Aminatta Forna - The Hired Man

At home I dropped a fork into the jar of plums, speared them one at a time and ate them whole. They tasted of all those winters when we ate food pickled and preserved in those months of heat gone by that you could neither recall nor imagine. I ate one jar and began on another. I drank the rakija straight from the bottle. Outside Kos barked at something in the night. I went outside and slipped the bolt of the dogs’ pen and let them follow me inside where they quickly chose a comfortable spot to lie down, in case I changed my mind.

The truth is, like the old folk of Gost, I’m not much given to the use of electric light either. Those races against Krešimir — I usually won them, I’m perfectly comfortable in the dark.

I looked at the cassettes. The Beatles. Sergeant Pepper. Rubber Soul . Supertramp’s Breakfast in America . Electric Light Orchestra. One by a band from here. I still had a cassette player for all the cassettes I owned and had never replaced with CDs. I put the tape in the slot, turned the volume up and sat back in my chair.

The music was terrible. The band was a rock band from the coast who lasted about three years before they broke up. Never my kind of thing, I prefer Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash. Fifteen years on, two of them reformed the band hoping to cash in on their past success, but in that time a lot had changed including the people who’d once been their fans and nobody wanted to know. Nostalgia interested no one, except perhaps the very young. The band released a second album, I think, and then dropped out of sight.

I ejected the tape and put in one by the Beatles. ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’. My heart quickened and drained as I listened to the familiar vibrating notes of the organ. I rewound and listened to it three more times; gradually I raised the volume and hoped they could hear it in Gost.

At two in the morning I was drunker than I’d been in years. I remembered Krešimir and his shopping bags and the rain on his head and thought it was funny. I must have laughed aloud because the dogs came over and nuzzled me. After I petted them Kos returned to her place, but Zeka, who is more anxious and less confident, lay down close to me. When I woke, several hours had passed, it was dawn and I was curled up on the floor, my face pressed into Zeka’s fur. Kos was at the door waiting to be let out. The room smelled of spirits and when I stood up I noticed the broken rakija bottle in the corner of the room. I must have thrown it there; I didn’t remember that at all.

Pots from the shed washed and arranged in a row upon a windowsill. Laura, coming from the field opposite, a bunch of wild flowers in her hand, said in a tight voice, ‘We missed you yesterday.’

‘I had some business to deal with.’

She passed me and went into the house without meeting my eye. I realised I’d upset the balance of things. That I was a hired man and she was my employer made Laura relaxed in having me around the house. A mistake to take a day away without explanation: it made her feel she wasn’t the boss. I followed her into the house and watched her put the flowers in a vase and set them on the kitchen table. I put the things I was carrying, a car battery and a can of motor oil, on the floor.

‘What are those for?’

‘The car. I’d like to see if I can get it started. If that’s OK.’

I went to work at the back of the house, stripping the paint from the windows. The day was sulphurously hot, the smell of melting tar in the air. I took off my shirt and felt the sun on my back. The work and the heat brought me back to a sense of well-being, to a time I spent working on the tourist boats on the coast — some of the best months of my life. Often I did nothing more than ferry folk to and from the beaches and the islets. One summer I worked on board a ketch. We’d load up in the morning, sail for an hour and drop anchor in a small cove where we’d hand out masks and snorkels and herd the day trippers out from under the shade of the canopy and into the sea. The point was to get everybody off the boat so we could relax among ourselves. For some of the guys it became a game and sometimes they even laid bets. No matter how old or young, they all had to get into the water. Once there was a shoal of jellyfish beneath and another time an old guy with a stick; his daughter went to the captain to say her father didn’t want to swim. But even he went in, protesting to the end. I remember the bump on his chest made by his pacemaker. The only exceptions they made were for the prettiest girls.

While they were at it I dived from the other side of the boat and swam to a place on the shore: a flat slab of rock, which caught the sun in the late morning. I’d climb over the other rocks to reach it and for nearly an hour I’d lie there, doing nothing but watching the horizon, which shimmered and shook, a tightrope between sky and earth. The rock was warm, blood temperature, as if during the day it drew life from the sun. It even had a feral, animal kind of odour, of salt, fish and dried seaweed. After exactly fifty minutes I swam back to the boat underwater, passing the tourists unnoticed, and climbed up the rope.

Laura appeared at the bottom of the ladder. Perhaps she’d called my name and I hadn’t heard. I’d been back on the islands. She said, ‘We’re going off to explore. We’ll be home in a few hours.’

‘Be careful,’ I said.

Laura raised her eyebrows and gave a little laugh. ‘Of what?’

I had spoken without thinking, living too much in the past. I smiled and started to come down the ladder. ‘Of the roads, of course. There are madmen in their cars at this time of year, during the holidays.’

I gave her directions for a drive I said would take her past some pleasant views and through a couple of villages. Forty minutes later and I was still up the ladder when Matthew came out of the back of the house and picked his way through the yard out into the field. The pace of his walk, the rounded back and shoulders, the trousers hanging low on his hips, the thumb of his left hand hooked into his front pocket and the way his skull rocked slightly back in the cradle of his top vertebrae, all advertised his utter boredom. Where he was going I didn’t know, but I knew what he was going to do because he was carrying a wine bottle in his right hand.

In the evening I fried sausages, peeled and boiled potatoes and chopped some chard, which I’d pulled from the neglected vegetable beds at the blue house. I poured a glass of wine (enough rakija !) and carried my plate of food into the main room where I set it on the table. I fetched the bag of mail I had taken from the outbuilding and began to sift through the contents as I ate.

Utility bills. I opened one at random. A demand for payment of several hundred dinara for electricity and warning of the consequences of non-payment. The next bill, dated a few months later, had been adjusted by the addition of several noughts. There was a time inflation ran wild. A letter from the publisher of the car magazine regretted the non-renewal of a subscription. Several copies of the same magazine still inside their plastic covers. There were no letters or postcards, no envelopes full of old photographs, not even a shopping list or an old chequebook bristling with scribbled stubs, no note left for the plumber, no scrap of paper bearing a scrawled address, directions. There was nothing except official letters and circulars. It was as though somebody had been through all of it before me and removed anything personal. I stuffed everything back into the bag and slung it aside. I thought: Is this all that remains? When I look back to that night I see that the idea for writing this seeded then. Would I take it all with me? Who would tell my story? So many people have left Gost, not like the old days when they stayed away for a few years and came back wearing Italian clothes and carting German fridges. Now they never come back. Of the old crowd, there are just three of us left: Krešimir, Fabjan and me.