The Hired Man

3

Gost lies upon a polje of karst limestone. Thousands of years of sediment made for good farming, and the soil is what kept Gost rich in grain all those years. They say that there are lost rivers, limestone caves and sink holes. I don’t know about that; I can only tell you that if you stand in the middle of Gost facing north and raise your head to look up into the hills, you will see how the river banks more steeply on one side than the other. The river starts as a spring outside a hamlet a few kilometres from Gost and it flows north, away from the sea, through our town, passing the old mills of Gost, cuts through the hills and eventually flows into a large lake some several hundred kilometres north-west of here. Visible from Gost is a scar of grey rock running through the green before the river divides into tributaries somewhere above the swimming hole: that is the ravine Gudura Uspomena.

Gudura Uspomena is Krešimir’s and my favourite place. The ravine is deep and we dare ourselves to climb down where the sides slope. A rock projects out beyond the others; we inch along it and lie on our bellies, peer over the edge at the dizzying drop, grow weak resisting the pull of the fall. We might climb down the slope and stay in the ravine for hours, a place nobody can find us. In the summer we swim in the swimming hole, leave our clothes in bundles to hop across the rocks, skinny and pale, and dive into the water, which is freezing all year round and leaves us gasping and winded. We dry off in the sun and then leap back into the water. Later we climb down to the waterfall below the swimming hole and hold our hairless dicks under the rushing water until our stomachs convulse with a strange new pleasure.

Other times we build encampments in the perpetual twilight of the pine forest, where we hoard stolen food and puff on cigarettes and later take turns drinking from bottles of rakija, with grimaces and coughs. Once we turn to alchemy and make our own: cheap grappa into which we stuff wild fennel, thyme and unknown berries we find in the ravine and which may or may not be poisonous. We bury the bottles and dig them up too soon and spend a night puking.

Once, under the influence, I challenge Krešimir to a dare. Stripped naked and on the count of three we race through the trees. You see we are hunters, fascinated by night vision, to which we attach great importance and as a consequence manliness. The naked race is to determine who possesses the greater night vision; the winner isn’t the fastest runner, although the whole point is to run as fast as you can, but rather the one who suffers the least damage: scratches, cuts and bruises, in other words who smashes into the fewest trees.

At other times we climb the hill to play in the old bunker, just above the tree line. Of course we’re not supposed to, the bunkers are there in case of a Soviet strike. Ours is cracked and covered in moss and the inside is dark and dank, with a dripping roof and smells of rot and pee, though who exactly would climb up there to empty their bladder, God only knows.

We are twelve years old, maybe eleven. A night in the summer we persuade our fathers to allow us to sleep in the woods. My father believes all boys should be toughened up, especially me because I have two older sisters and am small for my age. Krešimir’s father hasn’t died yet and he says OK. But the pine forest is alive with activity all night and it isn’t the cry of the animals that frightens us, but the sound of car engines, the glimmer of headlights, the tramp of boots and the sound of voices.

The next day my father looks at our sorrowful faces and tells me they are most likely black-marketeers, smugglers. He asks me whether any of the men saw us. I say no. Good, he says, and he pats me on the head. Krešimir and I add our brush with the smugglers to the repertoire of happenings that will one day make us men. In the market for the first time I notice men in leather jackets who stand together in groups as though they are waiting for something. They light cigarettes and exhale smoke and frozen vapours into the air and then throw the stubs onto the ground. Better mind your own business, chief, says my father (in those days he always called me chief). He gave me a shove. Don’t forget, chief, never ask a question you don’t have to, that way you’ll live a lot longer.

Charlie, Revlon, leather jackets, videos, second-hand jeans, American tobacco, Pino Silverstre aftershave from Italy, pirated pop cassettes, chewing gum and tampons, and in the years to come: Asian porn and disposable nappies and when things get really bad: toilet paper. Some days my father brings gifts for my mother and sisters: Eve roll-on deodorant, one for my mother and another for my sisters to share, a tiny jar of night cream with a red lid and the words Elizabeth Arden for my mother. My mother puts the jar away along with all the other things she never opens. My sisters smile and kiss him. My father blushes, and escapes by slipping on his clogs saying he has things to do; he goes to his shed at the bottom of the garden where I know he reads the newspaper and smokes. Another day he and I share a bunch of bananas. When I ask him where they come from he tugs my nose and winks.

Laura worked on rescuing the mosaic. At times we worked side by side, I on the windows, she on the mosaic. She drove into town to buy a small brush and tools better suited to the job: she was curious to know what lay beneath the layer of plaster. There was plenty to do on the house, but now she had me to take care of things. We passed several hours in each other’s company, often in silence, though from time to time Laura asked me a question. ‘Are you married?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

I asked her why she was sorry. She told me she hadn’t meant to pry. I replied that she wasn’t prying. She asked, ‘Were you ever married?’

‘No.’

‘I suppose you enjoy the freedom.’

I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know what else to say. My father and one of my sisters were dead. My mother and my eldest sister lived two hundred kilometres away, never came back to Gost and constantly urged me to move to be with them. Here I had Zeka and Kos, nobody else. I wondered if this was the freedom Laura was talking about. Laura apologised again. ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying that.’

‘It’s OK.’

‘I was just wondering, that’s all.’ Laura who speaks in English to strangers in a foreign land, but hates to be misunderstood.

Another time she asked, ‘Did you never want to marry?’

‘I never had the chance.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean things never worked out that way, but yes, why not?’

Laura told me her husband needed to stay behind in England to continue running his business and because he had meetings somewhere overseas to attend, otherwise he would have come with them. She’d headed out with the children to begin putting the house in order. Her husband would follow in a week or so. After that we were quiet for a while until Laura said, ‘I think it’s a hand.’ She stood back a metre from the wall with her head on one side, one arm wrapped around her waist, the elbow of the other arm cupped by her hand. Between the thumb and forefinger of the other hand, which rested against her cheek, she held the brush. I climbed down from the ladder. The mosaic had begun to emerge. Now visible against a background of chalky white tiles were what may very well have been three fingers. These were made of green tiles. Above the hand — if that is what it was — was a row of pointed shapes composed of deep blue tiles.

‘It could be a hand,’ I said. ‘It’s hard to tell.’

‘Only one way to find out,’ said Laura.

At that moment Laura’s son appeared. I say Laura’s son, his name was Matthew. Laura called him Matt or Mattie. Matthew seemed to spend the large part of the day asleep or else listening to his music with his eyes shut. Laura waved and said, ‘Matt, come and look at this.’ He ambled over without removing his earphones, inspected Laura’s work and gave a thumbs-up. ‘Ace.’

I watched him go. He walked with his hands shoved into his pockets, long and loose-limbed, his hair curled at the back of his neck and around his ears, pale blue eyes with heavy lids which added to the general air of listlessness. Laura watched him too with a slight smile and a look of something like longing, if that doesn’t sound strange, as if she wanted to run after him and touch him. She sighed and turned away.

‘Perhaps your son can help?’ I said.

Laura wrinkled her nose and shook her head. ‘You know boys. I’d never get him to, but Grace will. Grace!’ Grace appeared a few seconds later and Laura said, ‘Come and lend us a hand?’

Grace shrugged. ‘Sure.’

Laura went into the house and left Grace with the tools and the brush. Grace began to pick at the plaster. I climbed down the ladder. ‘Here,’ I said. I showed her how to fracture the plaster with the small hammer, and prise away the pieces with the pick.

‘Thanks,’ she said from beneath her fringe, following the word with the odd little habit she had: the curious apparently involuntary humming.

I climbed back up the ladder. ‘Do you like it here?’

Grace shrugged, hummed, blinked and then nodded. ‘We only just got here. I guess it’s pretty.’ She hummed. ‘There’s not that much to do.’

I said, ‘There’s plenty to do once you get to know the place.’ City kids like her brother didn’t understand entertainment unless it came with batteries.

‘There’s not even a cinema, and even if there was I wouldn’t understand.’

‘No, there’s no cinema. But there is a waterfall and a swimming hole up in the hills.’

‘Really?’ She was so surprised she actually looked directly at me.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will show it to you one day. You will have it entirely to yourself if you want. Nobody goes there.’

‘Where?’

‘Up there.’ I pointed. ‘We will go at the weekend, if you want.’

‘I’d have to ask Mum,’ she said. ‘But I think that would be really cool.’ Then the shyness overcame her like an allergic reaction; she gave a series of tiny dormouse sneezes and returned hot-faced to her task.

Early afternoon a car came down the lane and slowed as it passed the house. The driver craned forward and peered out of the windscreen. From the top of the ladder I saw it was a woman from Gost who worked in the supermarket.

Later the same day we went to the outbuildings with a view to seeing what we could salvage and what we needed to take to the dump. ‘What is all this stuff?’ said Laura as she looked around her.

‘Crumbs,’ said Grace, bent over the box of books; she pulled out a paperback and shook it, creating a swirl of dust, and flicked through the pages, turned it around to look at the back and front covers. ‘I think this is Anne Rice. What does this say, Duro?’

‘The Queen of the Damned,’ I said.

She began to pull books out of the box. ‘Gross silverfish! This must be The Witching Hour, the cover is the same. Too bad I can’t understand any of it, I need something to read. Look at this cassette cover! Look at what they’re wearing!’

Laura was on the other side of the space standing near the back wall. ‘What’s this? It looks like a bread oven.’

‘It’s a kiln,’ I said. I moved next to Laura and opened the door. It was heavy and resisted for a moment: inside the kiln was empty.

Against the wall stood a dozen or so pots layered with dust and a stack of boxes. Inside one Laura found tiles in assorted shapes and colours, many of which matched the tiles in the mosaic. She blew the dust from a few and replaced them, carried the boxes to the door to take into the house. The pots pleased her. One by one she lifted them to the light.

Time and rats had got to most of the stuff. We shouldered what we could outside and made a pile in the courtyard: several old suitcases, a large metal basin, an old canvas tent, a clothes horse, baskets — the wicker gnawed in several places, a coffee table with a smoked-glass top, blankets: swollen and stiff, quilts: powdery with mould, a box of plastic-handled cutlery, a bag of unopened envelopes, car magazines: rippled and sealed by damp, plastic sacks of clothing. Some rolls of fibreglass insulation-matting had survived. A container of petrol, half full. Laura took a liking to the old apple press, but it proved not worth saving. Stacks of empty preserving jars and others, a few, filled with bottled fruit, plums. And the rakija. Along with a wooden chair, Laura saved the metal basin in which she said she planned to grow herbs.

When we had cleared — or at least sorted — the outbuilding we carried the rakija and fruit into the house. ‘I’m not at all sure about this.’ Laura held a bottle of fruit up to the light.

‘It will be fine.’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘You’re welcome to it.’

‘I’ll take it if you don’t want it.’

‘Have it as a thank-you. Have the other stuff too, the ra. ’

‘Rakija. OK, but you must try some first.’

I took one of the bottles and twisted the cork. Laura fetched a pair of glasses, I poured some into each. Laura sniffed the contents of her glass and swirled the liquid around the bottom, gazing at it deeply but without confidence.

‘Let’s sit outside,’ I said. I took the glass from her hand and walked down the steps at the front of the house where the sun was low in the sky. On days such as these it was hard to believe in the existence of winter, when frozen snow covers the fields and the hills and the only people who use the roads are the farmers on their tractors. In winter I set traps and occasionally hunt. Days pass when I don’t see another person. In winter Gost is a sleeping beast, which breathes but doesn’t move. People stay burrowed, unwashed, and eventually emerge pale and fleshy, blinking in the light. Then the beast is roused and stretches itself. Come the spring it shakes, and settles. Then summer.

It was the blue hour. Streaks of cloud across a lapis lazuli sky. The hills: three shades of purple, the deepest, a black purple, to the fore, and the palest, almost lilac, to the back with the last of the light behind them. The blue paint of the house shone as did the blue tiles of the partly uncovered mosaic, two blue hands reaching for the sky. In the blue hour things happen. Some creatures prepare to sleep, others awaken. Up at the swimming hole at this time the house martins swoop down out of the sky to dip their breasts in the water. The bats begin to leave the hills. Through the trees the houses of Gost were just visible, no lights for at least an hour; many older people had grown up without electricity and regarded it as unnecessary while there was still a glimmer of light by which to move around. As for the other inhabitants of Gost, they’d still be on their way home. The men would have stopped off at the Zodijak or one of the other bars, the youths convened in the car park of the supermarket, where in the hours between work and sleep they tinkered with apparent endless fascination with the engines of their motorbikes.

I raised my glass to Laura and drank.

Laura did the same, but coughed and pulled a face. It was the same for everyone, you got used to the taste, I told her. Laura took another sip and shook her head. ‘I think I prefer wine.’

Laura gave me all the plums and the rakija, just as she said she would. I left her the opened bottle. There was more than I could carry so in the end I made two trips. The second time I stopped by the pile we had made in the yard and helped myself to several of the cassettes. At the last minute I took the bag of post as well.

At home I dropped a fork into the jar of plums, speared them one at a time and ate them whole. They tasted of all those winters when we ate food pickled and preserved in those months of heat gone by that you could neither recall nor imagine. I ate one jar and began on another. I drank the rakija straight from the bottle. Outside Kos barked at something in the night. I went outside and slipped the bolt of the dogs’ pen and let them follow me inside where they quickly chose a comfortable spot to lie down, in case I changed my mind.

The truth is, like the old folk of Gost, I’m not much given to the use of electric light either. Those races against Krešimir — I usually won them, I’m perfectly comfortable in the dark.

I looked at the cassettes. The Beatles. Sergeant Pepper. Rubber Soul. Supertramp’s Breakfast in America. Electric Light Orchestra. One by a band from here. I still had a cassette player for all the cassettes I owned and had never replaced with CDs. I put the tape in the slot, turned the volume up and sat back in my chair.

The music was terrible. The band was a rock band from the coast who lasted about three years before they broke up. Never my kind of thing, I prefer Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash. Fifteen years on, two of them reformed the band hoping to cash in on their past success, but in that time a lot had changed including the people who’d once been their fans and nobody wanted to know. Nostalgia interested no one, except perhaps the very young. The band released a second album, I think, and then dropped out of sight.

I ejected the tape and put in one by the Beatles. ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’. My heart quickened and drained as I listened to the familiar vibrating notes of the organ. I rewound and listened to it three more times; gradually I raised the volume and hoped they could hear it in Gost.

At two in the morning I was drunker than I’d been in years. I remembered Krešimir and his shopping bags and the rain on his head and thought it was funny. I must have laughed aloud because the dogs came over and nuzzled me. After I petted them Kos returned to her place, but Zeka, who is more anxious and less confident, lay down close to me. When I woke, several hours had passed, it was dawn and I was curled up on the floor, my face pressed into Zeka’s fur. Kos was at the door waiting to be let out. The room smelled of spirits and when I stood up I noticed the broken rakija bottle in the corner of the room. I must have thrown it there; I didn’t remember that at all.

Pots from the shed washed and arranged in a row upon a windowsill. Laura, coming from the field opposite, a bunch of wild flowers in her hand, said in a tight voice, ‘We missed you yesterday.’

‘I had some business to deal with.’

She passed me and went into the house without meeting my eye. I realised I’d upset the balance of things. That I was a hired man and she was my employer made Laura relaxed in having me around the house. A mistake to take a day away without explanation: it made her feel she wasn’t the boss. I followed her into the house and watched her put the flowers in a vase and set them on the kitchen table. I put the things I was carrying, a car battery and a can of motor oil, on the floor.

‘What are those for?’

‘The car. I’d like to see if I can get it started. If that’s OK.’

I went to work at the back of the house, stripping the paint from the windows. The day was sulphurously hot, the smell of melting tar in the air. I took off my shirt and felt the sun on my back. The work and the heat brought me back to a sense of well-being, to a time I spent working on the tourist boats on the coast — some of the best months of my life. Often I did nothing more than ferry folk to and from the beaches and the islets. One summer I worked on board a ketch. We’d load up in the morning, sail for an hour and drop anchor in a small cove where we’d hand out masks and snorkels and herd the day trippers out from under the shade of the canopy and into the sea. The point was to get everybody off the boat so we could relax among ourselves. For some of the guys it became a game and sometimes they even laid bets. No matter how old or young, they all had to get into the water. Once there was a shoal of jellyfish beneath and another time an old guy with a stick; his daughter went to the captain to say her father didn’t want to swim. But even he went in, protesting to the end. I remember the bump on his chest made by his pacemaker. The only exceptions they made were for the prettiest girls.

While they were at it I dived from the other side of the boat and swam to a place on the shore: a flat slab of rock, which caught the sun in the late morning. I’d climb over the other rocks to reach it and for nearly an hour I’d lie there, doing nothing but watching the horizon, which shimmered and shook, a tightrope between sky and earth. The rock was warm, blood temperature, as if during the day it drew life from the sun. It even had a feral, animal kind of odour, of salt, fish and dried seaweed. After exactly fifty minutes I swam back to the boat underwater, passing the tourists unnoticed, and climbed up the rope.

Laura appeared at the bottom of the ladder. Perhaps she’d called my name and I hadn’t heard. I’d been back on the islands. She said, ‘We’re going off to explore. We’ll be home in a few hours.’

‘Be careful,’ I said.

Laura raised her eyebrows and gave a little laugh. ‘Of what?’

I had spoken without thinking, living too much in the past. I smiled and started to come down the ladder. ‘Of the roads, of course. There are madmen in their cars at this time of year, during the holidays.’

I gave her directions for a drive I said would take her past some pleasant views and through a couple of villages. Forty minutes later and I was still up the ladder when Matthew came out of the back of the house and picked his way through the yard out into the field. The pace of his walk, the rounded back and shoulders, the trousers hanging low on his hips, the thumb of his left hand hooked into his front pocket and the way his skull rocked slightly back in the cradle of his top vertebrae, all advertised his utter boredom. Where he was going I didn’t know, but I knew what he was going to do because he was carrying a wine bottle in his right hand.

In the evening I fried sausages, peeled and boiled potatoes and chopped some chard, which I’d pulled from the neglected vegetable beds at the blue house. I poured a glass of wine (enough rakija!) and carried my plate of food into the main room where I set it on the table. I fetched the bag of mail I had taken from the outbuilding and began to sift through the contents as I ate.

Utility bills. I opened one at random. A demand for payment of several hundred dinara for electricity and warning of the consequences of non-payment. The next bill, dated a few months later, had been adjusted by the addition of several noughts. There was a time inflation ran wild. A letter from the publisher of the car magazine regretted the non-renewal of a subscription. Several copies of the same magazine still inside their plastic covers. There were no letters or postcards, no envelopes full of old photographs, not even a shopping list or an old chequebook bristling with scribbled stubs, no note left for the plumber, no scrap of paper bearing a scrawled address, directions. There was nothing except official letters and circulars. It was as though somebody had been through all of it before me and removed anything personal. I stuffed everything back into the bag and slung it aside. I thought: Is this all that remains? When I look back to that night I see that the idea for writing this seeded then. Would I take it all with me? Who would tell my story? So many people have left Gost, not like the old days when they stayed away for a few years and came back wearing Italian clothes and carting German fridges. Now they never come back. Of the old crowd, there are just three of us left: Krešimir, Fabjan and me.

Laura arrived and took over the blue house and things began to change. In a very short time it seemed certain people forgot what had been agreed for so long, or perhaps they thought it no longer applied, or no longer applied to them, that the pact we had held to for sixteen years was somehow over.

Some days I wondered what would happen to my own house when I was gone. I’ve lived here for eighteen years, and maybe with luck I’ll live twice as long again. More than likely I shall die alone, as I live now, and as I have no executor a person or persons will be appointed to come and deal with my estates, sort my belongings into piles to sell and throw. They will go through my papers and when they do they will find this.

Maybe that person is you. Or at least, I have to tell this story and I must tell it to somebody, so it may as well be you, come to sort through my belongings. You are young and you don’t know or don’t remember the things that happened. Nobody seems to remember, even those who are old enough, those who were there. But I remember it all, every grinding minute, hour and day, how things unfolded.

Our story doesn’t show us in a very good light. I wish it were different, but there it is. This story is not the story of the whole of the past, just the story of a single summer.

As I said, somebody must stand guard over the past.

In Gost, that somebody is me.

The only person I can trust.

I imagine myself with the body of a bird, a raven. Outstretched wings and neck, rigid beak and shining eye, I swoop over the ravine and hover over the town. Turning my head from side to side, I follow the pattern of the roads, left and right until I find the house. Hop through an open window, a dark shadow moving up the stairs and into the bedroom where a couple sleep without touching each other. The woman opens her eyes and looks straight at me, but she sees nothing except a shadow in the shape of a cross. A silent wing beat. In the room next door a stinking old woman breathes the same foul air over and over. Back in the sky, following the streets. A second house where the window is left open on a hot summer’s night. A man and a woman and two strong boys. House to house. Room to room. Night upon night.