Tales of the Ever Tree

"The Tree of Knowledge grew fast by, Knowledge of Good bought dear by knowing ill."—John Milton

Book One: The Prophet Goldman

Esther's fingers throbbed from arthritis and her head hurt from a revelation induced migraine worsened by the "clickety-clack" of her Underwood. The loud noise she had heard earlier and the flickering of lights outside meant her last story was nearing its end. The new visions needed to be recorded before three in the morning. She scowled at the page as the grandfather clock in her study chimed midnight, hating to be rushed. This would be the last thing she ever wrote. It had to be perfect.

She sighed, ripped the paper out of the typewriter, and started over.

The blank page curled inside my typewriter mocks and frightens me with words I have not yet written. I am troubled, not by writer's block, but by the story I have become entangled. I pray for God to deliver me from this burden, and if He can not, for Him to give me the courage and wisdom to continue my work.

Three visions in one night. It was a record. Devine revelation was a rare thing, even for her, and a handful here and there was the most she'd expect in the old days. Esther hadn't had one in years. It was just as well since most of what she foresaw was disturbing beyond words. The headaches weren't enjoyable either. It came as bitter comfort that these three would be the last. She needed to record them all before dawn.

The clock in her study chimed midnight.

This is the first revelation given to me:

I was lost in a vast desert wilderness, dieing of thirst and hunger when I came upon a soldier wearing the old uniform of the Polish army. He stood guard under the shade of two fruit trees. The first was a plum tree, twisted and decayed, its fruit lying in a rotting heap on the sand. The second, an apricot tree, was striving and lush, its ripe yellow fruit weighed its branches down. The scent of the plums was sweet as honey in spite of their rot, and I ached to have one.

I asked the soldier for some water and he offered me a sip from his canteen. The water was sweet and tasted of apricots. My thirst was quenched after only one sip, yet the smell of the plums still enticed me. I asked for one, but the soldier warned me that the fruit of that tree was poisonous.

"All who eat of that tree perish in agonizing death," he said to me.

Unable to resist, I did not heed his words. He did nothing to stop me as I snatched a plum and bit into it. The taste was surprisingly sweet but as I swallowed, my throat burned and my gut ached as if I had just eaten molten rock. I clutched my stomach and fell to the ground writhing in pain.

The soldier fixed his eyes upon me, without anger or pity, without any indication of emotion.

"Great is your burden," he had said. "Great is the responsibility you now bear."

As he said this, I heard his true voice, not that of anything human or animal, but of some creature unknown to mortal existence, and his true voice was the piercing wail of a million stars being born. I cringed at the sound and looked upon his face, his true face, and it was like staring into a million suns. He raised his arms as if to hold back the sky, and the arms became fiery wings, unfurled and beautiful and awful to behold.

I turned my eyes away, clutching my stomach and my head, and cried, "What is happening to me?"

"You have eaten of the poisoned fruit," he explained. "You will see what is real and what is not. You will hear what is true and what is lie. The knowledge of the ages is yours to command. You will be powerful, you will be mighty, but you will perish, for the rot of the tree is now within you."

"Why didn't you stop me?"

"Why did you not stop yourself? Did you not believe me when I said the fruit was poisonous?"

"I couldn't stop!" I growled in pain. "You knew I wouldn't be able to stop myself, but you just stood there and watched, didn't you?"

"There is always a choice even when there appears to be none."

I shouted and cursed and begged the creature to take this curse away from me, to end my suffering even if it meant killing me.

"The plum cannot be stuck back on the tree; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less."

When he said this, I wept. I knew I was given a wonderful gift, but the pain of bearing it was too great. I begged once more.

"I have it in my power to relieve your pain temporarily, but the burden of the knowledge you have gained is still yours to bear. Do you understand?"

I nodded my acquiescence and he knelt beside me and gave me another sip from his canteen. The creature became the soldier once again; his fiery wings shimmered and faded in the arid desert air like a mirage on a hot day. His voice was human and soothing, and as I drank, the burning inside me subsided but I knew the horror of what I had done could never be erased.

As I drank, the sky grew dark and the wind howled. The branches rustled above our heads. We both looked up to see what was wrong and I screamed as a terrible snake fell upon the soldier and devoured him.

Esther read over the passage, bewildered. This revelation wasn't new. In fact, it had been her first. She remembered receiving it the night before the Nazi's invaded Poland. While the city of Łódź was bombarded by enemy fire on all sides, all she could think to do was write down her silly dream. It had woken something inside of her, and she often wondered what her life would have been like if she had resisted the temptation to eat the fruit of that damn tree. Eve, the first woman, must have wondered the same thing, back in the garden.

The soldier hadn't lied. The pain of the dream was still fresh in her mind and not just from the burning in her stomach. Her mind had been bombarded with esoteric knowledge and images that lost their meaning upon waking. She stared intently at the page struggling to put into words what she had seen and felt, but it was like trying to explain how magic worked or deciphering some strange forgotten language. It couldn't be translated into mortal words.

The pain of bearing it all those years was the worst part. It hadn't killed her or rotted her from the inside out as it had the monster in the tree, but sometimes she wished it had, just so there would be an end to it. Esther had received a particularly important nugget of knowledge, something the soldier had given her for safe keeping, and whatever he gave her to fend off the pain couldn't hide the truth of what he had done. This particular bit of knowledge, she no longer held. Thinking of the snake and the part it would play, Esther knew that too was a bitter comfort.

The clock struck one.

This is the second revelation given to me:

I was running down a forest path, chased by the desert beast. And in this forest, it was always night, never day, and bitter cold, but I could see the path in front of me and knew I would be safe as long as I stuck to the path. There were many whispering voices all around me, familiar voices of loved ones that had long perished. They were my mother and father and sisters and brothers. They were the people I thought I had lost forever.

"Leave the path and come to us," the voices said, "and we will be together always."

I cried bitter tears because I wanted to follow the voices, to be with the ones I had lost, but I knew leaving the path meant death. I ran faster, always following the path.

The path led to a clearing with a solitary tree, the apricot tree of my desert dream. Sitting under the base of the tree was a young girl of sixteen. She wore the blue and white striped uniform of the camps and her hair was cropped short, almost to the scalp. The girl was staring at the sky with her hands raised above her head, palms open.

"A terrible beast is chasing me," I warned her, "If it sees you, it will kill you too!"

"I cannot leave," the girl said unconcerned, eyes still gazing at the sky, "I'm waiting for the stars to fall. Someone has to catch them before the die."

As she said this, thousands of stars fell from the sky in yellow burning arcs. The girl reached out to save as many as she could. Some had fallen into the palms of her hands, burning and sizzling her flesh as they did so. Some had fallen to the ground at her feet whole, but changed forever. Most burned to ash and disappeared.

I wanted to help her, but there was nothing I could do.

Esther's eyes welled with tears at the memory of so many dead stars. In her dream, the stars had been shaped like the yellow badges made of the Star of David the Nazis had forced her people to wear during the war, and while she dreamed, she could see each star as a number and every number as a person. When she woke, the memory would leave her, though she frantically tried to remember as many as she could. It was as if remembering these people would make it so they never died, but like the end of this revelation, she was totally helpless.

This second revelation was an old one too. The girl, she later learned, was named Chaya. She had been someone important, but her time had come and gone.

The clock struck two.

This was the third and final revelation given to me. It will be my last:

I dreamed that I finished typing my final revelation and fell asleep at my desk. At three o'clock, the gong of the grandfather clock in my study woke me and I found the beast standing before me, watching me as I opened my bleary eyes. The light of the lamp revealed its purple bloated face to be as rotten as the plums from the desert and its lips were stained red. My body shook with fear and my heart raced, though I had seen his coming many times.

"I know why you have come," I said to the beast, "but I cannot give you what you want."

"I don't believe you," it said smiling with teeth stained red and sharp as the fangs of a snake.

"Believe or don't believe," I replied. "It's all the same to me."

"Give me what I want and I'll share it with you."

"You won't share anything. It isn't in your nature."

"I'll make the agreement binding."

"I don't care. I don't want anything you'd be willing to give me."

Even through its rotting features, the beast looked skeptical. "You would turn down eternity?"

"My soul is already eternal," I said. "When I die I'll be with my Father. Can you say the same?"

It glared and hissed at me. When it gained its composure it said, "I can bring your people back to you. It will be like they had never died."

"I'll see them soon enough," I said, my temper flared. "But where are your people, your brothers and sisters? Where is your Father? When this is over, I will be with my family, safe and warm, and you will be alone, rotting for eternity. No one will weep for you because you are all alone!"

"We will see," it hissed and lunged for me as it had the soldier in my desert dream.

It bit into my throat, twisting my mind with its poisoned magic. He infected me with horrible images that would drive most souls insane. I knew he would not find what he was looking for, but I also knew he wouldn't kill me until he was certain I could tell him nothing useful. It made me both glad and regretful that I had given up my burden. If I still had the thing he had sought I would have given it to him without hesitation just to make the pain end. I prayed for death many times.

Esther read over the passage and sighed. She was tired, but didn't want to sleep. Sleeping meant waking and waking meant pain. She was trapped in her own horror story and there was nothing she could do about it.

She wondered what Alice would think of that. Her granddaughter often complained that she didn't like to read her grandmother's old stories, the ones she called her "Chaya stories". They were too depressing, she would say. Alice could never understand why Esther would end them on such a sad note.

"Why does Chaya die at the end of the story, bubbe?" she would ask. "Why can't she trick the evil Commandant and get away? If I were the author, that's what I'd do."

"I'm sorry, zeisele," Esther would try to explain. "Sometimes life doesn't give us a choice. That is how I saw it happen, so that is how I wrote it."

The explanation was never enough for little Alice. Esther's stories were just that to the little girl, stories.

"The author can do whatever she wants," Alice had pouted. "I would give my main character a happy ending. Let her have a little of her own back."

Well, there was nothing for that. Poor Chaya's destiny had already been ordained, and there was nothing an old woman could do about it. And she certainly couldn't do for herself what she couldn't do for Chaya. But gazing thoughtfully at the page in her typewriter, Esther recalled the words of the soldier.

"There is always a choice," she whispered in the hushed silence of the study, "even when there appears to be none."

Esther forcefully tugged the paper out of her typewriter, found an ink pen in her desk drawer, and scribbled a final addition to her prophesy:

When my body dies, you will read these revelations, beast. You will read my final message and will fall into a rage when you read these words: The knowledge you seek has been taken from me, given to someone for safe keeping. You should have eaten from the Ever Tree first. That was a lesson you could have learned from my people, but being the stubborn fool that you are, you thought you knew better than a bunch of mud monkeys. You will die. You will rot. You will lose. No one will weep for you.

Esther carefully folded the paper in half, rested her head on her wrinkled hands, and fell asleep with a smile on her face. As she drifted away into a blessedly dreamless sleep, she thought to herself that Alice had been right. Even when the story had to end on a sad note, it was always good when the main character had the last laugh.