Aminatta Forna - The Hired Man

Among my privileges as a frequent guest, bachelor, supplier of fresh game, is the right to be alone with Anka. It’s something I am careful not to do too often. I am bruised by Pag and a year after my return I am haunted by the ghost of an emotion for which I have no name. It rises to the surface in odd moments, sometimes when I am alone with Anka, is submerged by Javor’s dogged goodwill, his neck-locks and jokes, his rakija .

Anka is the only person I tell about Pag. Not my mother, who is unsentimental, and not my father, because he is far too sentimental. Daniela would have been upset for me. Anka listens without interrupting; when I am finished she stretches out her hand and holds my wrist lightly with her fingers, like a doctor taking a patient’s pulse. We are quiet for some time. Then she lets go of my wrist and leans across the table to take my head into her hands and shakes it, the way a child does a piggy bank. Eventually she says, ‘Silly bitch. She’ll never be happy with that attitude.’

When anything happens to me, good or bad, Anka becomes the first person I tell. I love her, but it’s a chaste love, bleached by time and familiarity, like a long marriage. In my love for Anka, even when we were teenagers and lay on a quilt under the pine trees, there was none of the hurt of Pag. If Javor ever left her, I would look after her, perhaps even ask her to marry me. But more than that, more than anything, I want to protect Anka, can’t bear the idea of her ever being hurt. I would sleep all night across the doorstep of the house if she asked me. In some strange way I fear for her. Because she has forgiven Krešimir and Vinka, you see. Something I cannot bring myself to do, but Anka has reworked the whole episode in her mind, rubbed away the stains, the malice and jealousy, painting on new, less wounding reasons.

Fabjan tips brandy down his throat and begins to outline his new plans for the Zodijak: folk night, karaoke, girls. Why not? Once a month. Javor slaps him on the back, grins. ‘Fabjan’s plans for world domination.’ Fabjan ignores him and carries on. The two men are so unalike, it is hard to think how they can be friends. Fabjan has thick hair on his forearms and his head. Javor looks like a fledgling fallen from the nest: his neck is long, his nose is prominent, his pale brown hair stands up to form a soft fuzz around his head.

Javor starts to sing, quietly at first and then louder. One by one the rest of us join in and Fabjan gives up. The song has been played on the radio all year. ‘ Hajde Da Ludujemo .’ That was 1990, the year we hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in Zagreb. Fabjan organised a Eurovision evening in the bar. His wife kind of looks like the singer, at least she dressed the same in a pink dress with a short skirt. I’ve forgotten the singer’s name. Anyway, now it has become a standing joke between us, to begin to sing the song and for the rest of us to join in. What Javor likes best is to start this at the worst possible time, under his breath: last week during his cousin’s wedding vows.

‘Fuck head,’ says Fabjan.

So that’s Javor for you.

You’re wondering about Krešimir.

According to Anka her brother was doing fine, living in the town house with their mother, decent job and all the rest. At first I raised the subject of Krešimir carefully, but Anka talked like everything that happened in the past had been left there. She’d forgiven him, as she forgave everybody. You must remember, Krešimir and her mother were family, the only family she had, and we always say blood and water aren’t the same.

At Christmas the first year of my return there was a reunion party, in the old school hall where the Licitar hearts still hung. The old gang were there: Andro, Goran, Miro. I’d seen them about in the last few months, of course. All married, to wives who fell pregnant as soon as they were up the aisle. Still cracking terrible jokes. Miro had brought a stash of porn videos and was trying to sell them for a few thousand dinara each. That was before the currency was revalued. The only person I hadn’t seen was Krešimir, though I’d seen Vinka Pavić. She’d finally given in to widow’s black, dyed her hair red, walking down the street with the careful, erratic gait of the habitual drunk. She greeted me as though the alcohol had rubbed her mind clean.

A billow of air through the double doors carried the smell of wood polish, rubber and feet. Tables covered in paper cloths, plates of food brought by the women, cups of cheap wine and home-made streamers. A band: some of the guys from school, not bad. Later, a DJ. Not much had changed, except that it was no longer the 1970s, instead it was the last year of the 1980s. We wore our hair shorter: Goran’s cut close to reveal the great swell of his head; he’d become a warehouse foreman. Andro had put on weight, he’d joined his father’s business as an electrician. Nobody had left Gost for the simple reason nobody wanted to. They were afraid if they did they’d lose their place in the ranking of second-hand cars and motorbikes, drinking bouts and blowjobs. A few of the guys gave me a slap on the back and they seemed really pleased to see me, but interest in what I’d been doing didn’t last long because people were only really interested in what happened in Gost: even the coast was another country.

Krešimir leant apart from the others, his back to the wall. I saw he was still wearing his father’s leather jacket. It gave me a jolt to see him, but I was relaxed, coming home had been good, I’d found my place again. The one time we talked about any of it, helping my father move things around his shed while we looked for wood to make a table for Anka and Javor, my father stopped and placed his hand on my shoulder. ‘The past is the past,’ he’d said to me, and I’d caught his meaning straight away, he was telling me, warning me to let it go. I thought: Yes, my father is right. Hadn’t Mrs Pavić greeted me in the street, hadn’t Anka found happiness with Javor? ‘Things happen. Forget about it.’ He touched my cheek, he looked tired. Time had passed. Now my father preferred to build sheds in his yard rather than drink with his old friends. My mother said he was becoming tender-hearted. So I walked towards Krešimir and extended my hand. And Krešimir looked at me and then looked away. He pushed off the wall and walked past me, as if I were never there.

The next day I told my father he was wrong: the past is never passed.

In the bakery, a man and a woman ahead of me in a short line.

‘After all this time. Now he comes back. The neighbours thought they were seeing a ghost.’

The man behind her gave a snort.

‘Everyone knew it was him,’ she continued. ‘He had a harelip. And they say the daughter was with him, a grown woman.’

‘They’ve moved back into the old place?’

‘Yes. And a row with the neighbours, over their tractor.’

The man grunted.

Every few months a newspaper article or something else kicked something off, put people on edge, set them talking. The same could happen anywhere. The knowledge was a shivering child locked in an upstairs room. The dark child haunted our dreams, invaded the places in our minds even we didn’t dare go. The couple in front of me stopped talking, having gone as far as they dared. They collected their loaves and left. I asked my cousin’s ex-wife. ‘Where?’

‘K—’ She gave the name of a town forty kilometres to the east, larger than Gost. Nothing more was said. People were becoming mindful of what could happen here. Another plough had broken the crust of the fallow field of memories.

I left the bakery and I thought I might go by the Zodijak for a beer. It was still early, the sky a pale blue and heat left in the sun. I reached the road and was about to cross, when I got a shock. There was Laura. Sitting at an outside table with Fabjan. Laura laughing — as though Fabjan had just said something really funny.