The tree had been dying for three years, and Marija knew it would not survive another winter. Its leaves had yellowed in August, ahead of schedule, and by October only a handful remained, curled and spotted with something that looked like rust.
Her grandmother had planted it in 1971, the year she married. She had brought the cutting from a village that no longer existed—erased by war, rebuilt under a different name, populated now by people who had never heard of the Vidović family or their orchards.
"Apricots need dry summers," her grandmother used to say. "That is why the coast suits them. That is why we suit them. We are both happiest when it does not rain."
Marija had been eight when she first helped with the harvest. Her job was to hold the basket while her grandmother picked. The fruit was warm from the sun, covered in fine fuzz that tickled her forearms. She ate so many that first day that she could not face apricots for a month afterward.
Now she was forty-three. Her grandmother had been dead for eleven years. The house belonged to her, the land belonged to her, and the dying tree was hers to decide about.
•••
The arborist came on a Tuesday in late November. He was younger than she expected—perhaps thirty—with a beard that looked carefully maintained and hands that did not. He circled the tree twice before speaking.
"Bacterial canker," he said. "You can see it in the gummosis—here, and here. The sap weeping from the bark."
"Can you treat it?"
"You can slow it. Copper sprays in autumn, pruning the affected branches, keeping the wounds clean." He touched the trunk with something that might have been tenderness. "But the infection has reached the heartwood. It is too late to cure."
"How long?"
"One more season, maybe two. You could take cuttings now, try to propagate. The disease does not always transfer."
Marija looked at the tree. It was not large—perhaps four meters tall—but it had presence. The way it leaned slightly toward the morning sun. The shape of its canopy, broader on one side where it had grown toward the light between the neighbor's wall and her grandmother's clothesline, now gone.
"My grandmother brought it from her village," Marija said. "Before the war."
The arborist nodded. He did not ask which war. There had been enough of them.
•••
That night Marija could not sleep. She lay in the bed that had been her grandmother's—the same mattress, replaced twice; the same frame, never—and listened to the wind move through what remained of the leaves outside.
She had not lived in this house since she was eighteen. Twenty-five years in the capital, then abroad, then the capital again. She had come back for funerals, for holidays, for the occasional summer week when the city became unbearable. Each time the tree had been there, producing its fruit or not, marking the seasons she was missing.
Her grandmother had never asked her to come back. Had never complained about being alone. "You have your life," she would say on the phone, every Sunday at six. "The tree and I manage."
When her grandmother died, Marija had inherited the house and immediately rented it to a couple from Germany who wanted a summer place. For eleven years, strangers had eaten the apricots. She had not minded. She had not thought about it at all.
Then the Germans divorced. Then her own marriage ended. Then she found herself at forty-three with a rented flat in a city she no longer liked and a house by the coast that had been waiting for her, or perhaps just waiting, since 1971.
•••
In the morning she went to the tree with a knife and a jar of rooting hormone she had bought at the garden center. The arborist had shown her where to cut—below a node, at an angle, from wood that was still healthy. She made three cuttings, each about the length of her hand.
The wood was harder than she expected. It resisted the blade. She had to press firmly, saw a little, feel the fibers separating. Inside, the heartwood was pale and clean. No sign of the rot that was killing the rest.
She dipped the ends in hormone and planted them in small pots filled with sand and peat. She placed them on the windowsill in the kitchen, where her grandmother used to grow herbs. Then she sat at the table and looked at them.
Three small sticks. No leaves. No roots. No guarantee they would take.
"This is ridiculous," she said aloud. "You are forty-three years old. You have a career. You have a flat. You have a life that works."
The cuttings did not respond.
•••
December came. The tree lost its last leaves. Marija stayed.
She had not planned to. She had taken two weeks of leave to "sort out the property"—a phrase that covered selling, renovating, or simply deciding. But the decision kept not getting made. Every morning she woke in her grandmother's bed, drank coffee at her grandmother's table, checked the cuttings on the windowsill. They had not grown. They had not died. They sat in their pots like three small questions.
She called her office and extended her leave. She called her landlord and gave notice. She called no one else because there was no one else to call—the divorce had been civilizing, her friends had been his friends, and she had learned, in the year since, that solitude was not the same as loneliness.
The house needed work. The roof leaked in two places. The wiring was older than she was. The kitchen had not been updated since her grandmother installed the refrigerator in 1989, and even then it had been second-hand. But the structure was sound. The view was still the view—the sea, the islands, the light that her grandmother had crossed two countries to find.
"We are both happiest when it does not rain," Marija said to the tree one evening, standing beneath its bare branches. The bark was rough under her palm. She could feel the shape of the disease, the places where the wood had begun to soften.
The tree did not answer. It was a tree.
•••
In February, one of the cuttings produced a bud.
It was small—barely visible—but unmistakable. A swelling at the node, green against the gray of the stem. Marija saw it on a Sunday morning while watering, and she made a sound she had not made since she was eight years old, holding the basket while her grandmother picked.
The other two cuttings showed no sign of life. But one was enough. One meant the possibility of continuity, of the village that no longer existed persisting in a new form, of her grandmother's hands still shaping the landscape even now.
She sat at the table and wept. Not gracefully—her face twisted, her nose ran, her breath came in gasps. She had not cried at her grandmother's funeral. She had not cried at her divorce. She had been saving it, apparently, for a three-centimeter piece of wood showing the first sign of green.
•••
By the time the old tree bloomed—weakly, one last time, pink flowers scattered among the dying branches—Marija had signed a contract with a builder. New roof. New wiring. Kitchen to stay as it was for now, because it still worked and because her grandmother's handwriting was on the labels of the spice jars, and some things should not be updated.
The cutting was in a larger pot now. It had three leaves, pale green and impossibly delicate, nothing like the tough, spotted leaves of its parent. It would be years before it could be planted outside. Years before it would bear fruit, if it ever did. She might be fifty before she tasted an apricot from this new tree. She might be dead.
But she understood, finally, why her grandmother had carried a cutting across two countries. Not because she expected to eat the fruit. Not because she needed to prove something. But because some gestures are worth making even when you cannot see the end of them. Because planting is an act of faith, and faith is what happens when you care about something you will not live to see.
In April, the old tree did not bloom. The arborist came back and confirmed what Marija already knew: it was done. She asked him to cut it down but leave the stump, and he did. The wood smelled sweet, like fruit, like summers, like the thing it had been.
She kept a section of the trunk—a cross-cut about ten centimeters thick, showing the rings that marked each year since 1971. She counted them. Fifty-four. Her grandmother had been twenty-one when she planted it. Marija was forty-three when it died.
Some things end. Some things continue. The difference is not always visible from the outside.
•••
Five years later, the new tree stood where the old one had been. Not tall yet—barely two meters—but healthy. It had survived three winters, produced its first flowers, set fruit that was small and sour and nothing like the apricots Marija remembered from childhood.
"Give it time," the arborist said, on one of his visits. He had become a friend by then, or something adjacent to it. "The roots are still establishing. The flavor develops."
Marija was forty-eight. Her hair was graying at the temples. She had learned to fix plumbing, read the weather, tolerate silence. The house was hers in a way it had not been when she inherited it—worn into, shaped by her presence, full of books she had bought and stains she had made and mornings she remembered.
Sometimes visitors asked about the tree. "It is from my grandmother's village," she would say. "Before the war."
They would nod and not ask which war. There had been enough of them.
But that was not quite right anymore, was it? The tree was not from the village. The tree was from the cutting she had taken from the tree that was from the village. A copy of a copy. A pattern that kept reappearing in new material.
Did it matter?
Marija looked at the leaves, now healthy and green, moving in the coastal wind. She thought about her grandmother's hands making the same cuts she had made. She thought about the village, erased and rebuilt. She thought about the apricots she had eaten at eight, warm from the sun, covered in fuzz.
The flavor was not the same. It might never be the same. But the tree was here, reaching toward the morning light, and Marija was here, and the gesture her grandmother had begun in 1971 was still unfolding.
That, she thought, was enough.