ΚΛΑΔΕΥΜΑ

 

The sky was so heavy that day, that it sagged sodden onto my shoulders sending a biting wind to lacerate the exposed parts of my flesh. A day earlier I had completed the pruning of the trees in my grandmother’s enormous garden and those muscles unused to activity except at the time of this annual ritual, were protesting vehemently. “I have now come of age,” I had thought to myself, as I surveyed my handiwork with satisfaction. “There is absolutely no way that yiayia would have unleashed me upon her prized arboreal offspring unless it were so.” My grandmother’s comment, when she looked upon my work, mowed down my pretensions with the mercilessness of a scythe: Εσύγιόκα μ’ πρέπει να μάθειςγράμματα, γιατί τα χέρια σου δεν πιάνουν γι’αυτές τις δουλειές». My ego smarting from the lacerations of her tongue, I collected the prunnings and receded, crestfallen.

Now I was back, mystified to see lopped-off tree branches, trunks and twigs littering the front garden and barring access to the back. Pushing my way past, I noticed the flows of the knots and the meanderings of the tree bark at my feet and I gulped. I knew this alphabet. It was the first one I had ever learned to read, having clambered on the branches of trees that to me were my first playmates, benign and friendly beasts that gently yielded up their fruit. Now they lay, shattered and broken, their life ebbing away in globules of resin, sobbing in silence. Past the grape vine, cut off at the roots as if by guillotine, stood my grandmother, hacking away at the lemon tree with her pruning saw. Swoping like a scimitar, my lips mouthed a silent scream as its enormous crocodile teeth sawed through flesh and rendered the tree no more. This was the first tree she had planted when she arrived in Australia and now it was gone.

It was my father who pulled me away, with a glance, half of sorrow, half of frustration, that for all my education, my reading skills were still incomplete. For he could decipher the furrows on my grandmother’s pallid brow, even as she smiled at us knowingly, casting aside my question “What have you done?” with a swoosh of her shears and a half-murmured: “Don’t worry, It’s all alright,” thus accepted her death a month later with the same resigned air with which he accepted the prognostications of the weatherman as to the weekly forecast. Everything in the corporeal world, after all, is a physical phenomenon. She was gone. It made sense that her garden should be no more as well, by way of preparation.

I cannot prune my own garden without recalling my grandmother, for I inherited her secateurs and I lop, crop and clip using her movements, employing her rhythms and muttering her expletives. I prune in Winter, under a leaden sky that hangs so low that it scrapes my shoulders and makes my eyes smart. I prune alone, or as alone as one can be when in the company of their dead grandmother and will tolerate no other companion. When my eldest daughter was young, she would run out into the yard to play and surveying the carnage strewn at her feet would burst out crying: “You’ve killed them! You’ve killed them! They are all dead! Why? These are living things! Why would you do such a thing? What will happen now?” I would take her in my arms as she sobbed inconsolably and reassure her: “These ones aren’t dead, μάνα μου. Just sleeping for the Winter. And this one here is sick. We have to chop it off here so it will grow back stronger than ever before.” Unconvinced, her plaintive weeping would grow louder and even more protracted. By Spring, she would forget everything, greeting the new buds and the flowers with a joyousness and camaraderie that only new life can feel for its other counterparts.

On this wintry day the sky was no longer bowed, or sagged but fissured and cracked, threatening to shatter its shards into my body in an infinite number of pieces. As I pulled up into my driveway, I noted the myriad of amputated tree limbs and rose branches barring my way. And there, by the front garden bed, was my wife, her hairless scalp covered by a headscarf, wielding my grandmother’s secateurs.

A few months earlier, I had made a joke about those very secateurs. “I’m going to cut my hair,” she announced, her voice a quivering grace note. “I don’t want the kids to see me suddenly lose my hair and get shocked. At least if I cut it gradually, in stages, they will get used to the idea.” This lustrous Sargasso Sea of hair, in whose curls I would lose myself, in those heady days when effusions were considered to be passably passionate enough to permit me to recite the Song of Solomon: “Behold, you are fair, my love!...Your hair is like a flock of goats, going down Mount Gilead,” was to be shorn. “With that level of thickness, you are going to need is my grandmother’s secateurs,” I commented wryly, biting my lip. “I think we will save them for the operation,” she responded, and I walked away before she could witness the sap falling from my eyes.

Now she looked at me through eyes framed neither by eyelashes nor eyebrows as I felt the blood rushing away from my veins. Every single rose bush, planted and tended from the time we moved into our marital home, amputated, their lifeless stumps pointing futilely at the sky.  I gulped, suppressing my grandmother’s expletives from rising rapidly up my throat. And as I looked deep in those lidless eyes, I saw my grandmother’s eyes staring back at me, in defiance.

“When you prune,” I muttered hoarsely clasping my hands so she wouldn’t see them tremble, you have to prune where the eye, I mean, where the bud is. You have to allow for the new growth. Otherwise, you will kill them. Look here,” I pointed to the rose bush closest to me. “You have basically left the stalk but there are no buds here. This tree is going to die. And so is this one, and this one, and this one.”

I moved among the plants, inspecting their inoperable wounds, the rude gashes testifying to the violence visited by the blade upon the exquisite curves of their sensuous torsos, my mouth hanging open as I mutely attempted to suppress my utter anguish. Inside my head, it was no longer my wife laying in the hospital bed, muttering in painkiller-induced delirium, as she searched for those parts of her body no longer there, but the surgeon, flourishing a pair of secateurs and in my grandmother’s voice mocking me: “Sixteen years of marriage and not once has she ventured into your precious garden. And now she has decided to prune.”

As she moved to take hold of the pruning saw, I saw a disembodied hand snatch it from her grasp. “You’ve killed them!” I screamed in panic. “You’ve killed them! They are all dead! Why? These are living things! Why would you do such a thing? What will happen now?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she answered, unperturbed, wiping her pallid forehead. “It’s all right. It will be alright. Trust me.  It’s all ok.”

“Don’t worry about what?” I raged. “It’s not alright. They are dead. Dead! They will not grow back. They will not survive. They are dead. Since when do you determine what lives and what dies?”

“Stop being silly and go wipe your eyes,” she ordered. And come and collect all these branches. My hands and my feet are being pierced with thorns.  It will be alright.”

Spring has arrived in the garden and my wife is often to be found there, gazing at the new rose branches reaching vigorously for the sky. That sky is of a blue of such enormity that it casts its azure luminosity over her luxurious crop of recently emerged hair that stretches strenuously towards the sun. She sees me approach, her long eyelashes flutter and her eyebrows rise in welcome. Without a word, she hands over the secateurs and smiles.

“See, μπαμπά,” my daughter explains. “You have to prune them so that can recover from their sickness. When you do that, they grow back stronger than before.”

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 28 October 2023