The Tree In Changing Light Read online

  My amazement must have shown in my expression.

  ‘Well, people do say that reptile people are very strange,’ Boyd ruefully admitted.

  When it came my turn to give a summary of several decades I took the short cut of encapsulating my life into a string of book titles. I ended by telling Boyd what I was writing at present—something I normally disliked doing, as it felt like having teeth pulled, and the people who seemed most ardently interested usually didn’t read me anyway (as Boyd hadn’t, with the excuse of Torah and sacred text commitments far into the night). But I owed Boyd something after the intensity of his memories, and there was another connection we had, namely that my second wife was Jewish, not all that observant but we inevitably celebrated the year’s major festivals. To show I knew my onions I named all five of them.

  Boyd leaned forward over the café table where we had just ordered our third espresso, and said there was another one too:

  ‘It’s an obscure one but might interest you. Put it in your book about trees. Ever heard of the trees’ birthday?’

  I hadn’t, of course. *

  For many years, Boyd continued, he had almost forgotten an invitation he and his father received to visit Joe’s orchard and join the Josephs, father and daughter, for a celebration supper concerning trees.

  It must have been issued the morning of the pigeon race, he said, and they would have gone out there a day or two later. (By the following year Leah had left and Boyd never went out there again, to that bend of the river where glossy-leaved orange trees were varnished with sunlight on every leaf.) It was strange, though, considering his later life—Boyd certainly remembered visiting with his father but recalled nothing of the particular celebration beyond the cornucopia of produce on a side verandah table where, as usual, visitors were urged to take what they liked. He supposed they sat down and went through a certain routine but he couldn’t remember a ritual, nor wine because he always remembered alcohol—the times when his father drank were engraved on his amazement. Over prayers and blessings, Boyd admitted, he would have switched off as he always did as a child. Perhaps he even ducked away from the table or buried his head in a comic. He would have had his attention on Leah, though, always there in the corner of the eye with her long black hair lustrously rich and tangled, and eyes that seemed to pick lazily through his mind.

  Sometimes they just lay around in the shade and read or played intense games of snap with a tattered pack of cards—then out to the cool-shaded packing shed they’d run to fetch bridle and blinkers. Down to the riverbank next, where a haze of green showed as the water evaporated, and the old draught horse stood waiting in the puggy mud. The two of them (and at times, Boyd supposed, a maximum of the six of them, when there were others) jogged on horseback through the rows of orchard trees, so deeply shaded in that arid, bright landscape. Finally Boyd helped Leah in her chores—she was good at making happy slaves of her friends—and then it was time to go home.

  Over the years various sayings of Rev Spackman came back to Boyd in fragments of mental static:

  ‘The last razor blade in a packet lasts the longest.’

  ‘A tube of toothpaste is infinite in quantity if carefully rolled.’

  ‘Ants are always ready for trouble.’ (Like his father, whenever Boyd saw an ant bed he grabbed a stick and annoyed the ants into a frenzy.)

  Another saying Rev Spackman bequeathed to Boyd was:

  ‘Trees, like racehorses, have a birthday on the same day—Old Testament tradition.’

  Boyd couldn’t date it, but surely the saying sprang not from the Bible but from the time of Rev Spackman’s visit to Joe Joseph’s orchard. In fact, he’d recently had it confirmed.

  Boyd was in the dining room of a large, old-fashioned flat in Woollahra when he heard someone say:

  ‘It falls on Tu Bi-Shevat, the fifteenth day of the month of Shevat—the New Year of Trees according to the Hebrew calendar.’

  There was a woman in the room, a stranger to the group of friends gathered for the Passover Seder. She sat midway down the grand table.

  ‘Oh, the trees’ birthday!’ she exclaimed.

  The rabbi called attention to her.

  ‘Does everyone know Leah?’ he asked, placing his hands on the crown of a dark, glossy-haired head.

  She was a tanned, elegant, fine-boned woman of around sixty who twisted with birdlike pleasure under his touch.

  ‘Good Yontov, everyone.’

  ‘Leah is one of my favourite people in the whole world,’ said the rabbi. ‘She’s our guest from Adelaide.’

  They all greeted her. When it came Boyd’s turn he found himself blushing. He’d been Jewish for years, but always with an unworthy fear that somebody would jump up in synagogue or study group and expose him as a Christian fraud—saying it was only because of falling in love at the age of nine with a classmate who had led him, spirit-wise, he knew not where, that he wore his prayer shawl around his shoulders and dipped from the waist praying Friday night and Saturday sunset till his hips ached.

  ‘Leah, I think I know you,’ he said.

  She stared, shook her head questioningly, smiled in a way Boyd remembered with excitement and then raised a hand to her lips in disbelief.

  ‘The Comic Book Boy!’ she said.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Boyd laughed, though he would have preferred a more impressive memory tag. They stood from the table and went around to greet each other. Leah took Boyd by the hands. He’d forgotten almost completely that other element of their friendship: comics. But now in his mind Boyd saw himself riding the river road with a stack on the handlebars, tied in string: Superman, Captain Marvel Junior, Donald Duck and Girls’ Own Stories.

  ‘You kept me endlessly supplied,’ said Leah. ‘I loved Superman’s X-ray vision, and guess what happened?’

  ‘You became a radiologist,’ said Boyd, intuitively playing snap.

  They went back to their places at the table, and the long evening marking the redemption of the Israelite slaves from Egypt proceeded. When it was over, Leah and Boyd sat up late.

  My wife and I came to Boyd’s celebration of trees near the beginning of the following year. Boyd had studied the ritual and led the service with Leah at his side. I can only give my impressions, but they were very strong—of two people completely at ease with each other, rich in humour and affection after one of them, Leah, had made a long roundabout journey through life (two marriages, both ended, and living on several continents over a distinguished career) and the other, Boyd, seeming to have in some sense always been arrowed straight for her heart.

  Being there in the dining room of Boyd’s narrow East Sydney terrace was like experiencing one of the produce displays I remembered from the Royal Easter Show. There were more than twenty varieties of fruit piled on four large boat-shaped platters. Locating much of it fresh at the wrong time of year was a tribute to Boyd’s dedication and a reflection of Australia’s climatic spread. We sat on cushions, a dozen of us packed in, the long, low plank table taking up the full length of the room. Boyd seemed to have gravitated to the Hassidic or mystical side of Judaism where a kind of rushed noisiness prevailed, bursts of song, prayer, and pithy phrases worthy of Reader’s Digest Quotable Quotes. Some of his friends looked unusual—a couple of barrel-shaped men with beards dense and scrolled with room for birds’ nests in them, and their melon-shaped wives in headscarves and wigs, and wearing plain print dresses to the wrist and ankle. That they were doctors and therapists was not immediately apparent.

  The four platters of fruit were each eaten in sequence with a cup of wine (or more) as blessings were said. We began with bread (representing wheat), olives, dates and grapes. A tree could just as easily be a vine or an evolved grass such as wheat or lupins in the definition of the ceremony. The Seder for trees followed the same pattern as the Passover Seder but despite the theme being introspection and self-searching it had a wilder, more bacchanalian or primitive feel. Boyd had located a dozen superb shiraz grown in central Victoria t
hat were blessed by a Melbourne rabbi as kosher, and I found myself getting a bit drunk, and I wasn’t quaffing as much as others. The main text or theme Boyd used for the evening was a noisily argued one: ‘For is the tree of the field a man?’

  I expected closely argued analogies about this (based, say, on head, trunk, feet and roots, etc.) but not at all. It had more to do with the idea that God ‘planted’ a few just or righteous men in every generation and on these the merit of the world depended. They set an example through envy or admiration in the way that branches were grafted from good trees and from them many other good trees were generated.

  Envy as a way to good had never occurred to me, but I liked the saying, thrown in my direction by a humorous Boyd, that ‘the envy of authors will multiply wisdom’. Then relating to Boyd’s chosen life was a text from the Song of Songs as we munched on dates: ‘This thy stature is like a palm tree’—interpreted as meaning the palm tree didn’t bend or sway in the changing winds—and so too the Jewish people.

  Something else discussed was the connection between planting and faith, as many small seeds in any sowing always rotted and the farmer needed faith waiting for them to sprout. The word zera (seed) was a pun for ze-ra (this is bad), since at first glance it appeared that seed rotted and nothing good would come of it.

  We ate, drank, and recited from texts into the night.

  The strangest ideas seemed the strongest. There were scientists and doctors in the room, children of Darwin and Freud, but more powerful than any theory of evolution or the material mind guiding their professional decisions was the vision of the four worlds. Each was represented by a category of fruit because the worlds fell down to the vegetative level after the sin of Adam. Only the world of Emanation remained in holiness. The next, Creation, contained the minimum of evil and so had the fruit that was eaten whole, skin, seeds, and all—figs, grapes, persimmon and apples. In the world of Formation, where evil was more prominent, fruits were eaten with the skin but the seed discarded—olives, peaches, dates and plums. The fourth world, of Action, was covered with evil, and so its fruit must be peeled to find the good within—oranges, pomegranates, walnuts, and almonds.

  It amazed me, remembering barely anything about Joe Joseph, that here in East Sydney so many years after his death his orchard was present so strongly—completed, so to speak, as Leah and Boyd touched hands.

  Leah remembered the candied fruit she had prepared and packed for her father. Being made of peel they showed that even the husk could be transformed into good. A plate of these was handed around last.

  ‘He felt white-hot inspired, elaborating a theory of his own

  at last, the idea of the universal spiral on which could be

  attached anything ever thought or any action ever taken,

  whether individual or social, by man, beast, or god …’

  THE IDEA came to Burton when he sat down to rest on a patch of grass on a walk he took every day from home to work. At first he called it the bright idea because really nothing he thought out for himself ever came to anything much and a voice inside his head mocked him.

  It was the month of October when Sydney winds were gusty and fresh, when the sun already bit and burned. We, Burton’s old friends and colleagues, worried about him. He talked in loudly stitched arguments admitting no interruption, then pale-faced and looking alarmed stalked off seeming to ring a small bell and direct non-existent traffic with a hyperactive arm.

  Finding himself in the centre of Centennial Park’s six hundred acres Burton lay on his side, drew up his knees, and watched grassblades bend at angles in the breeze. Each new shoot—there were thousands of them—leaned away from him with a kind of opposite attraction. They pointed towards a huge dark fig with inky shade and heavy branches. It was like the primal tree in a Buddhist pilgrimage, rooted into the navel of the earth. Burton’s idea was simple: to climb that tree and hang his backpack there. That was all the idea was—just a whim. Yet it had a sensation of pulling him in, and the only force holding Burton back from starting his climb at that moment seemed to have been the question of what his backpack would contain. It would need to hold everything he was.

  Home at his paint-peeling Paddo terrace Burton had visitors.

  Through the open top of Bruce Hubbard’s blue 1970s convertible parked with two wheels up on the kerb came the sound of Leonard Cohen lyrics. Hubbard, an actor, was married to Burton’s ex-wife Sophie, who was busy unpacking a basket of food on Burton’s front porch among dry potted ferns and a doormat shedding fibre.

  ‘Hurry up, babe!’ called Hubbard, tipping his head back and regarding Burton blankly through reflective lenses. Sophie later rang me and said she was always a little afraid of Burton now.

  But she touched his cheek and in her raspy, intent voice asked if everything was all right with him. ‘Are you eating?’

  Burton lofted a stray cat with the toe of his boot and peeled back the lid of a Tupperware container. Chick peas. They meant protein and fibre going back to student days, when we all shared a house. A body needed those things. Burton muttered a checklist of the requirements of the physical life while reminding Sophie that a small tin of tuna usually kept him going for a whole day.

  Burton’s job was teaching the history of sociology at Sydney’s leading university. It was an occupation rife with great ideas but precluding any new ones in the mind of Burton the explainer. He taught a timeline from Karl Marx to Clifford Geertz and back again via Emile Durkheim, Raymond Aron, and the curiously named Dennis H. Wrong. Like a snowstorm in a paperweight Burton’s lectures were composed of almost identical material year by year with variance in where the emphasis fell. Lately Foucault was more in front than Freud, but that was all. Sociology was a play without plot, with a distant action in which the characters were representative individuals only. Curiously, it was all very much like Burton’s life, in which meanings rose to a more representative plane as his wife left him, his children led other lives, and we, his friends, ceased phoning or at best attended his crises like undertakers impatient for termination. His letter-box overflowed with unpaid bills that were finally eaten by snails. Burton was left the corpse of himself seeking understanding.

  Being a spectator to experience was all right professionally—it was Durkheim’s founding definition of sociology, after all, that individuals were subject to social facts they couldn’t recognise, and needed specialist interpreters—but in person Burton was Icarus falling. In the park watching children play, cricketers at their game, or cyclists whizzing around Grand Drive he felt the spiralling-in of existence. It was here somewhere near and fearfully dear that he would come home. He felt the power of a centre and he himself at that centre. Mentally into the backpack went a small tin of tuna and the book of Leonard Cohen lyrics with paintings by Henri Matisse that Sophie had given him when she first brought Bruce Hubbard home as a family friend.

  Walking was Burton’s habit, heading south from Paddo through Centennial Park and thereafter through angles of shaded, handsome streets—always choosing those with over-hanging fig trees and interesting root patterns on low sandstone cuttings. Mostly he took them in the same order, crossing to the other side of the road when a certain cracked pavement gave him permission, or a street sign such as ‘Walker’ or ‘Shoebridge’ gave him the pun of consent. Outside shops when he found himself blocked by delivery trucks he stopped. Instead of going around he waited like a blinkered horse as the beeper of the reversing vehicle sounded. Walking was somewhat exhausting and Burton looked careworn, unkempt and was on some days, lately, obviously unwashed. A Mr Bayeh at one corner store and a Mrs Wing at another noticed his routines and started coming out, handing Burton something from the pastry cabinet gratis, an apricot Danish or a slice of baklava which he took on the hoof, wolfing it down, discovering sugar to be a prime necessity of the life of the mind. Had they known he was no itinerant, but the one educating their children to social inclusion they would have been dumbfounded. Going early the sun was on Burton’s l
eft cheek and returning it was on his left cheek again. When he told them that they nodded in kindness.

  Walking gave a rhythm to Burton’s thinking that carried over into his Tuesday and Thursday lectures. He was already down to part-time duties yet counted the reduction in his circumstances as merely a commentary on what was happening to him, as if it were an indicative phenomenon. There Burton stood in the lecture hall sweating and breathing hard, wearing the linen trousers, the fringed embroidered waistcoat and the beaded casbah cap he’d favoured since postgrad years. Hot from striding, his heart hammered as he gripped the lectern and shaped his material into pentameters that pulsed with his blood flow. He felt white-hot inspired, elaborating a theory of his own at last, the idea of the universal spiral on which could be attached anything ever thought or any action ever taken, whether individual or social, by man, beast, or god. Meantime Burton’s students got up a petition to the head of department and demanded Burton’s removal for lectures that were barely comprehensible. What excited Burton in his private self was the growth of his idea, the way it extended down into his veins for nourishment and, far from being a contemptible bright idea any more, it was a theory of everything awaiting ignition to unite.

  I understood him as best I could. Thinking excitedly while lecturing it was apparently easy for Burton to be in two places at once, to lay out the four functional dimensions or problems in the structural-functionalism of Talcott Parsons, say, and compare them with the simpler and more attractive propositions of, for example, Vilfredo Pareto and the inescapabale circulation of elites. Mentally at the same time Burton remained with his left cheek to the earth watching fingers of wind trailing through grassblades and leading his eye to the inky shade of a spreading fig. He thought he had never been so brilliant and on top of himself. A panel of peers sat in.