War Story

by Aliya Whiteley on June 26, 2010

When he first showed me the crosses I thought he must be joking.

‘All of them?’ I said.

He nodded.

His overalls hung from him. His cheeks were sunken in, with white flecks of stubble; I thought he looked like a living skeleton.

We took a slow walk along one of the avenues. The white crosses stretched ahead, away, over the hills. I could see no end to them. ‘Where will you be going?’

He didn’t reply.

We couldn’t have explored a tenth of the grounds when he came to a halt. He held out his hand. It was thin and grey, and his knuckles were knobbly. I felt repulsed by him, but I took his hand and shook it. ‘Is this goodbye, then? But where’s the lawnmower? Where’s the white paint and the weedkiller?’

He let go of my hand and pointed over my shoulder. I turned around and saw a neat blue shed with a corrugated roof, only twenty yards away.

‘Right,’ I said, ‘and where will I get my overalls?’ But when I looked back he was striding away, fast, really much more quickly than I could have believed possible for such a bag of bones. To be honest, I was glad he’d gone. I’ve always preferred to learn on the job, work at my own pace. I went into the shed and found it surprisingly warm, and well stocked. Garden implements leaning on the left: hoes, rakes, shovels. On the right, bottles and jars. I sat down on the camp bed and gave an experimental bounce. It was still springy, and the peach duvet cover was clean. On a folding table next to the bed was a primus stove, a kettle, and some tea things; underneath the table was a selection of tins, mainly beans and ravioli.

I found the overalls on the back of the door, and put them on. I had to roll up the arms and legs to fit. After I had them on I felt a little more at home. I decided to take a good look around and see if any immediate changes would be needed.

By the end of the year I’d settled right in.

The white crosses needed constant painting. It was a usual rainy Autumn, and the fat, heavy drops would cause mud to spatter. Damp seeped into the hut, and I found myself dreading the cold nights and the slow days. I think it was November when I came to the conclusion that something had to be done.

I found some old tins under a tarpaulin around the back of the hut, and when I prised off the lids with a screwdriver I found a range of colours that brought an immediate smile to my face. I found a brush in the hut, then took the yellow tin over to the nearest cross and slapped it on, big wide strokes, feeling my bad mood evaporate. As soon I had finished one, I painted the next, and then the next. Then I swapped over to red.

By February I’d painted about a quarter of the crosses.

Four years later I started to experiment with little pictures. I painted desert islands and palm trees on the crosses. I painted figures, holding hands, kissing.

By the seventh year I’d moved on to words: love and peace in the good months, fuck and shit in the bad ones. Then I made up poems, putting one word on each cross, down the row, to make up a line. I would be the first to admit that I’m not gifted in that department, but I’d like to think that I had something to say. My solitude taught me things about the human condition. I didn’t rush those poems. They took up years seven to twenty-two.

In the summer of the twenty-third year I started rearranging things. The long rows began to really get to me, and it was so good to have the hard work, really back-breaking labour, of digging up the crosses and shifting their position. I put some back into the soil in an inverted position, and turned others on their sides. I made sculptures, and as the years went by they became bigger, better. I cut some up, and lashed them together with the rope that had once held the tarpaulin in place, so I could build a fence.

By the time I turned sixty-five, I had a white fence around half of the area, and very proud I was of it too. It represented a great achievement, years of expended energy, and single-minded purpose. Not many people have devoted themselves so completely to a task. I began to feel an emotion that was unfamiliar to me. It could best be described as dread. It came to me in the night, and as I approached my sixty-fifth birthday, it intensified, until it was a strong taste in my mouth, and my throat hurt from the sourness of it.

He turned up on my birthday, as I knew he would. He had a quick step, bright eyes, and his chin was raised high. He only met my gaze for a moment, and then looked away, with a smirk on his lips.

I’d had a speech prepared, about where everything was and how nothing should be touched, what rows should be preserved, and what rows could be used for the rest of the fence, but I could tell he wouldn’t have listened, so in the end I didn’t say a thing. It came to me, as I walked away from him, over the hill, that one has to have a little faith in the next generation. Maybe he would read my poetry, see my sculptures, and learn from them. The crosses were a record of something important. My sweat, my dreams, my years, had fallen upon them.