The Fig Tree by Arnold Zable

she said when we asked if she’d seen something we’d carelessly misplaced. When she indulged her love of gossip, she would sometimes pause, as if catching herself, and say, ‘The camel does not see its own hump.’ If we were going through a personal crisis, she would remind us, ‘The night’s doings were seen by the dawn and laughed at.’ And if we persisted she would add, with an edge of steel, ‘Everyone cries for his own pain.’
    These are the memories that come to us now, and this is why it hurts to see her in so much pain. And this is why we are full of gratitude for the attention she receives from the nurses. It is an aspect of medical care so often unnoticed, and yet so obvious to those who are forced to spend time in a hospital ward.
    Doctors come and go. Surgeons perform their operations and move on to the next patient. They do what they have to do. But it is the nurse who remains to care for the patient; and it is the nurse who, at times, in the absence of loved ones, becomes a companion, a last friend of the dying, responding to whispers; listening to confessions. These are the unsung heroes of the city, those who stay put whilst the city enjoys its festival days.
    A cancer ward in St Vincent’s. Private griefs and battles are on open display. There is camaraderie among strangers united by a common fate. Emma is eighty-seven years old. In the mornings the nurses wash and dress her. For the rest of the day she sits in a chair by her bed. She seems ethereal. Her slender body is wrapped in a white gown. She plays with Alexander whenever he is in the ward. On the eve of her departure, she surveys the room with a mischievous grin and announces, to anyone who cares to listen, ‘Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye.’
    There is Tom, a tall man who has lost several kilograms in weight during the past month. I can imagine him as he would have been not so long ago—a muscular road-worker from the country. Like the other patients, he has followed Lily’s progress with concern. There is Cheryl in the corner bed, on the far side. Every day, without fail, her husband and daughter arrive in the early morning after an hour’s drive from an outer suburb. They tend her from morning till night in the wake of her chemotherapy treatment. Throughout it all Cheryl seems to maintain her composure and warmth.
    Eighty-nine-year-old Anna, Polish-born, oscillates between hours of gloom and moments of elation, as if she has just realised anew that she is still alive and cared for by the two daughters who sit by her bed. As Lily deteriorates, Anna is drawn out of herself, and she begins to inquire after her health. This concern for another appears to soften her, to ease her own discomfort. Then there is Theo, the ward joker, a middle-aged man who shuffles about with his drips in tow to chat with fellow patients, to dispense an amusing anecdote here, a joke there, offering words of comfort even on the eve of his own perilous operation.
    And all the while, running between them, answering their every need—checking pulses, blood pressure, intakes of fluids and tablets, administering oxygen, rearranging tired bodies, bathing patients wracked with pain—are the nurses. Always, it seems, they tread the fine wire that stretches taut between compassion and detachment, while outside can be heard the sound of traffic and bustle, of a city forever on the move.
    As she moves towards her final coma, it is the fig tree that Lily recalls. The one she planted in the final garden after half a lifetime on the move, with her restless husband, from shop to shop, from house to house, from one bayside suburb to the next. It was the one fig tree that she was able to see mature and bear fruit.
    It began as a fragile cutting, culled from aunt Mantina’s garden. Mantina was Athanassios’s cousin and Lily’s confidante, a woman who was born in Ithaca. A woman who understood fig trees. She had