The Hired Man

15

The bowl I’d watched Anka take from the kiln days before is now a deep blue, the colour of sea when the water reaches a certain depth and the sun is high, when you sail over rocks. Fish of different sizes swim head to tail around the inside of the bowl, slender and pale. The bowl is like nothing I have ever seen Anka make, completely different from the thick, brightly painted pieces she makes for the shops. With the small tool in her hand, Anka scrapes at the fish and to each she gives gills, scales. An eye. Every so often she pauses to blow the dust out of the inside of the bowl.

I watch in silence. When she is finished I carry the bowl into the blue house for her. Cardboard and cloth cover the windows, the mirrors are taped across. The plates that used to be displayed on the dresser have been put away. On the table the blue bowl, looking suddenly immensely fragile.

Later in the day I ask Javor, ‘How are the folks?’

‘I was up there today. Roof needed some work. They’re OK.’

‘The house was hit?’

‘Shrapnel.’

He worries about his mother who was due to travel to have an operation at the district hospital a while back. The hospital in Gost is too small. The operation had been scheduled and then cancelled when travelling became difficult. Javor’s father is head of the post office. I told you this. A job he’s been in ten or more years. I’d last seen him at my father’s funeral five weeks ago. He’d brought Chivas Regal and said a few words in the church, the first time I’d ever seen him there, because the family usually worship at the Orthodox. My father had always thought he was about as decent as a boss could get. Too many people got their jobs because of who they knew. My father liked the fact his boss had once been on the floor sorting mail, just like the rest of them.

No post now for five weeks.

I’ve brought over a lark and a pigeon. Anka has stewed the birds whole, there is gravy dark with blood. Anka tells Javor not to put the prices at the Zodijak up any more.

‘Tell Fabjan,’ says Javor. ‘He doesn’t care. He says we sell rakija and beer, not baby milk.’

I’d been in the Zodijak just that morning. Krešimir had been there, too. He’d ignored my nod, as he does unless someone’s looking. When he said goodbye to Fabjan he shook his hand, patted him on the shoulder. Fabjan is fast becoming an important person in Gost, it’s as easy as that. Krešimir behaves with Javor as he does with Fabjan, but I’ve sometimes seen Krešimir give Javor the same low stare he gives me. And I never see Krešimir at the blue house. As far as I know Anka goes alone to visit her mother and brother at the house in town. Maybe this is the only way they have to keep the pecking order alive. Fabjan, who’d hardly bothered to look up when Krešimir left, asked me to help him heft some crates up from the cellar. Every bar in Gost is closed or on the point of it, and yet the Zodijak seems to have a limitless supply of beer, vodka and brandy. This fact I’m sure is connected to the soldiers of the National Guard who I see drinking there in the evenings. Fabjan keeps their glasses filled. When they leave he shakes their hands and this time it’s Fabjan who pats the other men on their shoulders and tries to persuade them to stay, have another drink. One for the long road back to the checkpoint.

Javor and Fabjan are joint owners of the Zodijak but Fabjan takes all the big decisions and mostly this suits Javor just fine. Two things he hates: conflict and hard work. Not that he’s lazy, it’s simply that he’s never had to try too hard. His father is influential, his business partner has ambition enough for both of them. As a young man he walked a straight line from the love of his mother to the love of his wife. He does not lie, because he doesn’t need to. He has never been betrayed; he has never been frightened.

In silence we sit at the table and pick the last shreds of meat from the hollow, ivory bird bones. Anka is thinner, the shadows under her cheekbones have deepened, her skin is pale even though it is summer. For all her outward robustness, there’s a new delicacy about her. She is more beautiful than before. She uses her index finger to wipe the gravy from her plate and lifts it to her mouth. No bread for a week now. We dine on woodpecker and lark, like the kings of long ago, like the Parisians who dined on the elephant meat, on Castor and Pollux. Eating has become our only pleasure. We talk about food all the time.

‘Asparagus, veal saltimbocca,’ I say, describing the food in a hotel restaurant I worked in briefly. ‘With mozzarella and ham from Istria.’ The chef in that restaurant was an Italian and good, but it was attached to an ageing hotel whose corridors smelled of mould and toilet cleaner: the vast restaurant was more often empty. That nobody came to eat his food didn’t seem to bother him in the least; he executed every order as though he were cooking for a duke. ‘Once in pity I sent through a fake order. Nobody was in the restaurant and the manager was asleep in the office behind the front desk. I took the order, I served it to myself. I ate it. Veal saltimbocca. Asparagus. Another time he made squid ink risotto for the two of us, he told me it was his signature dish. They made it in a lot of the restaurants I worked in but I never tasted it so good.’

As you see we did a good job of holding on to the lie of civilisation.

‘You need a haircut,’ I say to Javor. The soft brush of his hair has grown lank.

‘I told him the same,’ says Anka. ‘You know what he says?’

‘I grow it as an act of protest,’ says Javor. ‘When we are free I will cut my hair. I will also go to the movies, eat fucking maraschino ice cream and demand an audience with the Pope.’

While I listen to all the things Javor never knew he wanted, I look around. There is Anka’s bra hanging to dry at the top of the banister, the picture of her grandparents on the dresser: her grandmother in mud-caked man’s shoes, a wedding dress, her hair framed by the points of a star, on the couch a grey cat reaches out to touch the air with a single paw. ‘Don’t go,’ says Anka, when I rise to leave.

‘I need to, it’s late.’

‘To where? Stay.’ Javor punches me lightly on the arm. ‘It’s dark. Not safe to be out.’

‘As safe as staying.’

‘True.’ The window shutters, closed tight against the night, maybe even the dead eye of a rifle sight high in the hills. Javor stands to switch off the single light above the table before he opens the door.

I walk home slowly. Across the fields the houses of Gost are hidden by the darkness: not a single light, not a single sound, except the whisper and smell of the trees, no movement save for a pair of bats leaving their roosts. I walk on listening to the sound of my footsteps. I imagine the arc of a shell coming from the hills, the blue house blown apart behind me: the slender fish on the sides of the bowl, a golden star and the grey cat flying through the night sky.

* * *

I hold up the piece of mirror I use to shave and rub a hand over my head. Take the scissors and cut the hair blind, use a razor to remove the rest. All this by candlelight, some minutes past three, an hour and a half before the dawn. I dip my fingers into a jar of paint and draw two fingers across my nose and cheekbones, one side and then the other, and remember Anka’s finger sliding across her plate last night, taking up the last of the gravy. Just like the old days when we went out before school: Anka, Krešimir, me. How I used to enjoy those early morning hunts.

I blow out the candle. Downstairs I pull an old woollen hat down over my forehead, from the rack I collect my rifle, the old 7.62 my father took such care of the years I was away. Outside Kos, in her pen, rises to greet me. I scratch the top of her head with two fingers and I promise to feed her when I get back. Today I’m hunting alone.

The morning air is warm and damp and the crickets have gone quiet. There will be a mist later, which is no bad thing. I breathe deeply, there’s a tension in my gut. My heartbeat is slow and regular. My head is entirely clear. I leave the road almost immediately and duck into the long field, staying close to the hedge; moving at an easy pace I head straight uphill until I reach the pine plantation. The last rows of trees mark an undeclared border between the people of Gost and the men in the hills. They don’t drop below it and we don’t rise beyond it. The two hundred or so metres of slope below the plantation is no man’s land.

Moving from tree to tree, it takes me forty minutes to reach within half a kilometre of the old bunker where Krešimir and I used to play.

They’ve changed the position of the watch; it takes a few minutes to find him. He’s awake, obviously exhausted, teetering on the edge of sleep. This is the worst time of the night for the look-out, standing alone in a dark forest, thinking no further ahead than the next hour, half-hour, fifteen minutes — the end already in sight. I see him check his wristwatch, flashing his torch on and off to do so. My watch, my father’s watch which I’ve been wearing these past few weeks, is on the table by the side of my bed; on a morning as still as this one I might be given away by the ticking of the watch. It’s early and I decide to have a look to see what’s happening in the camp. I draw a loop around the guard and head uphill.

The smell of them: ashes and burned pine resin, earth, night breath, canvas and oil, underneath it all the sting of sweat and ammonia. With my next step I set foot on a firm crust of earth which yields to something softer. I ease my weight back off, too late. The stink floats upwards and clots in the back of my throat. I try not to breathe in. Along with their rations the soldiers are forced to swallow everything, all the boredom, anger, homesickness and frustration which comes with doing what they are doing; the brew curdles in their guts, their shit stinks of it.

Four guns. I am struck by the size of them. Even though I was once trained to use these very guns, in my mind’s eye they have grown to the size of howitzers, but really they are much smaller. The barrel reaches my shoulder, the wheels just above my knees, that’s all. There’s enough ammunition for more than a month. Probably there must be twenty men, asleep in their bivouacs.

In all their imaginings, this is probably not how they saw war: sitting on a hill, trying to frighten the shit out of people on their way to work and to school, blowing them apart. They start off being sickened by it, slowly become inured, and then bored, the resentment begins — that’s when the fun starts. I saw it when I worked for a short time in a slaughterhouse. There were guys who in the first week could barely keep the contents of their stomachs down, a month later would be ramming the stun gun up the backsides of pigs and slitting the throats of lambs in front of the ewes. Not all the guys, just some of them. And maybe some of these soldiers have enjoyed it all from the start: look through the field scope and decide who to kill today. A man on a scooter. A couple leaving a café. A young woman carrying a meat paste sandwich to her father in a shack at the end of a garden.

The stink of them, I cannot stand it.

What are you doing? I stop moving. The voice, clear and loud, as only a sleep talker would speak, comes from inside one of the bivouacs. There’s a stirring and grumbling, the sound of bodies turning. I’m fucking your mother.

Silence again.

Now it’s time to choose. I can either go back for the boy down the hill, or I can wait for his relief. I think about it and decide to wait for the relief. Today is the boy’s lucky day. Maybe because he looked at his watch and maybe the watch was given to him by his father. Or because he doesn’t look like the type who’d be out here willingly, doing this kind of work: he looked on the small side and quite young, difficult to tell exactly how young in the flash of light from the torch. Too young but old enough. Counting more than the minutes to the end of his shift, counting the weeks and the days until he can go home.

I change my mind back again.

A mist is coming down, as I knew it would, thickening around me. Soon enough I find him. He’s sitting with his back against a tree, one hand on his upright rifle, head back, eyes closed. For a moment I think he’s asleep, but he opens his eyes and looks around, peering into the mist. I am about a hundred metres away and I know he hasn’t seen me or heard me: he’s looking for the guy who’s coming to replace him. He wants the hell out of there while he’s still alive. The commander should put them on watch in pairs, but he doesn’t want to lose face. As for me, I’ve tried not to be too predictable. But this guy, whose eyes keep darting in the direction he expects the relief to come from, well let’s just say it would be a shame not to disappoint him.

I move closer. Seventy metres.

He cocks his head like a dog, turns from side to side. Then he yawns and even though he tries to control it, still it gives me the opportunity to move closer. Sixty metres. I have a clear line of sight through the trees. I raise the rifle to my shoulder and put my eye to the eye piece. In the grainy light of the new dawn I see him stare into the mist with the blank, wide-eyed stare of a person trying to stay awake. From a distance, the rustle of dead leaves. Now he’s alert. This is it, he thinks, relief on its way or somebody coming to kill him. He’s wrong on both counts. The sound is just deer moving through the woods, magnified by the mist, so that they sound nearer than they are. As for the person coming to kill him, I’m already here.

He has tightened his grip on his rifle and is looking around. He has that way of screwing up his eyes and sticking out his chin that short-sighted people do. He licks his lips and the corners of his mouth. The minutes pass. I place different parts of him at the centre of my cross hair, his left eye, then his right eye, his nose (which needs a wipe), his mouth. The deer move on. The man in front of me slumps, his shoulders and chest drop and his belly sinks, he loosens his grip on his rifle, he rolls back on his heels to lean his weight against the tree. He does something I’ve never seen a grown man do, he puts his thumb in his mouth and sucks.

Mist threads through the trees, water gathers on the branches, drops fall in patterns of sound. I let the minutes pass. I’m so close to him I can hear his breathing. Ten minutes or so later and the thing I’ve been waiting for happens. He yawns and this time he lets it go, taking short breaths and opening his mouth wider with each one. His eyes are closed tight and his head rocks back. He doesn’t bother to cover his mouth.

Time now. I take a breath and exhale slowly. I think: Now that’s a good way to die.

He is small, I was right. I pull off his jacket and use it to bind his head, to prevent a blood trail, because the back of his head is open. Then I hoist him without too much difficulty over my shoulders. The body is warm and limp. When we reach the edge of the ravine I lower him to the ground and unwrap the jacket. His jaw falls open. I push it shut. He has a cleft in his chin and long, dark eyebrows. The jaw falls open again. I heft him over the side of the ravine. The body thuds as it bounces off a rock, a crack as it snags briefly on the branches of a small tree and then it’s gone. A splash as he enters the swimming hole. The body lands face up and I watch while it gently corrects itself, spinning slowly in the current. I pick up both our guns and head home.

This is how it has been for a few weeks now. The first one, of course, the drunken hunter. There’ve been others. Three, maybe four. Once I left it too late and with daylight coming I had to string the corpse up by the ankles, hoist it into a tree and wait until later to come back. Some of the skull came loose and part of his brain slithered out and fell to the ground. I kicked earth over it. Later I worried the dog would find it, but that didn’t happen.

All over the country the number of deserters is growing; the commander doesn’t let his men spend too much time looking for the men who’ve gone missing. Does he even know they’re dead? At any rate the dog has definitely gone, because there’s been no sight of him, not even a bark or a whimper. Maybe he ran away.

September, a day passes without the scream and whistle of shells. I’d like to tell you we left our houses and wandered the streets shaking hands and gazing at the clear blue sky, but it wasn’t like that. A month earlier the National Guard finally lived up to their promises and began their offensive; they’d been waiting to be supplied with weapons and ammunition by the government. For months St Mary’s Church survived the shelling. People said it was a miracle, but I knew, because I had read it in a book in the library, that artillerymen rely on spires and other landmarks to direct their aim. When, in the final days, the soldiers on the hill rained shells on us St Mary’s Church was hit several times; this time they were aiming for it, something for us to remember them by. I pass by the day the shells stop and see the priest (he’d shown courage in the last months, leading the funerals to the graveyard): he is moving a large silver cross out of the way of the weather and thieves. In the street a dog stands on a low roof and barks at the heads of passers-by. The smell of scorched brick and dust mixes with the odour of oleander. For twenty minutes I help the priest shift rubble and broken statues, then I walk through Gost as I haven’t for weeks.

Over the days that follow memorial notices are posted on telegraph poles and lamp posts throughout Gost, so that the poles and posts flutter with white paper like they do at carnival time; some notices are new and brightly white, others rippled and water-stained, streaked with ink. Some sheets of paper are blank, washed clean by the weather; announcements of new deaths are pasted over the old. I stop and read. Jelena Rukavina. I saw her, her face had been crushed by her own house, the cheek caved in and part of the skull. She looked exactly like a broken doll, as though her head was hollow inside. Joso Cacić. He burned. Gas from a pipe. He was trapped and he couldn’t get away from the flames. We didn’t get to him in time. Karlo Klanac cracked jokes all the time we removed the bricks from on top of him. He died anyway. Smiling death, the doctors called it, something to do with the kidneys. Karlo Klanac went with smiles and bad puns. Bernarda Zorica. Shrapnel. Radmila Štimac. Shrapnel. Ivan Maras-Brico. I went to school with him. He had his head blown off. Miro’s brother, digging up potatoes in his back yard, took a direct hit. Imagine what that does to a man. His wife, standing at the window, blinked and he was gone. Puff! Antun Ratković crashed his car driving home without headlights in the blackout.

Later I climb up to the old bunker, where the men had been camped. Bleached rectangles of grass, an old shaving brush and a pink plastic toothbrush with bent bristles, a lighter in the shape of a steamer ship, which no longer works, a penknife, the blade is rusty and the handle dew-stained but I keep it anyway, and a wallet empty except for a photograph of twin dark-haired boys. A pile of rubbish: empty tins, cigarette cartons and ration packs. And a cesspit full of shit.

In the third week of October the men arrive. The Mayor calls those of us who served in the territorials to a meeting in the school gymnasium, thanks us for our courage and dedication. We’ve been drilled in weapon use, though we all learned how to handle a rifle at our mother’s breast. Mostly we cleared up after a shelling, hoisting corpses to the mortuary. We’ve attended nightly meetings. None of us has seen any fighting, which was left to the National Guard. Now the commander of the National Guard stands beside the Mayor and afterwards shakes several of us by the hand and then shakes his fist in the air. There are a few cheers.

Standing either side of the Mayor are two of the men from the new unit. The Mayor introduces them by name. (Perhaps one of these names is familiar to you. For a while some seven or eight years later he was mentioned in the newspapers several times a week. One picture they used a lot. In it he wore a tall fur hat and a brocade jacket; probably it was taken at a wedding. By coincidence, I saw a picture of him in a newspaper just the other day. He was being transferred to an open prison for good behaviour, which is how seriously the government took his penance. He was sentenced to fifteen years, not enough, but still someone took the trouble to put him there. No, not enough, but enough to unnerve some people with secrets of their own. I looked at the picture for a long time: he hadn’t changed much except that now he was bald. He is very unremarkable-looking, you would pass him in the street. You’ll find the picture in the box with the other cuttings.) He has short dark hair, already receding into a sharp widow’s peak, a nose with a cleft tip, grey eyes and heavy, pale eyebrows, which are at odds with the colour of his hair; he is dressed in fatigues, a peaked cap bearing the insignia of the new country and army boots, and stands with his legs apart and his hands behind his back, in the way that militiamen do. Everything in his manner gives the impression that here is a most resolute man, who knows exactly what he wants, down to his breakfast order. When he smiles he shows surprisingly good teeth. Next to him the Mayor in his nylon blazer looks grey and rumpled. The Mayor tells us these men have been sent direct from Zagreb to offer us assistance. The one with the pale eyebrows steps forward and shakes his fist in the air. He cheers. His cheer contains the air of a challenge, so this time people cheer. He cheers again and we cheer back, once, twice, three times. By the third cheer the men are really roused.

The newcomers say they are here to protect us.

After the meeting a few souls wander over to the Zodijak for a drink. Fabjan is wiping down the pinball machine. No sign of Javor, who tends to stay away from the Zodijak a good deal of the time these days. I guess he and Fabjan must have decided it’s awkward given the bar remains the favourite watering hole of the National Guard. Madness to turn down the money they bring. ‘Business is business,’ says Fabjan. So Javor concentrates on collecting supplies and bringing the books up to date. I’ve seen him sitting at the kitchen table working his way through the bound ledgers that contain columns of the Zodijak’s profit.

We drink for an hour. There’s talk, about the meeting and other things. Someone wonders out loud who the fuck these pansies are who turn up when the show’s over, but they shut up quick when four of the same walk in: the two we have just seen at the meeting and two more. Fabjan goes over to shake hands and offer them drinks on the house, business first always. After he serves them he sits down at their invitation and from the bar I watch them laughing and joking, downing beers. Fabjan looks very comfortable: he’s winning them over the way he wins over everyone.

By nine o’clock I’m drunk. The bar begins to empty as men leave for their wives and smashed homes. A couple more customers wander in, not a busy night. One of them is a distant cousin of Javor, looking for a drink because after all drinking is the only thing left to do. He nods to a few folk, including me, and leans on his elbows hunched over the bar. Fabjan, sitting with the new arrivals, sees Javor’s cousin but he doesn’t come and serve him. As for the cousin, he’s in no hurry; he leans on the bar and kicks the floor with the toe of his shoe. After a while he reckons he’s waited long enough and he wants that drink, he twists round to see what’s going on. ‘Eh, Fabjan!’ Fabjan ignores him. The cousin calls again. ‘Eh, Fabjan?’ Again no reply, even though it’s impossible for Fabjan not to have heard. So the cousin stands up straight and draws in his chin, the way people do when they think they are being insulted. He looks around, but nobody meets his eye. We are witnessing a show of strength and most people are not keen to get on the wrong side of Fabjan. In a situation like this timing is crucial. All it would have taken was for another customer to have ordered a drink, as little as that to bring Fabjan to the bar, to rupture the line, but the moment has already passed. And the reason why has something to do with the presence of the newcomers.

The man with the widow’s peak and pale eyebrows lifts his glass to his lips and slowly drinks. He’s watching, although his gaze rests on nothing in particular. He puts the glass down on the table, reaches for his cigarette in the ashtray and takes a puff, putting it back with the same deliberateness. He puts his hands on the table and spreads his fingers, the way people do in films.

Me, I stand there and watch. I am drunk, which has slowed my responses. I’ve missed the moment too, and now it feels as if there is nothing to do but watch the thing unfold. I also want to know as much as anyone whether Javor’s cousin will call a third time and demand to be served and if he does what Fabjan will do. But the cousin is no fool. He swears under his breath, pushes himself off the bar and leaves. Through the glass I see him gesture, more or less to himself, he sort of flicks his hand, as though there is something stuck to his fingers.

The man with the pale eyebrows and the widow’s peak smokes his cigarette and orders another Johnny Walker. Fabjan takes his place behind the bar. The burning filter of the cigarette of the man next to me in the ashtray makes a bad smell until he finally notices and crushes it out.

By the next morning the whole incident is gone from my mind. Too much else to think about. I need to hunt, to bring some meat to the table. We have all been hungry for so long. When I see Javor later that evening the business with his cousin comes back into my mind, but there is Anka and in the moment I realise I am not sure what it is I am going to tell them. I say nothing. We talk about the food. I say nothing. This is the greatest mistake I will ever make.