The Island of Missing Trees(52)
Defne held the letter so tight it crumpled around the edges. Her gaze fell on the tomato plant again as her eyes welled up. Kostas had once told her that long ago in Peru, where tomatoes were believed to have originated, they used to call it ‘a plum thing with a navel’. Defne had liked that description. Everything in life should be evoked in such detail, she had thought, rather than being given abstract names, a random combination of letters. A bird should be ‘a feathery thing with a song’. Or a car, ‘a metallic thing with wheels and a horn’. An island, ‘a lonely thing with water on all sides’. And love? She might have answered this question differently until today, but now she was certain love ought to be called ‘a deceptive thing with heartbreak in the end’.
Kostas was gone and she had not even found a chance to tell him. She had never felt so scared of tomorrow. She was on her own now.
Foreigner
London, July–August 1974
When Kostas Kazantzakis arrived in London he was greeted at the airport by his uncle and his English wife. The couple lived in a timber-framed brick house with a small square garden at the front. They had a dog, a brown-and-black-and-white collie named Zeus, who loved to eat cooked carrots and raw spaghetti straight from the box. It would take Kostas a while to get used to the food in this country. But it was the change in the weather that took him by surprise. He was not prepared for this new sky overhead, which was dimly lit most of the time, only occasionally flickering into life like a buzzing bulb with low voltage.
His uncle, who had settled for good in England, was a jovial man with an infectious laugh. He treated Kostas with kindness and, guided by a strong conviction that a young lad should be neither idle nor still, instantly put his nephew to work in the store. There Kostas learned how to stack shelves, count the stock, manage the till and keep the inventory ledger. It was hard work, but he didn’t mind. He was used to being on his toes and it kept him busy, making the days away from Defne a bit more bearable.
A week after his arrival, Kostas heard the staggering news: a military force backed by the junta in Greece had overthrown Archbishop Makarios; gunfire had broken out between the supporters of Makarios and the de facto president, Nikos Sampson, appointed by the leaders of the coup d’état. Kostas and his uncle pored over all the newspapers, shocked to read about how ‘bodies littered the streets and there were mass burials’. He barely slept at night, and whenever he drifted off, he plunged into disturbing dreams.
Then followed even more unthinkable events: five days after Archbishop Makarios was overthrown, heavily armed Turkish troops landed at Kyrenia, 300 tanks and 40,000 soldiers, marching steadily inland. The Greek villagers in their path were forced to run south to safety, leaving everything behind. In the maelstrom of chaos and war, the military regime in Athens collapsed. There were reports of clashes between Turkish warships and Greek warships near Paphos. But the deadliest fights were taking place in and around the capital, Nicosia.
Sick with dread, Kostas tried to find every titbit of information he could, glued to the radio to catch the latest reports. Words cloaked and blurred as much as they revealed and explained: ‘invasion’, said Greek sources; ‘peace operation’, said Turkish sources; ‘intervention’, said the UN. Strange concepts jumped out at him from the bulletins, pulled to the forefront of his mind. The articles spoke about ‘prisoners of war’, ‘ethnic partition’, ‘population transfer’ … He couldn’t believe they were referring to a place that was as familiar to him as his own reflection in the mirror. Now, he could no longer recognize it.
His mother sent a frantic message, telling him not to come back. Through miles of traffic jams, she had managed to get out of Nicosia at the last minute, frightened and fighting for her life. Such was the shock and fear among Greek civilians, and so utterly terrifying the tales and testimonies they heard of the advancing army, that a little girl in the neighbourhood had died of a heart attack. Unable to take any personal items with her, Panagiota had sought refuge with some relatives down south. They no longer had a home. They no longer had a garden with five carob trees. Everything she had painstakingly built and lovingly tended since the day her husband had died and left her alone with three sons was taken away from her.
Despite Kostas’s objections, his uncle cancelled his return ticket. He could not go back to an island in flames. Trapped in a situation over which he had no control, Kostas tried every which way he could think of to reach Defne – telegram, phone calls, letters … At first, he was able to talk to Yusuf and Yiorgos, but then, oddly, they too became unreachable.
After six weeks had passed with no reply from Defne, Kostas managed to get hold of Meryem through a friend who worked at the post office, and who brought her to a phone at a prearranged time. Her voice low and troubled, Meryem confirmed that their address was unchanged, their house intact. Defne was receiving his letters.
‘Then why doesn’t she write back?’ Kostas asked.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t think she wants to hear from you any more.’
‘I don’t believe that,’ Kostas said. ‘I won’t believe it until I hear it from her.’
A pause on the line. ‘I’ll tell her, Kostas.’
A week later a postcard arrived in Defne’s handwriting, asking him to stop trying to contact her.