Harvesting the Olives

My first day in the olive groves began at dawn. Diaphanous blue haze half-obscured the mountains, and a lean moon hung above the camp as I was dressing. A shepherd was herding his flock out of the cave a hundred metres down the hill. From the shelf of land outside the tent I could see the millions of trees, waves and billows of smoky green, descended from Homer"s Sea of Olives. Mount Parnassos loomed above them, an austere, frost-bitten island.

Dimitri, whose father owned the trees we would harvest, arrived as I was gulping sweet black coffee. We set off in his van down the winding road to Chrisso, a cold and rosy village on that crisp December morning, and already astir with shopkeepers sweeping their sections of the pavement.

The baker, looking stupefied for want of sleep, was blinking into the light from the fragrant warmth of his doorway. He had told us that he didn"t finish baking until three a. m., and then he worked behind the counter from seven in the morning to one in the afternoon, and again from five to eight in the evening. Not that this was unusual, in his trade: the bakers who leavened the rich, crusty bread in all the villages of Greece blur in my mind into a weary succession of heavy-eyed men, their clothes pollened with flour, shuffling like somnambulists among the golden loaves.

Dimitri pushed open the door of his father"s general store. It had the air of dignified chaos and cosy continuity that I had come to associate with such premises. Ancient, fly-bespattered calendars competed for pride of place with a dusty, framed photograph of the proprietor as a young man, garnished with ferocious moustaches and pomaded hair. The wares displayed on cobweb-festooned shelves ascending into the gloom below the ceiling ranged from chipped enamel chamber-pots to herrings. Assorted cats slept casually in likely and unlikely places, on top of open sacks containing rice or flour, and in boxes or baskets of merchandise.

Two itinerant olive-pickers from Thessaly were sitting at a table with the cumbrous proprietor, who was shaped like a spinning-top. They were brothers from the town of Karditsa, Fotis and Alekos, slight but sinewy in build, with soft brown eyes, hazel curls and honey-coloured faces. Vasiliki, Dimitri"s mother, dressed for the harvest in pinafore and headscarf, served us coffee and cognac before we set off, then, carrying a basket filled with picnic food, she took her place between Dimitri and me in the front of the van.  Her German Shepherd pup was tucked in between me and Vasiliki, and, with the brothers and all the olive-harvesting equipment in the back, we were ready for the day"s activity.

"How many of us will there be?" I asked Dimitri.

"Two womans and three people," was his answer. "This is enough."

There were many vehicles heading for the groves. It was the end of the first week in December - time the crop was gathered in before the weather broke. I had seen some of the associated activity in the port of Itea, on the Gulf of Corinth, fifteen kilometres away, where jumbo-sized brown plastic barrels stood outside the olive factory, stencilled faintly in English, in black or white letters: OLIVES -- BLACK -- IN BRINE.

There were no fences and very little I could see to differentiate one plot of olives from another. The trees formed a muted silver-green screen to the edge of the Pleistos Gorge, interrupted only by the rosy thread of road. I could see the humped frog-shape of Kirphys - the immense grey-white and blue-green wall of cliff slanting from Delphi to the sea. It towered above us, shutting out the sun, which would not appear until mid-morning. Until then, lilac anemones and yellow bells on lanky stems kept their petals tightly closed in shade beneath the trees. On the levees around each plot grew mauve and white peppermint, an accent in the olive grove"s astringent, fresh aroma.

Harvesting olives, I learned that day, is a matter not of picking them but of picking them up, after the beaters have set to work to dislodge them. To catch the falling fruit we spread light, synthetic straw tarpaulins on the ground beneath the trees. "You see these marks?" Dimitri asked me, pointing to carmine stains on the mats. "This is the blood of olives." Seeing the vivid sap oozing from fruit crushed underfoot, I realised the aptness of his metaphor.

Fotis and Alekos each took a straight, sturdy staff of spruce-wood tapered at one end, and started beating the lower branches. Olives fell with a sound like muffled hail onto the groundsheets. Before long the brothers had swarmed up into the higher foliage, positioning themselves securely where the branches forked, and resumed their beating. The rasping, snicking sound was echoed all along the gorge. Somewhere, hidden in the groves, a man with a mellow voice was singing.

Vasiliki and I were collecting fruit that fell wide of the mats. It was still cold under the trees and my fingers felt clumsy, fumbling for small, slippery shapes on the uneven ground and in the tender emerald nap of camomile and clover. Unlike village matrons, I was not constrained to wear dresses on all occasions, so I had worn overalls which allowed me to bend my knees instead of my back. Women who worked in the olives, I had been warned, suffered from ailing backs.

When a tree was beaten free of its black, lustrous burden, Vasiliki and I would roll the olives toward the middle of the groundsheet and strip stray twigs among them of their fruit. Sometimes a branch would be pruned because the wizened fruit it bore indicated that it was no longer productive, or because the men, testing with their feet, pronounced it rotten. Vasiliki plucked the olives deftly, while I fumbled with unaccustomed fingers. Quickly we tipped the fruit into a crate and moved on with the beaters. Thin columns of smoke rose out of the gorge from places where old prunings were being burnt, and coiled their way among the clouds of silver leaves.

With variations in the terrain on account of the uneven terraces, the beating and gathering process was repeated several times before the sun appeared above the brooding bluff of Kirphys. My fingers thawed out after that, and I pulled off my sweater and worked in overalls and T-shirt. Donkeys clopped along the road from time to time with their jerky gait, empty panniers bouncing at their sides.

The men"s movements were disciplined but free, a dance. Standing on terra firma again after they finished beating the fruit down, they would bend forward from the waist, arms outstretched, and embrace the pile of olives underneath the tree, separating fruit from twigs in a sinuous flow of movement. They could have worn the "kotinos" - the victor"s wreath of olive leaves, awarded at Olympiads and at Delphi"s Pythian Games - with ease.

At one o"clock we stopped for lunch. Vasiliki spread a blue and white checked cloth over two upended olive crates. She set out soup plates and a billy-can of bean soup, fresh village bread, hard-boiled eggs and, of course, olives. To these she added white slices of feta cheese, pink sausage, pomegranates, and halva as a sweet finishing touch, until it seemed miraculous that such a feast could be conjured out of a modest basket. Dimitri arrived back from the village with fresh honey cakes, apologising for omitting to bring wine, I added some oranges and figs to the repast, then, sitting on upturned crates, we ate. Vasiliki"s German Shepherd pup with the quizzical face was given the same food as the rest of us, including a chunk of halva.

Vasiliki sat apart, in profile. She made the sign of the cross before she started eating. The villagers respect their food, but work is more important when the olives have to be brought in. Soon Fotis and Alekos resumed their rhythmic work among the leaves, and the muffled, thudding hail commenced again. By two o"clock, warmed by the declining winter sun, I felt overcome by drowsiness, a temptation to sink down in the emerald oxalis leaves, cool and tender underneath the trees, and let my tired muscles go slack.

We were working on another plot farther down the gorge by then, on level ground broken by a knoll, on top of which stood a small, white church with the unassuming exterior of the traditional Byzantine style. The customary sombre, slender cypresses grew close by. "Near here," Dimitri told me, "one boy from my village shoot himself. He love his cousin, and he want to marry her, but he can"t, so he come here to olives and he shoot himself."

The trees where we were working that day were more than a hundred years old. They must by then have exhausted or at least exercised generations of olive pickers, and their lives had spanned wars, occupations, civil war... They were still flourishing, bearing prodigiously, taxing the stamina of novices like me. The gnarled and twisted wood of their boles supported new growth, young wood emerging in brachiate formations from the old. When the new growth was advanced enough, the old wood was cut back above the bifurcation. In this way the olive trees renewed themselves, and could go on bearing, I was told, for centuries.

At four in the afternoon I stooped to gather my last olive. We drove into the village and stopped outside the store. Poor weary Vasiliki brought us coffee and cognac. The brothers from Karditsa, in Thessaly, inquired about my back. No doubt they were thinking of the after-effects of olive-picking, but, still warm from the work and drowsy from the cognac, I was ready to dismiss any suggestion of aching backs and stiff muscles as old wives" tales.

Dimitri"s father asked how I had enjoyed the day. "Kala, kala!" (Very much!) I replied, nervous but emphatic. Annoyed at my own timidity, I found myself in awe of him. He had the kind of face one doesn"t trifle with. Puzzled looks from Dimitri and the two brothers gave way to guffaws. As Fotis attempted to explain, only a deranged person would express such positive sentiments about harvesting olives.

Before I left to be driven back to the camp, Dimitri"s father beckoned me behind the counter and placed a roll of crumpled drachma notes in my hand. Satisfied with the manner in which I had earned it, I pocketed the money, looking forward to counting it when I was out of sight, curious to see what value he"d placed on my services. As I was standing waiting by the van, the drachmas still nestled in my hand inside my pocket, Vasiliki rushed out, looking agitated, and without a word pressed another roll of drachma notes upon me before disappearing back into the shop. Having asked Dimitri at some stage what the women were paid, I realised later, when I counted my earnings, that only thanks to Vasiliki had I been paid at the standard rate.

The next day, when I hobbled down to the village, outraged thigh muscles shrieking protests all the way, Dimitri"s father beckoned me again behind the counter after I"d made my purchases, and placed a sugar-coated piece of pink "loukoumi" (a traditional sweet) into my hand, gently folding my fingers over it as one does with a child, nodding to reassure me that all was as it should be.