Olive Harvest on the Terraces

Dirt road below half out of hiding, and two burros (how like their double sacks) single-filing to the mill as if hesitations in a step will make the way straight, float an endless roll of hills away and turn the breeze this way, silver the orchard trees in fits and starts.

An apparition of white butterflies veers as one from tree to tree against the morning’s incessant blue. Where we’ve stopped under our tree a lizard, throat pulsing the moment’s desperation, vanishes into the earth. We’re putting down sheets:

today red olives, only one tree. Raki Mamut, hair black as a coal seam emblazoned with light, measures tree and sky and tells me we won’t be long, white Neyzen Yachting shirt ironed smooth, perfect fit. His wife, Munifer, almond eyes and dark embroidered dress, cleaning sunglasses like a pilgrim of the terra incognita within, in the doorway her mother bent by osteoporosis to a question mark no taller than her grandchild in primary school today. Mamut has never said marriage to beauty and money although a dream will divide you, and perhaps his thinner angular part still knows how to towel drinking glasses, prop them like bowling pins in a narrow bar in Turgutreis at three in the afternoon, small quarrel of wind redesigning the grass and palms, the brochures about this place untrue but his voice in the bamboo hut bottomless: “the raki is ready, meine Damen und Herren.”

Mamut and I on opposite sides of the tree, circling as if we’re about to invent revels of ripeness by shaking branches and listening to the hail-drum of olives. I stare into the sun, ignite everything, surprised by the moment it takes for a world to burn black, yet my jet-lagged body knows it’s time to be here, as it did north of Tarsus on the far skirt of the Taurus Range when the engine chatter of our van stopped across the road from a man’s silhouette black against morning sun shooting flames through the harvester – beyond the harvester golden wheels of winter wheat and wheels within the prophet’s fiery wheels. And when these terraces return, first as shimmering and then as olive trees, Mamut is half way to my side, beating languid branches with a three-metre pole. The rake Munifer gives me with a Yes/No shake of her head is smooth in my hands like skin tingling with details as I climb the ladder’s rungs, strip the highest branches of leaves and small pendants blood-brown.

Our second hour of work is losing method, Mamut and I opening shirts, pulling them out of our jeans. Truth is, knowing how much repeats itself, what is finished or not, what’s next, we want to sit down. “These trees make you think in ways you haven’t before” – ladder, pole, and rake the same as last year, and the sacks and wedding sheets on the ground – “there aren’t that many kinds of olives; there are many ways to harvest them.”

Yes, Mamut, so much of our knowing comes to nothing, even that which doesn’t lead to bad ends, and stripping a tree of most of its olives and many of its leaves is easier than forgiving our teachers.

“I say a few simple words and the professor is lost in thoughts, I like that,” Mamut grasping the sheet by two corners, waiting for me to do the same. Munifer has been picking leaves and stems from the litter, unafraid of her body’s beauty, neck and back perfectly straight, cupped hand sweeping redness back and forth, fingers alive like a pianist, her face almost serious as she finally turns back, rolls a jute sack down as if to step inside, watches olives roll and mound end to end across the middle of the sheet, places the sack at Mamut’s edge, moves it closer, half the open top underneath, hands and arms ready. Far off another olive orchard with the vagueness of neighbours allowing something to happen and children’s laughter like the sound of water washing a day’s grace clean at the door.