The Island of Missing Trees(10)
With all due respect to believers, it makes no sense to assume that the first man and the first woman were tempted to sin by eating some plain old apple and that, finding themselves naked, shivering and mortified, and despite fearing God would catch them at any moment, they nonetheless took a stroll through the enchanted garden until they stumbled across a fig tree and decided to wrap themselves in its leaves. It’s an interesting story, but something doesn’t add up here, and I know what it is: me! Because it was me all along – the tree of good and bad, light and dark, life and death, love and heartbreak.
Adam and Eve shared a tender, ripe, deliciously alluring, aromatic fig, splitting it open right down the middle, and as the fleshy opulent sweetness dissolved on their tongues they began to see the universe around them in a completely new light because that is what happens to those who attain knowledge and wisdom. Then they covered themselves with the leaves of the tree they happened to be standing under. As for the apple, I am sorry, it didn’t even feature.
Look into each religion and creed, and you will find me there, present in every creation story, bearing witness to the ways of the humans and their endless wars, combining my DNA in so many new forms that today I can be found on almost every continent across the world. Of lovers and admirers, I have had plenty. Some have even gone crazy for me, crazy enough to forget everything else and stay with me until the end of their brief lives, like my little fig wasps.
Even so, I understand, none of that makes me entitled to love a human being and hope to be loved back. Not a very sensible thing to do, I admit, to fall for someone who is not of your kind, someone who will only complicate your life, disrupt your routine and mess with your sense of stability and rootedness. But, then again, anyone who expects love to be sensible has perhaps never loved.
‘You’ll be warm under the ground, Ficus. It’s going to be okay,’ said Kostas.
After all these years in London, he still spoke English with a palpable Greek accent. It was reassuringly familiar to me, his raspy r, sibilant h, blurred sh, truncated vowels, the cadence quickening when he felt excited and retreating when thoughtful or unsure of himself. I recognized every twist and turn of his voice as it rippled and rolled, washing over me like clear water.
He said, ‘It won’t be for long anyway – just a few weeks.’
I was used to him talking to me, but never as much as he did today. I wondered if, deep down, the winter storm might have triggered feelings of guilt in him. It was he, after all, who had brought me to this sunless country from Cyprus, hidden inside a black leather suitcase. I was, if truth be told, smuggled on to the European continent.
At Heathrow airport, as Kostas pulled the suitcase past the gaze of a burly customs officer, I tensed, expecting him to be stopped and searched any second. His wife, meanwhile, walked ahead of us, her stride brisk, purposeful and impatient as always. Defne was pregnant with Ada at the time, though they did not yet know it. They thought they were bringing only me into England, unaware that they were also bringing their unborn child.
When the Arrivals doors opened wide, Kostas exclaimed, unable to control the excitement in his voice, ‘We’re here, we made it! Welcome to your new home.’
Was he talking to his wife or was he talking to me? I’d like to think it was the latter. Either way, that was more than sixteen years ago. I have never been back to Cyprus since.
I still carry the island with me, though. The places where we were born are the shape of our lives, even when we are away from them. Especially then. Now and again in my sleep I find myself in Nicosia, standing under a familiar sun, my shadow falling against the rocks, reaching towards the prickly broom bushes that burst with blossoms, each as perfect and bright as the golden coins in a children’s fable.
Of the past we left behind I remember everything. Coastlines etched in the sandy terrain like creases in a palm waiting to be read, the chorus of cicadas against the rising heat, bees buzzing over lavender fields, butterflies stretching their wings at the first promise of light … many may try, but no one does optimism better than butterflies.
People assume it’s a matter of personality, the difference between optimists and pessimists. But I believe it all comes down to an inability to forget. The greater your powers of retention, the slimmer your chances at optimism. And I’m not claiming that butterflies have no recollection of things. They have, surely. A moth can recall what it learned as a caterpillar. But me and my kind, we are afflicted with everlasting memory – and by that, I don’t mean years or decades. I mean centuries.
It is a curse, an enduring memory. When elderly Cypriot women wish ill upon someone, they don’t ask for anything blatantly bad to befall them. They don’t pray for lightning bolts, unforeseen accidents or sudden reversals of fortune. They simply say,
May you never be able to forget.
May you go to your grave still remembering.
So I guess it is in my genes, this melancholy I can never quite shake off. Carved with an invisible knife into my arborescent skin.
‘Okay, this should be good enough,’ Kostas said as he examined the trench, seeming satisfied with its length and depth.
He stretched out his aching back and wiped the mud off his hands with a handkerchief that he pulled from his pocket.
‘I need to prune you a bit, it’ll be easier that way.’
Grabbing a pair of clippers, he trimmed my wayward lateral branches, his moves deft, practised. With the help of a nylon rope, he encircled me, fastening my thicker branches together. Carefully, he tightened the bundle and made a square knot, loose enough to avoid damage but snug enough for me to fit in the trench.