The Island of Missing Trees(7)
Tonight was set to be the coldest night of the year so far. Already the air, as if composed of splinters of glass, pierced everything it touched. That is why Kostas was rushing, bent on completing his task before the ground turned to stone.
Storm Hera – that’s what they had called the impending cyclone. Not George or Olivia or Charlie or Matilda this time, but a mythological name. They said it was going to be the worst in centuries – worse than the Great Storm of 1703, which had torn the tiles from rooftops, stripped ladies of their whalebone corsets, gentlemen of their powdered wigs, and beggars of the rags on their backs; wrecked timber-framed mansions and mud-built slums alike; smashed sailing ships as if they were paper boats and blown all the sewage floating down the Thames on to the riverbanks.
Stories, perhaps, but I believed in them. Just as I believed in legends, and the underlying truths they tried to convey.
I told myself that if everything went according to plan, I would only be buried for three months, maybe even less. When the daffodils bloomed along the footpaths and the bluebells carpeted the woods, and the whole of nature was animated again, I would be unburied. Bolt upright and wide awake. But, hard as I tried, I could not hold on to that sliver of hope while the winter, fierce and unrelenting, felt as if it were here to stay. I had never been good at optimism anyway. It must have been in my DNA. I was descended from a long line of pessimists. So I did what I often did: I began to imagine all the ways in which things could go wrong. What if this year spring did not arrive and I remained under the earth – forever? Or what if spring did make an appearance at long last, but Kostas Kazantzakis forgot to dig me up?
A gust of wind swept past, cutting into me like a serrated knife.
Kostas must have noticed for he stopped digging. ‘Look at you! You’re freezing, poor thing.’
He cared about me, always had. In the past, whenever the weather turned frigid, he took precautions to keep me alive. I remember one chilly afternoon in January he set up windbreaks all around me and wrapped me with layer upon layer of burlap to reduce moisture loss. Another time he covered me with mulch. He placed heat lamps in the garden to provide warmth throughout the night and, most crucially, before the crack of dawn, the darkest hour of the day and often the coldest. That is when most of us fall into a sleep we never wake up from – the homeless on the streets, and us …
… fig trees.
I am a Ficus carica, known as the edible common fig, though I can assure you there’s nothing common about me. I am a proud member of the great mulberry family of Moraceae from the kingdom of Plantae. Originating in Asia Minor, I can be found across a vast geography from California to Portugal and Lebanon, from the shores of the Black Sea to the hills of Afghanistan and the valleys of India.
Burying fig trees in trenches underground during the harshest winters and unearthing them in spring is a curious if well-established tradition. Italians settled in sub-zero towns in America and Canada are familiar with it. So are Spaniards, Portuguese, Maltese, Greeks, Lebanese, Egyptians, Tunisians, Moroccans, Algerians, Israelis, Palestinians, Iranians, Kurds, Turks, Jordanians, Syrians, Sephardic Jews … and us Cypriots.
Maybe not the young so much these days, but the elderly are no stranger to the custom. The ones who first migrated from the milder climes of the Mediterranean to the blustery cities and conurbations across the West. The ones who, after all these years, still dream up ingenious ways to smuggle across borders their favourite smelly cheese, smoked pastrami, stuffed sheep intestines, frozen manti, homemade tahini, carob syrup, karidaki glyko, cow stomach soup, spleen sausage, tuna eyeballs, rams’ testicles … even though they might, if only they searched, find at least some of these delicacies in the ‘international food’ section of supermarkets in their adopted countries. But they would claim it is not the same taste.
First-generation immigrants are a species all their own. They wear a lot of beige, grey or brown. Colours that do not stand out. Colours that whisper, never shout. There is a tendency to formality in their mannerisms, a wish to be treated with dignity. They move with a slight ungainliness, not quite at ease in their surroundings. Both eternally grateful for the chances life has given them and scarred by what it has snatched away, always out of place, separated from others by some unspoken experience, like survivors of a car accident.
First-generation immigrants talk to their trees all the time – when there are no other people nearby, that is. They confide in us, describing their dreams and aspirations, including those they have left behind, like wisps of wool caught on barbed wire during fence crossings. But for the most part, they simply enjoy our company, chatting to us as though to old, long-missed friends. They are caring and tender towards their plants, especially those they have brought along with them from lost motherlands. They know, deep within, that when you save a fig tree from a storm, it is someone’s memory you are saving.
Classroom
‘Ada, please sit down,’ Mrs Walcott said one more time, tension lending a hard edge to her voice.
But once again Ada did not move. It wasn’t that she hadn’t heard the teacher. She understood perfectly what was being asked of her and she had no intention of defying it, but in that moment she just couldn’t make her body obey her mind. At the corner of her vision she glimpsed a hovering dot – the butterfly she had sketched in her notebook was fluttering around the classroom. She watched it with unease, worried that someone else might see it, though a small, separate part of her knew they wouldn’t.