The Island of Missing Trees(90)
Thus saying, she sat back with a little smile – one that disappeared completely when she heard what Ada asked next.
‘I kind of understand why my older relatives might have found it difficult to accept my parents’ marriage. It’s a different generation. They all went through a lot, probably. What I don’t understand is why my own parents never talked about the past even after they moved to England. Why the silence?’
‘I’m not sure I can answer that,’ said Meryem, a hint of caution entering her voice.
‘Try.’ Ada leaned forward and stopped the recorder. ‘This is not for school, by the way. It’s for me.’
Silences
London, early 2000s
Nine months after Ada was born, Defne decided to go back to working for the Committee on Missing Persons. She might be two thousand miles away from Cyprus, but she believed she could still be of help in the search for the missing. She began to visit immigrant communities from the island settled in various boroughs and suburbs of London. In particular, she wanted to talk to the elderly who had lived through the troubles and who might towards the end of their lives be willing to share some secrets.
Nearly every day that autumn she would put on her blue trench coat and walk around streets with signs in Greek and Turkish, rain pattering on the pavements and running down the gutters. Almost without fail, after a friendly chat, somebody would point her towards this house or that, insinuating that she might find what she was looking for over there. The families she met in this way were usually warm and welcoming, offering her tea and pastries, but a veil of mistrust remained between them, unspoken yet palpable to all in the room.
Occasionally, Defne noticed, a grandfather or a grandmother was keen to talk when there were no other family members around. For they remembered. Memories as elusive and wispy as tufts of wool dispersed in the wind. Quite a number of these men and women, born and raised in mixed villages, spoke Greek and Turkish, and a few, in the throes of Alzheimer’s, slipped down the slopes of time into a language they had not used in decades. Some had personally witnessed atrocities, some had heard about them, and then there were others who seemed evasive to her.
It was during these difficult conversations that Defne came to realize that hands were the most honest part of a human’s body. Eyes lied. Lips lied. Faces hid themselves behind a thousand masks. But hands rarely ever did. She observed the hands of the elderly, resting demurely on their laps, withered, wrinkled, liver-spotted, bent and blue with veins, creatures with their own minds and consciences. She noticed how, every time she asked an uncomfortable question, the hands answered in their own language, fidgeting, gesturing, picking at their nails.
As she tried to encourage her interviewees to open up, Defne was careful not to demand more than they were ready to provide. She was, however, troubled to observe deep rifts between family members of different ages. Way too often, the first generation of survivors, the ones who had suffered the most, kept their pain close to the surface, memories like splinters lodged under their skin, some protruding, others completely invisible to the eye. Meanwhile, the second generation chose to suppress the past, both what they knew and did not know of it. In contrast, the third generation were eager to dig away and unearth silences. How strange that in families scarred by wars, forced displacements and acts of brutality, it was the youngest who seemed to have the oldest memory.
Behind the many doors she knocked on, Defne came across a plethora of heirlooms brought in from the island. It touched her to see stitched quilt pieces, crocheted doilies, china figurines and mantelpiece clocks, carried lovingly across borders. But then she also became aware of the presence of cultural artefacts that felt completely out of place – stolen church icons, smuggled treasures, broken mosaics, pillaging of history. The international public paid barely any attention to how art and antiques came on to the market. Customers in Western capitals happily acquired them without questioning their provenance. Among the buyers were well-known singers, artists, celebrities.
For the most part, Defne went alone on these house visits, but sometimes she would be accompanied by a colleague from the CMP. Once they were treated so rudely by the elder son of a ninety-two-year-old survivor – who accused them of unnecessarily probing into the past when bygones should be bygones, acting as the pawn of Western powers and their lobbies and lackeys, and giving their island a terrible image in the international arena – that she and her Greek colleague left the place shaken. They stopped under a street light to catch their breath, their faces shrivelled in the sodium glare.
‘There’s a pub around the corner,’ the other woman said. ‘How about a quick drink?’
They found a table at the back, the smell of beer-soaked carpets and damp coats strangely soothing. Defne brought two white wines from the bar. It was the first drink she would have since she had found out she was pregnant. Now she was breastfeeding. Something like relief spreading across her face, she cradled the glass between her palms, feeling its chill slowly turn to warmth. She chuckled nervously, and before they knew it both women were laughing so hard, with tears in their eyes, that the other customers began to look at them disapprovingly, wondering what was so funny, no one imagining it was pain they were setting free.
That night Defne got home late and found Kostas asleep on the sofa with the baby by his side. He startled awake when he heard her footsteps.