The Island of Missing Trees(60)

Butterflies and Bones


Cyprus, early 2000s


The Wandering Khayyam was a simple tavern with tile-topped tables, pastoral oil paintings and a wide selection of fish on ice. Kostas arrived around seven thirty, checking his watch, unsure whether he was early or late, having not been told what time to meet the others.

As soon as he walked in, he was greeted by an elegant, heavily made-up woman somewhere in her seventies, her platinum-blonde hair piled up in an intricate coil.

‘You must be Kostas,’ she said, stretching out her arms as if to give him a hug. ‘I am Merjan. I’m from Beirut, but I’ve been here for so long, I consider myself an honorary Cypriot. Welcome, darling.’

‘Thank you.’ Kostas gave a nod, slightly thrown by this effusive reception from a stranger.

‘Look at you!’ Merjan said. ‘You’ve become too English, haven’t you? You need to spend more time in the Mediterranean. Get back to your roots. David says you left the island as a boy.’

Seeing the surprise on Kostas’s face, she chuckled. ‘My customers tell me lots of things. Come, let me take you to your friends.’

Merjan guided him to a table at the back, by the window. The place was bustling, the customers loud and boisterous, and with each step he took into the heart of the tavern, Kostas felt the hair on the back of his neck bristle. He could not help being reminded of The Happy Fig, the similarities were too obvious for him to ignore. He had never been in a place like that since, and it felt a betrayal to be here now.

Only when he tore his gaze away from his surroundings did he get a proper view of the table he would be joining. Three people sat there. Defne was wearing a teal dress, her sea of dark hair falling to her shoulders in rebellious waves. She had changed her earrings to a pair of pearl teardrops, and they caught the light, dancing in that quiet space between her ears and her chin. As Kostas reached the table, he realized a moment too late that he had been staring at Defne and no one else.

‘Oh, there he is!’ exclaimed David. ‘Thank you for delivering him safe and sound.’ Seizing Merjan’s hand, he planted a kiss on it.

‘No problem, darling. Now you take good care of him,’ said the owner, before gliding away with a wink.

Kostas pulled out the empty chair next to David and sat down, opposite a woman with a wide forehead and hooded grey eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses. She introduced herself as Maria-Fernanda.

‘We were chatting about exhumations, as you do,’ said David, raising a glass of raki, of which he seemed to have already had a few.

The others were drinking wine. Kostas poured himself a glass. It tasted of tree bark, sweet plums and dark earth.

‘Maria-Fernanda is from Spain,’ said Defne. ‘She played a big role in documenting atrocities from the Civil War era.’

‘Oh, thank you, but we were not the first,’ said Maria-Fernanda with a smile. ‘A lot of progress was made in forensic fieldwork in Guatemala in the 1990s, thanks to the relentless efforts of human rights activists. They managed to discover a large number of mass graves where political dissidents and indigenous rural Maya communities had been buried. Then there is Argentina. Unfortunately, until the late 1980s, exhumations weren’t included in conflict resolution. Such a shame.’

David turned to Kostas. ‘The Nuremberg trials were a landmark. That’s when people realized how random and widespread violence actually is. Neighbours turning against neighbours, friends selling out friends. Now that’s a different kind of evil, one that we still haven’t come to grips with as humanity. It’s a difficult subject across the world – the acts of barbarity that happen off the battlefield.’

‘It’s hard work,’ said Maria-Fernanda. ‘But I always say to myself, at least we’re not combing the ocean.’

‘She’s talking about Chile,’ said Defne, glancing at Kostas. ‘Thousands disappeared under Pinochet. Secret flights over the Pacific Ocean and lakes, packed with prisoners – tortured, drugged, many still alive. They tied railway tracks to the victims, hurled them from Puma helicopters, down into the waters. The officials always denied it, but there was an army report and it said they had “hidden” the bodies in the ocean. Hidden! Arseholes!’

‘How did people find out the truth?’ Kostas asked.

‘Pure coincidence,’ Maria-Fernanda replied. ‘Or God’s doing, if you believe in such things. One of the victims washed up on the beach. I’ll always remember her name: Marta Ugarte. She was a teacher. Horribly beaten, tortured, raped. She, too, had been tied to a chunk of metal and thrown out of a helicopter, but somehow the wire came loose and the body surfaced. There is a picture of her taken right after she was fished out of the sea. Her eyes are open, looking straight into your soul. So that’s how people woke up to the fact that there were many more buried under the waters.’

Kostas balanced his wine glass between his palms, feeling the round, flawless heft of it. He peered through the crimson liquid. Not at his companions around the table but into a part of his heart that he had kept closed for so long. He found old sorrows there, some his own, others of the land where he was born, the two inseparable now, layered and compressed like rock formations.

Lifting his head, he asked Maria-Fernanda, ‘Where else have you worked?’

‘Oh, all around the world. Yugoslavia. Cambodia. Rwanda … Last year I took part in the forensic exhumations in Iraq.’