The Tree that Never Stopped Growing

The tree was born on the sidewalk and never stopped growing.

We went to see it one day. It was casually standing in front of a clothing store, leaning to its left like an intellectual from the sixties. Its skin was flawless and smooth. We resisted the temptation to feel it. Young men and women passed us by and entered the store, enthused and full of life, eager to try the warmth of freshly stacked garments. The tree stood still. So did we. We looked up to see its head. We couldn’t. It stretched into the cumulus that roofed our town and seemed eternal like a child’s peskiness.

‘What are you looking at?’ An old man stopped and asked.

‘We are trying to see it head,’ we replied.

‘Huh, how could you, standing here? You have to climb it to see the top,’ the man said. His voice didn’t tremble.   

Climb it? We gasped. This was a tree that never stopped growing. Who knew how tall it was? It would take us years to climb it, let alone the danger of falling down and leaving a spot on the street on our way to the morgue.

‘It’s not difficult. People did it before,’ the man was indomitable.

‘Really?’ My friend ignored my signal and continued, ‘Pray tell us who did it before.’

‘Why, me. I climbed it once.’

‘You!’ Both of us stared at the man with disbelief mixed with irritation. Another old man with a wrinkly desire to impress strangers with silly adventure stories.

‘Why is it so hard to believe? I was younger then.’ He said nonchalantly, as if his age was the only factor that could discredit his claim. ‘Do you want to hear the story?’

Shit, I thought to myself, a war veteran came back and found his wife sleeping with other men. Sad, he went to the forest and killed a bear and became the king of the jungle. Same story, different forms.

‘It won’t take long. Do you drink beer?’

We exchanged looks. It was not that we were in a hurry. Both of us didn’t have any job at the time. We had some money to spare as well. Having a couple of beer with an old man who claimed to have climbed the tallest tree in the world didn’t sound fun, but perhaps more fun than going home and having a couple of beer with each other until we reached the end of our wakeful drunkenness and slipped into sleepy drunkenness.

‘Don’t worry. I’ll pay for the beer.’

That clinched the deal. We looked around and found a water hole. The tree stood still. We marched towards the story.

2.

When I was your age I had a stable life. I had a nice career in advertising. I had a beautiful wife and was planning to buy a house in the suburbs. We didn’t have any kids but we were not complaining. My wife cooked for me, washed and ironed my clothes, even sang for me when there was a power cut.

We were happy. Suspiciously happy.

The first time I saw the tree when we went to the clothing store to buy a gift for my mother-in-law. Did you notice the store? It was only started then – not a humongous thing like today – it was a small shop where people went to check the price of branded clothes and bought the fakes from the stores elsewhere. We never went there before. My wife was excellent at keeping things new. I hardly felt the need to buy new shirts or pants. Or maybe she did all the shopping, I never noticed.

That day she insisted to go to the new store. I didn’t understand her eagerness. I saw her putting some makeup and smiling in the mirror. That was strangely erotic. I grabbed her from behind and tried to kiss her. She said, later.

I wasn’t very keen to go out, that too for shopping for my mother-in-law. But the festival was approaching and we had to buy her something. My wife was her only child. She lost her husband in a flood a couple of years ago. All in all, she had a good case.

We had a bad experience at the store. The shopping assistants were rude and uninterested. The prices were absurdly high. No item seemed suitable for my wife’s seventy-year old mother. We came out after half an hour and I lit a cigarette.

I noticed two things immediately. My wife’s face in the light of the burning matchstick and that tree.

I don’t remember which looked sadder. She was disappointed that we couldn’t manage to get anything nice for her mother but the tree was so depressingly unending. Almost like a Russian novel.      

‘This is one sad tree,’ I told my wife, ‘it must have been standing here for ages.’

‘Why don’t you give it some company?’ She said angrily. 

‘Maybe I will,’ I said breathing out a lot of smoke.

We had never had any argument before but that day was different. Soon we started calling each other names. She called me ambitionless. I called her fat. That ended the conversation.

After she was gone I lit another cigarette and looked at the tree more carefully. It was dark already and the dusky halo around it had made it more poignant. Trees don’t speak, I thought, or better, I don’t speak tree. We would never have any fight, I told the tree and touched its trunk.

Something happened inside me, I can’t explain what. Suddenly I felt a strong craving for being with the tree forever. I didn’t know I was capable of having such a strong feeling. When I was a child I was famous for my cruelty against insects. I grew up quite indifferent to the matters of heart. True that I loved my wife but it was more like a mole on my chin – it was not there from the beginning but gradually it became my identity. This feeling that I had for the tree was unique. I didn’t want to have sex with it, that would be stupid. I didn’t lose my head. But somehow it felt unmistakably sexual. I even had a faint erection.

What were the ways to be with a tree forever? I started to think. I could lean on it for a while but that would be short-lived. I could take a photo and look at it all day but that would be perverse. I could break a brunch and take it home but that would be a crime.

I kept thinking.

The darkness grew denser. The passers-by passed me by, each and everyone. The stores were closed finally. The vagabonds got tired and cosied under the deserted shades at the warmer corners of the street. The occasional cars honked only for pleasure. The dogs bit each other’s tails. The drain water flowed. The wind blew. The cigarettes burnt.

I kept thinking.

Finally my thinking cemented into hallucination. I saw a naked woman with a mask of mud on her face pleasuring herself in front of a refrigerator. The door of the fridge was open and cold smoke tweaked her nipples.

Unable to think I started to climb the tree. It seemed the most natural thing to do. The more I moved up, the more my mind got cleared. I realized it was inevitable. Since the tree never stopped growing, the only way I could be with it forever was to climb it nonstop.

And so I did.

The first few hours were the most excruciating. I never climbed a tree before. I didn’t know the technique. But I discovered that I had a knack for it. My talent lay not in writing smart copies for frozen yogurt, but in climbing a relentless tree on a deafeningly lonely street.

I slipped quite a few times. My hands got sleepy; my legs hurt, my waist and shoulders stopped existing. I carried on. After a while it felt like I was having sex with a porcupine. My whole body got bruised. I didn’t let loose.

I might have fallen asleep at some point. I was awoken by a whisper. I opened my eyes and saw my wife. At first I thought I was sleeping on my own bed. Then I remembered I was climbing a tree for the last few hours.

But what was my wife doing here? Was she climbing too? I asked her. She yawned and I saw a newsreel being played out inside her gaping mouth. It showed three years of our conjugal life in three minutes. The major events, the fleeting moments of post-coital sadness, the occasional smiles and brushing teeth in front of a mirror. I recognized the mirror. We bought it at a village fair.

The she disappeared. I climbed up and saw my parents. They were still waiting for my postcard. I climbed up and saw my friends. They were having a party without me. I climbed up and saw my ex-girlfriend. She was asleep. I didn’t want to break her sleep, so I kept climbing.

Months passed. Years went by. Decades changed. I kept climbing. My memory of life below faded like a dream of a dying sheep. I forgot my wife’s face. Only her yawn remained. And the mirror. We bought it at a village fair.

The day I reached the top was not unusual. The last bit of crawling proved tedious. I couldn’t see much ahead as the clouds blurred my vision. Suddenly I felt I was home and I knew I had reached.

When the clouds dissipated, I saw a staircase. I was sure I was hallucinating once again. Who would put a staircase at the top of a tree? I climbed to the stairs and stood at the first step. I couldn’t remember when the last time I stood on anything. My legs were shaking uncontrollably. It was like meeting the ghost of a childhood friend whose face was eaten by a grizzly bear. I lifted one of my legs and put it on the next step. The rest was easy.

While climbing the stairs, I started to feel uneasy. Was it the paradise? Was the tree some sort of naturally developed Tower of Babel? Would I now meet those who had left me behind in the earth? I didn’t even like some of them. What would I do if I met them now? All sorts of queasy thoughts hovered in my mind.

I reached the final step and opened my eyes. I realized I had my eyes closed until now and that was why I didn’t see what was coming. What stood in front of me made me sad and happy at the same time. People say this all the time but it doesn’t happen that frequently. It was, however, one of those rare moments when you can’t distinguish between tears of joy and sorrow. I wasn’t crying actually. I only had a blocked nose.

I saw life in front me. The same life that I left beneath, a little foggier now. The same street, a little dirtier now. The same stores, a little bigger now. The same people, a little fatter now. I was standing at the same place from where I started climbing. I looked up and saw the tree. It was still there in front of the store. It never stopped growing.

I turned back but couldn’t see the stairs. They had disappeared with my decades-long history of climbing the tree. It all felt like a joke, brilliantly unfunny and sadistic, told by an idiot with a lisp.

I didn’t know what to do next. Should I look for my wife? What’s the point? So long had passed. Maybe she was dead. Worse she could be alive and still waiting for me to come back with a gift for her mother. I didn’t have any gift. Neither did I have any money to buy one. All my money was blown away in a storm I faced in 1979.

I walked a few steps away from the tree and watched the people passing it by. I saw two gentlemen gawking at it, possibly trying to figure out how to climb it. I thought it was my responsibility to tell them what happened when someone climbed that fucking tree.

And here we are.

3.

Of course we didn’t believe a word of that story. Of course we went back and climbed that tree. Of course we ended up here under the tree, still looking up to see its head. Of course it never stopped growing.

Now we can see an old man approaching us. We know what he has to say. The tree has seen this happen many times before.

And it never stopped growing.