The Island of Missing Trees(58)
‘Hi, Kostas.’ Her handshake was brief, giving nothing away. ‘David told me you were coming. He said, a friend of mine is enquiring about you. I said, really, who? Turns out it was you.’
He was taken aback by the distance in her voice, not cold or formal, but carefully measured, guarded. The years had etched fine lines on to her face, her cheeks had thinned slightly, but it was her eyes that had changed the most: a hard glaze had settled on those big, round brown eyes. His heart constricted as he saw how beautiful she still was.
‘Defne …’
Her name felt strange in his mouth. Worried that she might hear the thumping of his heart, he took a step aside, his gaze settling on the nearest tarpaulin. His breath tightened as he processed what the dusty, soiled, russet-stained fragments piled on it were. A split femur, a cracked thigh bone … they were human remains.
‘We had a tip-off,’ said Defne, seeing the expression on his face. ‘A peasant pointed us here. Father of six, grandfather to seventeen. The man was in the late stages of Alzheimer’s, didn’t recognize his own wife. One morning he woke up and started uttering strange things – “There’s a hill, a terebinth tree with a boulder at its foot.” He drew it on a piece of paper, describing this place. The family contacted us, we came, we dug, and we found the remains just where he said we would.’
In all the times he had imagined their encounter, Kostas had never thought they would be talking about such things. He asked, ‘How did the peasant know?’
‘You mean, do I suspect he was the murderer?’ Defne shook her head, her earrings swaying. ‘Who knows? A killer or an innocent eyewitness? That’s not our business. The CMP is not into that kind of investigation. If we conducted an enquiry or passed the information to the police, no one on this island would talk to us ever again. We can’t afford that. Our job is to find the missing so that families can give their loved ones a proper burial.’
Kostas nodded, mulling over her words. ‘Do you think there might be other graves around here?’
‘Possibly. Sometimes you search for weeks on end and achieve nothing. It’s frustrating. Some of the informants misremember the details, others deliberately lead us on wild goose chases. You search for victims, you encounter medieval, Roman, Hellenistic bones. Or prehistoric fossils. Did you know there were pygmy hippopotamuses in Cyprus? Pygmy elephants! Then, just when you think you are going nowhere, you find mass graves.’
Kostas glanced around him, taking in his surroundings, the grass tinted with gold under the sun, the pine trees with their dome-shaped tops. He stared into the distance as far as he could see, as though trying to recall what he had broken away from.
He asked, cautiously, ‘And the missing you’ve found here, were they Greeks or Turks?’
‘They were islanders,’ she said and there was a sharp edge to her voice then. ‘Islanders, like us.’
Overhearing, David interjected. ‘That’s the thing, my friend. You don’t know until you send the bones to a lab and get a report. When you hold a skull in your hands, can you tell if it’s Christian or Muslim? All that bloodshed, for what? Stupid, stupid wars.’
‘We don’t have much time, though,’ said Defne, her voice tailing off. ‘The older generation is dying, taking their secrets with them to the grave. If we don’t dig now, in a decade or so there won’t be anyone left to tell us the whereabouts of the missing. It’s a race against time, really.’
From the shrubs in the distance came the buzzing song of cicadas. Kostas knew there were some cicada species that could sing at extremely high frequencies, and perhaps they were doing so right now. Nature was always talking, telling things, though the human ear was too limited to hear them.
‘So, you two are old friends, huh?’ asked David. ‘Did you go to the same school or what?’
‘Something like that,’ said Defne, lifting her chin. ‘We grew up in the same neighbourhood, haven’t seen each other in years.’
‘Well, I’m glad I reconnected you,’ said David. ‘We should all go out for dinner tonight. This calls for a celebration.’
A strong, delicious aroma filled the air. Someone was brewing coffee. The team members spread out, taking their break beneath the trees, chatting in low murmurs.
David perched on a rock, produced a silver tobacco box and started to roll a cigarette. When done, he offered it to Defne, who accepted it with a smile, without a word. She took a drag and handed it back to him. They began smoking together, passing the butt back and forth between them. Kostas looked away.
‘Kafé?’
A tall, lithe Greek woman was serving coffee in paper cups. Thanking her, Kostas took one.
He walked towards the sole terebinth tree and sat under its shade. His mother would make bread out of its fruit and use its resin as a preservative in carob liquor. A profound sense of sorrow came over him. He had done everything he could to take care of her after she and Andreas joined him in England following the partition of the island, but it was too late. The cancer from second-hand exposure to asbestos had already metastasized. Panagiota was buried in a cemetery in London, far away from all that she had known and loved. He stood still, absorbing the smells of tobacco and coffee as memories rushed over him.
Overhead, the sun shone full and bright. In the heat Kostas thought he could hear the branches around them cracking like arthritic hands. He glanced at Defne, who had returned to work, her features drawn tight in concentration, writing down in her notebook every single thing they had unearthed so far that day.