Aminatta Forna - The Hired Man

Andro brings a stolen love letter, from one of the girls in our class to a boy we hate, and he reads parts of it out in a high-pitched voice. We see her in the street and run behind her calling out phrases from the letter.

A pack of three rubbers.

A bra, once. Stolen from somebody’s washing line or perhaps from an older sister.

Dumb stuff. Until the day Krešimir brings Anka’s diary.

Red leatherette, brassy little lock, easily picked. Small, round letters, crabbed to fit into the space for each day. Some are left blank and some are full. Dear Sonja, Sorry I missed you yesterday . Sonja had been the name of her best friend from primary school, who left to live in Sarajevo. Anka named her favourite doll Sonja, then a kitten. In her diary she wrote to Sonja.

Dear Sonja, Sorry I missed you yesterday .

We wear faded blue jeans and anoraks and our hair as long as we can get away with. Miro has a feather-cut he is proud of. Krešimir a leather jacket that once belonged to his father. Makes him look older. Everyone crowds around to listen.

Dear Sonja, Sorry I missed you yesterday. I was too tired by the time I got to bed to write to you. I had to go shopping with my mother and then do my homework. In school I read about something called astral flight, which is when your spirit leaves your body and flies to another country. Two people can meet like that. I am going to try it tonight and see how far I get. Then I’ll write you a letter and you can practise, and then maybe we can meet.

The lads hoot. Andro drains the last of his bottle of beer, drop-kicks the bottle over the wall. Encouraged, Krešimir continues, works us like a street performer works a crowd, but I see that only later.

Dear Sonja, Dear Sonja, Dear Sonja.

Dear Sonja, Horrible day. All my friends at school have bras, but when I went to Vinka (my mother) and tried to talk to her she laughed and told me I didn’t need one yet. But my chest really hurts. Do you wear a bra?

Here was the genuine thing, a beam of light shone through the darkness of female thought, like looking up the skirt of a sleeping woman. Someone makes to snatch the diary out of Krešimir’s hand, but he holds it up out of reach. Someone else, Andro, I think, climbs up on the wall and grabs it from behind. For ten minutes they pass it around, reading sections out loud. Andro throws the diary to Goran, who throws it to Miro, who misses. Goran snatches it up again. A page flutters free.

Krešimir stands and watches, watches and smiles.

At the end of it, the diary lies in the road, on the edge of a puddle, face down like a fallen bird. I pick it up. ‘What are you going to do with it?’ I ask Krešimir. I am angry, too late. He knows it. I am ashamed and he knows that too.

‘Put it back, of course.’

‘Promise?’

‘Yes. Don’t be stupid. Give it to me. Before anyone gets back to the house.’

And I do. I have to collect a set of jump leads from my uncle’s house.

It doesn’t occur to me, not until late into the night: Anka would have found her diary and wondered how it came to be ruined. Somehow the not knowing, the imagining, seemed the very worst possible. Better I had destroyed it.

— mumps

— their father’s new job

— move to the house in town

— Licitar heart

— old P dead

— hunt birds in the rain

— K pisses on the dog

— diary

Where did the hatred come from? For years I sifted the possibilities, the things that had happened, the sequence of events, examining each one for clues and then the characters of Krešimir and of Vinka, for some other answer. Was Krešimir looking for an outlet for his own frustration? What of Vinka? Somehow none of it seemed enough. Maybe hatred like that is bred in the bone, or maybe it belongs to some darker and more distant place.

In a long-ago past, wolves lived in the mountains to the north-east, now some say they are back. Acid rain has stripped the leaves and killed the trees in the forests to the north and this has forced the wolves south, if you believe it. The deer have moved south and the wolves with them.

Once we went on a school trip to a wolf sanctuary. It was the height of summer and the wolves were moulting: hanks of matted fur hung from their haunches. I was disappointed: these gaunt, furtive animals were far from the majestic hunters of my imagination, the creatures I’d read about in my stories of hunters and trappers. At the sight of us they rose and began to move away, except one, which ran in the opposite direction, towards rather than away from us. On its way it passed a large female who twisted her neck and lunged, you heard the snap of teeth in the air. The lone wolf feinted but carried on. One. Two. Three. Four. A raised hackle, a lazy lunge: every wolf did the same. Go away, they seemed to be saying, I don’t want you.

The omega, who bore the brunt of the pack’s aggression and frustration. The omega wasn’t allowed to eat until the rest of the pack were finished, so this one begged for food from visitors.

Because she was the youngest, because she was a girl, because her brother had always been her mother’s favourite. Or because she shared her father’s easy temperament and now her father was gone. Or simply because she was there and there was nobody else, Anka became the last to eat at her mother’s table.

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.