The Island of Missing Trees(59)
Human remains … What exactly did that mean? Was it a few hard bones and soft tissue? Clothes and accessories? Things solid and compact enough to fit inside a coffin? Or was it rather the intangible – the words we send out into the ether, the dreams we keep to ourselves, the heartbeats we skip beside our lovers, the voids we try to fill and can never adequately articulate – when all was said and done, what was left of an entire life, a human being … and could that really be disinterred from the ground?
The sun was descending by the time the members of the CMP downed tools, the clouds on the horizon soaked in glowing amber.
They put every scrap of bone into plastic bags, which they carefully sealed and numbered. These were then placed in labelled boxes. They wrote the date and place of the excavation on each box, as well as the details of the group that had carried out the work. Every single piece of information was recorded and archived.
Wearily, they started making their way down the hill, splitting into smaller groups. Kostas walked alongside Defne towards the back, an awkward silence expanding between them.
‘The families …’ said Kostas after a while. ‘How do they react when you tell them you have found their dead after so many years?’
‘Gratitude, mostly. There was this old Greek woman, a talented seamstress in her youth, apparently. When we informed her that we’d found the bones of her husband she cried so much. But the next day, she comes to the lab wearing this pink frilly dress with silver shoes, silver purse. Bright red lipstick on her lips. I’ll never forget. This woman who had worn nothing but black for decades, she came to pick up her husband’s remains in a pink dress. She said she could finally talk to him. She said she felt like she was eighteen again, and they were dating. Can you believe it? A few bones, that was all we gave her, but she was as happy as if we had given her the world.’
Defne took out a cigarette and lit it, protecting the flame between her palms. As she exhaled a cloud of smoke, she asked, ‘Want one?’
Kostas shook his head.
‘And once there was this heartbreaking coincidence. We were digging at Karpas Road. The area was too large, and we had to hire a bulldozer operator. The guy began to excavate and he found a body. So he goes home and tells his grandmother, describing the clothes on the corpse. “That’s my Ali,” the old woman says and starts to cry. Apparently, Ali Zorba had a caravan of camels in the 1950s. He was returning from Famagusta when he was killed and buried by the road. All this time people passed by without knowing.’
Just then, David, walking a few feet ahead, turned round and called back. ‘Hey, Kostas! Don’t forget dinner tonight. We’re going to a tavern – the best in town!’
Kostas flinched upon hearing this, his entire body clenched.
Defne noticed. ‘Not the tavern you’re thinking. That one is long gone. The Happy Fig is in ruins.’
‘I’d like to visit it,’ said Kostas, a sadness seizing his heart. ‘I want to see the fig tree.’
‘Not much to see, I’m afraid, although the tree must still be inside. I haven’t been there in ages.’
‘In England, I tried to contact them so many times. I managed to get hold of Yiorgos’s relatives. They told me he was dead. They didn’t share much, didn’t seem to like that I was asking so many questions. I was never able to reach Yusuf – or his family. Someone said he had left Cyprus and gone to America, but I am not sure if that’s true.’
‘You don’t know?’ Defne squeezed her eyes tight shut before opening them. ‘Yusuf and Yiorgos disappeared in the summer of 1974 – a few weeks after you left. They are the among the thousands of missing we are digging for.’
He slowed down, a knot in his throat. ‘I … I didn’t …’
‘It’s normal. You’ve been away for too long.’ There was no emotion in her voice – not a trace of anger, bitterness or lament. A voice as flat as steel, and just as impenetrable.
A kind of desperation smouldering in his heart, he tried to say something, but words felt pointless. She didn’t give him a chance anyway. Quickening her steps, she sprinted away to join David at the front.
Kostas lagged behind, watching the two of them walk in tandem, linking arms. When they reached a corner ahead under a street lamp, David swivelled round to wave goodbye, shouting:
‘We’ll be at The Wandering Khayyam, ask around and you’ll find it. Don’t be late, Kostas. God knows we all need a drink after today!’
Fig Tree
A tree is a memory keeper. Tangled beneath our roots, hidden inside our trunks, are the sinews of history, the ruins of wars nobody came to win, the bones of the missing.
The water sucked up through our boughs is the blood of the earth, the tears of the victims, and the ink of truths yet to be acknowledged. Humans, especially the victors who hold the pen that writes the annals of history, have a penchant for erasing as much as documenting. It remains to us plants to collect the untold, the unwanted. Like a cat that curls up on its favourite cushion, a tree wraps itself around the remnants of the past.
When Lawrence Durrell, having fallen in love with Cyprus, decided to plant cypresses behind his house and took his spade to the soil, he found skeletons in his garden. Little did he know that this was by no means unusual. All around the world, wherever there is, or has ever been, a civil war or an ethnic conflict, come to the trees for clues, because we will be the ones that sit silently in communion with human remains.