The Island of Missing Trees

I wish I could have told him that loneliness is a human invention. Trees are never lonely. Humans think they know with certainty where their being ends and someone else’s starts. With their roots tangled and caught underground, linked to fungi and bacteria, trees harbour no such illusions. For us, everything is interconnected.

Not a very sensible thing to do, I admit, to fall for someone who is not of your kind, someone who will only complicate your life, disrupt your routine and mess with your sense of stability and rootedness. But, then again, anyone who expects love to be sensible has perhaps never loved.

For it is a land without borders, a lover’s body. You discover it, not at once, but step by anxious step, losing your way, your sense of direction, treading its sunlit valleys and rolling fields, finding it warm and welcoming, and then, hidden in quiet corners, running into caverns invisible and unexpected, pits where you stumble and cut yourself.

Kostas felt a sense of loneliness so acute it was almost tangible. After that day, he would no longer talk about fruit bats and how important they were for the trees of Cyprus, and hence for its inhabitants. In a land besieged by conflict, uncertainty, and bloodshed, people took it for indifference, an insult to their pain, if you paid too much attention to anything other than human suffering. This was neither the right time nor the right place to carry on about plants and animals, nature in all its forms and glory, and that is how Kostas Kazantzakis slowly shut himself off, carving an island for himself inside an island, retreating into silence.

When we left the tavern… the moon, the smell of your hair, your hand in my hair, your hand in my hand, after all the horror when we realized we had only each other to depend on.

You know what I’ve been thinking since? I’ve been thinking that you are my country. Is that a strange thing to say? Without you, I don’t have a home in the world; I am a felled tree, my roots severed all around; you can topple me with the touch of a finger.

[Kostas] asked, cautiously, “And the missing you’ve found here, were they Greeks or Turks?”

“They were islanders,” [Defne] 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 a Christian or Muslim? All that bloodshed, for what? Stupid, stupid wars.”

David turned to Kostas. “The Nuremberg trials were a landmark. That’s when people realized how random and widespread violence actually is. Neighbours turning against neighbours, friends selling out friends. Now that’s a different kind of evil, one that we still haven’t come to grips with as humanity. It’s a difficult subject across the world—the acts of barbarity that happen off the battlefield.”

When they subjected survivors’ seedlings to high-intensity fires in lab conditions, they discovered that trees whose ancestors had experienced hardship reacted more swiftly and produced extra proteins, which they then used to protect and regenerate their cells. Their findings were consistent with earlier studies that showed how genetically identical species of poplars growing in similar conditions responded differently to traumas, such as dry spells, depending on where they came from. Could all this mean that trees not only had some kind of memory but, also, they passed it on to their offspring?

Much as he loved the arboreal world and its complex ecosystem, was he, in some roundabout way, avoiding the day-to-day realities of politics and conflicts? A part of him understood that people, especially where he came from, might see it that way, but a bigger part of him fiercely rejected the idea. He had always believed there was no hierarchy—or there should be none—between human pain and animal pain, and no precedence of human rights over animal rights, or indeed of human rights over those of plants, for that matter. He knew many among his fellow countrymen would be deeply offended if he voiced this out loud.

“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.”