The Island of Missing Trees(61)
‘And how did you and Defne meet?’
Defne answered him. ‘I knew about Maria-Fernanda, I wrote to her. She responded so graciously and invited me to Spain. Last summer, I got a grant and visited her. She and her team carried out three exhumations: Extremadura, Asturias, Burgos. Each time, Spanish families gave their dead a beautiful funeral. It was very touching. After I returned to Cyprus to join the CMP, we invited Maria-Fernanda to observe our methods. And here she is!’
Maria-Fernanda slid an olive into her mouth and chewed slowly. ‘Defne was amazing! She came with me to talk to the families, she cried with them. I was so moved. You don’t share a language, you think, and then you realize, grief is a language. We understand each other, people with troubled pasts.’
Kostas took a slow, deep breath and the room seemed to cradle him – or maybe it was her words. ‘Do they ever appear in your dreams, the things you see during the day? Forgive me if it’s too personal a question.’
‘No, it’s fine. I used to have disturbing dreams,’ Maria-Fernanda said, taking off her glasses and rubbing her eyes. ‘But not any more. Or perhaps I just can’t remember.’
‘Injuriarum remedium est oblivio,’ said David. ‘Oblivion is the remedy for injuries.’
‘But we have to remember in order to heal,’ Defne objected. She turned to Maria-Fernanda and said, with a tenderness in her tone, ‘Tell them about Burgos.’
‘Burgos was the heartland of Francoism. There were no battle lines there. That means, all the bodies we found in mass graves belonged to civilians. Most of the time the families did not want to talk about the past. They just wanted to give their loved ones a decent burial – dignity.’
Maria-Fernanda sipped her water before continuing. ‘One day, I took a cab to an excavation site. I was running late. The cabbie seemed like a nice fellow – friendly, funny. After a while we passed by this place, Aranda de Duero. A charming town. And the driver looked at me in the mirror and said, “That’s Red Aranda, full of troublemakers. Our guys executed many people, young and old, it had to be done.” And I suddenly realized this man I had been chatting with about the weather and random stuff, this father of three, who proudly displayed photos of his family on the dashboard, was someone who supported the mass murder of civilians.’
‘What did you do?’ asked David.
‘There wasn’t much I could do. I was alone on the road with him. I didn’t talk to him for the rest of the journey. Not a single word. Once we arrived, I paid his money and left without even looking at him. He understood why, of course.’
David lit a pipe and exhaled, gesturing towards Defne through the smoke. ‘What would you have done in her situation?’
They all looked at Defne. In the candlelight, her eyes gleamed like burnished bronze.
She said, ‘I don’t mean to sound moralistic. Forgive me if I do. But I think I’d tell that bastard to stop the bloody car and let me out! I might have to hitchhike afterwards – whatever. I’d think about that later.’
Kostas studied her face, knowing she was telling the truth. In that fleeting instant, like a night traveller who makes out a distant shape when lightning flashes, he had a glimpse of the girl she once was, her rage in the face of injustice, her sense of righteousness, her passion for life.
David puffed on his pipe. ‘But not everyone needs to be a warrior, my dear. Otherwise we’d never have poets, artists, scientists …’
‘I disagree,’ said Defne into her wine glass. ‘There are moments in life when everyone has to become a warrior of some kind. If you are a poet, you fight with your words; if you are an artist, you fight with your paintings … But you can’t say, “Sorry, I’m a poet, I’ll pass.” You don’t say that when there’s so much suffering, inequality, injustice.’ She drained her drink and topped it up. ‘What about you, Kostas? What would you have done?’
He drew in a breath, feeling the weight of her gaze. ‘I don’t know. Until I’m in that situation, I don’t think I can really know.’
A half-smile flickered across Defne’s face. ‘You were always reasoned, logical. A close observer of the marvels of nature and the errors of the human race.’
There was an edge to her tone, impossible not to notice. It darkened the mood around the table.
‘Hey, let’s not judge each other now,’ said David with a flippant wave of his hand. ‘I’d have probably stayed in the car for the full trip and carried on nattering with the cabbie.’
But Defne was not listening. She was looking at Kostas and only at him. And Kostas saw that behind her sudden anger were all the words that had been left unsaid between them, swirling inside her soul like unsettled flakes in a snow globe.
His eyes fell to her hands, which had changed with the years. She used to love to paint her fingernails, each polished to a pearly pink. She didn’t do that any more. There was a slight unkemptness now, her nails short and uneven, the cuticles peeling. When he looked up again, he found her studying him.
His chest rising and falling with rapid breaths, Kostas leaned forward and said, ‘There is another question we could consider, perhaps a more difficult one. What would we do, each of us, if we were young people in 1930s Burgos, caught up in the midst of civil war? It’s easy to claim in hindsight we’d do the right thing. But, in truth, none of us knows where we would be when the fire is raging.’