we both recognized the sinister drone of the buzz saw the instant it started, though a few more moments passed before we traced its exact origin. The stone walls of the nearby houses played tricks with the din, and the echo of the blade’s harsh ring first sent us scrambling downhill instead of up, in search of the source. By now we knew that sound and its meaning all too well. In just a few months’ time, two of the neighborhood’s oldest and loveliest trees had been hacked down to the strains of that same vile rattle. First, the tallest pine in the municipal garden was felled in minutes flat, too abruptly for us to do anything but mourn it. The man we knew was responsible — he had recently attached a huge, garish balcony to his top-floor apartment and cleared the tree to allow an unobstructed eastern view — denied it with a snide shrug, not worth challenging. The tree was already reduced to a stump and, we realized, no argument would bring it back.
Then, by cruel coincidence, on the same day Rafi’s mother slipped out of her coma and into death at the Gates of Justice hospital, another neighbor began his attack on the grand eucalyptus whose dipping and swishing I had attended so raptly from the bedroom window on Daniel Street, and whose gentle undulations had served as a familiar, dynamic backdrop to the view from our newer porch. The dead woman, too, had spent every afternoon since I had known her — and probably for several decades before — sitting on her balcony, staring off in the direction of the tree. Now, in just a few days’ time, both it and she would be gone forever. When we realized what was happening, Peter called the parks department’s hot line (lukewarm was more like it), and waited on the phone as a string of sleepy-sounding operators transferred him here, and then there and around again, through a loop of other operators, who each listened in turn to his complaint, then mumbled “just a minute” or yawned at him to “wait” then switched him elsewhere, each passing of the bureaucratic buck punctuated by a blast of cheerful Muzak. Meanwhile, in the background, the saw groaned on. When finally he reached the appropriate department and explained one more time about the eucalyptus, the woman on the other end grumbled that she would have to check the file, this might take some time. He should call back in half an hour. And when he did, it was only to learn that all was legal. There was nothing we could do. The man did have a year-old permit that allowed him to cut down the tree: The roots might damage his house’s foundations, the clerk read from the form. And, besides, the higher branches stood in the way of low-flying planes. Too dismayed to laugh out loud, Peter hung up the phone and we were forced to listen to that taunting metallic death knell for a full week afterward, as the self-appointed lumberjack and his helper chopped, meter by meter, down to the base of the tree. When they finished, the landscape had a hole in it, a terrible dead space in the air where that constant green flutter ought to be. This, though, was a weird, almost wraithlike phenomenon that seemed even to apply to the cypress that had once, we had heard, existed near the edge of our porch, before another neighbor “helped” it to come down. He began quietly to uproot it — “trees make dirt,” we were told, yet again, in terse explanation for the perceived need to remove from the local landscape as much greenery as possible — and then when the once-in-a-decade blizzard came, used the “dangerous” weight of the snow as an excuse to fell the tree. Although I’d never seen that cypress, I could sometimes swear I felt its absent shade, heard its invisible swish in the wind.
This time we had advance warning. About a week before, Peter had happened upon a “little ape of a man,” as he unapologetically dubbed him, with a long black beard and blue cap who had crawled high up into the stocky eucalyptus that sat a few yards from the fresh pine stump in the municipal garden, and was attempting to amputate one of the thickest branches with his puny handsaw. Peter had called to the man to ask him what he was doing and why. The man cursed him and told him to Mind your own business and Get lost, till Peter yelled louder and threatened to call the cops. (On paper, at least, cutting down trees without permission is a criminal offense in Jerusalem.) Then the man had descended, his face hot, eyes and neck veins popping, and pushed Peter in the chest as he screamed at the top of his lungs, “WHO ARE YOU? YOU’RE NOT EVEN A JEW!” (Meaning he didn’t dress in the standard religious black-and-white uniform and grow his side-locks long — or, worse still and not altogether improbable, given Peter’s tough-to-place accent — he might be a half-breed, heathen Russian, a devoted sausage eater!) Realizing he had locked horns with a lunatic, Peter turned to go. The man abandoned his work soon after.
But now a brief, fruitless trip downhill made it clear that the buzz saw was humming from the very same tree. I dispatched myself to go investigate while Peter dialed the police and the parks department, yet again. On my way out the door, I grabbed a book — a cookbook, it turned out, from which I would pretend to study recipes for lentil soup with melon and fish baked in salt as I spied and awaited the squad car — and, sure enough, there in the tree was a short bearded man who matched Peter’s monkeyish description: He had a compact body, long swinging arms, and the telltale cornflower cap. As he talked to himself, the edges of his mouth drooped buffoonishly and his nostrils swelled and shrunk, swelled and shrunk like a set of cartoon bellows. And though his bearing was somehow comic — his grotesquely disproportionate features suggested a crayon drawing rendered by a small child — there was nothing even vaguely funny about the destruction he had already accomplished. He had wiggled into the top part of the eucalyptus and was breathing heavily as he heaved all his weight at one sturdy bough. The branch was far too massive for his cheap hand tools, which he had inadvertently contrived, in the course of just a few minutes, to lodge deep into the wood. Abandoning the dulled spikes and pickax there for the time being, he’d now moved on to an electric saw and he seemed mad, even vindictive, determined to injure the tree for the losses it had caused him. And sure enough, as he shoved the blade back and forth, swearing and grunting loudly, he managed quite efficiently — if that is the word for the speedy execution of such slipshod butchery — to seriously mangle the tree.
What could I do? I paced beneath him with my cookbook, round and round the trunk, and even contemplated snatching his Charlie-the-tramp-like satchel, which rested on the ground nearby. If he scrambled down to get the bag back I could spare the tree further damage before the police came. But the thought of this little man pushing me in the chest and shrieking racial epithets was more than I could bear. (He was slight but looked strong, agitated, and definitely crazy enough to hurt me.) And if the police arrived to discover that I had stolen his belongings, things might get messy.… So I continued to pace, round the trunk, and round. The man ignored me as he sent rough chunks of wood crashing down on the bushes below.
Meanwhile, Nehama, our former neighbor, had appeared in a floor-length plush housedress and slippers on her balcony and was taking in the scene through what looked to me from a distance like a suspicious squint. “Leave him be,” she called out to me with a wary smile and warning tone. “He’s just earning a little money.”
“But the tree …” I attempted, rather feebly, as several of the students from the yeshiva right beside the eucalyptus emerged to smoke cigarettes, eye me, and flamboyantly greet the small bearded man, whom, I soon realized, they themselves had hired to perform their illegal tree-slaughter. Now they were determined to protect him from a hard-hearted, nature-loving outsider like me.
This yeshiva, it ought to be said, existed at the very epicenter of the neighborhood as both a literal and figurative black hole. It was a study house for the newly religious, and most of the men who lived and learned the fundamentals of Jewish law there had a distractedly unkempt and tentative look about them, as if they were in hiding. They called themselves penitents but most wore the long, ill-fitting dark coats, the wide-brimmed hats, and scruffy beards of ultra-Orthodoxy as a kind of defensive costume, a dare to those who would question their spiritual superiority. A sloppy anger emanated from the place. Many of the students had, at some point in their former lives, spent time in prison or reform school, though few seemed like serious felons: Their demeanor suggested small fry, occasional crime. I imagined most had been petty crooks, amateur drug dealers, participants in yelling matches that had unexpectedly turned bloody. Perhaps they were cat burglars. Now that they were saved (or, as the Hebrew phrase would have it, they had “returned with the answer”), they parked their cars at crowded angles all along the garden path and tossed their towels from the ritual bath to dry over the green plastic tarp they had slung crookedly around the front courtyard, built in the hostile haste that usually signaled illegal construction. And their sneering contempt for everyone who was not of their kind — that is, Jewish, male, religious, right wing, and dark-skinned — made me walk faster when I passed their courtyard. There was something sordid and aggressive about their collective gaze: Aside from the periods they had spent behind bars, these men had lived “outside,” without such strict rules about purity and the separation of the sexes, and while they might adhere now to a prudery they considered heaven-sent, they hadn’t adjusted their bald habit of staring. If anything, I sensed that the laws they had recently learned on the subject gave them the feeling of lecherous entitlement, especially where secular women in short skirts were concerned. Officially, at least, they fancied themselves above “base” passions, and so deemed it kosher to ogle all they liked. Their women knew to dress modestly.
Unfortunately, on this particular summer day, I had burst out of the house in my T-shirt and thin cotton skirt without thinking. And now, as a few of them emerged from the study house to see what was going on in the tree and to argue (they looked ready to argue at all times), they didn’t hesitate to address their remarks, in a creepy, unblinking way, directly at my bare legs. I clutched the cookbook closer to my chest and started to pace. “What’s with you?” one of them snorted. “It’s not a fruit tree.”
“What?” I snapped back, a bit too forcefully. “It’s a tree — he’s destroying the tree.”
“But it’s only forbidden to cut down fruit trees,” explained the smug man who stood before me, broadly scratching his potbelly. “It’s written.”
“You’re a religious man —” I said, not thinking too clearly and sputtering a bit as the tree chunks continued to litter down behind me. “He’s killing the tree. It’s a kind of murder, no? Don’t you see?”
Potbelly was amused by my agitated tone, and he grinned as he called up to the man in the tree “Yosef! She says you’re a murderer!” There were chuckles all around, a bit of noisy whispering, and then the monkey man, Yosef, inched back down the tree. Aggressively avoiding eye contact with me, he began to make the rounds of his smirking supporters, shaking hands with each of the onlookers who had gathered to rally around him and cast shifty looks in my direction. One slapped him on the back, another offered him a cigarette, and yet another put his arm around the little man and mumbled in his ear. With this, he began to look a bit anxious. His face flushed to angry pink, he muttered something harsh-sounding just under his breath, then let the mumbler steer him away from the tree and me, and toward the public housing projects below. The cue had been given: As the two disappeared into a sea of concrete, the other yeshiva students dispersed and I was left alone with the tools and the wounded tree.
At this point, the police pulled up. The officers looked tired and a little bit bored by my story, which only made me more defiant as I described the man, showed them his abandoned tools, and gestured in the approximate direction toward which he’d fled. One of them began a strolling search for the missing perpetrator while the other stayed to radio dispatch. By this time, the presence of the squad car in the middle of the garden had created a small stir. A group of preteen punks with buzz cuts had gathered on their bicycles to witness an arrest. Nehama had descended to the street, in full naptime regalia, and was talking in muted, conspiratorial tones with a few of the yeshiva students who had reemerged from their fortress-lair and now stood watching at a curious remove. “Mizken,” she said, clicking her tongue when I approached her, “poor thing … he’s just doing his job. He doesn’t have anything, it’s just a job. Poor thing …” she began again, and though I tried once more to defend the tree itself as a “poor thing,” I understood as I spoke that I had drifted into waters much deeper and murkier than I had first realized when I set forth. Not only was my basic, arboreal concern completely alien to these parts, but my defense of the tree was viewed by Nehama as a direct assault on other, more essential values. In her mind, I could see, there was a selfish, cold, even un-Jewish aspect both to my feeling for the tree and my method of handling the problem. Calling the police was a last resort, to be taken only in extreme, life-threatening instances, which the cutting down of a mute evergreen most certainly was not, to her mind: better to bellow and carry on than involve officials who didn’t, anyway, have to live day in day out with the people next door and who didn’t subscribe to the somewhat faulty local logic that said there was no problem, major or minor, that couldn’t be solved by just screaming loudly enough. Now, it was clear, the struggle for the future of this eucalyptus was about to metamorphose into a showdown of nasty, racial sorts — which was the very last thing I’d ever wanted when I set out to save a tree that had, in fact, stood guard at the neighborhood’s center long before my own pale-skinned arrival. About then, Peter wandered up cautiously from our street and a few minutes later Nomi, our widowed jeweler-neighbor, also passed by and stopped to commiserate, an unfortunate coincidence that worked to further emphasize the us–them aspect of the standoff taking ugly shape around the base of the tree.
For all its apparent serenity, the municipal garden had for some time now been associated in my mind with a slow-boiling sort of ethnic hatred. Abed, the soft-spoken Palestinian gardener who had cared with such patience for the plumbago and oleander there, had recently quit — driven away by a combination of factors, some of which he explained to Peter in staccato Hebrew (the solitary weeding, watering, pruning made him lonely, he said; he preferred to work with a crew). Then, to top it all off, a group of neighborhood children had started a horrible game of taunting Abed — jumping on his water hose, calling out names, and yanking up the flowers he’d just planted. Instead of fighting them off, he had left as soon as the insults began, clenching his jaw and requesting a transfer. He preferred to work in Arab East Jerusalem, no matter if the job of gardener there entailed more garbage detail, less plant maintenance. He was understandably hurt at the way these brats had treated him, though he remained friendly toward us, far too polite and dignified to ever stop smiling when we saw him later in the East, and he recounted the awful story.
The yeshiva students hadn’t, it was true, been directly involved in Abed’s leaving, but I couldn’t help thinking that their rude proximity had also made him uneasy. Theirs was a noisy, sprawling presence at the garden’s center. They seemed to need to assert their dominance by defying nature, manhandling it — the delicate almond tree right in front of their door, for instance, became a coatrack, over which they’d drape their wilted clothing — and while they shared with Abed the strict tendencies of the Orthodox (at his cue from the muezzin, he would stop work at regular intervals to pray on a small cardboard mat), his bearing was quite the opposite of theirs: contained, businesslike, almost mute.
Just as I began to think in horror of how Abed would have responded to the vision of the ax tip jammed into the flesh of the tree, a pickup truck stenciled with the municipal parks department logo pulled up, bearing Abed’s replacement, sullen as always in his green uniform. A very young man, a boy really, with a molting mustache, thick glasses, and a blank look, he’d let the garden wither and scorch since Abed had left — whether in conscious defiance or mere laziness, I could not say. He was accompanied by a Jewish supervisor, a middle-aged Yemenite with a swarthy face, a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to his ample paunch, and a pair of worn sandals. In just a few seconds, this man — a savior of exhausted-looking sorts — had already grasped what was happening and taken stern control. “Who is responsible for this?” he asked, staring at the yeshiva students, who had grown suspiciously silent and averted their gaze the moment he had stepped from the truck. His skin was several shades darker than that of the darkest of them, and in a certain, horrible sense, all he needed to do to diffuse the feverish racial tension that had seized this ragtag group was stand there, hands on hips, in front of the tree whose presence he’d come to defend, showing off his coffee-brown pigment.
“Whose tools are these?” No one spoke. “Whose … tools … are … these?” he asked again, softly, this time looking harder at each of the black-hatted men in turn. One of them, a gangly jokester with a wiry beard, sneered and muttered something to his friend beside him, at which the supervisor turned to face him, irritated but restrained, formal in a faintly ironic way. “Is this funny? Maybe you, sir, can tell me something about what’s going on here.”
And before the Jokester was forced to lie and claim his ignorance, Yosef the monkey man appeared, huffing and puffing and obviously upset as he sweated up the hill. Ignoring the police, the parks official, the gardener, and the curious crowd that had gathered, he approached his satchel and began the rather clownish task of trying to collect nonchalantly the few remaining tools that he hadn’t lodged in the tree.
“Excuse me.” The supervisor continued to speak in the same measured tones. “But are these your things? What are you doing to this tree? You know there are fines for damaging trees.” At the panic-stricken look that Yosef gave his own shoes, the supervisor’s voice grew softer. “Who hired you to do this?”
Without any warning, Yosef began to scream in Hebrew and curse in Arabic, and charged the dark-skinned official, headfirst, as if preparing to butt him with his blue cap. “NO ONE HIRED ME, your mother’s a whore, LEAVE ME ALONE!” The yeshiva toughs jumped to hold him back.
The supervisor blinked and shifted his weight, nonplused. “Who … hired … you … to … do … this?”
“Your sister’s a cunt, you son of a whore —”
“Leave him alone,” the Jokester dove in, too insistently. “He didn’t do anything.” Catching himself sounding a bit overinvolved, he gave a little, helpless shrug, as if daring the supervisor to bully him instead of the runtish man.
“Maybe you know something, then, if you’re so sure you know what he did or didn’t do.” The Jokester shrugged again, in unmasked mockery, and as the supervisor turned his gaze back to Yosef to check his reaction, the little man looked ready to burst into terrified tears.
His face grew still redder and now he began to plead in a shameless, whispery way, stepping up to stand much too close to the official, lifting his face upward to beg: “Let me go. Just forget about the tree.” The supervisor sighed wearily, then moved off to get some air and signal the police to leave. Their threatening presence wasn’t helping any and had only served, it seemed, to set the little man off on his neurotic jag.
This back-and-forth continued for some time, with the park supervisor posing patient questions and even offering the shaken man gardening work at City Hall if he would point a finger at the person who’d paid him. But he continued to refuse and pounced frequently from one aggravated state to the next (he cowered, he screamed, he pleaded, he cursed). At the same time, the yeshiva students either paced the perimeter or defended the accused in noncommittal terms called out from the sidelines, while other onlookers — especially Nehama — piped up often to offer support for the little man’s actions. The branch, she insisted, looked sturdy, but who knew? It might fall down one day and hurt the children playing below. Now it might fall down, I tried to counter. Now that he had severed its base from the trunk and left it to dangle it was dangerous. It had been fine before he came along. But the children! she insisted in turn, and I knew it was best for me just to shut up: No matter the contentious subject of discussion (chemical warfare, daylight saving time, terrorism, the water supply), this inevitable but-the-children line of reasoning always stood as a dead end of incontestible sorts. Rhetorically, at least, the children of Israel were the be-all and end-all, the altar on which every shard of reason, calm, and self-respect could be sacrificed without apology or shame. I bit my tongue and looked up at the poor orphaned branch, left half-attached in painful suspension over the tiny park, where in actuality few children ever played.
Peter, at the same time, exchanged charged words with the Jokester, who was a bumbling but determined liar. By now his agitated interjections made it plain that he was the one who had personally hired the man to do his tree chopping and though he wasn’t prepared to step up and take responsibility for the crime, he felt he could not abandon the little man at the height of his interrogation. (It wasn’t pure altruism that kept him there, though. He seemed nervous that Yosef might, with his departure, start to name names.) The monkey man wasn’t much good at dissembling either, and as he trembled he watched the Jokester out of the corner of his rapidly blinking eye, making it clear once and for all that he trembled in terror not of the police but of his patron, who was twice his size and boss of the block. He might explode if accused, and would certainly never ever find Yosef another odd job again.
But the scared little man need not have worried. The Jokester had already redirected his nervous energy and was anxiously attempting to aggravate my husband. Peter had just stated with an exotic sort of placidity that he knew the man was lying; he ought to stop faking and admit what he had done. His honor and honesty challenged in such a cool, apparently unbothered manner by a hatless American, the Jokester looked baffled. When your opponent screamed, it was obvious what to do: You screamed back and threatened him physically. But when faced with this understated accusation, the other man looked lost, almost saddened by Peter’s mild tone. He tried, feebly, to start a fight on moral grounds, a kind of Talmudic tug-of-war, as if he thought he might goad Peter into anger by interjecting a few of the more sophisticated argumentative strategies he’d just picked up at the yeshiva. “You — you just come in here and start making accusations. What do you care? What do you know? It’s not your tree. This man was just trying to earn a little money, so someone paid him to work. It’s between the two of them. You don’t know anything about this. And even if you did, you’d see I know nothing, I didn’t do anything. I was just sitting inside, minding my own business, when I heard all the noise you were making out here. What’s it to you?”
Getting no response whatsoever from Peter, who merely stood there, staring back, the Jokester began to get frantic and protest too much, his voice growing louder. “Who are you to start calling me a liar? Do you know me? NO. And this tree is none of your business anyway. Who do you think you ARE? I am NOT a LIAR.” With this last, stentorian proclamation, which had a new and slightly desperate ring, he turned his gaze away from that of the supervisor — who had fixed him now in a knowing, inescapable, entirely native way — and sighed, apparently conceding a certain grudging guilt.
After this explosion, the fireworks fizzled out. The yeshiva boys scattered; the Jokester stomped off; the punks got bored and rode away; Nehama smiled at us at the conclusion of another afternoon’s entertainment and excused herself to go prepare dinner; the monkey man calmed slightly as the supervisor talked to him in the low, even tones that one uses to quiet a crying child (apparently some private deal had been reached); and we mumbled our thanks to the parks official then made our way back home, too exhausted by the whole elaborate jousting match to fret much more about the tree’s future, which we’d tried our hardest to secure. Its fate was now out of our hands.
In the months following, after Yosef reclaimed his tools and disappeared, and the park returned to its former overgrown state, the episode with the tree was almost forgotten. The eucalyptus was safe for the time being, and only two small signs of the incident remained. First of all, the Jokester, recognizing he had been caught in a lie, turned into a perfect gentleman around both of us — bowing gallantly and asking about our health each time we passed him wandering the street with his brutish entourage, or standing around the counter at Meir’s, where he was a regular whiskey-sipper and where, I imagined, our friend the grocer may well have set him straight about the venality of those stinking Ashkenazis. The Jokester was especially polite and forthcoming when he saw us inside Meir’s store.
Then the hacked branch itself sprouted a feathery burst of new, pale leaves, which seemed to emerge from the splintered wood as a sweetly comic footnote to the whole obnoxious episode. As far as the tree was concerned, the close brush with the buzz saw had been nothing more traumatic than an invitation to put forth fresh foliage. Like new hair growing out beneath a bad dye job, this young effusion was softer and several shades lighter than the older, tougher green, and soon covered the entire battered branch-stump with its gentle swaying.