The Hired Man

18

We were petty thieves, smugglers and black-marketeers. We kept illicit stills, we hunted out of season because we could. We hated to pay tax, we did deals on the side and took cash whenever we could; we were the kind of people governments don’t like: bullet-headed, obstinate, as hard to control as it is to herd cats. It turned out we were the sort of people who would steal from the houses of those who had fled, which we did, without shame.

I see Goran’s wife in the street and she is wearing a long leather coat I’ve never seen her in before. Bicycles for Andro’s two boys, there’s a swing chair on the front veranda that wasn’t there before. Miro drives a different car, a car I recognise and I know doesn’t belong to him. So, he shrugs and asks me what’s the difference? If they come back he will give them their car, of course he will, otherwise it just sits there outside the house or somebody else takes it. He used to sell dirty videos to make a bit of cash, but he doesn’t bother with that any more. He has a house full of second-hand items for sale: everything from kitchen clocks to candlesticks.

Yes, we are petty thieves, smugglers, black-marketeers, we are makers of moonshine and tax dodgers, we fiddle the books of our businesses and peddle porn, and when our neighbours’ houses are empty we steal from them.

One thing we are not is killers. We hate to be governed, we are unruly, headstrong, we govern ourselves and all that governs us is the weather, the changing of the seasons, the land.

So what we lack they send to us.

They arrive and what they find is a bunch of petty crooks and boys who race their scooters up and down the supermarket car park, with moustaches of soft sparse hair, bitten fingernails and acne scars: boys in love with their cocks, who think themselves men.

Soon there is a list of names, drawn up from the post office records. People are told to report to the Crisis HQ. There are arrests, the new authorities insist these are not arrests but detentions in the name of security. Two students shop their teacher, who gave them poor grades. A farmer, mad with jealousy for ten years, exacts revenge on his wife’s old lover. Grudges are reckoned. Greed grows. People denounce their neighbours to the new authorities on the quiet, with an eye on the couch, chest freezer, televisions always. Others give names in exchange for cash. ‘Daddy’s hiding in the attic,’ says a small boy to the men who have come to take his father into custody.

The grey van does the rounds. Around and around.

Javor moves into my father’s sheds at the bottom of my mother’s garden. The people who know he is there are: my mother, Anka, me. Anka visits him every day and sometimes stays over; the nights are still warm. They eat with us in the house and at night retire to the shed. One day the grey van visits their house. Anka is there. She tells the men Javor has gone hunting, it’s the best she can come up with. They tell her to ask him to come down to Crisis HQ, nothing serious — in regard to his father. For a moment we forget and laugh about this, because Javor is a terrible hunter. I feel sorry for Javor, he is scared, he asks me to find out what has happened to his father.

I ask Fabjan, because Fabjan knows everything and everybody. I don’t trust him, but he is Javor’s partner and friend. He promises to investigate and he acts like he’s taking it seriously. A day later he tells me not to worry, to tell Javor not to worry: his father will be released in a few days once the authorities are convinced of his loyalty. It’s all connected with his job, which is after all an important one, a lot of people with his kind of background are going through the same thing. There won’t be any problem. He even tells me where the detainees are being kept: in our old school. ‘I mean,’ he says, ‘they’re keeping them in kids’ classrooms, not the police station. A baby could break out of there.’ He shrugs and picks up a glass to begin polishing it. ‘The whole thing’s fucking crap, but tell Javor I’m here minding both our interests. The only thing to do at a time like this is make money. People turn into arseholes. Fortunately they turn into hard-drinking arseholes.’ He puts the glass down. ‘So where is Javor?’ he asks, picking up another glass.

‘At his house,’ I say and shrug, like the question means nothing, though my heart beats a little faster. I keep my eyes on the counter in front of me, but I watch everything he does, for a sign, for a hint.

Fabjan polishes the glass very carefully. ‘Sure,’ he says and sets it down. For a moment neither of us says a word. Then Fabjan starts to tell me about an idea he has for pond-raised catfish, he saw it on TV, wonders whether it would work here.

Parked outside the school is an old-fashioned grey van. Nothing looks very changed, there are a couple of guys, the ones from the Zodijak, cleaned up and given caps. Hardly Fort Knox, I say to Javor and Anka later. Anka watches me and nods without smiling. ‘OK,’ says Javor in answer to each new piece of information. ‘OK, OK, OK.’ He is sitting with his legs crossed, hunched over himself as though he is very cold, sucking smoke through a rolled cigarette; he used to smoke occasionally but now he smokes a lot. The foot of the crossed leg flips up and down, all the while he is staring at me very intently. I wish I could offer him more; I can’t tell whether he is satisfied with what I am able to tell him; he just taps his foot and jerks his head forward, blinking, a woodpecker searching for grubs. ‘OK, OK.’

‘Is there anything you want from the shops?’ I ask, getting up to go.

‘You can ask Fabjan for my share of the profits. We need money. Anka hasn’t been selling. Fabjan knows that. Tell him I just need enough to get by for a few days more.’

‘No problem. Anything else?’

Javor smiles and throws the cigarette stub out of the door of the hut. ‘Get me some fucking ice cream.’

Anka gives me a lift into town in her car. We pass the Crisis HQ and Anka looks at the building, which was once a municipal office where some works of minor bureaucracy were achieved. Now it is everything. Anka is going to visit her mother. I tell her I have some business to do, there is work around for someone like me, although rates are low. Still, work is work, I’m in no position to turn it down. After that I’m going in search of ice cream, whatever I can find. Maraschino. And if I can’t find that, I’ll buy a can of condensed milk and a packet of wafers which is the next best thing.

Some say October is the best time to visit these parts, after the rush, but when the sea and the air are still warm. There is a low sun. Anka takes her time gathering her things together before she steps out of the car. She places her basket on the car roof while she searches for something in her handbag. At the last minute she looks up and waves at me. She’s wearing a red hat, the one she wore the summer before and earlier this summer, before the bombardment began. For a few months nobody wore colours, nothing that might risk turning you into a target and certainly not a red hat. But in recent weeks she has taken to wearing it again. A small act of defiance.

What memories of people you keep with you. I remember my father polishing the lenses of his black-framed glasses and peering through them before he placed them on his nose. I remember that he did it, of course, but each time I remember it, I remember the one particular time he did it just before he opened a book of birds I’d brought home from school with me and began to name each species without reading the captions. Greenshank, redshank, sandpiper. I remember the smell of him at Christmas and weddings, his citrus aftershave. I remember Danica being stung twice by bees during a family picnic. My mother rubbed crushed parsley on my sister’s arm. I remember my mother with a pair of secateurs in her hand, tapping the glass of the kitchen window at a cat about to defecate among the herbs. Most strongly I remember, again, the smell of my mother: her rose hand cream. When she’d been cooking she smelled of sweat and onions. I remember Anka standing on a rock, one leg stretched out behind her, a pointed foot. Anka shooting a rabbit. A coin flipping across the knuckles of her right hand. Picking a drunk Javor from the floor. Once again the strongest memory is a smell: of Anka’s vinegar-clean hair the day she hugged me and pressed her nose into my face as she kissed me, the day I came back to Gost. That smell. Maybe the memory of the physical senses, those of taste, touch and smell, is stronger than the memory of images or sounds. I don’t know. Maybe it all depends on the person. Whatever, the memory of the sight of Anka in her red hat, with her red car — was never one of the ones I kept — not until a summer sixteen years later brought it sharply back. It wasn’t my last memory of her.

My last true memory of her was of another time, not long afterwards.

Once, long after we were lovers and had already become friends, Anka told me that her favourite place on my body had been the back of my neck. I was sitting at the table in the blue house, the table I made, cutting a piece of lino with a sharp knife. She passed behind me and touched it with her forefinger. ‘The way the hair grows,’ she said. ‘And the skin is very soft. You grow rough all over, except here, in this place,’ and she tapped the top of my spine, ‘nothing changes. You are all still boys. Yours looks exactly the way it did when we were still children. If I took a photograph and showed it to somebody they wouldn’t be able to tell me if you were a girl or a boy.’ It was perhaps the only time she ever referred to the fact we had once been more than childhood friends. That evening I held up the piece of mirror I used to shave and tried to see the back of my neck in the reflection of the window.

Two years later I am standing at the door of my mother’s house watching Anka wash her hair at the well. She’s not doing it well. At first she scoops palmfuls of water from the bucket over the back of her head. When that doesn’t work, she tries to pour water over her head by holding the pail at an awkward angle, elbow in the air. The water rushes out and swamps her. From the kitchen door I laugh. ‘Go shit in a lake, Duro,’ she says through her hair.

Where was Javor? Still asleep in the hut. She doesn’t want either to wake him or to leave while he is still asleep and so she goes out to wash her hair by the well at our house, even though she has a well and a bathroom at home.

I come down to help her, taking the pail. I am eating a carrot and I bite a piece off and give her the rest. She stands up to eat it, flipping her hair back over her head. She is facing the sun and the light catches her cheekbones. In her eyes the pupil and iris are separate, two distinct colours, where usually they are almost the same. Her beauty changes depending on the time of day, the quality of the light. She laughs and takes a bite of carrot and chews it carelessly with her lips slightly apart, so that occasionally there is a faint glimmer of a tooth, a hint of orange. She swallows the last of the carrot, bends and flips her hair over her face.

I sit on the edge of the well and pour water in a thin stream so that it slides over her hair. She takes a bar of soap (shampoo is scarce) and rubs it into her hair and I watch the motion of her fingers and the magic of the rising froth, not listening to what she is saying until the fingers of the hand which isn’t holding the soap grope round and catch hold of my wrist. ‘Stop, stop!’

‘Sorry.’

‘Wait. I’ll tell you when to start again.’ While I wait I fold my arms and stare at the hills. My mind moves away from the hair-washing and the well water and I wonder where we are heading. Nobody dares think more than one day in advance, can imagine a place in time as distant as next week, next month, next year. Nor is anyone thinking about war, or using the word. Not the newspapers, not the drinkers in the Zodijak. War is far too big a word.

‘Duro, pour!’

I begin to pour again. The water is cold, very cold indeed. I can see it in the pinched, pale ends of Anka’s fingers. For the first time I notice the back of her neck and realise that this maybe is the only time I’ve ever seen it, at least since we stopped being children, because usually this part of her is curtained off by her hair. I remember not so long ago when she talked about the back of my neck. Now here is hers, pale as the moon, the hairs raised on tiny goose pimples. I reach out my fingers and touch it. She lifts her head slightly. ‘What?’

‘Nothing. A bit of soap.’ I pour more water and when I look up, Javor is standing at the door of the outbuilding where he sleeps, barefoot, wearing a pair of jeans, smoking a rolled cigarette. Just watching us, without anger. I hold out the bucket to him and he stubs his cigarette out on the side of the flimsy building, steps forward and takes it from me. He tips the remainder of the water onto Anka’s hair and she sees it’s him, reaches behind her and briefly clasps his ankle with her fingers.

I go into the house and come back with my mother’s bottle of vinegar.

Afterwards Anka rubs her hair with a towel and leaves it to dry in the sun. The nape of her neck is back behind its veil. I go to fetch coffee and when I come back she is sitting on the edge of the well, where I had sat; Javor is behind her. He is playing with the hair at the back of her neck and occasionally, idly and without thinking, he strokes her neck with his thumb. When I hand him his coffee he removes his hand from Anka’s neck to take the cup. I don’t envy him. These people are as dear to me as they are to each other. Javor and Anka. My friends.

The image I best remember from that morning is only this, a single snapshot: Anka, bent forward, her neck exposed to the light, the filaments of fine hair standing upright on their tiny goose-pimple hillocks.

A day later I go to town, to the Zodijak, sent by Javor. When I arrive, there is Krešimir, standing in the office talking to Fabjan. The door has been left slightly ajar. I wonder if I should come back, but at that moment Krešimir leaves. He passes me at the bar. Usually Krešimir ignores me but this time he smiles, nods and asks after my mother and sister. I tell him they are fine. He leaves. That’s it. All of this is unusual, but not enormously so. Krešimir doesn’t like people to know of his dislike for me so he greets me when he sees he has no choice, this time because Fabjan has come out of the office and is standing right behind him. Krešimir likes to impress Fabjan, I’ve told you this. Maybe he wants Fabjan to back some business venture of his. Krešimir was meant to make money but never really has, well not a great deal, not as much as was always supposed, despite his job at the fertiliser factory and all the opportunities that must offer. I think it is because Krešimir is afraid of risks, would rather hang on to what he has, like all good misers. Fabjan, on the other hand, could never be accused of being afraid to take risks. Fabjan is all about business. All the same there is something about Krešimir’s smile that makes me wary, as his smiles always do.

Fabjan nods at me and goes behind the bar. I take a coffee, there are other customers in the bar. I wait for the place to empty and then I give Fabjan Javor’s message about the money. Fabjan doesn’t look up from what he’s doing, which is jabbing the buttons of an outsize calculator with his finger, but he nods as if he is listening and jabs some more. He stares at the numbers on the screen. ‘Tell Javor I’ll have something for him tomorrow. How much does he want?’

I say enough to last until this is over. I name a sum.

‘Tell him I can do better than that. The way inflation is going, he’ll need more than that. But he’ll need to hold on a few days: cash flow, you know. It’ll be sorted. How’s he doing?’

I say he’s fine. His mother left for her operation, which she’d had to put off but couldn’t any longer. She’d gone to the district hospital.

‘Tell her to take her time coming back. You know what I mean?’

I tell all of this to Javor later. He presses his lips together and nods, frowning. He’s worried about his father and wants to try to see him. I say I think that’s a bad idea, but I’ll go. Anka and I walk back down the road, she to the blue house and me to my place; Anka is quiet and restless at the same time. She tells me she and Vinka had argued on her last visit.

‘Over what?’

‘She’s drinking more. She gets into rages. I’d asked for a little money, just until Javor gets some in. She started on Javor. We argued. No, she argued. I tried to explain the situation. I didn’t want to argue.’

‘I can give you money.’

‘It’s fine. Krešimir gave me some. It’ll be sorted soon. Fabjan knows.’

‘Krešimir was there?’

‘Yes. Krešimir was there.’

The rain comes down suddenly, though the sky stays bright. It feels like a summer storm but it’s a bit late in the year for that. I am on the mountain above the tree line. The rain is so heavy that, despite the light, I can hardly see where I’m going. It’s like looking through a waterfall. With the lightning I change my mind about going back through the plantation and head in the direction of Gudura Uspomena.

Earlier the same day, as well as visiting Fabjan at the Zodijak to ask for Javor’s money, I had also been to ask after Javor’s father. The school looked just the same as before, the grey van parked outside. I approached one of the lads outside, I recognised him and he knew me by sight. He told me visitors weren’t allowed but said he’d take a message. I thanked him. I told him I’d wait in case Mr Barac had a message for me. The lad shrugged, please yourself he said and disappeared inside. About fifteen minutes passed and just when I was about to go in search of him he came back and said, ‘Barac has been released.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Isn’t that what I just said?’ he replied cockily.

‘Yes, and I asked if you were sure.’ I stared him down.

‘That’s what they told me.’ Surly now.

So then I went by the Barac house and found it closed up, as it had been ever since Javor’s mother travelled to have her operation and her husband was taken away. I’ve checked on it at intervals, to make sure it doesn’t get looted. So far nobody has dared. I banged on the door for the sake of it. A woman passing by watched me out of the corner of her eye. At the end of the street she stopped and turned to look. At first I ignored her but then I stared back at her and after a while she shuffled off, though not immediately. At first she met my gaze for a full four or five seconds before she gave a little smirk, dropped her chin and turned her back to me. Nobody had dared to steal from the house just yet, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t. What was it they were waiting for? I wondered. Was it merely a matter of time, or was there some other signal? I went back to the school, to the same guy I spoke to half an hour before, and waved at him from a short distance. He looked up but didn’t wave back. He ground out the cigarette he’d been smoking and was about to duck back inside when I caught hold of his arm. I told him the house was empty.

‘So what? What’s that got to do with me? They said he’d been released.’

‘Who?’

He jerked his thumb in the direction of the school building.

‘Well someone’s made a mistake.’ I let him go.

Something like twenty minutes passed before he came back out. He mumbled and I couldn’t hear.

‘What?’

‘Deported.’

Javor’s father had been deported, but how do you deport someone from this country? ‘To where?’ I asked.

Javor’s father had wanted to join his wife and gone to the north.

‘You just said he’d been deported.’

A minute ago he wouldn’t look at me, now he looked up, lip raised above yellowish teeth, like a cornered rat. ‘That’s all I fucking know,’ he hissed.

‘Did they say when he was let go or taken there or whatever?’ asked Javor when I told him.

‘No,’ I answered. ‘Your mother hasn’t called?’

Javor shook his head but determined to remain hopeful. ‘She’s been in the hospital. It hasn’t been long, a few days since he was taken into custody. Maybe there’s some kind of transit centre. paperwork.’

I had forgotten. It felt like we had been in this new world far longer.

Here up in the hills the rain washing down my face feels good. I lift up my head and open my mouth and let the water in, it is sweet, pure and sweet. I shield my eyes and look in the direction of the town, invisible behind the torrent of water. Let it run, I think, through the streets, down the gutters, into drains until it is carried away by the river. Let it wash away the shit and the pus and the blood, the things that can be washed away. But let it also wash away the fear and the malice and the spite, the things that are harder to erase. I wish these things that are happening right now weren’t happening to us, I wish they were happening to someone else, somewhere else. I didn’t care who. I clenched my fist. Leave us alone.

The rain makes Kos mad: she runs in a loop with her head down, and races through puddles with her head held high, letting her tail and backside drag through the water.

As swiftly as it came, the rain clears: the drumming slows and the threads of rain thin and lift. The air is scentless, pure. When it is clear again the sun shines strongly. The roofs and roads of Gost glitter and wink, the heat draws out thin drifts of steam from the tiles and stone. Between where I am standing and the houses of Gost the ravine yawns and stretches out, like a sleeping dragon whose tail begins at Gost and whose body lies to the north. The trees that fill the upper banks are just beginning to change their colour. Opposite me the clouds have moved behind the hills, dark-centred clouds with gleaming edges, and through the gaps between them slanting columns of light fall, radiating out from a hidden sun, lighting parts of the hills and the fields, a roof here and there.

My father used to call this god light.

On a tree on the edge of the ravine a colony of crows shelters and with the end of the rain they become twitchy and raucous, hopping along and between branches, others hunched and watchful sit facing the ravine. Forty, fifty of them. Not so long ago I hunted these birds for food. For no reason, except that I feel like it, I lift my rifle and send a shot into the sky. The air vibrates with movement. I lower the rifle. A stupid thing to do, but who cares. Something about them bothered me. Perhaps they reminded me of the woman earlier in the day, hovering around the Barac house, waiting for something, for a death. And yet they are beautiful birds: the intensity of their colour: black beak, eye and feather; when they stand and tilt their throats to the sky, they look noble in their own way. As a child I collected every feather I found, examined one under a magnifying glass: the filaments and threads, all the varieties of blackness. Even now I find it hard to pass a crow feather and not bend to pick it up, just to hold it for a few moments before giving it to Zeka who loves to play with them and carry them to his bed. The farmers hate the crows and trap or shoot them, hang the corpses on the fences to rot, as a warning to others. A time-tested method, the birds’ bodies rotate in the rain and wind, their heads flop on the ends of their necks, execution victims. The ends of their feathers lift and flutter like the clothes of hanged men. And yet were it not for the crows the roads would be littered with road-kill carcasses and the woods, fields and hills with the rotting corpses of every animal that ever died. I watch as the birds hover overhead, circling in the currents of air over the ravine. In less than a minute they’re back, every single one of them. There must be something in the ravine, a deer that’s fallen over the edge maybe, possibly still alive and the crows holding on until it’s too weak to fight before they stab at it with those murderous beaks. I put my gun on my shoulder and move closer to the edge. Kos, by my side, swings into the lead, because now we are doing something interesting.

Within a few metres of the edge the smell starts, unmistakably a decomposing animal corpse. High, strong and sweet, it has a quality about it I can only think to describe as alive. It seethes, enters your nostrils like a swarm of tiny insects. The rain had cleared the air and now the heat of the sun releases the stink, along with the smell of earth and rotting leaves and something else, wet ash.

Autumn rains have left the ground soft. The earth gives way beneath my boots. There are tyre tracks. Someone has been up here, hunting from the back of a pick-up truck, dazzling the deer with the headlights and then chasing them down, possibly to their deaths over the edge. On the grassy slope which borders the steep edge of the ravine a couple of rocks have come loose and rolled away, leaving streaks of earth. A crow swoops and another: defending their find from me, this intruder. I expect to see a buck with a broken neck, but there is nothing. In the place where the ravine shelves less steeply some of the topsoil has washed away. I climb down, it’s easy enough and Kos outpaces me. Her fur is raised and her nose is down, suddenly she’s very interested, zig-zagging, sniffing the ground. Whatever is there has been buried and the foxes have got to it, and now the rain has done the rest. Kos barks. She barks and bounces the way she does when she has found something and wants my attention. I know because of the pitch of her bark, which is both a call and a warning: she has found something she either cannot handle alone, like a large boar, or else cannot understand.

A human body. Wearing a blue wool sweater, a polo-neck stained with what at first looks like earth or blood, but is actually scorch marks. I squat down to take a closer look, to check the unbelievable truth of what I am seeing. The face has been burned away, the nose is gone, the nostrils are dark holes, the lips are no more, the gums shrivelled and the teeth are bared like an animal’s and black in places. Reddish, singed hair, like doll’s hair. Fingers curl around a handful of soil. Candle-coloured fingers. A woman sprawled and stiff on her back, legs open, knees bent.

Everything else disappears.

I stand up. My heart is beating wildly, the blood rushes to my head. I try to call Kos but my throat has closed and my mouth is dry, I can hardly make a sound, much less whistle. I step forward and yank her collar. I look around, but there is nobody watching us except the crows. For a moment I feel dizzy, the periphery of my vision is closing in black. I have stopped breathing and when I begin again I breathe hard, inhaling the awful smell deep into my lungs. The thoughts come fast, as I try to rationalise what I am seeing. I even think that perhaps this is some kind of overflow from the cemetery, where at one time the burials had become too many. Rogue gravediggers, perhaps, disposing of bodies they are paid to bury. But I know better, I know evil when I see it, the smell of it.

I was right about the foxes. There are more bodies, buried less than a metre down and they have been unearthed by animals and the elements. A short distance away an exposed shin, partly eaten, I can see the teeth marks, the torn flesh and gnawed bone. There is clothing: shredded and burned. I pick up a stick and use it to turn over pieces of a garment: denim, a jacket perhaps. It too is partly burned.

The bodies haven’t been here for very long. My stomach bucks and the bile rises. I bend over and retch, drily save for a string of yellow. I have a terrible thirst. I pull the collar of my shirt across my mouth and poke in the earth with the stick, the wet leaves and ash with the stick. A twisted leg. The heel of a trainer. A yellowed hand, bent sharply at the wrist. Beneath the fingernails there is dirt. Dark unravelled entrails, strewn about by the birds, I suppose, caught in the low branches of a bush. The belly itself is a dark, gleaming hollow and the flies, chased away by the rain, are returning in their scores, bluebottles buzzing loud as bees. Every few seconds I have to stand to breathe, there’s a light wind that comes from the west. I turn my face into it until I can bring myself to look again. I have a duty. I count. There are at least five people, though there could be more.

A crow swoops down and rises back to the branch with a coil of intestine in its beak. The sudden movement makes me start and straighten. I lose my grip on my rifle and it lands on the corpse with the open belly. As I reach for it my hand touches the cold flesh and I snatch it back, I fight the urge to flee. I wonder again if I am alone here, whether I am being watched by whoever did this. I stand there, listening, holding my breath, but there is no sound. I am alone, standing on the edge of a ravine: the landscape I know so well is suddenly a new danger. Now the silence is terrifying. I turn and run. Once away from the ravine, under the cover of the trees, I stop. Up in the trees the other crows start to squabble over the piece of entrail. I try to think what all of this means. Of one thing I am certain: these are not the men I killed and threw into the swimming hole. Those men, the soldiers, are long gone. I have dealt with death. I dealt with the deaths of those men, disposed of their bodies. But these deaths are different. These are different people. These are people I know. One of them, the one with red hair, is a woman.

I think I know who she is: the baker’s wife, mother of the Mongol daughter. Perhaps the Mongol is buried there, too, the whole family. I don’t know.

I don’t know.