The Hired Man

by Aminatta Forna

During the conversation on the way up to the pine forest she frowns and chooses her words carefully, as if she’s worried about their effect, as if this thing, whatever it is that she’s afraid of, which right now is made of smoke and dust, will crystallise and harden by being put into words, be made real, like an illness or a death pronounced by a doctor. There will be no going back. She chooses her phrases carefully: ‘just a matter of time’, and ‘for now’, and ‘when things get back to normal’. A lot of people in Gost talk this way, if they talk about what’s happening at all, but Anka does it because she’s afraid she and Javor might need to leave, like the baker and his daughters, and she doesn’t want to leave Gost because like all of us, like Javor, this town, these hills, the ravine and the pine forest are all she knows.