The Island of Missing Trees(98)

Legends, perhaps, but I do not belittle them.

I believe in legends and in the unspoken secrets they try to gently convey.

Even so, take everything I have recounted with a grain of salt, and everything I might have failed to say, too, for I may not be the most impartial narrator. I have my own biases. After all, I have never been too fond of gods and goddesses, and their endless hostilities and rivalries.

I found it touching that Meryem, bless her heart, built a tower of stones in the garden that night, a bridge made of songs and prayers, so that I could leave this world peacefully and move on to the next, if there is one. It was a nice wish, as far as wishes go. But my sister and I have always had our separate views. Whereas she wanted me to migrate to the hereafter, hopefully to be ushered through the gates of paradise, I much preferred to stay where I am, rooted in the earth.

After I died and emptiness swallowed me whole like a huge yawning mouth, I floated about aimlessly for a while. I saw myself lying on the hospital bed where I had remained in a coma, and I knew it was sad but I could not feel what I knew; it was as if a glass wall had been erected between my heart and the sadness surrounding it. But then the door opened and Ada walked in with flowers in her hand, her expectant smile fading with every timid step, and I could not bear watching any more.

I was not ready to leave them. Nor was I able to relocate, yet again. I wanted to continue to be anchored in love, the only thing that humans have yet to destroy. But where could I possibly reside now that I was no longer alive and lacked a body, a shell, a form? And then I knew. The old fig tree! Where else to seek refuge but in its arboreal embrace?

Following the funeral, watching the last of the day slide away and light become dark tranquillity, I drifted above and danced in circles around our Ficus carica. I seeped into her vascular tissues, absorbed water from her leaves and breathed life again through her pores.

Poor fig tree. When I metamorphosed into her, she suddenly found herself deeply in love with my husband, but I didn’t mind that at all; it made me happy, in fact, to see this, and I wondered what would happen if some day Kostas were to reciprocate – if a human were to fall in love with a tree.

Women, at least where I come from, and for personal reasons of their own, have, time and again, turned themselves into native flora. Defne, Dafne, Daphne … Daring to reject Apollo, Daphne became a laurel. Her skin hardened into a protective bark, her arms stretched into slender branches and her hair unfurled into silky foliage while, as Ovid tells us, ‘her feet, so swift a moment ago, stuck in slow-growing roots’. Whereas Daphne was transformed into a tree in order to avoid love, I transmuted into a tree in order to hold on to love.

The air is warming up, the sky above London the shyest shade of blue. I can feel a pale ray of sunshine combing the earth, excruciatingly slowly. It will take time, renewal. It will take time, healing.

But I know and I trust that, any moment now, my beloved Kostas Kazantzakis will come out to the garden with a spade in his hand, perhaps wearing his old navy parka again, the one we bought together from a vintage shop on Portobello Road, and he will dig me out and pull me up, holding me gently in his arms, and behind his beautiful eyes, engraved in his soul, they will still be there, the remnants of an island at the far end of the Mediterranean Sea, the remains of our love.





Note to the Reader





Many of the stories of the missing mentioned throughout the novel are based on true accounts. Beneath the Carob Trees: The Lost Lives of Cyprus by Nick Danziger and Rory MacLean, launched by the Committee on Missing Persons, UNDP, is a profoundly touching resource for those wishing to read further.

While I was researching this novel the exhumations carried out in Spain and Latin America were of great importance to me. The story about the cab driver is fictional, but inspired by a real account – a chilling remark made to Red Cross representatives by their Francoist guide – that I came across in Layla Renshaw’s excellent book Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War.

The story of Kostas’s grandfather being shot by soldiers during curfew echoes a similar tragedy that took place and is mentioned in The British and Cyprus: An Outpost of Empire to Sovereign Bases, 1878–1974 by Mark Simmons. Another insightful book is James Ker-Lindsay’s The Cyprus Problem: What Everyone Needs to Know.

The article Kostas read in August 1974 was inspired by an article published a year later, on 8 August 1975, in Science, ‘Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?’, by the US climate scientist and geochemist Wally Broecker, who was one of the first people to warn us about the connection between human-induced carbon emissions and rising temperatures.

The information on floral farms and wreaths for dead British soldiers, as well as several striking details about the island, are drawn from Tabitha Morgan’s wonderful Sweet and Bitter Island: A History of the British in Cyprus. Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons is an illuminating, personal and perceptive take on Cyprus between 1953 and 1956. Andrekos Varnava’s British Imperialism in Cyprus: The Inconsequential Possession provides a spectacular account of the period between 1878 and 1915, while the anthology Nicosia Beyond Borders: Voices from a Divided City, edited by A. Adil, A. M. Ali, B. Kemal and M. Petrides, brilliantly represents the voices of both Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot writers. For personal anecdotes, myths and history, Colin Thubron’s Journey into Cyprus offers a compelling narrative.