OLIVE TREES, MIDWINTER by John Freeman
You grew up in the olive-growing capital of America but have never seen a tree up close. Standing outside her house, the garden frozen in mid- winter chill, she points out a gnarled tree with dry silvery leaves. Waxy in the dark. On the ground around it wood chips and pine leaves make a kind of greenish blanket. At this time of year in England it’s night most of the day. Wet roads the color of pewter sluice around and beneath ancient oaks, their bald crowns resplendently articulated. You imagine her and her family arriving in this country by car with all their worldly belongings from Lebanon, a story which has been told many times already, even though you are newly in love. It feels strange to you, too, this witchy, wooded place squelching in its darkness. The olive tree is a transplant too. Say hi to Dad she says, he’s scattered here. Then: come on, let’s go inside.
Inside where the father is everywhere, on the mantel with gentle hands holding hers, walking in woods. In the food, which he brought from Zagharta, and used to cook as if dozens were coming for dinner. And sometimes they did. The photos of endless, social drunken dinners adorn her bookshelves in the apartment in New York, the shelves you paced up and down the first night you spent together. You grew up in a hot dry place too but there were no visitors. Your home wasn’t sad, but it wasn’t open. She grew up being carried to bed after cardgames veered on into evenings, her father smoking a pipe and yelling. And then laughing. And then going to bed in the middle of his own parties and sometimes leaving her mother to clean it all up.
One of sixteen, raised by monks on a hillside monastery in Lebanon. He and his sister the only ones brought back to the country, a transplant to their native land. I wish he could have met you, she says, and what can you say to such a compliment. You look and listen and begin to see traces of him everywhere, in her nephew’s temper. Her brother’s height and sense of the absurd. Her mother’s life of adventure. Swept off her feet at nineteen and then Libya to live with a previously married man working for the oil companies. To suddenly run a house with a car and driver and a cook and servants, two children by twenty- one. This a woman raised during the Blitz in London, her father some sort of something for MI6. These stories fall into conversation like winter darkness, gently and perpetually, as if re- narration plants them in the ground.
You have never, at this point, buried anyone you’ve loved. The ground is for growing. It’s for standing upon, or building upon. Your family stories are irrelevant: you are here. That’s what your family tells you when you move to California. You dig up weeds and roots of invasive vines which are choking the palm tree in your front yard to death. A eucalyptus grove lines the back fence wall, like a windbreak, except there is no wind. You have planted flowers, beautified your family’s yard – it is not called a garden – every summer in the 110 degree heat. You have never seen a fox, the way they simply trot down the sidewalks and streets in southwest London, limbs liquid and alive, like a hallucination. They make the night with their appearance, proof it’s no longer day. A dog off a leash where you’re from is a problem. It’s an escaped mad man, a terror threat. You never learned to kneel in front of them, or to extend your hand gently to their nose. Or how to talk to them. You’ve only been taught to hold the lead.
All around you trees shaded houses. None of them were native species, but close to your school where your suburban neighborhood ended there was a field and an old farmhouse. The drive to this 172 house was lined with olive trees, which you now know must have been decades old, because they bore fruit, and under one of them you kiss the second girl you will ever kiss in your life, a girl years later you learn comes from a family from Lid, her great- grandfather had an olive soap factory before the Nakba. They distributed their bars to countries around the world, to Italy, to France, to Libya. Your kiss lasts around ten seconds, but you stay in touch for the next forty years.
You are tumbling out of where you were from. You are aware that when you step out of the cold, away from the tree where her father is buried, you are in the conservatory. The glass black against the night, black against the stars, against the limestone bricks. The Lord Mayor once lived in this house, when it was all one building: a vast home. Now it is three, each of them big enough to fit two or three of the houses you grew up in and you grew up middle class. Dogs the size of small cars sleep on the slate kitchen floor and in the drawing room like guardians, or snoozing dragons. They are, you later learn, Pyrenean Mountain Dogs, elderly, but formidable still. They can’t be allowed in the same room so the house has been divided into zones and the dogs are transferred several times a day in a migration dance which is meant to keep them apart. Each time one of them reenters a space it moves about sniffing, sensing its rival, before settling down heavily into half- sleep, their bones against stone rattling the walls of the old house.
You have never been around a dog bigger than a spaniel. Dogs low to the ground, bred for hunting waterfowl and rabbits and mice. Your childhood dog is a breeder herself, you picked her up not long after she’d had her second litter, her belly still swinging. Your father teased you and your brothers by flashing her nipples on occasion. She had a snout the color of dirty snow and a coat of perfectly soft brown fur. She walked with you for hours anywhere you went, her nose snuffling and hoovering, sensing. When you come to England she has been dead a decade – a dogless decade – and you have to remember what it’s like to share space with an animal, whose loyalty and kingdom are vast but specific but invisible and inviolate. On the mantel piece are photos of your beautiful new girlfriend with her father and the dogs, before the dogs went to war with one another, walking through the woods hand in hand.
And that’s why they are here. They are war dogs. It was one of their ancestors who rescued her from being lost in the mountains above 173 Beirut, where her family had moved during the war. For this reason, her father once drove back into the city during a fire- fight to retrieve the dog. A soldier sticks a gun in her father’s mouth just because he can. You try to imagine what you say to a young man with that much contempt and that much power. You try to imagine loving an animal so much because it loved your child. The dog arrived in England traumatized and hating anyone in a uniform. She lived an extraordinarily long time for a Pyrenean, like a survivor who has been fortified by what has not killed her. They traded a raspberry farm with terraced hillside plants, olive trees – her father’s resistance to war, to give up on everything but growing things, including the first raspberries in Lebanon – for England and its water- logged winters. At night one or the other of them – descendants of those first survivors – goes into the garden by the tree where her father is planted and barks into the air for an hour. You speculate together what it is saying, and years later, when you hear Mahmoud Darwish read his poem, “I am from here,” you imagine one version:
I come from there and I have memories.
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave, snatched by sea- gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.1
At night in the dark she tells you things you will never repeat. Terrifying things about growing up in war time. The second intifada has been underway for several years and the Israelis have uprooted hundreds of thousands of olive trees, and soldiers delight in burning them in front of farmers. You watch a documentary together and soldiers turn their guns upon weeping elderly men and she weeps next to you for an hour. Trees which are hundreds of years old are lit on fire and bull- dozed and hacked apart and something inside you suddenly sees what this is, that it is not a clearing of landscape, it is a violent assault on the body of Palestine. You try to imagine how many trees were planted like the one outside in the garden with the ashes of the dead beloved. For days after the documentary she is a walking container for grief and fury.
You wake up on that trip in the bed you share in the attic in her mother’s house, the lights of the city visible in the distance across South London’s blanket of trees and the vastness of the city feels strange, occult, and too big to take in, now that you see what one tree contains. From the tiny cantilevered window you can barely see the olive standing alone under the oak in the dark. Its roots must already be extending beneath the field stone walk. It’s only a young tree though, it will be a decade before it bears fruit, a decade you can’t at that moment, bewildered awake, imagine. You are just beginning the part of love where to see ahead you have to imagine behind.
Sometimes on this trip, this first trip to London together, you pad downstairs in the dark and into the garden and stand in the cold. There are foxes in the garden some nights, you can’t see them but they rustle in the shrubbery at the south fence- line. They crap by the small pond, and occasionally, during the day, one or the other of the Pyreneans trots in triumphantly covered in the fox’s excrement. It occurs to you that grief creates its own biosphere, and that you have to be careful not to be a settler on this landscape. You try to listen to what the trees say in the dark and what the wind brings and some nights you simply stand there before going inside and clicking on the news.
It’s the season of a new war, what is being called the forever war. Two decades of vengeance begin. The U.S. drops bombs on Iraq, on Afghanistan, on Syria, occasionally parts of Lebanon. The economy is engorged on war. Every day the news brings new news of heights reached in the stock market indexes. Two- and three- and four- thousand pound bombs cannot be made fast enough. They have catchy names. Bunker busters. Tall boys. Soldiers build semipermanent bases outside of Baghdad and Kabul and an endless dead or alive hunt seethes for Osama bin Laden, calling back posters from your part of the globe from a different century. Occasionally your girlfriend’s mother passes the TV and says thank god he wasn’t alive for this.
In Baghdad, after the fall of the city, the zoo is looted, and the only animals which remain are the ones which can defend themselves. Big cats. Lions, tigers, and bears. Meanwhile, date palms which took decades to grow are chopped down for American snipers and mortar teams. The city becomes a tree in winter, denuded, frozen. Ironically the American airbase within it, planted on Saddam’s old palace, is called The Green Zone, as if it is an arboretum. Nothing new 175 is planted. The fortified strip on the west bank of the Tigris is full of majestic palm trees, like the ones you grew up near, like the ones which line the boulevards in Los Angeles where your brother lives. The Green Zone is described as a miniature America. Soldiers can get their nails done. Suicide attacks have begun to target American installations; twelve are killed in Karbala during this visit, your first to London and to the tree.
Olive oil is brought out at every meal. At breakfast with labne and za’atar, at lunch with hummus and garlic chicken, at dinner. Olive oil is added to beans and rice, to pastas, to any kind of bread. There are four different jars of it on the counter by the stove which you can see, which makes four more than any other time you saw in your house growing up. Meals come out in waves and you are liked because you have an appetite. He would have loved you if you eat like this, you are told, and you feel embarrassed at an unearned compliment. You fold deeper into the grove of a new family and yet you are so newly a couple the generosity can embarrass you – you wonder how to return it, making the mistake of thinking of hospitality as an exchange.
Over dinners the past unfurls like a blanket. Not once does the family refer to the olive tree again. It will only be mentioned five or six times over the next twenty years, but the father remains present at every meal. Stories are told of the father’s driving, dragging the side of his Citroen along skinny London lanes, shouting in Arabic at any police officer who stopped him. All of them let him off in confusion. He looked by then like a crazy old man. He slept with one of the dogs because he loved it like a person. He worked downstairs in a tiny office, from which he sold pipes and valves to oil companies, work he hated but which set up this family in its final home. One of the only ones which will not be taken by war.
What sort of animal are you to them, wandering into this heavily wooded past. Among people you realize so much of your life every piece of information has told you are not people, are less than people, are animals. You are quiet because there is so much to hear, and you wonder a lot about belonging. Your country’s politics have built the world which expelled them. Supported the insane Libyan dictator which collapsed the state around them, sent bombs to the Israelis who later bombed Beirut, and weapons to the militias that shot at Hezbollah and pushed them into the mountains. How do you as a guest gesture to this past without breaking the spell of the stories they’d rather tell and do tell, which is about the father, who is not here but is everywhere? They are all stories that produce laughter. You realize how good laughter feels when it is relief. Only once or twice does the table fall silent, and you can hear the trees outside in the dark, the new and the old ones, clacking against the side of the house. One night you go to the window and one of the big white Pyreneans is lying on the ground beneath the olive tree like it’s praying.
NOTE
Translated and edited by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein. https://poets.org/poem/i-belong-there
John Freeman is the author and editor of a dozen books, including Wind, Trees (Copper Canyon Press, 2022); Dictionary of the Undoing (MCD & FSG Originals, 2019); and the anthology There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love (Vintage, 2021), co-edited with Tracy K Smith. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Orion, and ZYZZYVA.