22

 

When I came to this house, a large chinaberry stood in the garden. Even though this is not a native tree but an ornamental, imported one—I loved it, the smell of its blossoms, its crown that resembles a canopy, and its height of thirty feet. I loved watching the nesting of the woodpeckers in the holes they had pecked there, but at the time it did not occur to me that these amiable woodpeckers would decide the chinaberry’s fate.

The woodpecker also nests in the pecan and eucalyptus, but when it sees a chinaberry tree it will always favor that for its soft core. It perforates the tree’s bark with its formidable beak, penetrating inside, widening and creating a space for use as a room for the goslings, and builds a nest there. These internal spaces weaken the tree, which is not strong at the best of times. And indeed, several years after my arrival here, a large branch broke close to where the trunk splits, falling and thumping to the ground three feet from where I was working in the garden. At the point of breakage, the branch was hollow, and I could see the remains of a nest.

My common sense told me to cut down the tree, but I took pity on it. Less than two weeks later, another branch fell. When it comes to a chinaberry, no official permission is needed to chop it down. In the past it was a common and beloved tree, but today it is regarded as an invasive species and a dangerous tree. I summoned my young friend Gal, a woodcutter and pruner of trees. He showed up with a tractor that had a folding hydraulic arm, the kind used to repair traffic lights and hang flags. He stood on a platform at the end of the arm, equipped with a short electric saw he held in one hand, and began to circle the chinaberry. He first removed the treetop’s thin branches and then proceeded to work on the thicker ones, until nothing remained but the skeleton of the trunk and a few large limbs, devoid of foliage. Once its boughs were removed, the tree also lost its color. The green torso, pulsating with life, became a black silhouette against a gray firmament, a skeleton with hands outstretched, a monument on the back of a gravestone. My friend Gal hovered around it dejectedly, the saw rattling in his hand, felling one section after another.

The chopping down of a tree is a difficult sight, but actually a carefully planned one is even harder on the eye and the heart. In a residential neighborhood it is impossible to cut down a large tree from the base of the trunk because it might fall with all its weight onto a roof, a person, car, or other plants in a garden. This is why Gal cut it down limb by limb, a slow execution. But because of his professionalism and experience, his movements did not manifest themselves as the violent touch of death but as gestures of attention, and even love.

In Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer it is written: “When a tree that bears fruit is cut down, its moan goes from one end of the world to the other, yet no sound is heard.” This is beautifully worded and has a certain Zen quality to it, arousing envy for its very elegance, but the content is disappointing because it has a utilitarian, anthropocentric attitude that is in fact expressed in the term “a tree that bears fruit”: all trees bear fruit, since it is the fruit that contains the seeds, but man bestows the honorable title of “fruit tree” only on those trees bearing fruit deemed edible. All the other trees are described insultingly as “barren trees.” The word “barren” suggests emptiness—a continuation of the perception outlined in Genesis that nature and all its creatures were created for the benefit and enjoyment of that pinnacle of creation, mankind.

Whether or not they produce fruit we can eat and enjoy, trees possess qualities common to humans and animals: they are born and die; they eat, drink, multiply, grow, fall sick; they sense light, heat, touch, moisture, and perhaps even time. Some of them actually have the ability to move—toward the sun, for example, or in search of support or something to cling to. One of my olive trees, for example, does not like the big terebinth tree that grows beside it and clearly inclines away, distancing its branches from those of the terebinth.

Do trees feel pain? I doubt it. Do they shout out in their suffering? Despite what is written in Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer, I further doubt this. I do, however, agree that if they feel pain and cry out, humans cannot hear their voices, since they are not able to hear and understand anything that so differs from them.

At this stage, Gal lowered the arm of the crane, sliced the thick bifurcated branches, and cut the trunk into circular slices. The pieces fell with heavy thuds to the ground. The sounds as they hit the ground, from a steadily decreasing height, gradually changed, from the mighty thump of the first one to the soft, dull blow of the final one, the last one. Gal climbed off the crane, sliced the last few sections of what was once a trunk, silenced the saw, and put it aside.

We sat down to drink a glass of cold water. “There goes my good mood,” he said. “I hate chopping trees down to the ground. I’d rather prune it and save it, but there was no choice here.”

The boughs—spindly branches that bore leaves—he piled onto his cart to throw away on the dumping ground. He would use the chunks of thick branches and trunk for heating. In the picture that is framed by my kitchen window there is an empty space, like a mouth after a tooth is extracted, and in my heart—only sorrow and unease.