higher with every second. Soon it will break the horizon. I feel a small jet of rage.

I am barely in his eye line, I move noiselessly until I am out of it. I am less worried about being seen by him than I was by the dog. The guy is dead drunk. I move behind one of the pines and wait for him to finish. He seems to take for ever. I lean against the tree and watch. He shakes the final drops from the end of his cock. I wait for him to zip his flies and stagger off, but he doesn’t. He leans his back against the tree, standing in his own patch of piss, and begins to stroke his cock.

I wait and the waiting goes on, because the guy is drunk and his cock is stiff, but not stiff enough, so he rubs harder and harder but he still can’t make himself come. He tugs at it a couple of times and stares as though his dick has never let him down this way before. I think he’ll give up and stick it back in his pants but he doesn’t. What is he? Nineteen? Twenty? He can go on playing with his dick for hours. He changes hands. I think: Here is my enemy. I am watching my enemy masturbate.

The sun is rising. Above the horizon the sky is whitening.

My enemy. I could tell you I think about the shell that landed on my father’s row of shanty huts; the explosion left him pumping blood when he should have been eating the meat paste sandwich carried by his daughter who is now lying on her back on the grass, the arms that carried the plate blown off. My father was killed at once. Daniela took five hours to go, her whole body shook in a long death rattle. The expression on her face was as if she had done something wrong, like an animal caught in a trap, crying without making any sound. I could tell you I think about all of that, but I don’t. I think about the sun and the dawn which is almost over. I stare at this guy wanking in the forest. I have a silencer on my rifle. His friends will have reached the camp a kilometre away. I raise the gun and it’s the easiest shot I have ever taken.

As for the soldier, he dies with his cock in his hand. I might have waited for him to have one last blast, but then, to be honest, I’d waited long enough.