Aminatta Forna - The Hired Man

The stink of them, I cannot stand it.

What are you doing? I stop moving. The voice, clear and loud, as only a sleep talker would speak, comes from inside one of the bivouacs. There’s a stirring and grumbling, the sound of bodies turning. I’m fucking your mother .

Silence again.

Now it’s time to choose. I can either go back for the boy down the hill, or I can wait for his relief. I think about it and decide to wait for the relief. Today is the boy’s lucky day. Maybe because he looked at his watch and maybe the watch was given to him by his father. Or because he doesn’t look like the type who’d be out here willingly, doing this kind of work: he looked on the small side and quite young, difficult to tell exactly how young in the flash of light from the torch. Too young but old enough. Counting more than the minutes to the end of his shift, counting the weeks and the days until he can go home.

I change my mind back again.

A mist is coming down, as I knew it would, thickening around me. Soon enough I find him. He’s sitting with his back against a tree, one hand on his upright rifle, head back, eyes closed. For a moment I think he’s asleep, but he opens his eyes and looks around, peering into the mist. I am about a hundred metres away and I know he hasn’t seen me or heard me: he’s looking for the guy who’s coming to replace him. He wants the hell out of there while he’s still alive. The commander should put them on watch in pairs, but he doesn’t want to lose face. As for me, I’ve tried not to be too predictable. But this guy, whose eyes keep darting in the direction he expects the relief to come from, well let’s just say it would be a shame not to disappoint him.

I move closer. Seventy metres.

He cocks his head like a dog, turns from side to side. Then he yawns and even though he tries to control it, still it gives me the opportunity to move closer. Sixty metres. I have a clear line of sight through the trees. I raise the rifle to my shoulder and put my eye to the eye piece. In the grainy light of the new dawn I see him stare into the mist with the blank, wide-eyed stare of a person trying to stay awake. From a distance, the rustle of dead leaves. Now he’s alert. This is it, he thinks, relief on its way or somebody coming to kill him. He’s wrong on both counts. The sound is just deer moving through the woods, magnified by the mist, so that they sound nearer than they are. As for the person coming to kill him, I’m already here.

He has tightened his grip on his rifle and is looking around. He has that way of screwing up his eyes and sticking out his chin that short-sighted people do. He licks his lips and the corners of his mouth. The minutes pass. I place different parts of him at the centre of my cross hair, his left eye, then his right eye, his nose (which needs a wipe), his mouth. The deer move on. The man in front of me slumps, his shoulders and chest drop and his belly sinks, he loosens his grip on his rifle, he rolls back on his heels to lean his weight against the tree. He does something I’ve never seen a grown man do, he puts his thumb in his mouth and sucks.

Mist threads through the trees, water gathers on the branches, drops fall in patterns of sound. I let the minutes pass. I’m so close to him I can hear his breathing. Ten minutes or so later and the thing I’ve been waiting for happens. He yawns and this time he lets it go, taking short breaths and opening his mouth wider with each one. His eyes are closed tight and his head rocks back. He doesn’t bother to cover his mouth.

Time now. I take a breath and exhale slowly. I think: Now that’s a good way to die.

He is small, I was right. I pull off his jacket and use it to bind his head, to prevent a blood trail, because the back of his head is open. Then I hoist him without too much difficulty over my shoulders. The body is warm and limp. When we reach the edge of the ravine I lower him to the ground and unwrap the jacket. His jaw falls open. I push it shut. He has a cleft in his chin and long, dark eyebrows. The jaw falls open again. I heft him over the side of the ravine. The body thuds as it bounces off a rock, a crack as it snags briefly on the branches of a small tree and then it’s gone. A splash as he enters the swimming hole. The body lands face up and I watch while it gently corrects itself, spinning slowly in the current. I pick up both our guns and head home.

This is how it has been for a few weeks now. The first one, of course, the drunken hunter. There’ve been others. Three, maybe four. Once I left it too late and with daylight coming I had to string the corpse up by the ankles, hoist it into a tree and wait until later to come back. Some of the skull came loose and part of his brain slithered out and fell to the ground. I kicked earth over it. Later I worried the dog would find it, but that didn’t happen.

All over the country the number of deserters is growing; the commander doesn’t let his men spend too much time looking for the men who’ve gone missing. Does he even know they’re dead? At any rate the dog has definitely gone, because there’s been no sight of him, not even a bark or a whimper. Maybe he ran away.

September, a day passes without the scream and whistle of shells. I’d like to tell you we left our houses and wandered the streets shaking hands and gazing at the clear blue sky, but it wasn’t like that. A month earlier the National Guard finally lived up to their promises and began their offensive; they’d been waiting to be supplied with weapons and ammunition by the government. For months St Mary’s Church survived the shelling. People said it was a miracle, but I knew, because I had read it in a book in the library, that artillerymen rely on spires and other landmarks to direct their aim. When, in the final days, the soldiers on the hill rained shells on us St Mary’s Church was hit several times; this time they were aiming for it, something for us to remember them by. I pass by the day the shells stop and see the priest (he’d shown courage in the last months, leading the funerals to the graveyard): he is moving a large silver cross out of the way of the weather and thieves. In the street a dog stands on a low roof and barks at the heads of passers-by. The smell of scorched brick and dust mixes with the odour of oleander. For twenty minutes I help the priest shift rubble and broken statues, then I walk through Gost as I haven’t for weeks.

Over the days that follow memorial notices are posted on telegraph poles and lamp posts throughout Gost, so that the poles and posts flutter with white paper like they do at carnival time; some notices are new and brightly white, others rippled and water-stained, streaked with ink. Some sheets of paper are blank, washed clean by the weather; announcements of new deaths are pasted over the old. I stop and read. Jelena Rukavina. I saw her, her face had been crushed by her own house, the cheek caved in and part of the skull. She looked exactly like a broken doll, as though her head was hollow inside. Joso Cacić. He burned. Gas from a pipe. He was trapped and he couldn’t get away from the flames. We didn’t get to him in time. Karlo Klanac cracked jokes all the time we removed the bricks from on top of him. He died anyway. Smiling death, the doctors called it, something to do with the kidneys. Karlo Klanac went with smiles and bad puns. Bernarda Zorica. Shrapnel. Radmila Štimac. Shrapnel. Ivan Maras-Brico. I went to school with him. He had his head blown off. Miro’s brother, digging up potatoes in his back yard, took a direct hit. Imagine what that does to a man. His wife, standing at the window, blinked and he was gone. Puff! Antun Ratković crashed his car driving home without headlights in the blackout.

Later I climb up to the old bunker, where the men had been camped. Bleached rectangles of grass, an old shaving brush and a pink plastic toothbrush with bent bristles, a lighter in the shape of a steamer ship, which no longer works, a penknife, the blade is rusty and the handle dew-stained but I keep it anyway, and a wallet empty except for a photograph of twin dark-haired boys. A pile of rubbish: empty tins, cigarette cartons and ration packs. And a cesspit full of shit.