The Hired Man

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.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Hey, I said don’t move,’ called Matthew. He took the key to the car from the hook and went over to his mother, lifted her hand and pressed it into the palm. She fingered it, like a contestant in a game show.

‘Well that’s easy enough. It’s a key.’

‘You can look now,’ said Matthew.

Laura pulled the shawl down from her eyes, frowned and peered into the darkness of the outbuilding. Matthew and I each took hold of one end of the cover of the car and slid it off. Grace clapped a hand over her mouth. Laura took a pace forward. ‘You mean to say it’s ready?’

I said, ‘Yes, it’s ready to drive.’

The three of us stood back and watched her as she walked towards the car very slowly, as though it might just disappear in a puff of smoke. Carefully she opened the driver’s door and stroked the cover of the seat; she climbed in, felt for the ignition and slotted the key inside. When she hesitated Matthew said, ‘Go on. I’ve driven it.’

‘Have you?’ She looked up at him.

‘Sure, Duro let me. Yesterday.’

‘You two have been planning this?’

Matthew smiled.

‘Well, come on!’ Laura patted the seat next to her and Matthew opened the door and was about to swing himself inside but stopped. He stood back.

‘No, take Duro first.’

‘Of course. Come on, Duro,’ called Laura.

I sat in the passenger seat. Laura turned the key in the ignition and the engine started. I would have preferred to warm it myself beforehand, but that would have spoiled the surprise. She eased the car out into the courtyard and the sunlight and then into the track at the side of the house. Matthew whooped and ran after the car for a short distance, to be left behind as we picked up speed. I listened to the engine, and was satisfied. I wound down my window and dipped my hand into the wind, I turned to look at Laura as she adjusted the driver’s mirror and she caught my glance and smiled. ‘Are we going for a spin, then?’

I nodded. ‘Turn right here.’ I directed her out towards the main road, the one that heads north. A blue butterfly flew in through the open window and danced for a few moments in front of the windscreen and our faces. Laura slowed until I had time to catch and release it; she said it was beautiful. She began to sing and tapped the steering wheel lightly. She drove well, without hesitation, except once to look for the location of the indicators, and so I leaned across to show her. And she drove barefoot, Grace’s flip-flops kicked under the seat, feeling the pedals with her toes, like she was pushing them into sand, down on the accelerator. We were out on the main road, the warm wind on our faces.

‘How fast can I go?’

I didn’t answer the question. I leaned back and closed my eyes. Not so easy to relax in a car this size, you can imagine, all the same I did feel relaxed. I listened to the whine of the engine as it responded. I remembered the smell of the car, the way you could feel each rut and wrinkle in the road. Everything felt good. For the first time in many years I felt something like happiness. We did not speak, until Laura said, ‘Duro, I think we’re going to have to go back.’

I opened my eyes. ‘Why?’

‘Because I’m still wearing my night-clothes.’ And she looked into my eyes and laughed.

Later, after Laura had dressed, and after first Matthew and then Grace, and then Matthew again but driving Laura this time, had all ridden in the car, Grace and I were left alone in the yard. I turned to Grace. ‘Where’s the hat your mother bought in Zadar?’

‘Dunno. Why?’

I said, ‘Isn’t it the same colour as the car?’

‘Oh yes it is. Red hat, red car. Hang on. I’ll go and find it. Good idea. Mum will love that.’

That evening (because I had an idea about what might happen) I went to town for a drink. I’ve told you people no longer walk out in the evening, things have changed, but still there are a good many people around on a Saturday evening in Gost. Women doing last-minute shopping before the shops close on Sunday. Men sitting outside bars. Lads riding their scooters around the supermarket car park.

Plenty of people in the Zodijak. Fabjan was there. I nodded to him and said hello to the girl who took my order; I noticed she no longer greeted every customer with a smile. After she’d delivered my drink she went back to playing with her hair at the bar, pulling it out strand by strand from a patch at the back of her neck. I went to sit at Fabjan’s table; I wanted a ringside seat. Last time I’d seen him he’d been standing outside the blue house looking over the hedge at the family inside. He barely greeted me and nor did he offer me a seat (not that he ever does). He was smoking and reading a paper. I sat with my back to the bar and stretched out my legs, watching the street, and when I finished my drink I called for another one. Today I had all the time in the world.

Some time ago Fabjan had installed a satellite dish, quite likely illegally. Since the days of the pinball machine there had been continual upgrades at the Zodijak. On big-match days the place was packed. Today CNN was on: fires in Greece, the government has declared a state of emergency. Fifty-three people missing. Pictures of burned-out villages, burned-out cars, all of which looked very familiar. Evacuation helicopters. A statue of a winged god or perhaps an angel, blurred by smoke, flames visible in the near distance. There followed a feature about a member of the Ku Klux Klan convicted by a Mississippi jury of kidnapping and killing two black teenagers. The murders took place back in 1964, when the state was segregated, three years after I was born. James Ford Seale. On the screen a photograph of him as a young man, movie star handsome. Pictures of him being led into court: orange jumpsuit, wire-framed glasses, age spots. Happy black folk outside the court waving a placard: Forty Years On. The brother of one of the murder victims, according to the words running below the pictures, was the one who had tracked the old man down.

I sipped my wine and checked the football scores on the back of Fabjan’s newspaper until he put it down, possibly to spite me. I made some conversation about the football. He was no more in the mood for talking than on any other day. He answered me in monosyllables as he went through receipts in his wallet. I sipped more of my wine and counted the minutes.

This is what happened:

Some time between six thirty and seven Laura drove by in the Fićo. One or two people noticed the car, I’ve already told you they are quite rare these days. Even I can’t remember when I last saw one on the road. You see them dumped outside people’s houses, all rusted up. But also, and I’ve told you this too, in some quarters the cars were gaining a little cachet. So when Laura drove right through the middle of town in the Fićo some people’s attention was caught by the small red car. In the Zodijak a man at the table behind me said to his companion, ‘Would you look at that?’ (The guy from the municipal offices again.) His companion twisted round to see what he was talking about.

‘Now I had one of those. My first car. Loved it like my life.’

‘I had one. My brother’s first. He gave it to me when he went abroad.’

‘Mine was white, I put black stripes on the bonnet, like in that film The Italian Job.’

‘Those were Minis.’

‘I know.’

‘Had to keep the back open to stop the engine overheating.’

‘Drove it everywhere. Reinforced the roof to take more weight.’

The girl, who was serving them beer, said, ‘My uncle had a car just like that. He lived in Novigrad.’ Some of the other drinkers started talking about the cars: the limited choice of colours, advantages over the Fiat 600 and vice versa, the eighty kilometres per hour top speed. Someone claimed to have made eighty-six in theirs. Not a single person had not, at one time or another, owned or known one of these cars.

Fabjan looked up from the contents in his wallet. He turned his head to see what people were looking at, his great bull neck made it a slow movement. Laura was parking the car on the opposite side of the road. I kept a silent eye on Fabjan who watched with nothing more than casual interest much in the same way the two men and the waitress did.

Maybe if it had not been for what happened in K— just a couple of weeks before, which had everybody talking, already thinking the thoughts they tried not to think, that and the restoration of the mosaic and the fountain. Word had got around. The nerves of the town were close to the surface. The waitress was the only person to whom none of this meant anything and I wonder to this day what she thought about the way all the men around her went silent and stared at this woman in a red hat, stepping out of a small red car. This woman who was at least twenty years older than her, with short dark hair, the men were staring at her as if they’d never seen the like. The waitress, pretty and blonde, glanced around at the men and at Fabjan who was sitting with his hand (holding a receipt) frozen in mid-air and flounced back inside to the bar. Finally, Fabjan swallowed.

What stillness that evening, it lay over the town. All that moved was Laura, trailing a storm in her wake. Imagine: Laura in her red hat and the sunglasses she wore against the low evening sun, moving through the town, visiting shops to pick up whatever she’d come into town for. Did she even notice the long looks? The exchanged glances? And if she did, did she ask herself what it was all about? I don’t imagine so: knowing Laura, she would have swung through the town thinking only about what she had to do, crossing the errands off her list and enjoying the evening sun on her face.

In the bakery (which opens for a few hours on a Sunday) all talk was of the night before. I’d made sure to stop by for a pastry for my breakfast, something I did occasionally. Those who had seen the woman in the red hat who drove the little Fićo told those who hadn’t all about it. Details were added: the woman wore a necklace made of pottery beads, she spoke English but something in her accent made it sound as if this wasn’t her native tongue; it was as if she understood what people around her were saying. It was the same woman who took over the blue house a month ago now; it wasn’t the woman who had taken over the blue house, though she looked like her, this was a different woman. The woman was in her thirties; the woman was in her forties. It was claimed she asked directions to a house in Gost. Descriptions of her outfit varied: some said she was wearing a smock, others jeans. I know that Laura was wearing her denim skirt, a blouse tied at the waist and espadrilles, because it is my favourite outfit of hers.

Three details remained consistent: that the woman had short dark hair and wore a red hat. That the car was a red Fićo.

Later that day I was having a drink in the Zodijak. Perhaps I should have avoided the place for a while, but I was enjoying the atmosphere in town since Laura’s jaunt and I wanted to savour it. Anyway, it was Sunday and Fabjan was with his family, at least I assume he was. I bought a glass of wine and sat at the front of the bar; the evening was pleasant, cooler than it had been. The sky was filled with starlings the way it had been the evening of the day I first met Laura. You remember I’d stopped for a drink there and then seen Krešimir passing by with his shopping and invited him for a drink. I mention the starlings for no reason except that they were there, carving patterns in the sky as they so often did. It meant a hawk or a kestrel was somewhere around. I was watching them much the way I did the time before and when I looked down I again saw Krešimir, only this time he wasn’t walking past on the other side of the road carrying his shopping home, this time he was storming across the road towards me. It gave me a thrill to see him so angry; my heart quickened because Krešimir in a rage is capable of anything. I curled my fingers around my glass of wine.

‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

I stayed calm. The stakes we were playing for were rising and I needed to keep sight of the end game. I looked at him, I didn’t answer, though I may have blinked, with a kind of surprise. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?’ He was practically foaming at the mouth. Nobody looked up. Around us the other drinkers stared into their glasses, or at the street ahead, or up at the television above the bar.

I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You’d better put a stop to this shit, all this shit. I’m warning you.’

‘What shit are you talking about?’

‘That fucking woman, that fucking house.’

I said, ‘You mean the blue house, the one you sold to the woman from England?’

You’ll guess that the way I said woman from England and not Englishwoman, Engleskinja, was deliberate. Woman from England — the words left space for doubt to creep in and where doubt existed there was the possibility of something else: the dark child, scratching against the walls. Now I had the attention of everyone in the bar. They were all listening, even though some of them were still pretending not to. I stood up to face Krešimir because he was towering over me where I sat and I felt disadvantaged. I considered putting my glass of wine down. ‘What is it you think I am doing?’

‘You know exactly.’

‘I’ve done work on the house. I need the money. So what?’

‘Trying to stir things up, cause trouble.’

I raised my voice to be sure I was heard. ‘You’re the one who is causing trouble, you did it the day you sold the house. You had no right. No right. That house was never yours to sell. It’s you who has brought the strangers here and you who brought this whole thing down on our heads.’

By now the other drinkers were listening, making no pretence at deafness. Hardly a person in Gost didn’t know what we were talking about. This was good, but I’d had a bellyful of Krešimir. I said, ‘I think you need to calm down, Krešimir,’ and took a step back when he lunged for my throat. One of the men who had been watching stood up and put himself between us. He was broader than Krešimir by a hand-span. He didn’t say a word, he looked at Krešimir and tilted his head towards the street, showing him the door so to speak, obvious too from the way he stood he was confident he had the rest of the bar at his back. Krešimir, for all his bluff, is a coward. He took a step back, shook himself off and disappeared. I nodded to the man who’d just saved my skin and he nodded back. We did not speak, we resumed our places. I took a sip of my glass of wine and returned to watching the street and the patterns of the birds in the sky.