The Hired Man

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.

The night was warm, the air that slipped past me into the room brought with it the scent of the night, clean and fragrant.

That Kos was dead was a matter of fact, which couldn’t be changed.

For the first time in many years I didn’t know what to do.

I’d wake up after a night of dreaming, I’d have forgotten and then the memory would come back, and my stomach would collapse into my bowels with fear but also a fluttering excitement, knowing there could be no turning back, no choice but to see it through.

At first I raised the subject of Krešimir carefully, but Anka talked like everything that happened in the past had been left there. She’d forgiven him, as she forgave everybody.

When anything happens to me, good or bad, Anka becomes the first person I tell. I love her, but it’s a chaste love, bleached by time and familiarity, like a long marriage. In my love for Anka, even when we were teenagers and lay on a quilt under the pine trees, there was none of the hurt of Pag. If Javor ever left her, I would look after her, perhaps even ask her to marry me. But more than that, more than anything, I want to protect Anka, can’t bear the idea of her ever being hurt. I would sleep all night across the doorstep of the house if she asked me.

Love misses its mark, arrives too early or too late. Nobody dies, except in novels.

She doesn’t blame me, has never forgotten me. And she has forgiven me.

I went home to an empty house. I wondered whether she had left straight away, or whether we had passed somewhere upon the straits. I wondered whether she stood out on the deck in the wind, with Pag behind her, whether she followed the progress of every oncoming boat and wondered if I was on it, or whether she hid below deck.