Aminatta Forna - The Hired Man

‘I’ll miss him,’ I said. ‘And so would you.’

For a few seconds Fabjan considered my words. He didn’t add anything. We understood each other.

When Fabjan had gone I sat for a few minutes and thought about what to tell Laura. A sound made me turn. Matthew: standing on the stairs. I’d completely forgotten about him. ‘Duro.’ He rubbed an eye. ‘What are you doing here?’

We walked over to my house. I boiled water, made coffee. I told Laura that Fabjan was a businessman with many interests in Gost, a thug who operated outside the law. He and Krešimir had a falling out over money, I said. Krešimir owed Fabjan money and Fabjan wanted to be repaid from the sale of the house. I said I didn’t know more details but I supposed that’s what it had been about. Fabjan was used to getting what he wanted with threats. Laura didn’t pretend to understand; she was still stunned. If she had questions they’d come later, by which time I would have thought up more answers. For the time being the explanation I’d given was good enough. Matthew had slept through everything and his questions about what had happened prevented the need for further analysis, rehearsing the sequence of events from Grace being surprised by Fabjan when he walked in without knocking, frightening the life out of her where she stood in the kitchen, to Laura coming down the stairs in answer to her daughter’s call, Grace running to fetch me.

I walked them back to the blue house and stayed there the night. I lay on my back on the couch. I thought about Fabjan’s question. He asked me what I wanted, a question to which he already knew the answer and had known it for many years. It was why we were still here, we three in Gost, when so many had left.

I wanted everything the way it had always been.

Along the edge of the field: a dense scattering of pink pimpernel, the flowers came up at this time of the year in the farmers’ fields. The day was hot, cloudless, the trees shimmered behind currents of air in which a pair of kestrels hovered. The heron passed overhead on its way to the river. No wind. Dust in the air. The darkness of the trees came abruptly and I had to slow down until my eyes adjusted to the change. I’m getting old, I thought. Once or twice I heard the sound of other living things in the woods, but I hadn’t come to hunt, I’d come to escape the house. I carried nothing and had left with no particular destination in mind, but now I found myself headed for Gudura Uspomena.

In Gost talk about the blue house continued. People knew about the paint attack, though not about Fabjan’s visit. I imagined eyes following Krešimir wherever he went. I didn’t go to the Zodijak, I thought I’d give Fabjan a day or two. Anyway his car wasn’t parked outside. When I went back to the blue house the doors, which had stood open so much of the summer, were closed and Laura answered my knock warily, her hand at her throat as it had been last night. Inside the house was slightly altered: no vase of flowers on the table, the throws on the chairs, the cushions, these things were missing. Put away, I supposed. Laura was preparing to leave. We drank coffee at the kitchen table and she said she’d spoken to Conor who’d offered to fly out, but she’d told him they were OK. He’d asked her to give me his thanks. It seemed to me the full extent of what had happened the night before was just beginning to be felt.

‘What about the police?’ I asked Laura.

‘Conor says we might have to stay on if there’s an investigation.’

I told her that was likely to be true, that I was there if she needed me. ‘But he won’t be back,’ I’d promised her. ‘He was drunk. It’s over.’

Below me the water level in the swimming hole was low and the water barely moved. Shades of green, white rocks visible beneath the surface. Downstream the waterfall had narrowed to a spout, which spilled evenly into the pool below. The sound rode upwards through the still air. For twenty minutes I stood and stared at the view. I’d known it all my life and it changed every hour of every day.

A noise behind me made me turn. Something moved in the trees. The footfall, too heavy for a deer, belonged to a person. I waited with my back to the ravine. A figure appeared: Grace. She walked towards me, the sweat shone on her forehead and she was breathing heavily. A few metres out of the trees she stopped, looked at the sky and then out across the ravine, shading her eyes. She came over to where I was standing. ‘Isn’t it amazing? You never brought us up here. I found it by myself.’

I turned away, to look out over the ravine. ‘What do you want?’

‘I wanted to talk to you about the man who came last night.’

‘His name is Fabjan.’

‘And he runs the café where Matt went to use the Internet. Mum told me. She couldn’t remember his name. Is he a friend of yours?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Do you have any friends?’

‘Not really.’

Grace was quiet. She chewed her top lip. ‘But you used to.’ She said it as a statement, not a question.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘So what happened to them?’

I shrugged.

‘You knew the people who lived in our house before, didn’t you?’

‘Gost is a small place. I live a few hundred metres away. How could I not know them?’

‘Yeah but.’ She raised her hand to shade her eyes as she turned to look at me, I had my back to the sun. ‘I think you knew them quite well.’

‘So I did. So what?’

‘Mum hasn’t figured it out because she doesn’t care to look. It’s how she is. She sees the world the way she wants to see it, and then she believes that’s the way the world actually is, if that makes sense. And Matt, well you know Matt.’ She stopped and smiled at me: a sweet, small smile. ‘But it’s not that hard. Remember you told me how Kos found her way around? The places she knew by heart, you’d never know she was blind. Then other places, I remember you said she’d rely on Zeka or sometimes you’d have to call to her.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘So Kos knows our house. I mean, she knew it.’ Grace paused. ‘She knew where the doors were and where to lie down so she was out of the way without anyone having to tell her.’

I shrugged again.

Grace went on, ‘Also the way you touch the table. I’ve seen you do it. Of course, you knew the mosaic was there all along. I worked that out ages ago. ’ She stopped talking and bent to pick a blade of grass and smoothed it between her fingers. ‘So I think you knew the people well and you used to visit there a lot. Before us.’ She sat down on the ground and began to chew the end of the blade of grass. ‘It’s OK. You can tell me. I want to know.’

I discovered the bodies at the ravine.

On the way down the hill my head and heart pound, there’s a metallic taste in my mouth, also bitter bile. I am suddenly cold. And thirsty, desperately thirsty. I find a stream and drink from it, the water tastes of rotten leaves, I gulp it down like a man who has been lost at sea. The stink of the corpses is in my nostrils, my clothes, my hair. When I begin to move again I don’t run, I drag myself through the woods. What slows my pace is the immensity of the crime and of what it required for those bodies to be there: dumped in the ravine and raked over. How many people did it take? Who else knows about this? How many people in Gost are part of it? At times I imagine I’m being followed or watched and that somebody will challenge me. Once or twice I stop and listen. The further I get the more the idea of the bodies being up there, carelessly buried, nobody to guard over them and left to the animals, seems impossible: the baker and his family and their Mongol daughter. Who else has been killed and discarded? I think of the others who have gone, the empty houses. I think of my father’s colleague from the post office, whose boss is Javor’s father — walking along with his pockets stuffed with envelopes. What was it he knew or imagined? He was a man in his sixties, who’d seen more than I ever had, who may even have fought a war. I wonder at the fate of Javor’s father. I walk on, my mind becomes clearer. First, Javor. Javor must get out of Gost. I start to think how this might happen, I don’t trust the roads: full of checkpoints, militiamen and soldiers. Maybe through the mountains. Javor is no outdoorsman but I could go with him. Winter, when the passes became snowbound, is still some way off. There is fighting further north, which is where it moved after it left Gost. To the coast then. Across the plains, by foot. The hardest thing would be to stay out of sight. My thoughts loop back to leaving by road, of what it would take to smuggle Javor. Who could I rely upon? Now and with this new knowledge, how do I know who to trust?