The Island of Missing Trees(84)

During the nuptial flight, she held her head high and flew fast, the drones striving to catch up with her. They crossed over a sand track, scrambled up and down tyre marks. They traversed the ruins of the tavern. As soon as she saw me, laden with figs, she knew this was where she would build her kingdom. Here she mated and chewed off her wings as though discarding a wedding dress, so that she could never fly again. She turned herself into a fully fledged egg-laying machine.

Her features contorted in sadness, she then said that when the walls came down, they had found, there at the bottom of the well, two dead men. She didn’t know who they were until she met me and learned about the couple who owned this place.

I let my branches drop as the terrible truth behind her words slowly sank in. Seeing my distress, she assured me that they had not touched Yusuf and Yiorgos. They had left them there, undisturbed. Somebody would find them soon, now that they were half in the open.

After the queen and her entourage of loyal courtiers had departed, I drifted into a strange listlessness which grew worse in the days that followed. I was feeling unwell. Like every living thing, a fig tree can suffer from multiple diseases and infections, only this time I had barely any strength to fight back. The tips of my leaves curled into themselves, my bark began to peel off. The flesh on the inside of my figs turned a sickly green and then frighteningly powdery.

As my immunity declined and my strength tapered off, I fell prey to one of my worst enemies – a fig-tree borer, a large stag-horned beetle, Phryneta spinator. Like a nightmare she descended on me and laid her eggs near the base of my trunk. Helpless and filled with fear, I waited, knowing that the grub-like larvae would soon begin to bore into my trunk and start feeding on me, digging tunnels into my branches, destroying me from within, little by little.

The damage from this beetle is often irreparable. Fig trees that are heavily infested need to be destroyed.

I was dying.





Portable Roots


Cyprus, early 2000s


When Defne and Kostas approached The Happy Fig, they found it sunken into undergrowth, broken tiles and building rubble strewn all around, like wreckage after a storm. Knowing it was the first time Kostas would be seeing the place in years, Defne lingered behind, giving him time to take it in.

Kostas pushed open the door, its wood decayed and lifeless, hanging from its hinges. Inside, weeds had forced their way through cracks in the floor, the tiles were stained with lichen and the walls blotched with mildew, black as iron. In a corner, a window screen, its glass splintered long ago, creaked slowly in the breeze. There was a fetid smell in the air, of mould and putrefaction.

The moment he walked in it all came rushing back to him. Evenings redolent with delicious odours of steaming food and warm pastry, the chatter and laughter of the customers, the music and the clapping, the smashing of plates as the night wore on … He remembered the afternoons he had trudged up the hill, carrying bottles of carob liquor and those honey-sesame bars that Yiorgos loved so much, and how happy his mother was with the money he brought home … His eyes brightened as he recalled Chico flapping his wings, Yiorgos telling jokes to a newly married couple, and Yusuf watching it all with his customary silence and attentive gaze. How proud they were of what they had created together. This tavern was their home, their refuge, their entire world.

‘You all right?’ Defne said as she put her arms around him.

They stood still for a minute, his breathing slowing to match hers, until his heartbeat grew calmer.

Defne tilted her head and looked about. ‘Imagine, the fig has witnessed everything.’

Gently, Kostas disentangled himself from her arms and edged closer to the Ficus carica. His brow crumpled. ‘Oh, this tree is not in good shape. She’s sick.’

‘What?’

‘She’s infested. Look, it has spread everywhere.’ He pointed at the branches covered with tiny boreholes, the dry sawdust pulp at the foot of the trunk, the brittle dead leaves littering the ground.

‘Can’t you help?’

‘I’ll see what I can do. Let’s go and get a few things.’

They returned an hour later, carrying several bags. With the help of a sledgehammer, Kostas knocked down parts of the southern wall of the tavern, crumbled with mould. He wanted to make sure the tree could get more sunshine and oxygen. He then cut off the diseased branches with a pruning saw. Next, he injected insecticide with a syringe into the tunnels that the larvae had burrowed. To prevent the deadly insects from laying their eggs again, he enclosed the lower part of the trunk in wire netting and filled the tree’s festering wounds with a sealant.

‘Is it going to get better?’ asked Defne.

‘She – this tree is a female.’ Kostas straightened up, wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘I don’t know if she’ll be all right. The grubs are everywhere.’

‘I wish she could come with us to England,’ Defne said. ‘I wish trees were portable.’

Kostas narrowed his eyes as a new thought crossed his mind. ‘We could do that.’

She glanced at him, disbelieving.

‘You can grow a fig tree from a cutting. If we plant her right away in London, and look after her, there’s a chance she’ll survive.’

‘Are you serious? Can you do that?’

‘It can be done,’ Kostas said. ‘She may not like the English weather but she might be okay. Tomorrow morning I’ll come back and check how she’s doing. I’ll take a cutting from a healthy branch. Then she can travel with us.’