‘When will I get it back?’ Firas would say.
‘When it snows in the desert.’
And by the time coffee was on the table, the phone would be out of the honey jar and back in Firas’s hands. ‘Next time, Firas, I will not put it an empty jar!’
As long as Mustafa was cooking or eating, he was happy. It was later, when the sun had set and the scent of the night jasmine engulfed us, especially when the air was still and thick, that his face would drop and I knew that he was thinking, that the stillness and darkness of the night had again brought whispers from the future.
‘What is it, Mustafa?’ I said, one evening when Dahab and Afra were loading the dishwasher after dinner, Dahab’s booming laugh sending the birds up past the buildings and into the night sky. ‘You don’t seem yourself lately.’
‘The political situation is getting worse,’ he said. I knew he was right, though neither of us really wanted to talk about it. He stubbed out his cigarette and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
‘Things will get bad. We all know it, don’t we? But we’re trying to continue living like we did before.’ He stuffed a dough ball in his mouth as if to prove his point. It was late June, and in March of that year the civil war had just begun with protests in Damascus, bringing unrest and violence to Syria. I must have looked down at this point, and maybe he saw the worry on my face, for when I glanced up again, he was smiling.
‘I’ll tell you what, how about we create more recipes for Aya? I have some ideas – eucalyptus honey with lavender!’ And his eyes gleamed as he began considering his new soap product, calling Aya to bring his laptop outside so that, together, they could work out the exact composition. Although Aya was only thirteen at the time, Mustafa was determined to be her teacher. Aya was busy playing with Sami – how the child loved her! He was always desperate to be close to her, always scanning for her with his large, grey eyes. They were the colour of his mother’s eyes. Stone. Or the colour of a newborn baby’s eyes before they change to brown, except his didn’t change, and they didn’t turn bluer either. Sami would follow Aya around, pulling at her skirt, and she would pick him up, high in her arms, to show him the birds in the feeders, or the insects and lizards that crawled over the walls and across the concrete patio.
With each recipe, Mustafa and Aya would consider the pigments and acids, the minerals in each type of honey, in order to create a combination that worked perfectly, as he put it. Then they would calculate the sugar density, granulation, tendency to absorb moisture from air, immunity from spoilage. I would give suggestions, and they would accept them with kind smiles, but it was Mustafa’s mind that worked like the bees. He was the one with the ideas and the intelligence, while I was the one who made it all happen.
And for a while on those evenings, with the apricot sweets and the smell of night jasmine, Firas on his computer and Aya sitting beside us with Sami in her arms while he chewed her hair, and Afra and Dahab’s laughter reaching us from the kitchen, on those nights, we were still happy. Life was close enough to normal for us to forget our doubts, or at least to keep them locked away somewhere in the dark recesses of our minds while we made plans for the future.
When the trouble first started, Dahab and Aya left. Mustafa convinced them to go without him. As his fears began to be confirmed, he very quickly made plans, but he needed to stay a while longer to see to the bees. At the time I thought he was being too hasty, that his mother’s death when he was a child – which had haunted him for as long as I knew him – had somehow made him overprotective of the women in his life, and as a result Dahab and Aya were among the first to leave the neighbourhood and were fortunately spared from what was to come. Mustafa had a friend in England, a professor of sociology who had moved there some years ago on account of work, and this man had telephoned Mustafa and urged him to make his way to the United Kingdom; he was convinced the situation would get worse. Mustafa gave his wife and daughter enough money to see them through the journey, while he stayed in Syria with Firas.
‘I can’t just abandon the bees, Nuri,’ he’d said one night, his large hand coming down over his face and his beard, as if he was trying to wipe off the sombre expression he always wore now. ‘The bees are family to us.’
Before things became really bad, Mustafa and Firas would join us for dinner in the evenings and we would sit on the veranda together and watch the city below and hear the rumble of a distant bomb, see the smoke rising into the sky. Later, as the situation worsened, we started to talk about leaving together. We would gather around my illuminated globe in the half darkness of early evening while he traced with his finger the journey Dahab and Aya had made. It had been easier for them. In a thick leather wallet, Mustafa had the names and numbers of various smugglers. We went through the books, checking the finances, making calculations about the possible cost of our escape. Of course it was hard to predict, smugglers changed their rates on a whim, but we had a plan, and Mustafa loved plans and lists and itineraries. They made him feel safe. But I knew this was just talk; Mustafa wasn’t ready to leave the bees.
One night, late in the summer, vandals destroyed the hives. They set fire to them, and by the time we got to the apiaries in the morning they were burned to char. The bees had died and the field was black. I will never forget the silence, that deep, never-ending silence. Without the clouds of bees above the field, we were faced with a stillness of light and sky. In that moment, as I stood at the edge of the field where the sun was slanting across the ruined hives, I had a feeling of emptiness, a quiet nothingness that entered me every time I inhaled. Mustafa sat down on the ground in the middle of the field with his legs crossed and his eyes closed. I walked around scanning the ground for live bees and stamped on them because they had no hives or colony. Most of the hives had crumbled completely but a few stood like skeletons with their numbers still visible: twelve, twenty-one, one hundred and twenty-one – the colonies of grandmother, mother and daughter. I knew because I had split the hives myself. Three generations of bees. But they were all gone now. I went home and tucked Sami into bed, sitting for a while beside him as he slept, then I went to the veranda and watched the darkening sky and the brooding city below.
At the bottom of the hill was the Queiq. The last time I saw the river it was full of rubbish. In the winter they fished out the bodies of men and boys. Their hands were tied. Bullets in their heads. That winter day in Bustan al-Qasr, in the southern neighbourhood, I watched them pull the bodies out. I followed them to an old school, where they were laid out in the courtyard. Inside the building it was dark and there were lit candles in a bucket of sand. A middle-aged woman knelt on the floor next to another bucket, full of water. She was going to clean the faces of the dead men, she said, so that the women who loved them would recognise them when they came searching. If I had been one of the dead men in the river, Afra would have climbed a mountain to find me. She would have swum to the bottom of that river, but that was before they blinded her.
Afra was different before the war. She used to make such a mess all the time. If she was baking, for example, there would be flour on every surface, even on Sami. He would be covered in it. When she painted, she made a mess. And if Sami was painting too, it was even worse, as though they had shaken loaded brushes at the room. Even when she spoke she was messy, throwing words out here, there, taking them back, throwing out different ones. Sometimes she even interrupted herself. When she laughed, she laughed so hard the house would shake.
But when she was sad my world was dark. I didn’t have a choice about this. She was more powerful than I. She cried like a child, laughed like bells ringing, and her smile was the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. She could argue for hours without ever pausing. Afra loved, she hated, and she inhaled the world like it was a rose. All this was why I loved her more than life.
The art she made was amazing. She won awards for her paintings of urban and rural Syria. On Sunday mornings we would all go to the market and set up a stall, just opposite H
amid, who sold spices and tea. The stall was in the covered part of the souq. It was dark and a bit musty there but you could smell cardamom, cinnamon, aniseed and a million other spices. Even in that dim light, the landscapes in her paintings were not still. It was like they were moving, like the sky in them was moving, like the water in them was moving.
You should have seen the way she was with the customers who approached the stall, businessmen and women, mainly from Europe or Asia. At these times she would sit, very quietly, Sami on her knee, her eyes fixed on the customers, while they moved closer to a painting, lifting their glasses, if they wore them, then stepping back, often so far back they bumped into Hamid’s customers, and then they would freeze there for a long time. And often the customers would say, ‘Are you Afra?’ And she would reply, ‘Yes, I am Afra.’ And that would be enough. Painting sold.
There was a whole world in her, and the customers could see this. For that moment, while they stared at the painting and then looked at her, they saw what she was made of. Afra’s soul was as wide as the fields and desert and sky and sea and river that she painted, and as mysterious. There was always more to know, to understand, and as much as I knew, it wasn’t enough, I wanted more. But in Syria there is a saying: inside the person you know, there is a person you do not know. I loved her from the day I met her, at my cousin Ibrahim’s eldest son’s wedding, at the Dama Rose Hotel, Damascus. She was wearing a yellow dress, with a silk hijab. And her eyes, not the blue of the sea, or the blue of the sky, but the inky blue of the Queiq River, with swirls of brown and green. I remember the night of our wedding, two years later, and how she had wanted me to take off her hijab. I removed the hairpins, gently, one by one, unwrapping the material and seeing for the first time her long black hair, so dark, it was like the sky above the desert on a night with no stars.
But what I loved most was her laugh. She laughed like we would never die.
When the bees died, Mustafa was ready to leave Aleppo. We were about to go when Firas went missing, so we waited for him. Mustafa would hardly talk during this time, his mind completely preoccupied, imagining one thing or another. Every so often he would make a suggestion about where Firas might be. ‘Maybe he has gone to find one of his friends, Nuri,’ or, ‘Maybe he can’t bring himself to leave Aleppo – he is hiding somewhere so that we will stay,’ or, one time, ‘Maybe he has died, Nuri. Maybe my son has died.’
Our bags were packed and we were ready, but the days and nights passed with no sign of Firas. So Mustafa worked in a morgue in an abandoned building, where he would record the details and cause of death – bullets, shrapnel, explosion. It was strange to see him indoors, shut away from the sun. He had a black book, and he worked round the clock, writing down with the stub of a pencil the details of the dead. When he found identification on the corpses, his task was easier; other times he would record a distinguishing feature, like the colour of their hair or eyes, the particular shape of their nose, a mole on their left cheek. Mustafa did this until that winter day when I brought his son in from the river. I recognised the teenage boy dead on the slabs in the courtyard of the school. I asked two men with a car to help me take the body to the morgue. When Mustafa saw Firas, he asked us to lay him down on the table, then he closed his boy’s eyes and stood for a long time, unmoving, holding his hand. I stood in the doorway while the other men left, the sound of an engine, the car pulling away, and then there was stillness, such stillness, and the light came in from the window above the table where the boy was lying, where Mustafa was standing holding on to his hand. For a while there was no sound, not a bomb or a bird or a breath.
Then Mustafa moved away from the table, put on his glasses and carefully sharpened the small pencil with a knife, and, sitting down at his desk, he opened the black book and wrote:
Name – My beautiful boy.
Cause of death – This broken world.
And that was very the last time Mustafa recorded the names of the dead.
Exactly a week after this, Sami was killed.
2
THE SOCIAL WORKER SAYS SHE is here to help us. Her name is Lucy Fisher and she seems impressed that I can speak English so well. I tell her about my job in Syria, about the bees and the colonies, but she doesn’t really hear me, I can tell. She is preoccupied with the papers in front of her.
Afra won’t even turn her face towards her. If you didn’t know she was blind you would think that she was looking out of the window. There’s a bit of sun today and it’s reflecting off her irises, which makes them look like water. Her hands are clasped together on the kitchen table and her lips are sealed tight. She knows some English, enough to get by, but she won’t talk to anyone except me. The only other person I heard her speak to was Angeliki. Angeliki, whose breasts were leaking with milk. I wonder if she managed to find her way out of those woods.
‘How is the accommodation, Mr and Mrs Ibrahim?’ Lucy Fisher with the big blue eyes and silver-rimmed glasses consults her papers as if the answer to her question is in them. I’m struggling to see what the Moroccan man was talking about.
She looks up at me now and her face is a burst of warmth.
‘I find it very clean and safe,’ I say, ‘compared with other places.’ I don’t tell her about these other places, and I definitely don’t tell her about the mice and cockroaches in our room. I fear it would appear ungrateful.
She doesn’t ask many questions, but explains that we will soon be interviewed by an immigration officer. She pushes her glasses up the ridge of her nose and reassures me in a soft and precise voice that once we receive the papers to prove we are claiming asylum, Afra will be able to see a doctor about the pain in her eyes. She glances at Afra and I notice that Lucy Fisher’s hands are clasped in front of her in exactly the same way. There is something about this that I find odd. Then she hands me a bunch of papers. A packet from the Home Office: information about claiming asylum, eligibility, notes about screening, notes about the interview process. I skim through and she waits patiently, watching me.
To stay in the UK as a refugee you must be unable to live safely in any part of your own country because you fear persecution there.
‘Any part?’ I say. ‘Will you send us back to a different part?’
She frowns, pulling at a strand of her hair, and her lips tighten as if she has eaten something horrible.
‘What you need to do now,’ she says, ‘is get your story straight. Think about what you’re going to say to the immigration officer. Make sure it’s all clear and coherent and as straightforward as possible.’
‘But will you send us back to Turkey or Greece? What does persecution mean to you?’ I say this louder than I meant to and my arm begins to throb. I rub the thick line of tight flesh and red tissue, remembering the edge of the knife, and Lucy Fisher’s face is blurred, my hands are shaking. I undo the top button of my shirt. I try to keep my hands still.
‘Is it hot in here?’ I say.
She says something I cannot hear, I see only that her lips are moving. She is standing up now, and I can feel Afra shifting in her seat beside me. There is the sound of running water. A rushing river. But I see a sparkle, like the edge of a very sharp knife. Lucy Fisher’s hand turning the handle of the tap, walking towards me, placing the glass in my hands and lifting it up to my face as if I am a child. I drink the water, all of it, and she sits down. I can see her clearly now and she looks frightened. Afra places her hand on my leg.
The sky cracks. It is raining. Torrential rain. Worse even than Leros where the land was saturated with rain and sea. I realise that she’s spoken, I hear her voice through the rain, I hear the word enemy, and she stares at me, frowning, and her white face looks flushed.
‘Excuse me?’ I say.
‘I said we’re here to help you as much as we can.’
‘I heard the word enemy,’ I say.
She thrusts her shoulders back and purses her lips, she glances again at Afra, and in the spark of anger that fires up her face and eyes, I se
e what the Moroccan man was talking about. But it’s not me she’s angry with; she can’t really see me.
‘All I said was that I’m not your enemy.’ Her voice is apologetic now, she shouldn’t have said that, it slipped out, there is pressure on her, I can see it in the way she tugs at that strand of hair. But the words ring out still in the room, even as she packs her things together, even as she speaks to Afra, who now nods her head very slightly at her, if only to acknowledge her presence.
‘I hope you are OK, Mr Ibrahim,’ she says as she leaves.
I wish I knew who my enemy was.
Later, I step out into the concrete garden and sit on the chair beneath the tree. I remember the humming of the bees, the sound of peace, I can almost smell the honey, lemon blossoms and aniseed, but this is suddenly replaced by the hollow smell of ash.
There is a buzzing. Not a collective sound like thousands of bees in the apiaries, but a single buzz. On the ground by my feet there is a bee. When I look closely I see that she has no wings. I put my hand out and she crawls onto my finger, making her way onto my palm – a bumblebee, plump and furry, such soft pile, with broad bands of yellow and black and a long tongue tucked under her body. She is crawling over the back of my wrist now so I take her inside with me and sit in the armchair and watch her as she nestles into my hand, preparing to sleep. In the living room the landlady brings us tea with milk. It’s busy in here tonight. Most of the women have gone to bed, apart from one, who is talking in low whispers to a man beside her in Farsi. I can tell from the way she is wearing her hijab loose over her hair that she is probably from Afghanistan.
The Moroccan man slurps the tea like it’s the best thing he’s ever tasted. He smacks his lips together after each gulp. He checks his phone occasionally, then closes his book and tap-taps it with his palm like it’s the head of a child.
The Beekeeper of Aleppo: A Moving Testament to the Human Spirit Page 2
