Aminatta Forna - The Hired Man

I stay away from the ravine and the woods for a week or more, two weeks. When I finally go back up there, the bodies have been moved, the earth turned over. Just a few scraps of singed denim.

‘I thought she would find a way to come back. To my house, to my mother’s house. To those people who loved her and would protect her. Or to send a message at least. But she never did. She decided to rely only on herself. She went. There was a moment, after I shot the youth. I remember how she stepped back, she never screamed, simply stepped backwards into the darkness, turned and fled. For a long time, as I waited for her to return, I believed she knew I was there behind the trees and that this was my doing. That she knew I would come. For who else could it have been?’

‘Do you think she will come back one day?’

‘If she survived, if maybe she headed south and not north. But they would have been on the lookout for her. She would have had to circle back on herself. Cross the ravine. And if she forgives us, if she ever forgives us.’

‘What about Javor?’

‘The authorities found Javor, his remains, long after the war, many kilometres away. The militias had begun to transport people to be killed. Then came more wars, so many wars, it took years to find them. We were just the beginning, you see.’

Together we looked at the houses of Gost down below. I said, ‘You can never tell anybody.’

‘Why don’t you go and live somewhere else?’

I shrugged. ‘Why should I? And anyway where would I go? When you’ve seen it and you know nothing is going to change that, you get used to it, like an aftertaste of something rotten. You get used to it, because you have to. Gost is my home. I live here because it’s what I want.’

‘But then you’re reminded, every day.’

‘Yes,’ I said simply. ‘But I like to remember. Not just the bad times, but the good ones too.’

‘And that horrible man, Fabjan?’

‘I like to be sure he remembers too.’

Summer is nearly over, that time of year again. Here at the Zodijak it’s still warm enough to sit out and will be for some time. At this time of day the sun is low, it dazzles the drinkers who sit out front. I was in town running my errands earlier in the day, have stopped by as is my habit. The new girl has gone of course, decided life in Gost didn’t suit her after all. On the coast the restaurants will be closing up for the season: umbrellas stowed away, chairs turned upside down on tables for the last time. In the restaurant where I once worked with the Italian chef there was a tank in which hundreds of fish were kept alive. At the end of the season we had to catch all the fish so we could empty the tanks. I’ve been back to the coast. Sometimes I wonder what took me so long. I went to Pag, I drove across the newly renovated bridge, I even found my old hut, which has been done up and is rented to visitors. Wild bees had made their home in the old hives. Sage still grew everywhere. I understand why Krešimir had a dream of a life on the islands: I did once and it was a good life. But Krešimir won’t be going. Krešimir is staying in Gost; we are all staying in Gost: Fabjan, Krešimir and me. We three.

In the last days of their stay I tried to make sure that Laura and the family had a good time, to repair a little of the mood. I told Laura again that Fabjan had been drunk and there would be no repeat of his behaviour. I’m not sure how convinced she was, but later in the same day we shared a glass of wine outside the house and, in discussion about some fittings for the house, she said she’d look in England and bring them out next time — so that’s a good sign. The wine brought some colour back to her cheeks and we talked about the first time we’d met, when I found her looking for the water mains outside the house, and she blushed and laughed. I could still tease her, see.

I want them back.

The last thing I did was take Matthew hunting, as I’d promised. He didn’t do badly at all: more nerve than I’d given him credit for, though he flinched at the last moment and we ended up trailing his animal a short way. Zeka did well, considering it was the first time he’d worked alone; his confidence is building. I haven’t started another dog yet, but I will, perhaps in the spring so I can use next year’s hunt season to bring her on. For now Zeka and I, we manage on our own. We miss Kos still. Grace, once I had taught her how to tread more lightly and not to alert every beast for two kilometres around to her presence, turned out to have the eye and the steady hand of a marksman, the ability to concentrate, to go straight to the zone. I’d seen it in the way she worked to restore the mosaics, everything she did from examining a dragonfly’s wing to baking a cake, weaving friendship bands, so I fetched mine from the drawer and let her tie it round my wrist. In the woods, I watched her: the way she cradled the stock, you’d never believe it was the first time she’d held a gun. I thought about Anka and I felt the ember of hope that has burned inside me for years, that Anka is out there somewhere, that she took the boy’s rifle and used it to stay alive, that one day she’ll come back to Gost.

There are people like me all over, the ones who want to remember, like I told Grace, different from the ones who want to forget. Every time a DNA test comes up with a match, something is quieted, a hope is doused. I wonder if Krešimir and Vinka check with the authorities. Krešimir told Fabjan where to find Javor, I saw it in his eye that day at the Zodijak when he stopped to greet me. I knew it then. It was in his smile, in his voice and in his tread as he left. He’d found a way to avenge himself on all of us. Once, blind drunk, I banged on the door of their house. Krešimir was out but Vinka, equally drunk but better used to holding her liquor, flew into a rage in defence of her son. ‘He did his duty. It wasn’t his fault.’ And maybe Krešimir never imagined it would go so far. Probably he was moved by nothing more than a low spite. It was all the same to me: Vinka never cried for Anka and neither did Krešimir.

The family had been gone about three weeks when the graffiti appeared. It was painted on the bridge in an uneven hand, slashed strokes. It said:

We are all Krešimir Pavić.

It remained there for a whole day before the town authorities had it cleaned off. The paint must have been oil-based, black, hard to remove, the ghost of the words remained visible.

I didn’t see the graffiti when the paint was fresh, I hadn’t been into town for a few days. Still so much work to do. Up in the attic I cleared the wasps’ nest. Wasps are master builders, their intricate hexagonal homes, comprised of thousands of identical cells, are extraordinary. They are hunters too, though most people consider them nothing more than scavengers and nuisances. I have seen a wasp alight on a fly and sever its wings, carry the maimed creature away to feed its young. I removed the nest with care, handling it with respect, as one must. Next I need to finish splitting and stacking logs — the dead tree, hours of work there to be done before the bura begins to blow and the sea freezes over.

The next time the graffiti appeared it was on the wall of the railway station. We are all Krešimir Pavić. Talk in the bakery, in speech comprised of half-sentences, gestures and looks. The dark child is scratching on the walls, the scratching is becoming louder. In the Zodijak, a heavy silence. Fabjan sits surrounded by it. The words on the walls hold different meanings for different people, but nobody will say what those meanings are. People in Gost look at each other, mistrust seeps through every conversation. For days, it seems, we stand on the edge of something. We are all Krešimir Pavić . On the door of the empty Orthodox church. But who is responsible?