Bystanders in a story of lots

An olive tree

What were the lives of men to one who had seen centuries come and go? What were the squabbles and fights and wars and slaughters men seemed so fond of, like ants scurrying around her roots to raid the nests of others? She had seen this city that men built around her from the time it was but a dusty village on the outskirts of budding civilizations. It was a twig from her young foliage with which the boy was taught to press the hundred angled-markings into clay, so many springs ago. It was the oil from her fruit that the boy's great-granddaughter burnt in the autumn night as she sat sewing the tear in her son's coat. It was by her shade in which that son's children sat to nap through the hot, humid hours of the Persian summer. And now, at the very end of winter, it was with her branches that torches were made to light the pyres on which the people-ants piled their dead. Two of these, she recognized with a remorseful shutter of her leaves, were descendants of the great-granddaughter's son's children.

She did not weep, however, as she did not weep for the thousand bodies who died, were killed, buried, or plundered by her roots over the centuries. She was not human, to weep over their short lives, cut shorter by unfortunate events and reckless choices. But she was not human to forget them either, as she still remembered the boy from when she herself was young.

In the scheme of things, nothing really happened here this day. She had seen the great earthquake three centuries passed that felled trees, blocked rivers, and brought down cities on the heads of their inhabitants. She had borne witness to the massacre of the hill tribes by the great Assyrian general. Few now remembered the quake; none knew of the massacre. In comparison, these skirmishes were but the infighting of tiny tribes, the names of which were not important enough to have been noticed by the empires encompassing them. This day would be forgotten like the days and months before it. It would be celebrated by some, sure, and mourned by others. For a while even. But nothing remained in the memories of short-lived men for long. This day would be forgotten by all, save her.

There was another tree not far from her dwelling, a dead tree of chopped and hammered wood that rose high above her like the menacing shadow of a pouncing leopard. Men hung from this tree like ripe fruit – eleven of them, father and sons. The father had caused the meaningless events of this day, she heard from the reveling men singing drunkenly in the bloody streets. The father caused the events in his pride and ambition and hatred, and the sons paid the price. It was a very human tale, she thought.

Now, an old man dwelt in the house beneath the tree – a mansion by city standards, though he did not seem glad of his fate. He was the second cause of these events, the object of the first's hate, this Mordecai. She recognized his rare form of sadness as he rested beneath her branches in the timeless patience of one too old to care for appointments or timekeeping. For he was old, far older than any man she had seen since before Susa was built around her. She recognized his sadness as it was the same shallow gloom that invaded her own thoughts – the emptiness of one who had seen much, one who has done what one sought to do and was too old to begin something new. But there was another void in this man – she could sense his longing gaze towards the setting sun and knew it as the aching for a dream unfulfilled mixed with the realization it would remain unfulfilled. She wondered what that dream was – the first interest she had shown in a very long time. She imagined what dream the old, foreign man had, alone, yet alive, in this war-torn city.

Only later, when the young child walked up to the still dreaming man did she hear of the homeland the man knew he would not live to see. The youth handed him a ceramic pot and small leather flask – small, insignificant things that seemed the world to the man. When the child, an energetic and spirited youth, joined the old man with as much longing, old and young staring as one into the sunset, hands clasped, towards a home neither remembered – the tree knew. She knew this day and its meaning would not soon be forgotten by their descendants to come.