Aminatta Forna - The Hired Man

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.

The next day I arrived at the blue house wearing a pair of overalls I’d kept from the days I worked at the timber yard. I’d been hired as casual labour and though the work didn’t last for more than a few months they let us keep the overalls. Dressed like this I looked more like the hired man I was and sure enough Laura soon relaxed back into the same degree of informality we’d shared only a few days ago.

Meanwhile more of the mosaic was being revealed. Grace had brought a combination of zeal and patience to the job. She smiled when I complimented her on her handiwork and then looked down quickly, as if surprised by the sight of her own feet.

A green hand, reaching upwards. Two lines of yellow tiles either side of a single, narrow line of red tiles: deep, dark red tiles. These tiles were made of glass. On the far right of the mosaic the thumb and forefinger of another hand was in the process of being uncovered to match the one on the left; they were two hands reaching into the air. The three downward-pointed blue shapes remained as they had been. All of this against a white background. The tiles were different shapes and sizes, fitted each to the other accordingly. Here and there were gaps where tiles had been lost, some in the process of the mosaic being uncovered. Grace had saved them in a bowl.

‘Plus we’ve got the ones we found in the outbuilding,’ she said. ‘I’m going to put them back. Like, restore it.’

‘Good,’ I replied.

‘Hey, Duro, can I show you something?’ She led me a short distance to an indentation in the ground, obviously the outline of a shallow pond, up to this point concealed by the long grass. An edging of concrete gave way to tiled sides and a tiled base: a second mosaic. Grace crouched down and pulled at the grass to reveal more. ‘I think it’s an old fountain.’

I squatted down next to her and felt around for the water pipe that had once fed it. ‘You’re right,’ I said.

‘Do you think you can help me get it going? If I clean it out, that is?’

‘Why not? I think it will be simple.’

‘Awesome,’ said Grace. She chewed her bottom lip as though she had something else to say. In the end she said, ‘Do you think we can go to the place you told me about, the swimming hole?’

‘Sure. When do you want to go?’

At that Grace’s eyes widened slightly. ‘Like maybe this weekend?’

‘Fine.’

‘That would be cool.’

My life has been a sequence of temporary jobs and I enjoyed the sense of independence that came from it. Work is harder to come by in these parts but gratitude made Laura generous and we settled on a weekly sum. I considered what to do with the money. My house didn’t need any repairs as I was always there to do whatever was needed. I didn’t want to travel. My needs, which had always been few, were even fewer now. Perhaps I could go away for a weekend, meet a girl in a bar, one who’d agree to spend a night with me. How long since I spent the night with a woman? Nobody here in Gost, the town was too small. There were bars you could go to in some of the larger towns, and from time to time I’d visited them. But even then I’d never let myself stay the night; at some point before the light came up, and usually while the woman was sleeping, I’d slip out of the bed, pull my trousers on and leave quietly. There were times I would have liked to wake up next to a warm body, in a bed smelling of sex, fuck again and then fall into the streets looking for something to eat. But these things didn’t happen that way any more. These days the women clung to you and cried in their sleep; some were angry with you in the morning. And so I left.

One night I picked up a working girl; I didn’t know it at the time. Whores never sleep, they keep one eye on the clock and the other alert to the possibility of a dishonest customer. At the door she leapt spitting onto my back. I explained my mistake, that I hadn’t realised her profession. Immediately I offered to pay. Her face grew soft and she sighed. She took my cash, counted it, kissed a 100 kuna note and handed it back to me. She told me Monday was her day off. I walked away through the emptied streets. Bar owners were hosing down the pavements. Cats everywhere, glinting eyes watching the barmen and me, waiting for us to go so that they could claim the night for themselves. With every step I wondered if I should return to her.

I applied the first layers of new paint to the windowsills; nurturing the house back into being gave me pleasure. With these old buildings you can’t be too careful: few builders are up to the task. Owners prefer to knock them down and use their government grants to put up modern chalets: everywhere now, most of them less than ten years old. Yellow-painted stucco fronts are all the fashion, with wooden balustrades. It makes the place look like a ski resort. In some countries people love the past. I guessed Laura loved the past, one because she bought this house and two because the English love the past more than anyone else. To Laura’s way of thinking the past is a place of happiness, of safety and order, where fires, floods and wars were only ever sent to challenge the human spirit. There the sun shines when it should and the fields are full of wheat, in winter comes the snow. I know because of the tourists who came to stay in the hotel I once worked in, some of whom liked to talk to me while I fixed the shower or the cistern and in turn I’d ask them questions about where they were from and they’d tell me about their country, how it used to be and how it was now. The way the English saw it, the past was always better. But in this country our love of the past is a great deal less, unless it is a very distant past indeed, the kind nobody alive can remember, a past transformed into a song or a poem. We tolerate the present, but what we love is the future, which is about as far away from the past as it is possible to be.