Olivia and Zeno

Olivia and Zeno

I see the ancient olive every morning now: Olivia. She is on her own but not solitary. A not-quite-as-elderly tiglio totters beside her: Zeno. Bare now and barely budding, come June he will be intoxicating, bees and locals drunk on his limey blossom. On the hill beyond and within their view – should they choose to look - are olive groves shivering lavender-grey in the late-winter wind. A neighbour has a young, lanky olive potted on their balcony, Olivia encouraging it across the yard. ‘Hang in there. You can do it, kid.’

While I’m hugely interested in Olivia and Zeno, they have no interest in me. The cats though? They love them; indulging them endlessly in some minor sharpening and major climbing. Zeno is endlessly patient with the latest adoptee who will turn 20 this year. While the others spring and race up his trunk, loll in his branches, she climbs slowly, deliberately, paw over paw. It’s just as well she weighs about as much as a bag of air. Still, though, her clicketty-click claws must hurt over the extended time and area.

Olivia and Zeno have no interest, either, in Trump or Vance or Musk, even Zelensky. Netanyahu, more correctly Mileikowsky, is of a different order. Olivia gets news from her relatives in Palestine, and while for too long it was who now had been struck from the arborical registry, in recent weeks there is change and hope. Returnees are binding, standing their shattered family olives. Other trees, believed dead, have in fact, stood sentry at abandoned homes or mutilated gardens as Biden’s and Harris’s billion-dollar bombs rained and reigned. A tiglio Zeno is a linden, his own ancestors decorating Berlin, generations living Unter den Linden. Because of them and Olivia, he is sensitive to how German guilt has pathologized and to the degree it arms, supports, excuses the very actions for which it perpetually atones.

Apart from this, the political shenanigans in Brussels, Washington, Rome leave them unperturbed. Or, at least, until my own perturbation. I have made a tiny shrine in the bivio of Olivia from where she stretches her two, great arms filled with fruit that feeds the birds in winter. When I asked if she minded, she didn’t reply. The ground didn’t shake. The sky didn’t darken. So far, the candle in its lantern stays lit, the white riverstones gleam, the incense rises. There have been no Mediterranean or Levantine fits of pique or temper.

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Across our world, politicians are doing their best to do their worst. As democrats, we voted them in (or in the case of von der Leyen, we did not vote at all) to find we had elected, instead, their billionaire owners, be they donors or investors. In parts of Europe, over-promoted mediocrities regurgitate soundbites learned by heart “oh, that’s a good one, yeah, that’s good, that’s clever” while swathes of media regurgitate the regurgitation in the editorial panic of Centrism or Bust. Except, in reality, without the complicated media and civil-society life-support, European Centrism is not just bust, but pulverised, its toxic dust poisoning wells, fields, societies from the Atlantic to the Urals.

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It's getting dark now as I write. Shortly, I will go to the bivio light the candle, the incense. It is still outside. A prop plane whines in the distance, a bell from the 1400s beats the Angelus. There are last-light calls from birds, the regulars and the new arrivals, as they flit through and over Olivia and Zeno. My son has been lighting candles at a Shinto shrine today. May they keep him, the trees, the world. Us all.