Aminatta Forna - The Hired Man

The route we followed meant we would reach the ravine at a point a little higher up and climb down into it, the only other way being to follow the river from Gost. Briefly we joined a dirt road which led to a place where attempts had recently been made to encourage visitors: a parking place, a wooden bench. To my knowledge no visitors came except the youth of Gost who gathered in the car park and held dirt bike races along the track: a scattering of crushed beer cans and cigarette ends evidence of their activities. Here was the tail of the ravine, everything lay ahead.

The sides rose steeply either side of us. Zeka and Kos returned to my heel. I knew this landscape, every rock, tree and shrub, and I took it for granted, but for the first time in many years, decades, I saw myself in it, as I had when I was a child and coming here, everything we did, was an adventure. I expect it was the presence of others and their reactions to the surroundings.

The sun bore down and on the floor of the ravine there was no shade. We reached the waterfall some twenty minutes later. ‘Can we swim here?’ Grace was red-faced and panting.

‘A bit further.’

‘You mean we haven’t even got there yet?’ Matthew put down the basket he was carrying, took off his baseball cap and wiped his forehead.

‘Just fifteen more minutes,’ I assured them. ‘And then you’ll see.’

‘But this is beautiful,’ said Laura.

I explained there was little depth to the water, except directly under the fall, which made swimming unsatisfactory. They’d like the place I was taking them to better, I promised. We pressed on. I hoped I was still right. Many years had passed. Obvious from the state of the track nobody had been here recently. The worst that could happen would be that the water had succumbed to weed. The swimming hole was above the waterfall and the climb was a reasonably steep one, but then the ravine bed opened out into a small area of grass and wild flowers and the swimming hole: deep turquoise water, the loose forms of the rocks visible below; purple-black damselflies darted over a glinting surface.

‘Holy fuck,’ said Matthew.

Suddenly I was in a hurry to be in the water. I excused myself, pulled off my T-shirt and shed my jeans and ran the three or four strides to the pool, launched myself head first into it. After the heat of the sun, the shock of the drenching felt better than anything I’d felt for years. Under the water I opened my eyes and swam to the wall of rock at the opposite end, held my breath until dizziness set in. Just as I surfaced, a splash and Grace entered the water. Matthew was already in. Laura was picking her way from rock to rock to the water’s edge until she had positioned herself on the last and highest, with a clear path to the water.

‘Come on,’ I called.

‘It looks very cold.’

‘It’s lovely,’ said Grace.

Still Laura hesitated, edging forward and adjusting her balance on the rock.

Finally Matthew called, ‘For God’s sake, Ma, go for it!’

At the sound of her son’s voice Laura pinched her nose between finger and thumb and leapt to rise a moment later, shaking her head to release silvery arcs of water from her hair. She squealed and gasped and like a young girl swam towards her son.

Twenty minutes later Laura and I lay on the opposite side of the swimming hole where, when the summer was at its height and the water at its lowest, the shallow bank formed a small, stony beach. From there we watched Matthew execute dives from the high rock. With each dive he positioned his feet on the rock, the sun behind his body. His chest was virtually hairless, his limbs long and luminously pale, slim to the point of thinness: neither boy nor man, but something in-between. Laura applauded each dive. Grace was in the water, turning circles with a stick in her hand, encouraging the dogs to swim after it. Watching Matthew and Laura I felt like an intruder, as though I had opened a closed door and found two people stepping away from each other. Laura’s shining eyes as she looked at Matthew: enough to please any man. I wondered what was in her mind, what unformed, unspoken, perhaps unspeakable thoughts. He is perfect, she might well think. I made him and he is perfect. Or perhaps: He is perfect because I made him. When Laura looked at Matthew did she see herself in male form? I told you already that Laura had a slightly prominent canine on one side; occasionally her upper lip caught on it. For the first time that day I noticed Matthew had it too.

I left Laura’s side and walked to where the tall grass, wolfen spurge and wild fennel grew. I pulled some fennel from the ground, shook the earth from it and brought it back to Laura. Fennel grows everywhere, on the borders of the roads around the blue house, a few metres from her own doorstep. But Laura didn’t know this. She asked if she could cook with it, I said yes. I picked some leaves of wild garlic, tore them and rubbed them between my fingers, then held them under her nose to smell. I showed her a caterpillar clinging to the underside of a leaf. I told her how for a few hours every summer the mayflies mate on the surface of the water here and that the sand martins go mad darting and swooping, feeding their young and gorging on creatures who have become sated and slow, die in the act of copulating. Anything to draw her gaze away from Matthew, who performed his last two dives unnoticed and withdrew to sit on his towel in the sun.

I had an uncle and aunt who lived on the coast. Many years ago we visited them with my parents on holiday. My uncle would take tourists out fishing on his boat and encourage me to come along: it was useful to have a young lad about in case the anchor snagged. I taught myself to swim with my eyes open underwater. Once, following the line of the anchor chain, I saw a sea horse and we hovered nose to nose. My father and uncle fell out over the matter of my grandfather’s will and that was the end of our visits as a family. It was many years before I went back. How easily I might have been the boat boy in Laura’s story, though if I was I have no memory of it.

I advised Laura to hire contractors to fit the electric pump to the well and offered to oversee the work. I chose a company from out of town. The lining of the well needed some repairs and to be cleaned; the cracks and crevices were full of moss. Various tests for bacteria were conducted, even though most of us around here had been drinking water straight from the ground all our lives. When the men were gone I tested the turbidity of the water myself and in my own way: holding a glass to the light and drinking the contents.

How different the house looked already. I’d nearly finished painting the windows, the new tiles stared out from among the old ones on the roof. For some reason this pleased me, evidence of my labour, I suppose, a sign the house was being cared for again. Laura looked and shrugged and said no doubt no one would notice after a year or so and I didn’t disagree, but the truth is the new tiles

wear differently from the old ones, which were made by hand. There are houses in the town where most of the roof has been replaced and they still stand out among the rest after more than a decade.

I stood at the back of the house and viewed my work. The glass of the windows reflected the sky, the hills, the branches of the nearby tree. I thought of the one dead tree on the roadside at the front and reminded myself it needed bringing down. So much to be done. It’s true I’m happiest when I have a project, but all of this meant more to me than just the weekly rate Laura was giving me. Something that had been neglected and left to wither was being restored and if that bothered people, if it bothered Krešimir, then so be it. I raised my glass again, this time to the house, and I drank.