Aminatta Forna - The Hired Man

She doesn’t blame me, has never forgotten me. And she has forgiven me. Why? Because now she is ten years older, just as I am, and now the contours of her face are made up of hollows as well as curves, just as there are new straight lines and shadows in mine.

Because now she is ten years older.

Because now she loves another man.

There’s nothing new about this story of ours, such things happen. Love misses its mark, arrives too early or too late. Nobody dies, except in novels.

Most people in Gost never knew why I left; those who did have forgotten, even my parents seem to have forgotten, because neither my mother nor my father makes any mention of Anka. My father is only occupied with his sheds, and my mother is occupied with my father and his sheds. But this is a small town and so Anka and I reconfigure our love into a friendship, broad enough to include Anka’s husband Javor. I remember him. He’s a decent sort. I pretend to be more pleased than I am for them both. I don’t think Anka has told Javor about us, but then why would she? Ours was a calf love from a time long gone, from the days when we were children.

Of this I persuade myself.

With Javor and Anka, the summer following my return, back at the house from an evening at the Zodijak where we have celebrated the third anniversary of the bar’s opening. We are all drunk, but some are drunker than others. Javor, for instance. Times are lean for everyone, except Fabjan and Javor. The Zodijak thrives: misery likes company and beer. Javor has bought Anka a kiln and a car. He has installed the kiln in one of the outbuildings and Anka has been working hard these last weeks: the tiny back seat of her new red Fićo is crammed full of boxes of brightly painted ceramic ashtrays, bowls and plates, brooches, wrapped in newspaper. She wears one of her brooches, the imprint of a walnut in blue ceramic. I still have the little heart she gave me years ago, found again among those belongings of mine my father had stored in one of his sheds. I put it in my pocket. Every Wednesday or Thursday Anka takes the road down to the coast, to Zadar, where she sells the things she makes to the owners of tourist shops. Sometimes Javor goes with her to buy supplies for the bar and they drive the Fićo back rattling with bottles.

With the start of winter it became too cold to carry on sleeping in the shed. My father had a solution, which was to fix up the old pig house in the lower field. The field belonged to our family, it was used for grazing from time to time. The house had been abandoned years ago, but when I pushed open the broken door I saw my father wasn’t wrong.

For two days I shovelled shit and stinking, rotten hay, washed down the floors. While I worked I thought of nothing except hosing walls, scrubbing stains from the stone floors and spraying the whole place three times with diluted disinfectant. I ripped the rotten door from its hinges and threw it on a bonfire. Hard work took my mind far away from Pag. I was building myself a future in Gost. After his work at the post office my father came to lend a hand; having a project made him happy and it made my mother happy because he’d stopped building sheds in the yard. Working side by side, within a week we had the place weather-proofed and in another week we’d installed a new floor where the bedroom would be. Within a month I’d moved in and I added improvements all winter. My new home was even closer to the blue house than my parents’ place.

Then in November I found Kos tied to a tree and left to die and I took her home with me.

Anka puts plates on the table, Javor wants to help, but he is too drunk, he stumbles and catches his hip on the edge of the table. The plate flies from his hand and Javor tries to catch it, grasps it fleetingly. The plate breaks on the floor. Javor himself overtopples. He has removed his trousers and is wearing a T-shirt over a pair of blue Y-fronts. On his knees on the floor he begins to collect pieces of the plate, holding each one close to his face and examining it as if it is evidence of some immense crime. Anka pulls him to his feet. He sways and puts his arms around her. ‘I’m sorry, baby.’ Anka pushes him into a chair and returns to laying the table.

Once, they had an argument and Anka came over to my place and stayed a few hours. I cooked, she talked but not about Javor. While we were eating Javor telephoned, but Anka refused to speak to him. ‘OK,’ said Javor. ‘Tell her I’m sorry.’ I told Anka he sounded miserable and then Anka changed her mind and called him back, but Javor had accidentally left the receiver off the hook, she could hear him humming to himself and the sound of him biting into an apple, she shouted into the receiver but he didn’t hear her and then he must have stubbed his toe, she began to laugh and passed me the phone so I could listen to Javor stumble and curse. Javor never knew why she showed up at the house minutes later, her face stained with tears of laughter.

The door is open to the tepid night air. Fabjan arrives, accompanied by his wife, then a taut, blonde Venus with plastic hoops in her ears, her gaze permanently narrowed against the smoke of her own cigarettes. Javor levers himself to his feet and goes out of the back door, returns with a bottle of rakija . He puts a tape into the player on the windowsill, picks out a tune on an air guitar and makes a twanging sound to imitate the sound of the instrument. Three ascending notes, then down, up, down. Then the same three ascending notes. Da, da, da-da. He spins with surprising grace, as drunks sometimes do.

‘What the fuck is this crap?’

‘The greatest song ever written.’

‘By a coke head.’

‘Acid head. Anyway Lucy was a girl his son had a crush on so he made a painting of her. It was a kid’s painting, that’s all it was. “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”.’

Fabjan moves over to the recorder and jabs a stubby forefinger at the row of buttons. The music stops, leaving a ringing in the air. Javor puts an arm around Fabjan’s neck and kisses him, waves at Fabjan’s wife. ‘Fabjan, Fabjan! My good friend,’ he slurs, locates the rakija bottle and pours drinks all round. Javor is an excellent drunk. Fabjan has brought beer and a bottle of Stock 84. He refuses Javor’s rakija and pours himself a brandy which he knocks back in one and pours another. In between brandies he takes long draughts from the beer bottle. He lights a cigarette of a local brand, Morava, which smell strongly. In between draughts of beer and puffs on his cigarette his eyes follow Anka: his gaze slides down her back and comes to rest on her buttocks as she reaches for plates. The way Fabjan looks at every woman, but especially the way he looks at Anka, pisses me off. I move to insert myself in-between Fabjan’s gaze and Anka’s body.

‘I’ll help you,’ I say, and take the plates from her hand.

We eat: grilled pork and cabbage salad. A piece of food flies down Javor’s gullet and lodges there. Anka bangs him on the back; he reddens and coughs it up. Afterwards she kisses him on the back of the head. I see her do these things and know how she loves him. And I love Javor too, everyone does except maybe Fabjan, but then Fabjan only loves himself.

As for me, I have taken a few women out since I came to Gost, but somehow nothing lasts. I’ve come to depend on Javor and Anka, the door to their house is always open to me. I’ve been given the privileges couples in love bestow upon hopeless bachelors. Namely: the right to eat at their table without an invitation, the right to get drunk, the right to spend the night on the couch when I am too drunk to go home. In return I bring venison to their table, sometimes a partridge or a quail. And I make them a table, a belated wedding present. I use wood from my father’s stash in the sheds. I work on it in secret and my father helps me carry it to the blue house one day when the house is empty. Tricky getting it inside with just the two of us.