The Hired Man

8

Anka. By the swimming hole, in the shadow of Gudura Uspomena. For both of us, the first time. In the moment Anka tenses beneath me and afterwards squats at the edge of the swimming hole to wash the blood from her thighs. I watch, angry at my own clumsiness. Anka stands and turns. It is early summer, the water is freezing. Anka’s skin is luminous, her breasts small, nipples turned to the sky. She shakes her hair and hugs herself, rubs the goose pimples on her arms. Then she comes back to me, tucks herself under my arm and kisses the underside of my chin.

In the pine plantation I make a home for us, like the dens Krešimir and I once built. I drag an old quilt and some cushions up there. Anka picks wild flowers and weaves them into the roof thatch. We lie on the quilt on our bed of pine needles, imagine a life in which we are alone in the world. I watch Anka sleeping in my arms and see how she laughs as she sleeps; when she wakes up I ask her why she was laughing and she tells me that sometimes her dreams are funny. That summer it never rains, never rains, not once, as though Perun saw us and took pity on our makeshift home. Times I take my gun, so my family doesn’t ask too many questions. We meet after school and, when the school term is finished, we meet whenever we can. That summer I take a part-time job at the mechanics’ yard. I have two more years of technical school. Some of my teachers were disappointed I didn’t go to the gimnazija. They say I could have gone to college or even university, but I don’t want that. Everything I know, everything I want, is here in Gost.

For Anka shooting rabbits no longer holds much interest, but sometimes I take a rabbit or a pigeon. At home they think I’ve lost my touch. In the late afternoon Anka gathers her clothes, dresses and leaves before me. This is not something we talk about, we know these afternoons are secret, our whole relationship is a secret, from one person, in particular — though we never say his name.

I lie back, close my eyes and listen to Anka’s soft tread as she makes her way to the edge of the woods. I wait. Then in the blue of dusk I follow the path she has taken with my eyes closed, following her scent.

Friday, four o’clock, the Zodijak: empty except for Fabjan, watching television at the end of the bar. He grunted when he saw me and returned to the television. I ordered a coffee and leaned against the bar. On the screen an African woman dressed in a long black gown sat on a chair upon a raised plinth. She wore a judge’s wig and a pair of headphones.

Now the camera focused on three men sitting side by side; each of them also wore a set of headphones. One sat with his back hunched and his elbows resting on his knees, staring straight ahead. The second leant back in his chair, his arms folded behind his head. The third appeared to be trying to catch the eye of someone in the room: he was smiling and flicking his eyebrows up and down. Behind them stood two men in blue uniforms. The picture changed again to show rows of men dressed in black gowns seated behind computer monitors. All of them were wearing headphones. The camera returned to the black woman in the judge’s chair who began to read aloud from the piece of paper.

‘Cunt.’ Fabjan pointed the remote at the television, changed the channel then stalked off to the back room.

Let me tell you about Fabjan. Fabjan was not born in Gost. He arrived twenty-two years ago and brought with him a wife and a son. He had an uncle here, who lived alone. Fabjan and his wife moved in with him and when the old man died they had the house. People said he’d made money working in Australia, in the opal mines; the truth is nobody knew. I didn’t live in Gost at that time and when I came back Fabjan was already somebody in town, part-owner of the Zodijak. His partner at the Zodijak was Javor Barac, who I’d known for years. Javor’s father was head of the post office, my father’s boss. Every year I’d see Javor at the post office Christmas party, both of us pressed into wearing our smartest clothes, in both our cases a pair of black trousers and a ruffled shirt. Different kinds of men: I’m talking now about Javor and Fabjan. Javor was as easy-going as Fabjan was flash, but they made a good team. By the time I arrived back in Gost Fabjan was driving the only BMW in town. His teeth were a whole lot better back then.

Javor looked up to Fabjan, because in that time of shortages Fabjan always seemed to be able to get hold of whatever he wanted: coffee, sugar, even a pinball machine. Later, a video, a Betamax unfortunately. All the same, no other bar had one. You needed to know somebody, or know how to work the system to do anything in those days, whether that was to become the owner of a private business, or buy a pinball machine or get hold of black market videos. I used to wonder why Fabjan needed Javor at all, but maybe he saw Javor as the quickest way to be accepted in Gost, because Javor’s father was head of the post office and an important man in the town. The pinball machine made sure the bar was full every night. Full of lads in denim jackets and flared jeans, out of fashion everywhere but Gost. They played Turbo-folk day and night, drank beer and played pinball.

Fabjan’s wife wears a fur-collared coat and heavy jewellery. She draws the shape of her mouth with pencil and smokes skinny menthol cigarettes. You could say she’s good-looking, though she’s grown heavy around the jaw and if she knows about the women Fabjan takes into the back room at the Zodijak, she doesn’t let on. She has two grown sons and a hair-dressing salon. Last year when Fabjan arranged a party for her birthday he took over the whole banqueting suite of the hotel and hired a tribute band from the city.

People often wonder why Fabjan, with all his money, doesn’t leave Gost and try his luck somewhere else: one of the cities on the coast where he could own a bigger bar, maybe a hotel even, and then he could really be somebody. Gost is such a small place for a man of his talents. Nobody has ever asked me, but if they did I would say to them: maybe Fabjan just likes it here too much.

I asked Laura, Grace and Matthew to come and have dinner at my house, a return invitation. Too few chairs: I spent time in the morning fixing one with a broken leg. I took a haunch of venison from the outside freezer, potatoes from the store and helped myself to some more of the chard at the back of the blue house. In my store I had some ajvar I’d made with aubergines and peppers from my own beds the year before. Later I went into town for bread and wine. In the bakery, the woman behind the counter — I told you she’d been married to a cousin of mine — as she wrapped my loaf, asked, ‘Where’s your friend?’

‘Who?’

‘Engleskinja.’

I shrugged. I said, ‘I don’t know her, I was just helping out.’

She stood with her hands on her hips and regarded me through narrowed eyes, shrugged to show me she didn’t care and shifted her flat gaze to the next customer.

At home I made a caramel pudding and put it in the fridge. After I prepared everything for the rest of the meal I went upstairs to wash and change into my other good shirt. Back downstairs I put on a Johnny Cash cassette and laid the table. I have a lot of crockery. My sister didn’t want to take all this stuff to Zagreb, but my mother wouldn’t give away the serving plates, vegetable dishes and gravy jugs which had been her wedding presents, so she left them with me, to bring when I followed, which is how she gave herself permission to leave. They also left me a pair of goats, which I slaughtered in the yard three days later and froze. The meat lasted me two winters.

I remembered Laura liked flowers and was outside picking cornflowers from the verge when she appeared beside me. She wore a shirt knotted at her waist, a long tiered skirt and a pair of espadrilles. Her hair was tied back and a pale blue shawl draped across her shoulders. She handed me a posy. ‘Look, I’ve brought you some.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. I looked around. ‘Are you alone?’

‘You could say I’m the advance party.’

Inside Laura stood in the middle of the room and turned on the spot. ‘Very compact, isn’t it?’

‘It was used for pigs,’ I explained. ‘Until I made it my house. Pigs, they don’t like too much space, they like to stay warm. And I don’t need much either.’

‘I love that,’ she said, pointing to where I had set rows of bottles into the plaster of a wall, their ends out. ‘Clever. Do you think you could do that for me? Is that your family?’ Now she was looking at the photograph on the windowsill. I crossed the room, picked up the photograph and handed it to Laura. In the picture I am about ten years old and I wear an enormous pair of heavy-framed glasses. They belonged to my father and I loved to borrow them, to play the clown. My father stands behind me, his hand on my shoulder.

‘Daniela, Danica.’ I pointed to my sisters.

‘And Duro!’

‘Exactly.’

‘All your names begin with D?’

‘Family tradition. My father — Dejan.’

‘Didn’t you worry about running out of names?’

‘Why worry? Begin again. Same names, new generation.’

‘Any special reason it’s D?’

I said I didn’t know. These are the things you don’t think about until somebody else points them out. And even then, often there is no good reason, just the way it’s always been, that’s all. Laura said my family looked like nice people, handed me back the picture and carried on looking about the room. As I mentioned, it’s much the same as the blue house, only smaller: stone walls, tiled floor, wood-burning stove. There’s my armchair in front of the television. Next to the chair, a table where my father’s glasses lie (because now I have to wear them every day to read) along with whichever book I’m reading — most recently one I’d borrowed from the library about the Galápagos Islands. Like many people, I knew about Charles Darwin and the different variety of animal species he’d found on the islands, but did you know people lived there, too? Slaves, convicts, stranded sailors, pirates. Once you were on the islands it was very difficult to leave, you understand, and life there was brutal with any number of crimes committed between such violent inhabitants. There was a man called Patrick Watkins, a marooned Irish sailor, who hunted and farmed on the Galápagos and whose story was included in the book. I became very interested in Patrick Watkins. He stole a longboat and got out. There were other escapees with him in the boat, but when they arrived at Guayaquil, only one man remained on the longboat: Watkins. What happened to the others? Nobody knows. I spent some time imagining what could have taken place during that voyage. Had the other men been somehow swept overboard? Had one turned murderous, crazed by lack of water, the endless horizon, or the inescapable company of the others? Had Watkins killed them with his bare hands, one by one? What passed between them when they were down to the last three men?

Next to the table is a wooden chest where I keep my papers and where, when I have finished, I shall put this manuscript. On the other side of the room: the table where I eat my meals, laid for the first time with four plates. In the corner a gas stove, porcelain sink, wooden counter. A wooden plate rack hangs on the wall. Small pantry. Beyond that the wood store and outbuildings. On the windowsill, forgotten, the tiles I’d brought with me from the blue house. As I went to replace the picture, I covered them with my hand and slipped them into my pocket. I wiped the glass of the frame before putting it back and took a last look at my father. I remembered the smell of him — the hair oil he combed through his hair on special occasions, scented with limes, as now is Danica’s wedding and those of all my cousins, baptisms and feast days and every Christmas I can remember. Gost is beautiful at Christmas. Glowing lights around the buildings. Blazing floats on the river. Drifts of deep snow, sculpted into dunes by the wind. I told Laura this.

‘A proper winter.’

‘I suppose so, yes, but very cold. So cold the rats go mad with it. They try to come inside to where it’s warm. You have to stop them chewing their way in.’

‘How awful.’

I continued. ‘Not so much in town, but out here, yes. They cannot survive even in their nests. At night you hear them scrabbling against the walls, their claws.’ I realised Laura was staring at me, her cheeks were pale, she was no longer smiling. I stopped talking. Matt and Grace were at the door.

‘Gross!’ said Matt. ‘What do you do?’

‘Trap them.’

‘What do you use to trap a rat, like a giant mousetrap or what? How big would they have to be?’

‘Not those kind of traps. You would need too many and besides, with the dogs around it’s not safe. We use cage traps. Then you can catch a lot at the same time.’

‘Don’t you have to kill them afterwards?’

‘By morning they are frozen.’

‘That is totally gross.’ Matthew grimaced.

‘How do they die?’ asked Grace. ‘I mean slowly or quickly? What’s it like to freeze to death?’

‘Don’t be ghoulish, Grace,’ said Laura. ‘Let’s talk about something more pleasant.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Let me get some drinks.’ I went to the kitchen and came back with a glass of wine for Laura. To Matthew I handed a Karlovačko.

‘Matt?’ Laura looked at him pointedly and with raised eyebrows.

‘I’m seventeen.’

I said, ‘One beer. This way a boy learns to hold his drink. How my father taught me. One beer for my birthday. One beer at Christmas. Plus one plum brandy.’

Laura let it go. I went to the kitchen to fetch a Coke for Grace and she followed me in. ‘Duro,’ she said. ‘How do they die?’

‘You really want to know?’

She nodded.

‘It’s very cold, maybe minus ten or more degrees centigrade. Their metabolism slows down and they go to sleep, they die in their sleep.’

Grace looked at me. ‘That’s not true, is it?’ Normally she could barely look me in the eye, now she gazed at me steadily. It was that look more than anything that made me tell her the truth. Because Grace was not a child. And because Grace was not her mother’s daughter. Standing in the kitchen with her that evening I caught a glimpse of part of her nature I would grow to understand. Grace liked to examine every inch of her surroundings in a way that went beyond childish curiosity. Grace wanted to understand what the world was made of, the way that I had wanted to as a child. She watched and she listened. Grace asked questions. ‘How do they die?’ she said for the second time.

At first the rats huddle together. As the cold goes to their brains they become confused, stumble around the confines of the cage and into each other. The cold makes them aggressive. They fight, viciously, with what little strength remains. They try to burrow through the wire bottom of the cage. When their strength is all gone they lose consciousness, sometimes the ice melds their bodies into one grey mass. In the morning when I empty the cages, I pick them up by their tails and toss them in the river.

‘Is that what you wanted to know?’

Grace nodded slowly.

‘Does Gost mean anything? We were talking about it today.’ We’d eaten the venison and were leaning back in our seats. Grace, thinking no one was watching, slipped pieces of food to Kos and Zeka under the table.

‘It means visitor,’ I told Laura. ‘No, let me be more precise. In English you would say guest. Is that right?’

‘Guest and visitor mean more or less the same thing. Although guest is somehow more special. Anyone can be a visitor. A stranger can be a visitor, somebody uninvited can be a visitor. A guest is somebody who is being treated in a certain way, the way you’d treat somebody you had asked to your home. Hopefully you’d treat a visitor that way too, but not necessarily. But what’s the reason for the name, do you know?’

‘Gost was once an important place, if you can believe it. This was the provincial capital for the district, when we were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So people from many different areas visited or settled here. Also we are close to the mountains and they are the highest in these parts, so the crossing is hazardous, especially in the winter. Mountain people have a very strong tradition of hospitality. In such a place a traveller’s survival often depends on it. Also, in those days of wars and bandits, I suppose people thought if they treated a stranger as their guest, then he wouldn’t do them harm. Even today if you go from north to south or east to west you must pass through Gost. That has also brought a lot of strangers here.’

‘My husband said it was easy to get here from the city and the airport or from the coast, and that was one of the advantages.’

‘And as you see, you are my guests.’

‘Thank you. Gost in English sounds like a cross between guest and host.’

‘Or ghost,’ said Grace.

‘In Cro that would be duh.’

Grace repeated the word several times.

‘Correct. Or prikaza, well that would be more like a kind of vision. The last thing you would see before you died, something like that.’

‘Like angels, or somebody who’s already dead and who’s been waiting for you.’

‘That’s how it is in the movies. Who knows what people really see.’

‘I want to learn to speak Croatian. I’m already learning French and German. My teachers say I have a good ear,’ said Grace. ‘Could you teach me?’

I was about to say I would when Matthew, who’d left the room to go to the toilet, reappeared. ‘Are those your guns?’ he asked.

‘Of course. You want to see one?’ I went to the rack at the back door and came back with a.243 rifle I’d owned about ten years.

‘What are they for?’

‘Hunting.’ I slid the bolt to check the carriage and handed it to Matthew.

‘Hunting? No kidding!’ He raised it to his shoulder and swung the barrel around, pointing in different directions. I reached out, took hold of the barrel and pushed it down. ‘Never do that.’ I showed him how to hold it, to press the butt into his shoulder, rest his cheek against the wood and cradle the stock in his left hand. Matthew held the rifle and peered through the sights. ‘Will you take me next time you go hunting?’

‘It’s not the season to hunt. But if you want I will teach you to shoot, hunting we leave for another time.’ I removed the rifle from him.

‘Maybe we should talk about it first, Matthew,’ said Laura.

‘What’s there to talk about?’ said Matthew.

‘This is the country, not the city,’ I told Laura. ‘Here it’s different. You don’t have to worry. Besides Matthew is nearly a man.’

‘It’s not like there’s anything else to do around here. What about this one?’ Matthew had my old 7.62 in his hands and started to raise it, but I stopped him.

‘Not that one,’ I said. ‘That one’s not the right gun for you.’ I took it from him.

‘Then I guess it’s up to you, Matt,’ Laura said.

‘Duro?’ Matthew turned to me.

‘Of course.’

I looked from Matthew to Laura and back — the two were so much alike. Light gold skin and hair, they actually seemed to shimmer in the evening light. The slanting eyes, which in Laura looked feline but made Matthew look sleepy, careless. High forehead, long eyebrows. Matthew wore his hair almost as long as his mother did and his face had a feminine delicacy about it. By contrast Grace’s skin was paler, her hair darker and overall she carried more weight. Her nose was longer and rather sharp, she’d none of Laura’s poise. I don’t think I’d ever met a daughter so different from her mother. At that moment she was bent over kissing Zeka on the nose. She looked up at me, as though she’d felt the touch of my gaze. ‘Can I take them out for a run?’

Laura and I were left alone at the table. Grace was with the dogs, Matthew, outside with an old telescope of mine he’d found, was looking at stars. I fetched more wine, filled both our glasses and took my place opposite. Laura had her elbow on the table and was cradling her chin in her palm, her head angled away from me. For a while neither of us spoke and I was glad that Laura was so relaxed in my company. She sat up straight and sipped her wine.

‘I do worry about Matthew,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t really grown into himself, if you know what I mean. Quite the opposite from Grace who is very easily amused.’ The way she said it, stressing the word easily, made Grace sound defective. ‘What was it like for you growing up here?’

I shrugged. ‘No problem. We had the outdoors. So, freedom.’

‘I grew up in cities. We moved a lot. I changed school four times so I was always the new girl and on the outside of things. By the time I had a group of friends we’d move on.’

‘Your father’s job was the reason you moved?’

‘Yes and no. My father worked overseas, he was an engineer. Before that he had been in the Army, we lived in Germany. After he left the Army we went back to England. He worked for private contractors, he used to go away to consult on projects: Nigeria, Abu Dhabi, those kinds of places. Then he took an overseas posting. We only went out once, to Thailand. My mother didn’t like it and we came back. I was fourteen, I thought it was great and would have stayed but it wasn’t up to me. The idea, I think, was that he would go back and forth, but I think the marriage was on its last legs and so he ended up hardly coming back at all. By all accounts it’s pretty easy for men in Thailand. At first my mother did up houses to keep herself occupied while my father was away, it was more of a hobby. Later, after the divorce, she did it for the money. She’d buy a house, we’d live in it for a couple of years while she got it sorted, and then sell. I always lived in unfinished houses. As soon as the house was ready and I finally had my bedroom the way I wanted it, my mother would put the house on the market and we’d start again. Then we moved to Wales where she started doing up cottages to sell to people as holiday homes, but when the locals started burning English people’s houses the bottom fell out of that market and she had trouble selling the place we were living in. Back to square one. That was the only time I ever lived in the country. Out there it was just the two of us, we never had guests that I can remember, and I never had the sense I could bring my friends home. She refused to eat out, even when we could afford it. So by the time I was in my teens I was off with my friends as much as possible. I dyed my hair and hung out in the town centre. It was hard on her, I guess. I went away to tech in Bristol and while I was away she changed. She had an offer on the house and decided she didn’t want to move after all. She was happy. She’s still there. huge vegetable garden. I envy you. I’d love to have grown up in the countryside, you know, properly. Did you live here all your life?’

‘For some years I lived on the coast.’

Laura sighed. Her eyes were bright, she was quite drunk. ‘Growing up in the same place, where everyone knows you and you know everyone. In and out of each other’s houses with no locked doors. That’s how it was, I bet.’ She drained her glass.

‘Something like that.’

Grace burst through the door; she was panting and out of breath.

‘What is it?’ asked Laura.

‘It’s Conor!’

‘Has he called?’

‘Conor’s here.’

‘What?’

‘He’s here! Honest!’ said Grace. ‘I saw the car parked outside the house when I was on my way back. He’d been off and come back.’

‘Good heavens!’ Laura was on her feet. ‘I’m so sorry, Duro. We have to go. It’s been a lovely evening.’

I didn’t know what to say, so I said, ‘No problem.’

At the door Laura said to Grace, ‘But why didn’t he wait inside?’

‘He didn’t realise the door wasn’t locked.’

And they were gone.

For a few minutes I sat surrounded by the wreckage of the meal. Less than two hours had passed since they’d arrived. I stood up and cleared the table, scraping the leftover food into the dogs’ bowls. On the back of a chair I found Laura’s shawl, forgotten in her hurry. I folded it and put it on the windowsill.

When I’d finished with the table I went to the fridge and opened the door. There was the caramel pudding. It had come out well, perfectly in fact. I upended the dish straight into the bin.

I woke from dreaming of a wooden boat and a crew of men. Salt-dried skin, a vaporous heat, the terrible stillness of the ocean. We were becalmed. Six men marooned in a boat, water all around and lawlessness, the seventh man, huddled together with us in that small space. For a few minutes I lay on my back watching the images and colours of the dream drain away. In the dream, as only in dreams, I was both Patrick Watkins and myself, at times looking at the other men, knowing only what he knew and at other times I was one of them, watching Watkins for his next move. But what was it Watkins knew? What had seemed absolute in the dream had gone. I was left with the taste of salt in my mouth.

A memory creeps into the space vacated by the dream.

Waking to the scent of burning pine needles: Anka and I. We have been dozing in our makeshift home in the pine forest. Up above us a breeze steals over the trees and slips down the valley towards Gost, where it is late afternoon: shops all shut, main road silent. Earlier I’d shown her how to roll a coin across her fingers and sometime later on she’d taken that same hand and put it between her legs, showing me how to do something she already knows. When her back arches and she cries, I take my hand away thinking I’ve done something wrong, but she pushes it back. Then we fall asleep and the coin, a cold spot, lies somewhere beneath our bodies and the quilt. We sleep and something causes us to wake. A crescent of fire perhaps five or six metres long, as though somebody had been drawing a ring of fire around us. Not close enough to be a threat, and the pine needles are damp beneath so the fire burns slowly, only the drama of a cone as it spits and pops. I seize the quilt, run naked towards the flames and beat them out. Back in our shelter, Anka shivers. The quilt is scorched and useless. Above the trees, a blue sky, a sun full of fire: that same furious summer sun which burned now outside my house, slowly reaching through the space between the shutters.