I was on my knees in the olive grove gathering the new olives, called jerjar, when the sudden squawk of a blackbird startled me. I looked up. It was young Zahi. His slender body skittered down the rough trail between the terraces, breaking through the dappled sunlight. He landed near me with a thud and crouched, panting, “Adam, your uncle wants you right away. There’s an officer with him.”
The word ‘officer’ was reverent in his mouth. His eyes were shining, not with the excitement that sparkles off him when he leads his pack during football games, but with the darker dazzle of the civil war. He was the younger son of our next door neighbour and village shopkeeper, Abu Faour. I’d known and liked him since he was born. But today his demeanour was disquieting. As if his soul had been stolen from him when he wasn’t looking.
“I’ll be there soon. Stop at Sitti’s, tell her I’ll be late.”
Zahi nodded and was gone in a flash, taking with him my peace of mind.
I looked over my half-full basket and scowled. I’d been waiting for this day all summer, hoping to collect two loads of jerjar: one to share with my grandmother, and the other for my mother in Beirut – a treat from the heartland. Now I had to shelve it and join my uncle. Normally I wouldn’t mind, but I hate interruptions when I am working in the orchard. Something snaps inside me when that happens. Still, he wouldn’t have sent for me if it wasn’t urgent.  Reluctantly, I picked up my basket, extracted my pail and stick from the leafy shade of the myrtle tree, and trudged uphill. Yes, I’m still using your stick and pail, Father. The carving you did on the stick is a little more worn every year, but its oak remains as steely as ever and its knob as lethal. And your copper pail is a little more battered than when you were alive, but it still holds my lunch well enough – two boiled eggs, a boiled potato, a tomato, a few olives and a hunk of bread. Your Winchester I no longer use, not since I gave up hunting, but it’s displayed  on my wall: the third of my treasured possessions, constant reminders of you.
I walked faster than I should, stabbing the nooks and crevices with my boots, forgetting to breathe. “Rest before you get tired, and continue before you become idle.” I remembered one of my father’s field tips and took the time to regain my wits under a young oak overlooking the valley.
Except for the crickets, an eerie curtain of hush misted the orchards. It was late September, the brief period of respite after the relentless heat of summer and before the furious rush of harvest. The village should have been warming up with songs of Mijana exalting fertility and the joys of a plentiful crop. Instead, for the last few days people had been gathering in the square to gossip and speculate, troubled by confusing reports about the spread of the civil war which had started in Beirut six months ago. They disputed armament versus carrying on as normal. Some said, “What’s the point of being armed if our granaries are empty? Do we feed our children bullets and hand grenades?”  Others said, “But everyone around us is arming. We can’t let ourselves be sitting ducks.” The arguments buzzed in and out of the houses like a beehive gone awry. Meanwhile the early olives waited to be picked.