The Island of Missing Trees

“History is a most fascinating subject,” Mrs. Walcott was now saying, her brogues planted firmly behind her desk, as though she needed a barricade from behind which to teach her students, all twenty-nine of them. “Without understanding our past, how can we hope to shape our future?”

She could detect other people’s sadnesses the way one animal could smell another of its kind a mile away.

So many times in her past she had suspected that she carried within a sadness that was not quite her own. In science class they had learned that everyone inherited one chromosome from their mother and one from their father—long threads of DNA with thousands of genes that built billions of neurons and trillions of connections between them. All that genetic information passed from parents to offspring—survival, growth, reproduction, the colour of your hair, the shape of your nose, whether you had freckles or sneezed in sunlight—everything was in there. But none of that answered the one question burning in her mind: was it also possible to inherit something as intangible and immeasurable as sorrow?

Her voice cracked but persisted. There was something profoundly humiliating yet equally electrifying about hearing yourself scream—breaking off, breaking away, uncontrolled, unfettered, without knowing how far it would carry you, this untamed force that rose from inside. It was an animal thing. A wilderness thing. Nothing about her belonged to her previous self in that moment. Above all her voice. This could have been the shriek of a hawk, the soul-haunting howl of a wolf, the rasping cry of a red fox at midnight. It could have been any of them, but not the scream of a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl.

“Wisdom consists of ten parts: nine parts of silence, one part of words.”

Ada folded her arms. “I disagree. One must always speak up, no matter what. I don’t understand what you’re all so afraid of. And besides, I’ve been reading about it myself. I know there was a lot of hostility and violence between Greeks and Turks. Brits were involved too—we can’t ignore colonialism. It’s obvious. I don’t get why my father is so hush-hush like all this is some kind of secret. He doesn’t seem to realize that everything’s on the internet. People my age aren’t afraid to ask questions. The world has changed.”

“It’s been extremely hard for you. Maybe we give other names to grief because we are too scared to call it by its name.”

Ada’s eyes teared. She felt closer to this woman then than she ever thought was possible. Still, when she opened her mouth what came out was different. “I’ll never forgive you for not coming to my mother’s funeral, I want you to know that.”

“I understand,” said Meryem. “I should have; I couldn’t.”

They walked in tandem.

“They used to say Greeks and Turks are flesh and fingernail. You can’t separate your fingernail from your flesh. Seems they were wrong. It could be done. War is a terrible thing. All kinds of wars. But civil wars are the worst perhaps, when old neighbors become new enemies.”

“The tree was being strangled by its own roots. Because it was happening under the earth, it was undetectable. If the encircling roots are not found in time, they start putting pressure on the tree and it just becomes too much to bear.”

Ada was silent.

“Your mother loved you very much, more than anything in this world. Her death had nothing to do with the absence of love. She was blooming and thriving with your love, and I’d like to believe with mine, too, but underneath, something was strangling her—the past, the memories, the roots.”