Now let us consider the problem of the man with three children and one fig tree.
In the Talionis Commentaries we find a man whose will ordains that each fig be split into three equal pieces. This solution is just but impractical.
The Annotations of Marduk speak of a wiser man who assigns each child one of the three cardinal directions – sunward, windward, and seaward – in a rotation so the child who, one year, enjoys the sweet sunward figs will, the next year, command the robust windward figs, and will spend the third year savoring the tart seaward figs.
Our own problem concerns a man who is neither just nor wise. The son of a judge, he inherits a bounteous fig tree on a sunward slope. Eager to spend the money on drink, he picks the fruit before it ripens, but the green figs fetch a low price at market. Each night after the bar closes, the man returns to the tree to rage at the shade of his father for having left him figs that grow too slowly. At this time, there is a popular book called The Man Who Inherited Twenty-Three Fig Trees. Its genre is inspirational self-help. Our drunkard doesn’t read this book, but he sees it in a shop window, and it makes him feel hard done-by. He rages at the shade of his father for having spent his earthly time with law books and not business deals.
The man is handsome, and he fathers three children before his wife tires of his drinking and gambling and emotional unavailability. Finally kicked out of his wife’s house, the man returns to the tree. It no longer bears figs. Because he’s never watered it with anything but his own angry late-night urine, its branches have withered. After using his handsome face to borrow from a neighbor an axe he won’t return, the man chops wildly at the tree. The mournful shade of his father watches from a distance, in spectacles and judge’s robes.
The man’s bundle of green figwood fetches a poor price.
Now reduced to begging, the man wanders the hills with the axe until he reaches a tidy house. The widow in the house likes his face. She says she’ll take him in, but only if he has no children: she has enough of her own to feed.
“I had a few,” he admits, “but they were vile, so I’ve renounced them.”
“Vile, like how specifically?” she says, skeptical.
“Gamblers, drunkards. They’re emotionally unavailable and…” she looks unimpressed, so he grasps for something dire enough, “… they killed my only fig tree, leaving me destitute.” She gasps and urges him to make sure he’s truly rid of them.
The man carries the axe back across the hills to town.
There, he drafts a document disowning his children. Because they are drunkards and gamblers who killed my previously flourishing ancestral fig tree, I hereby disinherit my three children and cast them from this town in disgrace. He posts it in the town square, as is the custom, because the document has the correct legal form, all in the town believe its words to be true. He returns to the widow’s tidy house, stopping along the way at the stump of his tree to throw the axe at his father’s shade.
The disgraced children scatter to the three directions. The oldest, who has inherited his father’s face, travels windward to a cold land without figs. He founds a thriving event management business and soon forgets what figs are. Whenever he sees a picture of one, he perceives it as a date or – if the image in question is sufficiently ambiguous as to its sweet or savory nature – a red onion. His siblings believe he can’t keep this up forever, but they’re wrong; he can.
The middle child, who has inherited his father’s rage, travels a short distance sunward, staying in fig country. He so hates figs that he despises wasps, too, for their devotion to figs. He launches a wasp extermination company, but his emotional damage isn’t the kind that makes a man succeed in business, and the company fails.
The youngest, who has inherited her grandfather’s legal mind, travels seaward to a foreign land. She vows to disprove the charges her father posted in the town square: she’s no drunkard or gambler, and she never killed any tree. Her new country doesn’t let foreigners attend law school, but does allow her into the law library, where she reads every book on inheritance. She spends years writing a treatise. Her work demonstrates that in every earthly jurisdiction except fig country, it’s forbidden for a man to denounce and exile his children by falsely claiming his own wrongdoings were theirs. Fig country is a morally depraved land, she concludes.
She works up the courage to send the treatise to her father. Her brothers warn her not to expect a reply. They regret that she’s wasted her life shouting into the void instead of founding a business.
Her scholarship has, however, attracted suitors among the law students, who know that because she’s an uncredentialed foreigner, they can take her work as their own. The man she marries publishes her treatise. He wins an award for it, and the title Prof. Dr. Dr. jur.
After her wedding, an answer from her father arrives.
“I’ve done better by you than you deserve,” he writes, “for you are my property to dispose of as I wish, yet I only killed the tree and didn’t kill you.” That night, she dreams she’s a green fig shaken from the branch, falling onto the blade of her father’s axe. The shade of her grandfather whispers sadly that she can never win any battle against her father on the terrain of the law or its words, because these things, too, are her father’s property, made to belong to him.
In the next chapter, we will consider the problem of the land on which the fig tree grows.