Short Story: No Promises Were Ever Made

Short Story: No Promises Were Ever Made

I let the grains of soil slip through the spaces between my fingers. I let the grains of soil slip slowly through the spaces between my fingers. The spaces between my fingers. I plunge my hands into the fresh-turned earth. Dust to dust. Countless grains of soil. I sit back on my heels, my head full of pictures; the scent of warming thyme on the air; the sound of the lark high above, and ……… I let the grains of soil slip slowly through the spaces between my fingers. I am hunkered in the middle of my garden. I am hunkered here with my pictures and the soil beneath my fingernails. Slowly a tear detaches itself from the corner of one eye and runs down my cheek then falls into the countless grains of soil around my feet. There will be others. I let the grains of soil slip slowly through the spaces between my fingers.

I came to the village almost twenty years ago now. The circumstances of my arrival have some bearing on the story I am about to tell and so I will relate them, not out of any pride in self, but in the interests of a greater history. I am a photographer, though it is now some ten or more years since I shot a roll of film in anger. There now, that dates me, a roll of film. I am a photographer. If I have a curse it is this burden, for I cannot eradicate the images I retain in my mind. Some say that the eyes of a murder victim hold the image of the one who killed them burned into their retina; I have the images of countless victims and their killers burned into mine and it was to escape the growing inevitability of joining them that I came to this place. At first I only visited. Though this was my home, I still spent months in jungles and deserts and bomb-scarred cities capturing my precious images lest the dead lie forgotten in their shrouds, or so I felt. But gradually the village drew me away from all that, or perhaps the dead rejected me, pushed me back as though I could no longer serve a purpose for them. Whatever the reason, I became aware that I no longer wished to leave the comfort that the village provided; a strange substitute, but a welcome one.

The village is in the hills to the east of Avignon in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence five kilometres from Forcalquier and sits on a hillside surrounded by open countryside. There are only 400 souls in the village and a mercifully small number of settlers like myself. There is a café, a restaurant and a shop and a short ride by bicycle to Forcalquier market. I bought the house, really only a room with sheds attached, as a near-ruin and spent several months making it fit for camping inside, dry and watertight. Then an assignment to Bosnia took me away. Six months later, on the eve of spring I returned and simply retreated into the shell of my home. For the next three years I worked on that shell whenever I could, creating rooms from sheds, a workshop and building walls around what I knew one day would become my garden. In between the agency sent me on assignments to more war torn places and my periods of recuperation grew longer each time. Eventually I simply stayed put, tired of the stresses and afraid, finally, of fear itself. I e-mailed the agency with my resignation and apologies and slept soundly for the first time in months. I stayed put, shuttling between the village, Forcalquier and occasionally Avignon until gradually I accustomed myself to a new way of living. Now that I knew I would no longer take assignments and that I would stay here in the village, I set about establishing my garden.

I knew it would not be enough to simply grow fruit and vegetables and flowers; the garden, as a place of personal peace, would have to have more meaning for me. I suppose that I knew I must create a garden, which was in some way, a memorial to all the suffering and pain that I had experienced. I had made my living - a living which permitted me this very haven - from recording the misery, pain and death of others. I had profited from the unspeakable and no matter how much I consoled myself with the belief that my actions and my photographs had contributed to a just cause, to the understanding of issues and of man’s inability to live with other men, I still felt guilty for being alive, wealthy and secure. I had eaten when others went hungry, I had lived while others had died and I had departed at will, my film complete. I was in the deepest imaginable debt.

And so I began to revisit the past, working through the files of clippings, the folders of contact strips and the boxes of slides, arranging in my mind my personal history and my journey. I found photographs, some long forgotten, and some whose images were so vivid that my instincts bade my finger to press the shutter release and to take the next exposure as I trawled through wars and insurrections, atrocities and glimmers of hope. It was there in those glimmers of hope that I found what I was looking for.

It was a series I had shot for a Sunday magazine in late 1991, before the Bosnian conflict had started. It was an unusual assignment for me as there was no actual war or fighting going on, but I was in the area working with a journalist on the personalities behind the factions and the agency needed someone to take some “human interest” photographs for a piece on the people whose lives were in the process of changing forever. It involved travelling around with another journalist, not a war correspondent, but a features writer, and an interpreter speaking to people, mostly old people, about the old ways and how they were vanishing. One of the days we spent in a village just outside Srebrenica where the community was ninety percent Muslim. It had been a glorious day in late September and we had a very successful session. The subsequent article had concentrated mostly on one old woman and her garden, what it meant to her and what it meant to the other people in the village. I quote from it here:

The garden had been a meeting place for the other women of the area. In summer, when the rose bushes were in bloom, they would gather in the late afternoon and sip their tea and soft drinks as the light softened around them. They would talk about the day, about their children, about their grandchildren and occasionally about their husbands still among them or long departed. The old woman would sit in their midst, nodding, smiling, now and again joining in a reminiscence and passing the tray of sweetmeats to accompany their tea around the circle.

The garden had always been the old woman’s pride, ever since she had been a girl. She had watched it grow and tended it through all weathers; planting and replanting the cushions of plants that filled the beds surrounding her roses. Of all the plants the roses were her favourites, those she cared about more than all the others. Some of the roses were almost as old as herself, pruned and fed, nurtured like a precious child to always be as perfect as possible. She liked her roses to be red or to have red within them and she grafted her own varieties, creating flowers from her imagination, grateful for their gift of beauty.

The old woman had never married. When war broke out and when the Germans came, her betrothed had gone, with the other young men from the area, to fight and to die. Few had returned, too few for the old woman. She put all her love, all that had been left to her, into the garden; into creating a place of perfect peace and perfect beauty. At first for herself, and then, as they grew older, for the other women, so now they may sit in the evenings in the dying rays of the sun, listening to the Imam calling the men to prayer.

I read and reread the article, trawled through all the contact strips for the shoot and saw what I needed to do. I would recreate that garden, stone by stone, flower by flower, rose by rose. I would bring the garden to life once more as my atonement.

It took me many months to complete and early on I began to realise that I could not create a replica; too much time had gone into the original for that, years of toil and tears, of happiness and sadness. I needed to capture the spirit of the garden and to allow it to perform the same functions that the old woman’s garden had provided for her village. That, I knew, would be a fitting memorial to her and to all the others who haunted my past.

I had the resources to make it happen. I had the money, the time and the internet to help me source the knowledge and the materials the garden would need. I did not seek any physical help, though one or two of the villagers offered their time. I explained that this was something I needed to do by myself. I don’t know if many of them understood what I was saying and I’m unsure if I did myself, but they nodded and smiled and occasionally would sit and talk to me as I worked. Some offered me plants from their own gardens, which I was grateful to accept and Madam Dubois from the manor house offered me manure from her horses. The first year the garden looked sparse, there were spaces and gaps and the roses themselves were ragged. Some died and I felt a disproportionate sadness, as if the garden was telling me the futility of what I was trying to achieve. However, the next year the spaces began to fill in, the roses bloomed and the villagers would stop and praise my work. Sometimes, in the evenings, they would join me and sit sipping wine, not tea, and talking of the day’s trivial events and I would feel a contentedness grow inside me.

I did not make a big thing of the background to the garden, though I told everyone who asked what it was and what it meant. Most of them accepted what I was doing and, I suppose in their way they understood. In the third year of the garden, in September, I held a formal party for the village and we sat around in the dying light, sipping wine and I remembered.

I remembered the day I returned to the Bosnian village in 1994, this time with a war correspondent. I remembered the photographs I took then of what was left and I remembered his follow-up piece which appeared later in the Sunday magazine as an epilogue to the original story about the garden. I quote it in full:

But that was before the present war. Now no one came to the garden in the evenings, no one sat to gossip with the old woman over glasses of tea and sweetmeats, now people scurried from building to building, from shadow to shadow and fell in the spaces between to lie for eternity. The old woman still tended the garden, but later, after dark. The garden suffered from this of course, but still retained enough of its beauty for the old woman, so that she could sit inside her house and gaze upon its riot of red and white and yellow and pink flower heads and remember all that had gone before.

In late September, as the last of the blooms broke from the tight clusters of their buds, the garden ceased to be a garden and became a target. In the hills to the east the Serb mortar crews finally picked it out from the drab, pockmarked landscape of half ruined houses and shattered trees, and lobbed two shells into the garden and onto the house. From the security of their hillside the gunners saw the colours of the garden erupt and disappear into clouds of dust and the house slump wearily to its knees. For all the world it looked as if the garden and the house had disappeared under the weight of a single dun coloured rose that sprouted and withered in the same moment.

I let the grains of soil slip through the spaces between my fingers. I let the grains of soil slip slowly through the spaces between my fingers. The spaces between my fingers. I plunge my hands into the fresh-turned earth. Dust to dust. Countless grains of soil. I sit back on my heels, my head full of pictures; the scent of warming thyme on the air; the sound of the lark high above, and ……… I let the grains of soil slip slowly through the spaces between my fingers. I am hunkered in the middle of my garden. I am hunkered here with my pictures and the soil beneath my fingernails. Slowly a tear detaches itself from the corner of one eye and runs down my cheek then falls into the countless grains of soil around my feet. There will be others. I let the grains of soil slip slowly through the spaces between my fingers.