Aminatta Forna - The Hired Man

I didn’t know about Pakistan. I asked, ‘Is this your first time here?’

‘I came here when I was little. It must have been the late ’60s or maybe early ’70s. I came with my parents. I fell in love for the first time.’

I told Laura she looked too young to have been in love as long ago as that.

Laura laughed, a proper laugh, not the titter women give when they think they’re being flattered and which Laura produced every time she felt awkward. ‘I was just a kid. Not much more than five or so. I know it sounds ridiculous, and of course it wasn’t really love — but it was the first time I felt that kind of emotion, something that was different from the way I loved my parents or my sister, something far more thrilling. I can remember the exact moment, the place, what it looked like, smelt like. rosemary, lavender and thyme — all those herbs that grow wild, mixed with dust and salt from the sea. The heat. Even what I was wearing, which was a swimsuit with a big yellow sun on it. I was standing on a beach with my sister, my parents were in a boat offshore. I don’t know how we came to be separated like that, but we were and probably it wasn’t that far to swim, but to me it seemed a very long way. Everyone in the boat was calling to me, even my sister tried to encourage me into the water, but I panicked and started crying. I’d only just learned to swim and I still used my rubber ring; trouble was the rubber ring was on the boat. I refused to get into the water without it.’

‘Didn’t one of your parents bring it to you?’

‘No. The boat boy, the son or nephew of the man who owned the boat, he’d come with us to help out for the day and was completely at one with the water, he grabbed it and dived in. I worshipped him for the rest of the holiday. I guess he’d have been about nine. I still remember the sight of him diving from the prow of the boat. It made me feel special. He was my hero.’ Laura laughed again, softly.

At sundown I walked the dogs on the hills. The lights of Gost separated me from a vast darkness: the sea, two hours’ drive away. Zeka picked up a scent and ran ahead with her nose to the ground, Kos behind. I left them for a short while, to see where they were headed, and then called them to heel before they could disappear into the pine plantation. Together we entered the trees. Inside it was closer to night. The pine needles were soft underfoot, soundless. There is a place where the deer gather on the other side of the plantation and the trees give way to a clearing. At about fifty metres from our destination I told the dogs to go down and wait for me, which they did, sinking slowly to their haunches. They liked to pretend they didn’t care, Kos and Zeka, but under the skin every nerve and muscle twitched. I moved slowly forward, balancing my weight on the outside edges of my feet; every ten steps I stopped and listened. In the silence of the forest I counted on hearing the deer before I saw them and so it happened: a group of eight grazing at the edge of the clearing. A young doe lifted her head at my approach. I froze. She glanced about nervously before she lowered her head again. Seven does, two bucks. The bucks were younger, less than a year old, probably. The doe who’d raised her head was closest to me and perhaps three years old. I lifted my rifle, set my sights on her and released the safety catch. She grazed on, her body angled away from me. I watched and waited. She might have sensed me, for she lifted her head a second time and looked to the left and right and then in my direction. An ear twitched. Neither of us moved. Then she relaxed and lowered her head; reaching for another morsel she shifted her footing and presented her broadside to me. I placed the cross hair at her temple, took a breath, exhaled, squeezed the trigger and watched her drop.

At the sound of the gun the rest of the deer fled. Kos and Zeka were at my side, ready to follow the blood trail if there was one. But I didn’t need them today: she’d fallen exactly where she’d stood. The sky had turned to a deep blue and it was too dark now to dress her in the woods, so I hoisted her onto my shoulder and headed in the direction of home. For two days my thoughts had been crowded by memories of Krešimir and of Anka. It felt as though I had been lifted up and set back in that time, the events of which I’d found a way to live with. I’d had no choice, none of us had, though some were better at it than others. Now I remembered how here, where the ravine meets the pine trees, we’d seen our first boar.

Anka, wearing yellow pop sox, stands upon a rock, showing off her balance: on tiptoe, her arms above her head, like a dancer in a musical box. Slowly she extends one leg behind her, an arm in front. She is wearing a yellow skirt which matches her socks and it ruffles in the breeze; otherwise she is impressively still. I have opened my mouth to cheer, when I see her expression and follow her line of sight to the first row of trees. There, in the no man’s land of shadows and sunlight, a boar: huge. Slowly I raise my gun and take aim. I miss, thank God, because the gun is a pea shooter and would doubtless only have made him mad. The bullet ricochets off a tree. The great beast shudders, regards us a moment longer and is gone. Anka jumps off the rock and into my arms.

We walk home exultant. Nobody bothers to mention that I really shot a tree and not a boar. Krešimir and I are fourteen and Anka is ten. The year is 1975.

I stood and inhaled the cold scent of the pine, the base note of leaf mould, made all the more powerful by the darkness. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine 1975 and then opened them before a picture could come. I whistled for Kos and Zeka and we returned by way of the road. Light flared between the shutters of the blue house. I stood on the road facing the house, the warm corpse of the deer over my shoulder, the dogs silent by my side. Somebody (Laura?) crossed in front of an upstairs window. I stood there for some minutes more until Kos spoke, a soft whine, and we turned towards home.

I lay awake, thinking about the past, things I hadn’t thought about for years. Somewhere nearby the vixen called, an awful sound. I’d seen her, she came some nights, circling the houses to search for scraps to take back to her half-grown cubs and drawn that night by the scent of the deer I’d dressed in the yard a couple of hours before. She taunted the dogs and the dogs answered, racing up and down their pen, barking and howling, clawing the wire mesh.

Next morning, the Tuesday, I arrived early at the blue house. In my hand I held a chisel. A few years after the house first became empty somebody had plastered and whitewashed a section of the façade. The job had been hastily done. I checked nobody was around and then I scraped at a layer of the plaster, loosening a portion, which I pulled away with my fingers. I stood there for a few minutes scraping and tossing lumps of plaster into the tall grass. I stopped and stood back. Now you could see a part of what lay beneath: a patchwork of small blue and green tiles made of glass and clay, the same as the ones lying on my windowsill.

Inside Laura was talking on her mobile phone. The day was clear and the sky pale blue. On many days the mountains blocked the reach of the mobile networks, but that day the invisible force field that seemed to surround Gost so much of the time had lifted. Laura pointed to the phone in her hand and mouthed something to me, then waved a hand at the coffee pot on the table next to a single cup. She left to finish her call upstairs. No sign of either the son or the daughter. I carried my coffee outside and set to work removing paint from the windowsills.

An hour on Laura came out to see how I was doing, then left to go into town. When she came back I set down my tools to help carry the groceries from the car. More coffee, which we carried outside again. Laura turned her face to the sun, closed her eyes for a few seconds and then opened them again to take a sip of her coffee; her eyes roamed the front of the house. When she noticed the place on the wall where I had scraped away the plaster she stood up and went over to inspect it, running her fingertips across the tiles. I watched her for a bit and then I said, ‘What is it?’