Aminatta Forna - The Hired Man

‘No problem. Anything else?’

Javor smiles and throws the cigarette stub out of the door of the hut. ‘Get me some fucking ice cream.’

Anka gives me a lift into town in her car. We pass the Crisis HQ and Anka looks at the building, which was once a municipal office where some works of minor bureaucracy were achieved. Now it is everything. Anka is going to visit her mother. I tell her I have some business to do, there is work around for someone like me, although rates are low. Still, work is work, I’m in no position to turn it down. After that I’m going in search of ice cream, whatever I can find. Maraschino. And if I can’t find that, I’ll buy a can of condensed milk and a packet of wafers which is the next best thing.

Some say October is the best time to visit these parts, after the rush, but when the sea and the air are still warm. There is a low sun. Anka takes her time gathering her things together before she steps out of the car. She places her basket on the car roof while she searches for something in her handbag. At the last minute she looks up and waves at me. She’s wearing a red hat, the one she wore the summer before and earlier this summer, before the bombardment began. For a few months nobody wore colours, nothing that might risk turning you into a target and certainly not a red hat. But in recent weeks she has taken to wearing it again. A small act of defiance.

What memories of people you keep with you. I remember my father polishing the lenses of his black-framed glasses and peering through them before he placed them on his nose. I remember that he did it, of course, but each time I remember it, I remember the one particular time he did it just before he opened a book of birds I’d brought home from school with me and began to name each species without reading the captions. Greenshank, redshank, sandpiper. I remember the smell of him at Christmas and weddings, his citrus aftershave. I remember Danica being stung twice by bees during a family picnic. My mother rubbed crushed parsley on my sister’s arm. I remember my mother with a pair of secateurs in her hand, tapping the glass of the kitchen window at a cat about to defecate among the herbs. Most strongly I remember, again, the smell of my mother: her rose hand cream. When she’d been cooking she smelled of sweat and onions. I remember Anka standing on a rock, one leg stretched out behind her, a pointed foot. Anka shooting a rabbit. A coin flipping across the knuckles of her right hand. Picking a drunk Javor from the floor. Once again the strongest memory is a smell: of Anka’s vinegar-clean hair the day she hugged me and pressed her nose into my face as she kissed me, the day I came back to Gost. That smell. Maybe the memory of the physical senses, those of taste, touch and smell, is stronger than the memory of images or sounds. I don’t know. Maybe it all depends on the person. Whatever, the memory of the sight of Anka in her red hat, with her red car — was never one of the ones I kept — not until a summer sixteen years later brought it sharply back. It wasn’t my last memory of her.

My last true memory of her was of another time, not long afterwards.

Once, long after we were lovers and had already become friends, Anka told me that her favourite place on my body had been the back of my neck. I was sitting at the table in the blue house, the table I made, cutting a piece of lino with a sharp knife. She passed behind me and touched it with her forefinger. ‘The way the hair grows,’ she said. ‘And the skin is very soft. You grow rough all over, except here, in this place,’ and she tapped the top of my spine, ‘nothing changes. You are all still boys. Yours looks exactly the way it did when we were still children. If I took a photograph and showed it to somebody they wouldn’t be able to tell me if you were a girl or a boy.’ It was perhaps the only time she ever referred to the fact we had once been more than childhood friends. That evening I held up the piece of mirror I used to shave and tried to see the back of my neck in the reflection of the window.

Two years later I am standing at the door of my mother’s house watching Anka wash her hair at the well. She’s not doing it well. At first she scoops palmfuls of water from the bucket over the back of her head. When that doesn’t work, she tries to pour water over her head by holding the pail at an awkward angle, elbow in the air. The water rushes out and swamps her. From the kitchen door I laugh. ‘Go shit in a lake, Duro,’ she says through her hair.

Where was Javor? Still asleep in the hut. She doesn’t want either to wake him or to leave while he is still asleep and so she goes out to wash her hair by the well at our house, even though she has a well and a bathroom at home.

I come down to help her, taking the pail. I am eating a carrot and I bite a piece off and give her the rest. She stands up to eat it, flipping her hair back over her head. She is facing the sun and the light catches her cheekbones. In her eyes the pupil and iris are separate, two distinct colours, where usually they are almost the same. Her beauty changes depending on the time of day, the quality of the light. She laughs and takes a bite of carrot and chews it carelessly with her lips slightly apart, so that occasionally there is a faint glimmer of a tooth, a hint of orange. She swallows the last of the carrot, bends and flips her hair over her face.

I sit on the edge of the well and pour water in a thin stream so that it slides over her hair. She takes a bar of soap (shampoo is scarce) and rubs it into her hair and I watch the motion of her fingers and the magic of the rising froth, not listening to what she is saying until the fingers of the hand which isn’t holding the soap grope round and catch hold of my wrist. ‘Stop, stop!’

‘Sorry.’

‘Wait. I’ll tell you when to start again.’ While I wait I fold my arms and stare at the hills. My mind moves away from the hair-washing and the well water and I wonder where we are heading. Nobody dares think more than one day in advance, can imagine a place in time as distant as next week, next month, next year. Nor is anyone thinking about war, or using the word. Not the newspapers, not the drinkers in the Zodijak. War is far too big a word.

‘Duro, pour!’

I begin to pour again. The water is cold, very cold indeed. I can see it in the pinched, pale ends of Anka’s fingers. For the first time I notice the back of her neck and realise that this maybe is the only time I’ve ever seen it, at least since we stopped being children, because usually this part of her is curtained off by her hair. I remember not so long ago when she talked about the back of my neck. Now here is hers, pale as the moon, the hairs raised on tiny goose pimples. I reach out my fingers and touch it. She lifts her head slightly. ‘What?’

‘Nothing. A bit of soap.’ I pour more water and when I look up, Javor is standing at the door of the outbuilding where he sleeps, barefoot, wearing a pair of jeans, smoking a rolled cigarette. Just watching us, without anger. I hold out the bucket to him and he stubs his cigarette out on the side of the flimsy building, steps forward and takes it from me. He tips the remainder of the water onto Anka’s hair and she sees it’s him, reaches behind her and briefly clasps his ankle with her fingers.

I go into the house and come back with my mother’s bottle of vinegar.

Afterwards Anka rubs her hair with a towel and leaves it to dry in the sun. The nape of her neck is back behind its veil. I go to fetch coffee and when I come back she is sitting on the edge of the well, where I had sat; Javor is behind her. He is playing with the hair at the back of her neck and occasionally, idly and without thinking, he strokes her neck with his thumb. When I hand him his coffee he removes his hand from Anka’s neck to take the cup. I don’t envy him. These people are as dear to me as they are to each other. Javor and Anka. My friends.