Aminatta Forna - The Hired Man

‘There you go, darling. Straight from the horse’s mouth. Now you can stop worrying. Good heavens, this isn’t Africa.’

‘I never said I was worried ,’ Grace replied. Then to me, ‘Where then?’

‘East,’ I said. ‘A long way away, as your mother says.’

Grace nodded, she trusted my answer.

‘Sorry, Duro, did you want something?’ asked Laura.

‘The tree.’

Laura stood up. ‘Come on, Grace, let’s go and watch.’

The dead tree came down without so much as a groan, the earth beneath us shook with the impact. I’d secured it with a guide rope and, having done most of the work with a chainsaw, gave Matthew the final strike of the axe. He pushed his baseball cap back from his forehead and grinned. The tree lay across the verge, its crown in the road. I hadn’t wanted it to come down too near the house, but now it was blocking the road. ‘Come on,’ I said to Matthew.

‘What will you do with all that wood?’ asked Laura.

‘Firewood,’ I replied. ‘We can store it in the outbuilding.’

‘You take it, or at least as much as you need.’

I nodded. I turned to the boy. ‘Shall we deal with it?’ As well as workman’s gloves I gave him a pair of goggles and ear muffs, though in fact I was the one who’d be working the saw. I put another pair of muffs on my own head, erasing the sound of birdsong, of Laura and Grace’s voices. I pulled the cord on the chainsaw and the motor started up; the howl of the saw filled the air and the space inside my head. I ordered Matthew to stand back while I worked, bending, twisting, moving all the time, holding the dangerous chain well away from my body. The possibilities of what a chainsaw can do are never far from the mind. But I enjoy the bite of the teeth into wood, the flying yellow sawdust and the antiseptic smell of wood resin, the satisfying pace of work. First I cut the branches away near the trunk and then cut them into lengths, those of a size I could use for firewood, the rest, the smaller branches, twigs and leaves to be turned into a bonfire sometime in the winter when the family was gone. After the first branches were off I waved Matthew forward to haul them away into the field behind the house. He was enjoying himself, you could see. Then I cut the trunk itself into sections. After a while I turned the chainsaw off and the peace of the day resumed around us: pale blue sky and the hum of insects, the flap of a woodpigeon’s wings, the laughter of a magpie mocking our hard work. Finally we rolled and heaved the giant logs to the side of the road, where we sat on them and drank a glass of water, after which I patted Matthew on the shoulder.

‘Shall we finish?’ I said.

And the boy replied, ‘Let’s go for it.’

Early next morning we drove to Zadar. The thought of Zadar had made me want to see the city again. I used to travel to and from Zadar when I lived on Pag, sometimes when I needed nothing but a break from my own company, to sit outside a café and be served a coffee. The inside of the car smelled of leather. We took the road west out of Gost, which leads directly to the coast and then follows the water’s edge down to Zadar. Laura handled the wheel confidently through the twists and turns of the road, past the saw mill where I once worked, up to the summit of the mountain. There you pass through a short tunnel beyond which comes the first view of the sea, and of Pag: smooth, pale and elongated, half submerged in the turquoise water. There is a place where you can park and look at the scenery, which is what we did. Laura read aloud from the signboard there, about the Karrens and sinter-pools, the sink holes, caves and pits which lay below us. I took myself off a small distance and gazed at Pag. So many years since I had laid eyes on her, I had wondered what I would feel when this moment came, but it was not as I imagined. The feelings did not come.

We climbed back into the car and drove on to Zadar. The green of the mountains turned to rock and wild rosemary. Villages clung to the base of the cliffs like swallows’ nests. At the side of the road people sold jars of honey and lavender oil.

At Zadar harbour we stopped for coffee and ate burek walking along the front looking at the boats. The smell of diesel, salt and fish was the same as it had always been and my stomach tightened with the odour of the memories it brought with it. There was a pressure in my bowels. I wondered if I would see anyone I knew, and if I did if they would be the same or changed: missing an arm, a leg, or maybe just some part of their soul.

Lumbering, steep-sided ferries headed for the islands. The old Italianate buildings on the harbour front had been painted and restored; the trees were trimmed, flowers bloomed beneath them. The old town was another story: football slogans defaced the old stone of the entrance. From somewhere came the wail of a car alarm. From an open window music: the voice of an American crooner from the 1950s. Inside the city walls the streets were littered, building façades chalky and chipped, the fountains ran dry. Strings of washing fluttered like banners from high windows. Some shops had their windows papered over, a few gift shops were open. Cats. Bony and scarred, they slunk and stared dangerously up from beneath the cars, watched us from high windowsills. I threw the paper from my burek into a skip and found it full of strays picking over the rotting garbage. One leapt out right past my shoulder. I have always had a faint unease around cats, especially numbers of them: something in their sliding movements, voices like a baby’s cry.

Once, for a while, Gost was overrun with stray cats and dogs. People abandoned their pets; the animals turned feral. The cats fucked, bred, survived. The dogs mourned their masters, begged from strangers, grew thin. Then after a while the dogs found each other and joined to form packs: they turned on the cats.

I saw a cat once, cornered by a pair of dogs, a German shepherd and another dog, a spaniel whose golden hair was matted with filth. A cat, when it is angry or frightened, simply looks ridiculous. The ears of the cat were flattened against its scalp, its eyes were narrowed and its teeth bared; it warned the dogs with a throaty, high-pitched whine that rose and fell like a piece of faulty machinery. The dogs were growing bolder, taking turns to run at it. One had a bleeding muzzle.

Laura was relaxed, enjoying the day. She stopped to admire a courtyard, painted a deep red. Columns and stone stairs, in the centre stood a monument like an urn. Someone had drawn a penis on the red wall. I stopped to ask a waiter who was serving tables in a square where we might find a shop selling tiles and he issued directions in a grave manner which encouraged my confidence. In a street behind one of the smaller squares, between two shops selling ceramics and souvenirs, we found a tile shop. From her pocket Grace brought the red quartz and the glass tiles, but we couldn’t find a match on any of the shelves. I spoke to the young attendant. She told me to give her a minute, made a telephone call during which she nodded a lot. Da. Da . She replaced the receiver and led us out to the storerooms at the back where she tapped on the boxes of discontinued lines. Beneath layers of dust, we found what we were looking for.

On the harbour front Laura found an upmarket pizzeria she liked: chairs and tables set out under a yellow-striped awning and with a view of the harbour. I had waited tables in a place like this, though not in Zadar. On the table Grace arranged and rearranged tiles upon the tablecloth. Matthew read the menu through a pair of dark glasses.

‘Do you know Zadar well, Duro?’ Laura asked after we’d ordered.

‘I used to come here.’

‘It’s a long drive from Gost.’