The Island of Missing Trees(53)
All kinds of customers came to the small grocery store: factory workers, cab drivers, security guards. Also, a middle-aged teacher who taught at a school nearby. Having previously noticed Kostas’s interest in the environment and its conservation, and seeing his distress and loneliness now, this man began to lend him his books. In the evenings, with still no news of Defne, his limbs aching from the day’s work, Kostas would stay up late, reading in bed until he could no longer keep his eyes open. During the day, whenever there was a break between customers, he would sit behind the till and pore over nature magazines sold at the shop. It was only when he thought or read about trees that he found some solace.
In one of those magazines he came across an article about fruit bats, explaining how and why more and more of them were dying en masse. The author predicted that, within no more than a few decades, the world would experience dangerous levels of warming. There would follow collective deaths of species, seemingly random, but deeply connected. The piece drew attention to the positive role that forests could play to slow down catastrophic ecological change. Something shifted in Kostas when he read this. Until then he hadn’t known one could devote one’s life to studying plants. He could do this, he sensed, and if it turned out to be a life of solitude, he could do that too.
He still sent letters to Defne. At first, he only wrote about Cyprus and asked her worried questions about how she was doing, trying to pass along words of encouragement and support, signs of love. But, little by little, he began telling her about London too: the ethnic mix of the neighbourhood, the soot-blackened public buildings, the graffiti on the walls, the neat little terraced houses and their manicured hedges, the smoke-filled pubs and the greasy fried breakfasts, the unarmed policemen on the streets, the Greek Cypriot barber shops …
He no longer expected an answer from her, but he kept writing anyway; he continued sending his words southwards, like releasing thousands of migrating butterflies he knew would never return.
Fig Tree
Now that you have come this far into our story, there is something else I need to share with you: I am a melancholic tree.
I can’t help but compare myself with the other trees in our garden – the hawthorn, the English oak, the whitebeam, the blackthorn – all properly native to Britain. I wonder if the reason why I am more inclined to melancholia than any of them is because I am an immigrant plant and, like all immigrants, I carry with me the shadow of another land? Or is it simply because I grew up among human beings in a noisy tavern?
How they delighted in arguing, the customers at The Happy Fig! There are two subjects of which humans can never get enough, especially when they have knocked a few back: love and politics. So I have heard plenty of stories and scandals about each. Night after night, table after table, diners from all sorts of nationalities plunged into heated debates around me, their voices rising another notch with each glass, the air between them growing thicker. I listened to them with curiosity, but I have formed my own opinions.
What I tell you, therefore, I tell through the prism of my own understanding, undoubtedly. No storyteller is completely objective. But I have always tried to grasp every story through diverse angles, shifting perspectives, conflicting narratives. Truth is a rhizome – an underground plant stem with lateral shoots. You need to dig deep to reach it and, once unearthed, you have to treat it with respect.
In the early 1970s, fig trees in Cyprus were affected by a virus that killed them slowly. The symptoms were not visible at first. There was no cracking of the stems, no bleeding cankers, no mottled patterns on the leaves. Even so, something was not quite right. The fruits were dropping prematurely, they tasted sour and oozed goo like pus from a wound.
One thing I noticed back then, and have never forgotten, was that remote and seemingly lone trees were not as badly affected as those living together in close proximity. Today, I think of fanaticism – of any type – as a viral disease. Creeping in menacingly, ticking like a pendulum clock that never winds down, it takes hold of you faster when you are part of an enclosed, homogenous unit. Better to keep some distance from all collective beliefs and certainties, I always remind myself.
By the end of that interminable summer, 4,400 people were dead, thousands missing. Around 160,000 Greeks living in the north moved south, and around 50,000 Turks moved north. People became refugees in their own country. Families lost their loved ones, abandoned their homes, villages and towns; old neighbours and good friends went their separate ways, sometimes betrayed one another. It must all be written in history books, though each side will tell only their own version of things. Narratives that run counter, without ever touching, like parallel lines that never intersect.
But on an island plagued by years of ethnic violence and brutal atrocities, humans were not the only ones that suffered. So did we trees – and animals, too, experienced hardship and pain as their habitats came to disappear. It never meant anything to anyone, what happened to us.
It matters to me though and, so long as I am able to tell this story, I am going to include in it the creatures in my ecosystem – the birds, the bats, the butterflies, the honeybees, the ants, the mosquitoes and the mice – because there is one thing I have learned: wherever there is war and a painful partition, there will be no winners, human or otherwise.
Part Four
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