The Island of Missing Trees(6)

As a child she had loved turning in circles on the Turkish carpet to make herself dizzy and drop to the floor, from where she would watch the world spin round and round. She could still remember the hand-woven patterns of the carpet dissolving in a thousand sparks, the colours blending into each other, scarlet into green, saffron into white. But what she experienced right now was a different kind of dizziness. She had the sense of entering a trap, a door locking behind her, the click of a latch falling into place. She felt paralysed.

So many times in the past she had suspected that she carried within a sadness that was not quite her own. In science class they had learned that everyone inherited one chromosome from their mother and one from their father – long threads of DNA with thousands of genes that built billions of neurons and trillions of connections between them. All that genetic information passed from parents to offspring – survival, growth, reproduction, the colour of your hair, the shape of your nose, whether you had freckles or sneezed in sunlight – everything was in there. But none of that answered the one question burning in her mind: was it also possible to inherit something as intangible and immeasurable as sorrow?

‘You may sit down,’ repeated Mrs Walcott.

Still she did not move.

‘Ada … did you not hear what I said?’

Remaining upright, she tried to choke back the fear that filled her throat, clogged her nostrils. It reminded her of the taste of the sea under a harsh, beating sun. She touched it with the tip of her tongue. It wasn’t the salty sea brine after all, it was warm blood. She had been biting the inside of her cheek.

Her eyes slid towards the window, beyond which the storm was approaching. She noticed in the slate-grey sky, amidst banks of clouds, a sliver of crimson bleeding into the horizon, like an old wound that had never quite healed.

‘Please sit down,’ came the teacher’s voice.

And, once again, she did not comply.

Later, much later, when the worst had already happened and she was alone in her bed at night, unable to fall asleep, listening to her father, also sleepless, pacing the house, Ada Kazantzakis would revisit this moment, this fissure in time, when she could have done as she was told and returned to her seat, remaining more or less invisible to everyone in the classroom, unnoticed but also undisturbed; she could have kept things the way they had been, if only she could have stopped herself from doing what she did next.





Fig Tree





This afternoon, as storm clouds descended over London and the world turned the colour of melancholy, Kostas Kazantzakis buried me in the garden. In the back garden, that is. Normally I liked it here, among the lush camellias, sweetly fragrant honeysuckles and witch hazels with their spidery flowers, but this was no normal day. I tried to cheer up and see the bright side of things. Not that it helped. I was nervous, filled with apprehension. I had never been buried before.

Kostas had been toiling outside in the cold since the early hours. A light sheen of sweat had formed on his brow and it glistened every time he forced the steel edge of the spade into solid earth. Behind him extended the shadows of the wooden trellises that in summer were covered with climbing roses and clematis vines, but were now no more than a see-through barrier separating our garden from the neighbour’s terrace. Slowly accumulating beside his leather boots, alongside the silvery trail left by a snail, was a pile of soil, clammy and crumbling to the touch. His breath clouded in front of his face, his shoulders were taut inside his navy parka – the one he had bought from a vintage shop on Portobello Road – and his knuckles were red and raw, slightly bleeding, but he didn’t seem to notice.

I was cold and, though I did not want to admit it to myself, frightened. I wished I could have shared my worries with him. But even if I could have spoken, he was too distracted to hear me, absorbed in his own thoughts as he kept digging without so much as a glance in my direction. When he was done, he would put the spade aside, look at me with those sage-green eyes that I knew had seen things both pleasant and painful, and push me down into the hollow ground.

Only days to Christmas, and all around the neighbourhood sparkled fairy lights and metallic tinsels. Inflatable Santas and reindeer with plastic smiles. Bright, blinking garlands dangled from shop awnings and stars twinkled in house windows, offering furtive peeks into other people’s lives, which always seemed less complicated somehow, more exciting – happier.

Inside the hedge a whitethroat began to sing – swift, scratchy notes. I wondered what a North African warbler was doing in our garden at this time of the year. Why hadn’t it left for warmer places with all the others that must now be on their way south, and who, if they made a slight change in their flight path, might just as well head towards Cyprus and visit my motherland.

I knew they got lost occasionally, passerine birds. Rarely, yet it happened. And at times they just could not make the journey any more, year in year out, the same but never the same, miles of emptiness rolling out in all directions, and so they stayed, even though it meant hunger and cold and, too often, death.

It had been a long winter already. So unlike last year’s mild weather, with its overcast skies, scattered showers, muddy tracks, a cascade of gloom and grey. Nothing out of the ordinary for dear old England. But this year, since early autumn, the climate had been erratic. At night we heard the howling of the gale and it brought to mind things untamed and unbidden, things within each of us that we were not yet ready to face, let alone comprehend. Many mornings when we woke up, we found the roads glazed with ice and blades of grass stiffened like shards of emerald. There were thousands of homeless people sleeping rough on the streets of London and not enough shelters for even a quarter of them.