The Island of Missing Trees(41)

Bats! Dozens of fruit bats. Some strewn across the ground like rotten fruit, others dangling from the branches, hanging upside down by their feet, wrapped in their wings, as though in need of warmth. Most of them were about ten inches long, others as small as two inches. It was the pups that had first surrendered to the heat. Some so young they were still sucking milk, clamped to their mothers’ nipples, they had dropped dead, unable to regulate their body temperature. Their skins dehydrated and scaling, their brains boiling inside their skulls, these clever animals had turned weak and woozy.

A tightness constricting his chest, Kostas began to run. He tripped over a wooden crate and fell, the metal edge cutting his forehead. He pulled himself up and kept running, despite the throbbing above his left eyebrow. When he reached the first bat, he dropped to his knees and picked up the tiny body, light as breath. He stood there motionless, holding the dead animal, feeling its satiny smoothness under his fingers, the final vestiges of life evaporating.

He hadn’t cried when they had brought home Michalis’s body, so peaceful one couldn’t believe he was gone; the bullet that entered him perfectly hidden, as if ashamed of what it had done. Nor when he joined the pall-bearers carrying the casket to the church, a slight pressure weighing on the shoulder he had placed under the polished wood, the taste of silver lingering on his lips from kissing the cross, the smell of oil and dust in his nostrils. Nor when, at the cemetery, the casket was lowered into the ground amidst cries, and the only thing Kostas could offer his brother was a handful of soil.

He hadn’t cried when Andreas, only sixteen, had left home to join an ideal, a dream, a terror, leaving them in a state of constant fear. Throughout all this, Kostas had not shed a tear, fully aware that his mother needed him by her side. But now, as he held a dead bat in his hands, grief became tangible, like something stitched together was tearing apart. He began to sob.

‘Kostas! Where are you?’ Panagiota called from the house, a tremble of concern in her voice.

‘I’m here, Mána,’ Kostas managed to say.

‘Why did you dash out like that? I was worried. What are you doing?’

As she approached, her face changed from concern to confusion. ‘Are you crying? Did you hurt yourself?’

Kostas showed her the bat. ‘They’re all dead.’

Panagiota made the sign of the cross, her lips moving in a quick prayer. ‘Don’t touch them. Go and wash your hands.’

Kostas did not move.

‘You hear me? They carry diseases, filthy animals.’ She gestured around, her confidence returning. ‘You go. I’ll get a shovel and put them in the rubbish.’

‘No, not the rubbish,’ Kostas said. ‘Leave it with me – please. I’ll bury them. I’ll wash my hands.’

Panagiota, seeing the pain in his eyes, did not insist. But as she turned away she could not help murmuring, ‘Our youngsters are slain on the streets, moro mou, mothers don’t know where their sons are any more, in the mountains or in the graves, and you weep over a bunch of bats? Is this how I raised you?’

Kostas felt a sense of loneliness so acute it was almost tangible. After that day, he would no longer talk about fruit bats and how important they were for the trees of Cyprus, and hence for its inhabitants. In a land besieged with conflict, uncertainty and bloodshed, people took it for indifference, an insult to their pain, if you paid too much attention to anything other than human suffering. This was neither the right time nor the right place to carry on about plants and animals, nature in all its forms and glory, and that is how Kostas Kazantzakis slowly shut himself off, carving an island for himself inside an island, retreating into silence.





Fig Tree





The day the heatwave ravaged Nicosia will always be singed in my memory, etched in my trunk. When the islanders realized where the rancid smell was coming from, they set about getting rid of the carcasses. They swept the streets, cleared the orchards, sanitized the caves, checked the limestone areas and old mineshafts. Wherever they looked they found hundreds of dead bats. It scarred them, this sudden, collective death. In that mass extinction, perhaps they recognized their own mortality. Even so, based on personal experience, I can tell you one thing about humans: they will react to the disappearance of a species the way they react to everything else – by putting themselves at the centre of the universe.

Humans care more about the fate of animals they consider cute – pandas, koalas, sea otters and dolphins, too, of which we have many in Cyprus, swimming and frolicking about our shores. There is a romantic idea as to how dolphins perish, washed to the beach with their beak-like snouts and innocent smiles, as if they have come to bid humankind one last farewell. In truth, only a small number do that. When dolphins die, they sink to the bottom of the sea, as heavy as childhood fears; that’s how they depart, away from prying eyes, down into the blue.

Bats are not deemed to be cute. In 1974, when they died in their thousands, I didn’t see many people shedding a tear for them. Humans are strange that way, full of contradictions. It’s as if they need to hate and exclude as much as they need to love and embrace. Their hearts close tightly, then open at full stretch, only to clench again, like an undecided fist.

Humans find mice and rats nasty, but hamsters and gerbils sweet. Doves signify world peace, whereas pigeons are nothing more than carriers of urban filth. They proclaim piglets charming, wild boars barely tolerable. Nutcrackers they admire, even as they avoid their noisy cousins, the crows. Dogs evoke in them a sense of fuzzy warmth, while wolves conjure up tales of horror. Butterflies they look on with favour, moths not at all. They have a soft spot for ladybirds, and yet if they were to see a soldier beetle, they would crush it on sight. Honeybees are favoured in stark contrast to wasps. Although horseshoe crabs are considered delightful, it’s a different story when it comes to their distant relatives, spiders … I have tried to find a logic in all this, but I have come to the conclusion that there is none.