The Island of Missing Trees(24)
‘What makes you think they’ll help us?’ she asked.
‘I’ve a feeling they won’t say no to me. I’ve been observing these guys for so long. They are honest and hardworking, they mind their own business. Imagine, they meet all sorts of people, but never gossip about anyone. I like that about them.’
‘Fine. Let’s give it a try,’ said Defne. ‘But if it doesn’t work, we’ll have to find another way.’
He smiled, relief coursing through his veins. This he never told her, but he feared she might one day suggest that it had become too dangerous for them to see each other, this secret too heavy to hold, that they should break up before things got out of hand. Every time he felt this fear, he gently pushed it down into a place in the basement of his soul where he kept all uncontrolled and painful thoughts. He tucked it next to the memories of his father.
Fig Tree
Before you meet me in the tavern, I must tell you a few more things about myself and my motherland.
I came into this world in 1878, the year that Sultan Abdul Hamid II, sitting on his gilded throne in Istanbul, made a secret agreement with Queen Victoria, sitting on her gilded throne in London. The Ottoman Empire agreed to cede the administration of our island to the British Empire in exchange for protection against Russian aggression. The same year the British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, called my motherland ‘the key to Western Asia’, and added, ‘in taking it the move is not Mediterranean, but Indian’. The island, though without much economic value in his eyes, was ideally placed for lucrative trade routes.
A few weeks later the Union Jack was hoisted over Nicosia. After the First World War, during which the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire became adversaries, the British annexed Cyprus and thus we became a Crown Colony.
I remember the day they arrived, Her Majesty’s troops, tired and thirsty from the long journey, and slightly confused as to who exactly were to be their colonial subjects. The English, though themselves islanders at heart, have never quite known where to place our island inside their minds. One minute we seemed reassuringly familiar to their eyes, the next minute strangely exotic and oriental.
On that fateful day, Sir Garnet Wolseley, the first High Commissioner, showed up on our shores with a large force of soldiers wearing thick uniforms – English pattern trousers and red woollen tunics. The thermometer showed 110 degrees Fahrenheit. They camped at Larnaca, near the Salt Lake, carrying single bell tents that did little to protect them against the scorching sun. In his letters to his wife, Wolseley would later complain: ‘It was a very unwise move sending these British regiments here during the hot weather.’ But what disappointed him the most was the arid landscape: ‘Where are the forests we thought Cyprus was covered with?’
‘Good question,’ we trees conceded. Life was not easy for us. Swarms of locusts had plagued the island for too long, arriving in dense, dark clouds, devouring all things green. Forests had been decimated, cleared for vineyards, cultivation and fuelwood, and at times deliberately destroyed in endless vendettas. Constant logging, multiple fires and sheer ignorance were all responsible for our disappearance, not to mention the blatant neglect of the previous administration. But so were wars, of which we had already had too many throughout the centuries. Conquerors from the East, conquerors from the West: Hittites, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Assyrians, Greeks, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Franks, Genoese, Venetians, Ottomans, Turks, British …
We were there when violent attacks against Britons began to unfold in the name of enosis – union with Greece – and the first bombs went off in the early 1950s. We were there when the British Institute on Metaxas Square, and the library inside, the finest English library in the Middle East, was set on fire by protesting youths, and all those books and manuscripts made of our flesh were burned to ash. By 1955 things had deteriorated so badly that a State of Emergency was proclaimed. The local florists and flower farms, whose businesses had seen a dramatic decline perhaps because no one felt entitled to beauty when fear and chaos reigned, now made most of their money from fashioning wreaths for the funerals of the Gordon Highlanders and other Britons killed in the conflict.
By 1958, the Greek nationalist organization known as EOKA had banned all English lettering across the island. English street names were crossed out and daubed with paint. Soon Turkish names would be expunged too. Then the Turkish nationalist organization known as TMT started erasing Greek names. And there came a point when the streets in my home town were left nameless, only wet paint over wet paint, like watercolour washes that slowly fade into nothingness.
And we trees watched, waited and witnessed.
Tavern
Cyprus, 1974
The Happy Fig was a popular hang-out frequented by Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Maronites, UN soldiers and visitors to the island who quickly fell in step with the local ways. It was run by two partners, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, both in their forties. Yiorgos and Yusuf had opened the place in 1955 with money borrowed from families and friends, and kept their business afloat, even managed to thrive, despite the tensions and troubles besetting the island on all sides.
The entrance of the tavern was partially covered with twisting vines of honeysuckle. Inside, solid blackened beams ran the length and breadth of the ceiling, from which hung garlands of garlic, onion, drying herbs, chilli peppers and cured sausages. There were twenty-two tables with mismatched chairs, a carved wooden bar with oak stools, and a charcoal grill at the back from which the smell of flatbread wafted daily, along with the enticing aromas of cooking meats. With more tables out on the patio, the tavern was packed every night.