The Tree of Life

“It is more than a tree.” He tells me.

I stop, shading my eyes from the harsh Madagascan sun, staring at him in frustration. He seems so at ease in this the land of his birth, standing coolly looking back at me with eyes soft, dark, and unknowable as the night skies (which always feel so much closer here).

“What do you mean?”

“You will not find it until you are looking for it the right way,” Yohann tells me.

He has a knack for finding the smallest shade and positioning himself there while he waits for me to search. He’s standing in the shadow of a great baobab, its glossy grey trunk as tall and straight as a Greek column, six times his height, topped with an unruly tangle of branches which resemble roots.

“Tell me how I should look for it, then.”

“Mora, mora.” He advises (A phrase I recognise as something of a life motto among his people).

“I don’t have time to look for it slowly.” I say, feeling snappish.

I turn back to the arid landscape, a forest of bare thorny branches and trees with barely any leaves, punctuated with towering baobabs, and under my feet the dry red dirt which I can never seem to fully wash out of my socks.

If you’d told me there would be a day, I’d long to feel rain on my face, I would have laughed at you (you know how I moan about the weather). I’d give anything to be standing in the rain with you now and breathing in the cool damp British air, to be anywhere other than here. He catches me looking despondent.

“Rest, Ramatoa. The sun is hot now.”

In the jeep on the way back to the lodge I feel exhausted. The dry air and the oppressive heat seem to draw the very essence out of me. It feels like I’m slowly being desiccated alive. To distract myself from my discomfort I wonder where you are now. 

You’d have loved it here. You’d have found it exciting being jostled along bumpy tracks and ploughing through dried riverbeds in a jeep, while I find it nerve-wracking. You’d have sat with a huge grin on your handsome face, while I cling on for dear life and try not to feel sick. I’m trying to love it on your behalf, but it’s beyond me to cope with the heat and the strangeness of this place.

You’d have marvelled at how different it is, the unusual sounds of dawn and dusk (the bird song is quite different to the hedgerow chorus at home). The quietness and emptiness wouldn’t have unsettled you. It’s you who was meant to walk these trails, not me.

The air blows in through the open window and cools my face, extracting the tears from my eyes.

You said the trip would last no more than a week.

I should be home now celebrated baobab sapling in hand, already growing in the glasshouse in Cambridge, and me safely back in my air-conditioned lab. You the botanist, the bold adventurer; me the biologist, the cautious thinker.

As Yohann drops me back at the lodge I vow to never complain about the British weather again.

“Tomorrow will be better,” he tells me to reassure me, as I stand deflated waiting for him to go. “Tomorrow the rain might come.”

“You could help,” I say.

He thinks on this for a moment or two, which irritates me because it seems clear to me, two people searching will have more success than one person alone.

“Yes, I will help.” He says with a cheerful smile. “Tomorrow, I will take you to my village.”

“I haven’t got time to go sight-seeing….” I say in despair.

“Tomorrow…!” He says, driving off with an unaffected wave of his hand.

“That impossible man!” I say angrily, as I enter the lodge and find Peter, a fellow scientist, tapping at his laptop and enjoying a cold drink in the shade.

“Who’ve you got?” He asks, closing his laptop and picking up his drink.
“Yohann Rakotovao,” I reply as I tug off my hiking boots and peel off my socks

so that my poor aching feet can feel the air.

“I heard he’s quite good,” he says.

“He just doesn’t help. He takes me here and there and stands around, watching me. Surely, it’s not beyond him to search too?”

“Not going well?”

“I’ve not found any saplings, let alone a suitable one.”

“My advice, Lynsey, follow him. Don’t make him follow you. I had it the same when I was looking for a Tomato Frog. Our guides know what they’re doing. They have a very close connection to this land in a way us Brits can’t begin to even imagine. You should trust him… just relax.”

“I don’t have time to relax. I just need to get back.” I say feeling close to tears again.

“Maybe if you stop trying to rush, you’ll understand what you need to do.”

“You sound like him now!”

“They know what they’re doing,” Peter says with a reassuring smile and opens his laptop again.

*

Usually, by time I’ve finished breakfast and laced up my boots, he’s already arrived in his battered yellow jeep cheerfully calling to anyone around, ‘Manao, ahoana ianao!’ but I’m still waiting for him after lunch. Though, I must admit, it’s doing me good to have a few hours resting in the lodge.

I watch a group of lemurs scramble up into a Rosewood tree outside and I remember you sitting in your armchair by the fire telling me, with your typical infectious enthusiasm, how there are more different species of plants and animals here than anywhere else in the world.

It feels like there is here is so much space here. It’s noisy, but not in the distracting way that the traffic and people are noisy back home. It’s noisy because it’s full of life, but I feel like there’s no life in me at all.

Yohann arrives in the afternoon and drives me in a different direction than our usual route, further inland to his village.

“Today is a special day. We’re having Famadihana,” he tells me joyfully, as we arrive at a collection of houses on a hillside made of red mud bricks and straw thatch.

I sit in the shade outside his home and watch his family as they go about preparing food, getting ready for the celebration. His whole family have gathered. One of his sisters brings me a baobab fruit to try. I watch her expertly crack the coconut-like shell to reveal small chunks of soft white fruit. The fruit melts like candyfloss on my tongue. The flavour is citrussy, sweet, but also tart, then sweet again. It’s delicious.

His people are gathering in the late afternoon sun. Melodic music starts up from an instrument which he tells me is called a Valiha, it sounds like a harpsichord. Others play along on small stinged Mandoliny, with toe-tapping percussion on skin drums. The music lifts my spirits as I follow them to the outskirts of the village, to their family tombs.

I’m surprised to find the dead are housed better than the living. The tombs are made of neat stone blocks ornately decorated with blue and green paint. Yohann’s family tomb sits in the shade of a grand baobab, so tall and wide it would need ten people’s arms to encircle it.

“This is Dadabe Tara Fanahy,” he tells me proudly, laying a hand on the trunk of the tree. “In English kind grandfather, he watches over my family.”

There are wooden pegs hammered into the trunk, winding up like a spiral staircase so that the tree can be climbed to harvest its fruit. There are three hundred uses for a baobab, you told me.

I place my hand on the trunk of the tree wondering if it’s the fruit of this tree I’ve eaten. I close my eyes and find myself praying to find a sapling soon, praying to go home.

His family are opening the tomb and bringing out the bodies of their relatives wrapped in silk shrouds. For a while, they join the villagers dancing around the tombs with the bodies raised over their heads, before lying them on a reed mat.

“Oh! Yohann, no! I can’t see this!” I say, frightened and horrified as they begin to unwrap the corpses. I don’t want to cause offence when it’s something they seem so comfortable with, but it seems so indecent.

“Please, take me away,” I beg, bursting into tears.

He leads me away from the crowd to the edge of the bluff overlooking the river which slithers like a serpent, almost hidden, where the water is so low at the end of the dry season. I collapse onto a low wall and gulp the dry air into my lungs.

I can’t help remembering you lying in the coroner’s office under a neat white sheet. Even if I’d been allowed to, I don’t know if I could have touched your body. I might have been afraid your skin would be cold, that you’d smell different; that it would replace the memory of you being warm and alive, of the long Sunday mornings lying in bed drinking tea, reading newspapers, kissing slowly.

Yohann hands me a plastic bottle of mineral water. It’s come from France. Like me it’s out of place, far from where it came from, but I take grateful sips as my grief subsides.

“We do this in memory for our ancestors,” he explains gently. “For my grandparents, we are helping them be close to us. For my parents I will do this for them. My children will do this for me. The grandfather tree, he watches over us. The dead they live with us.”

I nod my understanding, but I can’t speak. It only serves to remind me how far away from you I am. I’d watched the curtain closing over your coffin knowing I would never see you again.

The wind is picking up and clouds chase over the setting sun. As I sit nursing my sorrow, a group of children come running towards us, chattering noisily.

“They want us to follow, they have something to see,” he tells me offering his hand. “Will you come?”

As the fiery sunset turns to a cooler dusk, stars appear one by one in-between the clouds. We pass the tombs where the bodies have been neatly re-wrapped. A bonfire has been lit and Yohann’s family sit with the villagers sharing food and drinking together. The music seems quieter now. They’re calling Yohann and I to join them, but he puts them off.

I follow the children away from the village, past the great silent baobabs their trunks the colour of cinnamon against the turbulent sky. A rumble of thunder rolls across the empty land and the first fat drops of rain fall, gradually at first and then increasing in intensity

“Oh, the rain!”

I’m overjoyed to feel the rain on my skin.

The children have guided me to a grove of slender younger looking baobabs. Tears mingle with the raindrops on my cheeks as I cherish the sight of the strong, healthy baobab saplings growing there.

While I’m looking down, Yohann is looking up. “Look, Ramatoa,” he breathes, standing just behind me.

I turn my gaze skyward to watch in wonder as, one by one in the dusky light the white blossoms of the baobabs burst open in a glorious ethereal display like stars captured from the heavens in the tangled boughs.

I imagine the baobabs were longing for the rain as much as I was, and it feels as though they are rejoicing in it with me. I realise now how amazing your dream of planting a baobab in the glasshouse has been. I’m grateful it’s me who has found the sapling, and it’s me who will bring it back. This beautiful living baobab will be your legacy, your eternal guardian. As I reach out and gently touch one of its soft young leaves, I feel closer to you than ever.