The Island of Missing Trees(11)

‘I’m almost done,’ he said. ‘Need to hurry up. That storm is not far off!’

But I knew him well enough to sense that the looming storm was not the only reason why he was in such a rush to bury me. He wanted to finish the task before his daughter came home from school. He did not want young Ada to witness another burial.

The day his wife fell into a coma from which she never woke, grief settled on this house like a vulture that would not leave until it had gorged itself on every last trace of lightness and joy. For months after Defne was gone, and still every now and then, usually before midnight, Kostas would come to the garden and sit by my side, wrapped in a thin blanket, his eyes red and raw, his moves listless as if he had been dredged against his will from the bottom of a lake. He never cried inside the house, not wishing his daughter to see his suffering.

On such nights I felt so much love and affection for him that it hurt. It was in those moments that the difference between the two of us pained me the most. How I lamented that I could not turn my branches into arms to embrace him, my twigs into fingers to caress him, my leaves into a thousand tongues to whisper back his words, and my trunk into a heart to take him in.



‘Right, that’s all done,’ Kostas said, surveying his surroundings. ‘I’m now going to push you down.’

There was a tenderness to his face and a soft glimmer in his eyes, reflecting the slowly setting sun far in the west.

‘Some of your roots will break, but don’t worry,’ Kostas said. ‘The ones remaining will be more than enough to keep you alive.’

Trying to maintain my composure, trying not to panic, I sent a quick warning down below, informing my subterranean limbs that in a few seconds many of them would die. Just as swiftly they responded in hundreds of minute signals telling me that they knew what was coming. They were ready.

With a sharp intake of breath, Kostas bent forward and shoved me down towards the hole in the ground. I didn’t budge, at first. Placing his palms against my trunk, he tried harder this time, the pressure careful and balanced but equally firm, constant.

‘You’ll be fine. Trust me, darling Ficus,’ he said dotingly.

The gentleness in his tone enfolded me and held me tight in place; even a single word of endearment from him had a gravity of its own that drew me back to him.

Slowly, all my fears and doubts abandoned me, floating away like wisps of mist. I knew in that instant that he would unearth me at the first sight of snowdrops peeping their heads out of the ground or golden orioles winging their way back through the blue skies. I knew as I knew myself that I would see Kostas Kazantzakis again, and it would still be there, behind his beautiful eyes, engraved in his soul, this searing sadness that had settled on him since he had lost his wife. How I wished he could love me the way he had loved her.

Farewell, Kostaki, till spring, then …

A look of wonder passed across his face, so rapid and fleeting that for a second it seemed he might have heard me. A recognition, almost. It was there, then gone.

Grabbing me tighter, Kostas gave one last forceful thrust downwards. The world tilted, the sky tipped and dipped, the low leaden clouds and the clods of earth merged into one muddy morass.

I braced myself for the fall as I heard my roots strain and snap, one by one. A strange, muffled crack-crack-crack rose from the ground beneath. If I were human, it would have been the sound of my bones breaking.





Night





Standing by her bedroom window, her forehead pressed against the glass pane, Ada watched her father in the garden spookily illuminated by the light of two lanterns, his back turned to her as he raked dry leaves over raw earth. Since they had returned home together this evening, he had been out there, working in the cold. He said when he received the call from school he had left the fig tree lying unattended, whatever that meant. Another one of her father’s foibles, she supposed. He said he urgently had to cover the tree now, promising he would be done in a few minutes, but minutes had stretched to almost an hour and he was still out there.

Her mind kept returning to the events of the afternoon. Shame was a serpent coiled inside her stomach. It bit her again and again. She still could not believe what she had done. There, in front of the entire class, screaming her head off like that! What had got into her? Mrs Walcott’s face – ashen, terrified. That expression must have been contagious, for Ada had then seen it on the faces of the other teachers when they were each apprised of what had transpired. Her insides constricted as she remembered the moment she was summoned to the headmaster’s office. By then all the other students had left, the building echoing like an empty shell.

They had treated her kindly but with visible concern, both worried for her and deeply puzzled by her behaviour. Until today, they had probably regarded her as one of the introverts, neither shy nor quiet, just not exactly fond of putting herself forward. A contemplative girl who had always preferred to live in her own mind but had become all the more distant and withdrawn since her mother’s loss. Now they were not sure what to make of her.

They had immediately called her father, and he had rushed there straight away, without even changing out of his gardening clothes, his boots mud-caked, a small leaf caught in his hair. The headmaster had had a private talk with him while Ada waited out in the corridor, sitting on a bench, bouncing her leg.

On the way back her father had kept asking her questions, trying to comprehend why she had done such a thing, but his persistence had only made Ada quieter. As soon as they got home, she had retreated into her bedroom, her father into his garden.