The Island of Missing Trees, page 18
‘You Greek?’
‘Yes, I am.’
The driver cocked his head. For a moment Kostas thought he saw a hard gleam flash in his eyes. To break a possible tension, he leaned forward, trying to change the subject. ‘So, has the tourist season begun?’
A smile appeared on the driver’s face, slow and cautious, like a closed fist opening. ‘Yes, but you no tourist, brother. You are from here.’
And that simple word, brother, so unexpected yet reassuring, hovered in the air between them. Kostas did not say anything else; nor did the driver. It was as if they both had heard all they needed to know.
Hotel Afrodit was a whitewashed, two-storey building held tight in the bright magenta embrace of bougainvillea. A broad-shouldered and rosy-faced woman stood behind the reception desk, her headscarf tied loosely in the traditional Muslim way. To her left, lounging in a wicker chair, a man who must have been her husband sipped tea. Behind him, the wall was crowded with a mishmash of items: Turkish flags in various sizes, prayers in Arabic script, evil eye beads, macramé plant holders and postcards from different parts of the world, posted by satisfied customers. One glance at the couple and Kostas sensed that, though the husband might nominally own the place, it was the wife who ran everything.
‘Good afternoon.’ He knew they were expecting him.
‘Mr Kazantzakis, right? Welcome!’ the woman chirped, a smile dimpling her round cheeks. ‘Good journey?’
‘Not bad.’
‘Great time to visit Cyprus. What brings you here?’
He was expecting this question and had his answer ready, but still he paused. ‘Work,’ he said flatly.
‘Yes, you scientist.’ She elongated the last word, her English thickly accented. ‘You said on the phone you work with trees, did you know all of our rooms are named after them?’
She offered him his room key in an envelope. For a second, Kostas dared not look at the name scribbled on it, half expecting it to be The Happy Fig. The hair at the back of his neck bristled as his eyes skimmed the words. His room was called ‘Golden Oak’.
‘That’s good,’ he said with a smile; he was finding it harder to keep memories at bay.
Upstairs, the room was spacious and full of light. Kostas threw himself on to the bed, only now realizing how exhausted he was. The soft covers invited him in, like a warm, scented bath, though he didn’t allow himself to relax. He took a quick shower and changed into a T-shirt and jeans. Crossing the room, he opened the double doors to the balcony. Overhead, an eagle – the animal companion of Zeus – soared across a cloudless sky and glided westward, in pursuit of its next quarry. As soon as he stepped out, he caught a long-forgotten whiff in the breeze. Jasmine, pine, sun-baked stones. A smell he thought he had buried somewhere in the maze of memory. The human mind was the strangest place, both home and exile. How could it hold on to something as elusive and intangible as a scent when it was capable of erasing concrete chunks of the past, block by block?
He had to find her. This very afternoon. Come tomorrow, he might lose heart and put it off for another day or maybe two, make sure he was terribly busy, so busy that the entire week would pass in a blur and it would be time to pack again. But right now, fresh off the ferry and still riding the wave of longing that had carried him all the way here from England, he was certain he had the strength to see Defne.
All this time, he had kept collecting bits of information about her. He knew she was an archaeologist and had made a name for herself in the field. He knew she had never married, had no children. He had seen photos of her in newspapers sold at Turkish Cypriot stores in London, where she was speaking at academic conferences and seminars. But what did any of that say about the particularities of her life today? It had been impossibly long since they had last seen each other. You could not fill that big a void with those few paltry facts he had gathered, and yet they were all he had.
He didn’t have her number and did not want to call the university where she worked. The friends they had in common from the past had all scattered to different corners of the world and could not be of help. But before leaving London he was able to find a contact, and that was as good a beginning as any.
He had a colleague, David, with whom he had collaborated on various projects initiated by the United Nations Environment Programme. They had gone their separate ways but kept in touch. A cheerful man with half a dozen languages under his belt, a propensity for alcohol and a distinctively sandy beard, David had been based in Cyprus for the last ten months. Upon deciding to travel to the island, Kostas had called him, hoping he could be the bridge that would take him to Defne, knowing that bridges appear in our lives only when we are ready to cross them.
Remains of Love
Cyprus, early 2000s
Kostas arrived at the bookshop where they had agreed to meet and checked his watch. With a few minutes to kill he browsed the books, some of them in English. In one section of the shop he found rows of stamps dating back to the years of his boyhood and before. Among the thousands was one issued in 1975, showing the island divided into two opposing colours, separated by a metal chain. So much symbolism packed into four square centimetres of paper.
From the souvenir shop next door, he bought an ammonite – an ancient marine shell, coiled around its secrets. Feeling its heft in his palm, he wandered around for a bit. On a poplar tree he spotted a bird – a black-headed bunting with splashes of yellow across its chest. A passerine bird. Every year, this tiny creature migrated from the pastures of Iran and the valleys of Europe to the coasts of India, and further east, traversing distances beyond the ken of many humans.
The bunting hopped back and forth along the branch, and then stopped. For a fleeting moment, in the gathering quiet, the two of them eyed each other. Kostas wondered what the bird saw in him – enemy, friend or something else? What he saw was a fascinating combination of vulnerability and resilience.
The sound of approaching footsteps jolted him out of his reverie. Alarmed, the bird took off. Turning his head, Kostas saw a tall, heavily built figure hurrying towards him.
‘Kostas Kazantzakis, there you are! I’d recognize that scruffy hairdo from a mile away,’ David said, his accent unmistakably British.
Kostas took a step forward, shielding his eyes against the sun. ‘Hello, David, thanks for meeting me.’
As he grabbed the hand Kostas offered, David broke into a smile. ‘I must admit I was surprised when you called to say you were coming. From what I remember, you didn’t want to return to Cyprus. But here you are! What is it – work or homesickness?’
‘Both,’ Kostas replied. ‘A bit of fieldwork … I also wanted to see my old town, some old friends …’
‘Yes, you told me. As I said on the phone, I know Defne well. Come, I’ll take you to her. It’s just five minutes away. She and her team have been up since early morning. I’ll explain it on the way.’
At the mention of her name, Kostas felt a cold panic grip his chest. They began to walk, picking their way along the rutted path, the hot wind searing their faces as they headed north-east.
‘So tell me, what are they doing exactly – she and her team?’
‘Oh, they are with the CMP,’ said David. ‘The Committee on Missing Persons. It’s pretty intense stuff. It gets right inside your head after a while. Turks and Greeks are working together – for a change. The idea came into being in the early 1980s, but nothing could be done for a long time because the two sides couldn’t agree on the toll.’
‘The toll?’
‘Of those who disappeared during the troubles,’ David replied, slightly out of breath. ‘In the end, they managed to finalize a list of 2,002 victims. The actual number is much higher, of course, but nobody wants to hear that. Anyway, it’s a start. The UN is a partner, that’s why I’m here, but it’s the Cypriots who do the real work. I’ll be around till the end of the month, then I fly to Geneva. They’ll keep digging, your Defne and her friends.’
‘The members, are they mostly archaeologists?’
‘Only a few. They come from all professions: anthropologists, historians, geneticists, forensic specialists … The groups are formed and approved by the UN. We work in different locations, depending on anonymous informants, who tell us things for all sorts of reasons of their own. Then we start digging. You think this is a small island, but if you’re looking for a missing person even the smallest place is impossibly big.’
‘What about the locals, do they support the project?’
‘The response has been mixed so far. We’ve many young volunteers from both sides who are eager to help, which gives you hope for humanity. The young are wise. They want peace. And the elderly, some kind of closure. It’s the ones in the middle who cause trouble.’
‘Our generation, you mean,’ said Kostas.
‘Exactly. There is a small but vocal minority who begrudge our work, either because they fear it might stir up old animosities or because they still bear them. Some of the CMP members have been threatened.’
They now approached a clearing in the woods. Kostas could hear low voices in the distance and a scraping, grating sound of shovels and picks stabbing the earth.
‘There’s the gang,’ said David, waving a hand.
Kostas saw a group of about a dozen people, women and men, toiling under the sun, wearing straw hats and bandanas. Most of them had their faces half covered with cloth masks. Large black tarpaulins were stretched over the ground and suspended between the trees, like swaying hammocks.
His heart quickening, Kostas scanned the group, but he couldn’t make out Defne among them. He had imagined this moment so many times, thinking of all sorts of ways it could go wrong, that he felt almost paralysed to be in it now. How would she react when she saw him? Would she turn and walk away?
‘Hey, everyone!’ David called out. ‘Come and meet my friend Kostas!’
One by one, the team members stopped what they were doing and strode towards them, their steps calm, unhurried. Taking off their gloves and masks, putting their notebooks and instruments aside, they welcomed him.
Kostas greeted each person warmly, though he couldn’t help stealing glances around to see where Defne might be. And then he spotted her, sitting perched on a tree limb with her legs dangling, her face impossible to read as she quietly watched him from above. Kostas noticed a spider’s web between the branches beside her, and for a fleeting moment Defne and those silvery threads merged in his mind, wispy and fragile like the remnants of the bond between them.
‘Oh, she does that all the time,’ said David when he noticed where Kostas was looking. ‘Defne loves sitting there like a bird, apparently she concentrates better when she’s up a tree. That’s where she writes our reports.’ David raised his voice. ‘Come down here!’
Smiling, Defne jumped down and walked towards them. Her wavy black hair fell to her shoulders. She wore khaki trousers and a loosely buttoned white shirt. On her feet were hiking boots. She didn’t seem surprised. She seemed to have been expecting him.
‘Hi, Kostas.’ Her handshake was brief, giving nothing away. ‘David told me you were coming. He said, a friend of mine is enquiring about you. I said, really, who? Turns out it was you.’
He was taken aback by the distance in her voice, not cold or formal, but carefully measured, guarded. The years had etched fine lines on to her face, her cheeks had thinned slightly, but it was her eyes that had changed the most: a hard glaze had settled on those big, round brown eyes. His heart constricted as he saw how beautiful she still was.
‘Defne …’
Her name felt strange in his mouth. Worried that she might hear the thumping of his heart, he took a step aside, his gaze settling on the nearest tarpaulin. His breath tightened as he processed what the dusty, soiled, russet-stained fragments piled on it were. A split femur, a cracked thigh bone … they were human remains.
‘We had a tip-off,’ said Defne, seeing the expression on his face. ‘A peasant pointed us here. Father of six, grandfather to seventeen. The man was in the late stages of Alzheimer’s, didn’t recognize his own wife. One morning he woke up and started uttering strange things – “There’s a hill, a terebinth tree with a boulder at its foot.” He drew it on a piece of paper, describing this place. The family contacted us, we came, we dug, and we found the remains just where he said we would.’
In all the times he had imagined their encounter, Kostas had never thought they would be talking about such things. He asked, ‘How did the peasant know?’
‘You mean, do I suspect he was the murderer?’ Defne shook her head, her earrings swaying. ‘Who knows? A killer or an innocent eyewitness? That’s not our business. The CMP is not into that kind of investigation. If we conducted an enquiry or passed the information to the police, no one on this island would talk to us ever again. We can’t afford that. Our job is to find the missing so that families can give their loved ones a proper burial.’
Kostas nodded, mulling over her words. ‘Do you think there might be other graves around here?’
‘Possibly. Sometimes you search for weeks on end and achieve nothing. It’s frustrating. Some of the informants misremember the details, others deliberately lead us on wild goose chases. You search for victims, you encounter medieval, Roman, Hellenistic bones. Or prehistoric fossils. Did you know there were pygmy hippopotamuses in Cyprus? Pygmy elephants! Then, just when you think you are going nowhere, you find mass graves.’
Kostas glanced around him, taking in his surroundings, the grass tinted with gold under the sun, the pine trees with their dome-shaped tops. He stared into the distance as far as he could see, as though trying to recall what he had broken away from.
He asked, cautiously, ‘And the missing you’ve found here, were they Greeks or Turks?’
‘They were islanders,’ she said and there was a sharp edge to her voice then. ‘Islanders, like us.’
Overhearing, David interjected. ‘That’s the thing, my friend. You don’t know until you send the bones to a lab and get a report. When you hold a skull in your hands, can you tell if it’s Christian or Muslim? All that bloodshed, for what? Stupid, stupid wars.’
‘We don’t have much time, though,’ said Defne, her voice tailing off. ‘The older generation is dying, taking their secrets with them to the grave. If we don’t dig now, in a decade or so there won’t be anyone left to tell us the whereabouts of the missing. It’s a race against time, really.’
From the shrubs in the distance came the buzzing song of cicadas. Kostas knew there were some cicada species that could sing at extremely high frequencies, and perhaps they were doing so right now. Nature was always talking, telling things, though the human ear was too limited to hear them.
‘So, you two are old friends, huh?’ asked David. ‘Did you go to the same school or what?’
‘Something like that,’ said Defne, lifting her chin. ‘We grew up in the same neighbourhood, haven’t seen each other in years.’
‘Well, I’m glad I reconnected you,’ said David. ‘We should all go out for dinner tonight. This calls for a celebration.’
A strong, delicious aroma filled the air. Someone was brewing coffee. The team members spread out, taking their break beneath the trees, chatting in low murmurs.
David perched on a rock, produced a silver tobacco box and started to roll a cigarette. When done, he offered it to Defne, who accepted it with a smile, without a word. She took a drag and handed it back to him. They began smoking together, passing the butt back and forth between them. Kostas looked away.
‘Kafé?’
A tall, lithe Greek woman was serving coffee in paper cups. Thanking her, Kostas took one.
He walked towards the sole terebinth tree and sat under its shade. His mother would make bread out of its fruit and use its resin as a preservative in carob liquor. A profound sense of sorrow came over him. He had done everything he could to take care of her after she and Andreas joined him in England following the partition of the island, but it was too late. The cancer from second-hand exposure to asbestos had already metastasized. Panagiota was buried in a cemetery in London, far away from all that she had known and loved. He stood still, absorbing the smells of tobacco and coffee as memories rushed over him.
Overhead, the sun shone full and bright. In the heat Kostas thought he could hear the branches around them cracking like arthritic hands. He glanced at Defne, who had returned to work, her features drawn tight in concentration, writing down in her notebook every single thing they had unearthed so far that day.
Human remains … What exactly did that mean? Was it a few hard bones and soft tissue? Clothes and accessories? Things solid and compact enough to fit inside a coffin? Or was it rather the intangible – the words we send out into the ether, the dreams we keep to ourselves, the heartbeats we skip beside our lovers, the voids we try to fill and can never adequately articulate – when all was said and done, what was left of an entire life, a human being … and could that really be disinterred from the ground?
The sun was descending by the time the members of the CMP downed tools, the clouds on the horizon soaked in glowing amber.
They put every scrap of bone into plastic bags, which they carefully sealed and numbered. These were then placed in labelled boxes. They wrote the date and place of the excavation on each box, as well as the details of the group that had carried out the work. Every single piece of information was recorded and archived.
Wearily, they started making their way down the hill, splitting into smaller groups. Kostas walked alongside Defne towards the back, an awkward silence expanding between them.
‘The families …’ said Kostas after a while. ‘How do they react when you tell them you have found their dead after so many years?’
‘Gratitude, mostly. There was this old Greek woman, a talented seamstress in her youth, apparently. When we informed her that we’d found the bones of her husband she cried so much. But the next day, she comes to the lab wearing this pink frilly dress with silver shoes, silver purse. Bright red lipstick on her lips. I’ll never forget. This woman who had worn nothing but black for decades, she came to pick up her husband’s remains in a pink dress. She said she could finally talk to him. She said she felt like she was eighteen again, and they were dating. Can you believe it? A few bones, that was all we gave her, but she was as happy as if we had given her the world.’
