The Hired Man

16

First I dug a pit. I dug it at the top of the long field. A metre square, a metre and a half deep, because of foxes which as you know are relentless. Second I zeroed the sights on the.243. I have my own set-up at the far end of the long field, with a bench and target, and this was one time when everything had to be right. I spent half an hour up there, checking the alignment of the cross hair on the target, fractionally adjusting the sights. I set up the rifle in the place I’d chosen, then I measured a hundred paces and made a mark in the grass.

I lifted Kos from the blankets on the floor by the side of my chair where she’d lain for the last two days. There must have been pain, but she barely made a sound. Impossible to carry her all the way, so I laid her on an old trolley I had in the yard, the kind you get from railways, which is where I got this one in the first place. I’d used it to shift bags of cement when I was turning the old pig house into a home for myself eighteen years ago; in November of the same year I found Kos. In human years she would be a centenarian, so perhaps what we were about to do wouldn’t be so far in coming anyway. I locked Zeka in the house, which is something I’d never done and would unsettle him, but was unavoidable. I gave him a piece of the fried liver I had in my pocket and set off with Kos, pulling her on the trolley first up the road and then carrying her from there to the top of the long field. I put her into the position and fed her some of the fried liver from my pocket. Kos lifted her head to take it from my hand, and nibbled it perhaps to please me for her appetite was pretty much gone.

After Kos was hit by Krešimir in his car, I had carried her into the house and examined her. Her hip was dislocated and although I had tried twice to push it back into place, it wouldn’t take. I had to muzzle her to stop her biting me in the madness of the pain. After the failure of the second attempt I sat back against the wall, then I released the muzzle and wiped the flecks of foam from the corner of her mouth. A third attempt would have been useless: at her age her chances of healing were already poor.

Now I put my lips to the top of her head, stood up and walked to where I’d set the rifle up an hour before. I could feel myself beginning to sweat, my palms were moist. I wiped them on my trousers. I didn’t want Kos to catch the scent of my fear, I wanted her to die taking the trust with her. My father had put an end to our dogs, when the need arose, with a shotgun in the long field. He did it alone, solemnly, and never spoke to any of us about it. Sometimes, with a favoured dog, he would never mention the dog’s name again. I’d thought through all the ways to kill Kos, to smother her perhaps. She would have let me put the pillow over her face, would only have started to kick when her instincts overcame her and died knowing she’d been betrayed.

As it was Kos was lying in the sun, in a place she knew. I’d positioned her with her back turned to me, not so that she couldn’t see me of course, she was blind anyway, but because it made it harder for her to catch the smell of my fear and also because it presented me with the top of her head, which she raised briefly as I walked away. She was listening and waiting for me to come back to her. The sounds of the rifle — of the bullet dropping into the breech, of the bolt sliding into place, the click of the safety catch coming off — were sounds she had heard all her life, maybe they even brought back the memory of a hunt, if those were the last sounds she heard then that was OK.

She was lying on her side, one ear to the wind, the cross hair was lined on the centre of her skull. My hands shook and I was glad I’d set the gun on a tripod. I’d taken care to fit the silencer, too. Nothing left to wait for and so I released the safety catch with my thumb, took a breath and slowly exhaled, I pressed the trigger and shot Kos through the head. Then I buried her in the hole I’d dug on the edge of the pine plantation. I went back to the house and let Zeka out. He circled the yard twice with his nose in the air and came back inside. I took a chair and sat at the table. For the first time in many years I didn’t know what to do.

Fifteen, twenty minutes might have passed. I don’t know. A knock on the door. I sat up, rubbed my face and went to answer it. Grace. She stood in the road, some distance from the door. She held out her hand with the palm up, a strip of braided thread lay across it. The events of the day, Kos, my mind wasn’t working. ‘What is it? What do you want?’

Grace smiled, maybe a little uncertainly because I’d spoken more sharply than I ever did; she raised her hand a little further. ‘What is it?’ I asked again, differently.

‘A friendship band. I made it for you. To say thank you for helping me with the fountain.’

I took it from her. ‘Thank you, Grace,’ I said. I wanted her to go.

‘Can I come in?’

‘Not today,’ I said. ‘I’m busy.’

Grace’s smile faltered.

I said, ‘Thanks for this. ’ I wasn’t really sure what it was. Before I could shut the door Zeka had appeared and pushed Grace’s hand roughly with his nose, demanding to be stroked.

‘Maybe I can take the dogs for a walk. If it would help you. Where’s Kos?’ She looked past me through the door and began to call Kos.

‘Kos is gone.’

‘What do you mean Kos is gone?’

‘Kos is dead.’

Grace looked up as though I’d hit her. ‘Kos is dead? How come? What happened?’ With every word her eyes grew brighter.

‘It was an accident. A car.’

‘Poor Kos. Duro, I’m so sorry.’ Without warning Grace stepped forward and embraced me, an awkward embrace, I was standing on the step and she was several inches below me, she put her arms around my waist and pressed her ear against my chest. We stood like that for some seconds. I didn’t know what to do, what I wanted was to be left alone. I patted her shoulder, I think. Grace sniffed and stepped back. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. I said, ‘Thank you, Grace, very much for this.’ I held up the coloured strip, stepped back inside and shut the door in her face.

The next morning I was up early. I made coffee and exercised, adding an extra ten press-ups, pull-ups and so on. I felt drained and heavy. I took Zeka for a walk in the hills. Dogs are slower to realise the fact of death than humans; of course Zeka didn’t know Kos was dead, he only knew she wasn’t there and he’d taken advantage of this by occupying all the best places to lie in the yard and in the house. But as we walked it became obvious to me that he was beginning to miss her presence. All his life they had moved and thought as a pair: running, trailing, routing. He’d been used to taking the lead in unfamiliar places and following her in familiar ones. Zeka bounded out of the house and across into the long field, but then all the rhythm was lost. He charged off once or twice at the scent of something, but lost interest. Again and again he circled back to me; by the end he had given up and trotted quietly by my side.

One thing I know, I have always been able to lose myself in work, so as early as was reasonable, I walked over to the blue house. As I turned the corner where the house comes into view I stopped to look at it. I was proud of my work: the gutters were cleared, the broken tiles of the roof fixed, the woodwork, windows and doors painted their original shade, the dead tree was gone, the stonework at the front was whitewashed. And of course there, restored, the mosaic of the bird. I’d never paid it much attention when I first saw it so many years ago. I thought it was just a bird, a whim of Anka’s, maybe her way of making the house more her own, the fountain too. Now it seemed brighter, more splendid than ever before: you half expected it to take flight like a mythical creature out of the pages of a children’s book that comes to life and flies over the hills and the roofs of the houses, breathing fire upon the townspeople.

Inside the house Grace was washing up the breakfast things. When she saw me she stopped what she was doing to come over and give me a hug. I sat at the table with the coffee she made for me, answered her questions and avoided her puddled eyes. Instead I talked about my plan for the day: to trim the trees at the front of the house and the hawthorn hedge at the back for which I’d brought the chainsaw along. Some sizeable branches needed to come down. I looked around the room. The interior had hardly been touched, though I’d fixed the roof which would prevent the patch of wall getting any worse. I could do that later today or tomorrow. As for the rest, Laura talked about getting rid of the pine cladding and tearing up the floor tiles, she also wanted an entirely new kitchen and that was just downstairs. But I was in no hurry now, this was the house as I had known it and as I liked it, I could make sure the work was never done, especially if we began other projects, it would all go on the back burner.

Matthew walked in. As ever he appeared half-asleep and shuffled over to the fridge. He took a carton of milk and drank straight from the spout, then he slumped onto the table opposite me, his back to Grace, who, when she thought I wasn’t looking, gave him a kick. Matthew looked up in confusion, first at Grace and then at me. He put the milk carton down on the table. ‘Shit, man!’ he said. ‘I’m sorry about your dog. Jesus.’

‘Thank you, Matthew,’ I said.

Out of the tail of my eye I saw Laura appear at the back door, where she hesitated, paused for a moment and turned away. Matthew continued, ‘Yeah, well like I said, when Grace told us. ’ He lost the thread. ‘What was her name?’

‘Kos,’ I replied.

Matthew leaned across the table and patted me heavily on the shoulder. It was kind of Matthew, who hardly ever thought about anyone but himself. He sat back down, shaking his head as if making sense of the tragedy.

Later, with Laura, I discussed the height of the boundary hedge and which branches of the trees I planned to take down. After the moment when she’d turned away from the back door she’d eventually come into the house and behaved much as she was doing now. Her hands flew, her smile shone and her eyes slid over me. At lunch I helped Laura open a jar of pickled vegetables, for which she thanked me too many times. She offered me every item of food on the table separately, as if she was nervous, not of me going hungry but of leaving a gap in the conversation, into which something else might possibly slip. It didn’t matter to me especially, you understand. That Kos was dead was a matter of fact, which couldn’t be changed. I might even have thought Laura was trying to spare my feelings, if it wasn’t for the way she avoided my eye as though pain was a disease she could catch.

Late in the day I went up to the hills with Zeka, spent too long up there and by the time I was coming down it was nearly dark, I was just below the lower tree line, not far from the place I’d first seen Laura’s car drive into Gost. Just a little further on there is a view of the blue house and as it came into sight I thought I saw the figure of a man standing behind it, under the walnut tree and beyond the hawthorn hedge which I’d trimmed earlier that day. Now that the hedge was lowered you would have had a view to the back of the house, which I guess was why the man was standing there. My eyesight is good even in poor light, as I’ve told you many times, but now it was late and very nearly completely dark. I couldn’t be sure. I stopped, waited and watched, keeping the figure in view and waiting for any shift or movement, and sure enough it came. There was somebody there and he had just lit a cigarette, taken the packet out of his jacket pocket, shaken it and put one in his mouth and then lit it. I had not much more than a view of his profile and a white smudge of face, lit by the flare of the flame. He wore a pale jacket and dark trousers or jeans and stood smoking and looking into the back of the house, into the kitchen where I supposed the family was gathered to eat their supper. Upstairs a light went on and the man lifted his head towards the window on the upper floor. The light went off again and he went back to watching the kitchen window. He stood with his legs apart and one hand in his pocket, like a man on a street corner in any city in the world, casually lifting the cigarette to his lips and lowering it, watching passers-by as if he had every right to be there, not even bothering to look around or behind him. He might even have been waiting for the right moment to go and knock on the door, perhaps after he’d finished his cigarette. Or at least he would have if it wasn’t for the fact he was standing in a field behind a hedge at the back of the house and not out front. The way he’d positioned himself was interesting: half hidden but in such a way as to suggest he didn’t care whether or not he was seen.

From where I stood I couldn’t see whether or not a car was parked anywhere near by. I moved closer, swinging back a little the way I’d come so that I approached from behind. The fact is I’d recognised him more or less at once, certainly by the time he lit his cigarette. Now he flicked the butt away with a gesture that was completely familiar. It wasn’t Krešimir, who I’d also have recognised from his height and the slight curve of his shoulders. This man was stockier, heavier and a smoker, pale jacket and jeans. The jacket was made of butter-coloured suede and the car, wherever it was, would be a BMW. The man standing outside the blue house was Fabjan.

At a distance of one hundred metres I gave Zeka a silent command to lie down and to stay. At a distance of fifty metres I stopped and waited. Fabjan hadn’t heard me, but as I say, everything in his manner said he didn’t care if he was seen, in fact I’d go further and say it was almost as though he wanted to be seen, by the occupants of the house at least. He lit another cigarette, I watched him. He smoked it down, flicked the stub with his thumb and forefinger so it flew, a malignant yellow firefly, over the hedge and into the yard of the blue house. In all he smoked three cigarettes. He never turned. After the final cigarette he walked down the side of the house, where the ladder is. After a short while I heard a car engine and then a few seconds later came the headlights and the BMW drove past the blue house.

I called Zeka and went up to the hawthorn hedge, to where Fabjan had been standing and where, on the other side of the hedge, an ember glowed in the matted grass. For a minute I stood where he had stood, watching Laura, Grace and Matthew where they sat at table over the remains of a meal: a new Laura, with shorter, dark hair, a fringe and sun-tanned skin, a sweater over her shoulders, playing with the melting wax of a candle, her profile lit by its flame.

Sixteen years ago we endured months of candlelight. When it was finally over and we could turn the lights on, some of us were already used to the dark but for others nothing less than one hundred watts would do. I’ve heard that over at the hotel the passing tourists complain about the lighting in their rooms, in the foyer, but most of all in the restaurant. They say it’s too bright, they want something called ambience. The tourists can’t understand and nobody wants to explain, so they lie and say that people here like to see their food.

Some people start to return to Gost, others leave. Javor’s mother makes the journey north to have her operation. Javor puts her on the bus, which is packed with people. The family who owned the baker’s shop up sticks and are gone. The shop is closed, the hatch through which they used to sell devrek and meat pies is sealed. Yesterday’s bread still sits on the shelves at the back. Soon it is no longer yesterday’s bread but three-day-old bread, last week’s bread. There’s no explanation, no note on the door, just an old notice in faded black felt tip stuck to the door which asks customers to make their orders for the next day by ten o’clock. Somebody crosses out the word hleb and writes kruh. Both of the words mean bread, but some people use one and some the other. The ones who start leaving are the hlebs. So now there is only one baker’s shop in town. This inconveniences everybody, and yet it’s also the way we want it. In the closed shop the bread behind the counter turns blue. I know the family, everyone does: the two daughters: the Mongol the boys at school used to follow and grunt at and the slutty one in the angora sweater. I’d often been to their house, my father and theirs were always lending and borrowing things. Also the father used to supervise karate practice at the sports club, which I went to for a short while because my father thought it would do me good. In their front room they had a round rug, deep red colours, with a Persian-style pattern. I remember it well because I used to sit and stare at my feet and the pattern, embarrassed by the presence of the Mongol, while the red-haired mother offered me day-old pastries from the shop and the father went to search for whatever he was returning or giving.

So when I see a woman and a man, whom I also know, walking down the road with the very same rug on their shoulders, I know exactly from where it has come. The man strides forward and nods briskly at me but doesn’t speak and looks me right in the eye for a beat longer than anyone would normally. Behind him the woman, his wife, who is still wearing her slippers (they are the kind with a small heel), totters under the weight of the thing. She gives me a sheepish grin, lowers her head and scuttles on. The husband’s boldness stays with me for a long time. A pair of middle-aged thieves, challenging me to challenge them.

The door of the family’s house stands open, a downstairs window has been broken. The television has gone already, and of course the rug. Over the weeks that follow the remainder of the family’s belongings disappear into the homes of neighbours and former friends. I recognise their curtains hanging in the window of the deputy karate coach’s house two streets away. Somebody drags a mattress from one of the upper floors, gives up and abandons it in the doorway. Someone else sets fire to it. A sticky little turd appears upon the scorched ticking. Stray cats move in and take over from the family’s pet cat: the toms make mincemeat of him.

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.