The Beekeeper of Aleppo: A Moving Testament to the Human Spirit

by Christy Lefteri

  When I looked up from the ground, I saw that I’d reached a checkpoint. Two soldiers stood in my path. They both held machine guns. One of them wore a checked keffiyeh. The other one took a gun from the back of a truck and pushed it against my chest.

  ‘Take it,’ the man said.

  I tried to mimic my wife’s face. I didn’t want to show any emotion. They would eat me for it. The man pushed the gun harder into my chest, and I stumbled, falling back against the gravel.

  He threw the gun on the ground and I looked up to see both men standing over me, and now the man with the keffiyeh was pointing his gun at my chest. I could no longer stay calm and I could hear myself begging for my life, grovelling with my knees in the dust.

  ‘Please,’ I was saying, ‘it’s not that I don’t want to. I’d be proud, I’d be the proudest man in the world to take that gun in your name, but my wife is very ill, gravely ill, and she needs me to look after her.’ Even while I was saying this I didn’t think that they would care. Why would they? Children were dying every minute. Why would they care about my sick wife?

  ‘I’m strong,’ I said, ‘and intelligent. I’ll work hard for you. I just need a few days. That’s all I’m asking for.’

  The other man touched the man with the keffiyeh on the shoulder and he lowered his gun.

  ‘The next time we see you,’ the other man said, ‘either you take a gun and stand beside us, or you find someone to take your body.’

  I decided to go straight home. I sensed a shadow behind me as I walked and I wasn’t sure if I was being followed or if it was my mind playing tricks on me: I kept imagining a cloaked figure, the type in childhood nightmares, hovering over the dust at my back. But when I turned around there was no one there.

  I arrived home and Afra was sitting on the camp bed, her back against the wall, facing the window, holding the pomegranate in her hands, turning it around, feeling its flesh. Her ears pricked up when I entered the room, but before she could say anything I ran around the house, searching for a bag, cramming things into it.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Her eyes searched the blankness.

  ‘We’re going.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They’ll kill me if we stay.’ I was in the kitchen, filling plastic water bottles from the tap. I packed an extra set of clothes for each of us. Then I searched under the bed for the passports and the stash of money. Afra didn’t know about it – it was the money Mustafa and I had managed to put aside before the business collapsed, and I also had some in a private account, which I hoped I could still access once we got out of here. She was saying something from the other room. Words of protest. I packed Sami’s passport too; I couldn’t leave it here. Then I returned to the living room with our bags.

  ‘I was stopped by the army. They held a gun to my chest,’ I said.

  ‘You’re lying. Why has this never happened before?’

  ‘Maybe before there were still younger men around. They didn’t notice me. Had no reason to. We’re the only stupid people left.’

  ‘I won’t go.’

  ‘They’ll kill me.’

  ‘So be it.’

  ‘I told them that I needed a few days to take care of you. They agreed to give me just a few days. If they see me again, and I don’t join them, they’ll kill me. They said I should find someone to take my body.’

  At these last words, her eyes widened and there was sudden fear on her face, real fear. At the thought of losing me, maybe at the thought of my dead body, she came alive and stood up. She felt her way along the hallway and I followed, breathless, and then she lay on the bed and closed her eyes. I tried to reason with her, but she lay there like a dead cat, with her black abaya and her black hijab and that stone face that I now despised.

  I sat on Sami’s bed and stared out of the window and watched the grey sky, a metallic grey, and there were no birds. I sat there all day and all evening until the darkness swallowed me up. I remembered how the worker bees would travel to find new flowers and nectar and then come back to tell the other bees. The bee would shake her body – the angle of her dance across the comb told the other bees the direction of the flowers in relation to the sun. I wished that there was someone to guide me, to tell me what to do and which way to go, but I felt completely alone.

  Just before midnight I lay down beside Afra. She hadn’t moved an inch. I had the photograph and the letter beneath my pillow. And this time when I woke up in the middle of the night I saw that she was facing me and whispering my name.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Listen.’

  From the front of the house, footsteps and men’s voices and then a laugh, a deep-throated laugh.

  ‘What are they doing?’ she said.

  I climbed out of bed and walked quietly over to her side and took her hand, helping her up, leading her to the back door and out into the garden. She followed without question, without hesitation. I tapped my foot on the ground to find the metal roof, then slid it aside and helped her sit beside the hole with her legs over the edge so that I could climb in first and lower her in. Then I pulled the roof over us.

  Our feet sank into inches of water, full of the lizards and insects that had made this space their home. I’d dug this hideout last year. Afra wrapped her arms around me and buried her face in the crook of my neck. We sat like this in the darkness, both blind now, in this grave made for two. In the deep quiet her breathing was the only sound left on earth. And maybe she was right. Maybe we should have died like this and nobody would need to take our bodies; and then some creature moved about, close to my left ear, and above us and outside things moved and broke and cracked. The men must have entered the house now. I could feel her shaking against me.

  ‘Do you know what, Afra?’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I need to fart.’

  There was a second of silence and then she began to laugh. She laughed and laughed into my neck. It was a quiet laugh, but her whole body shook with it, and I tightened my grip around her, thinking that her laugh was the most beautiful thing left on earth. But for a while I couldn’t actually tell if she was still laughing or if she’d started to cry, until I felt my neck wet with tears. And then her breathing was soft and she was asleep – as if this black hole was the only place she felt safe. Where inner darkness met outer darkness.

  For a while I knew what it meant to be blind. And then memories blossomed, like dreams, so rich in colour. Life before war. Afra in a green dress, holding Sami by the hand; he’d just started to walk and was waddling along beside her, pointing up as a plane crossed the cool blue sky. We were going somewhere. It was summer and she was walking in front with her sisters. Ola was wearing yellow. Zeinah, pink. Zeinah was flapping her arms around as she talked, in her usual way. The other two said, ‘No!’ in unison at something she said. There was a man beside me, my uncle. I could see his cane, hear its tap-tap-tap on concrete. He was telling me about work: he owned a café in Old Damascus, and he wanted to retire now, but his son didn’t want to take over the business, the lazy, ungrateful boy; he married the monkey for its money, and the money went and the monkey stayed a monkey …’ And in that moment Afra lifted Sami onto her hip and then turned back and smiled and her eyes caught the light and turned to water. And then it all faded. Where were these people now?

  I blinked in the darkness. It was impenetrable. In her sleep, Afra sighed. I asked myself if I should break her neck, put her out of her misery, give her the peace she wanted. Sami’s grave was in this garden. She would be close to him. She wouldn’t need to leave him. All her self-torture would be over.

  ‘Nuri,’ she said.

  ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘I love you.’

  I didn’t reply and her words became part of the darkness, I let them sink into the soil, into the waterlogged earth.

  ‘Will they kill us?’ she asked, a slight tremor in her voice.

  ‘You’re scared.’

  ‘No. We’re so close to it now.’


  Then there were footsteps close by and the voices became louder. ‘I told you,’ a man said. ‘I told you not to let him go.’

  I held my breath and I held her tight so that she couldn’t move. I thought of covering her mouth with my hand. I didn’t trust her not to speak, not to call out. It was her choice now: to live or to die. Above, there was movement and shuffling and mumbled words, and then, finally, the footsteps retreated. It wasn’t until Afra released her breath that I realised she still had an instinct to live.

  It was morning when I decided that the men must have left, there had been no sound for a few hours and light spilled through at the edges of the metal roof, illuminating the mud walls. I pushed up the roof and saw the sky, vast and unscathed: the blue of dreams. Afra was awake but silent, lost in her black world.

  When we entered the house I wished I was blind too. The living room was trashed and the walls covered in graffiti. We win or we die.

  ‘Nuri?’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘Nuri … what have they done?’

  I watched her stand there among the broken things, a dark ghost of a figure, erect and unmoving and blind.

  But I remained silent and she took a step forward and knelt down, searching with her hands. From the floor she picked up a broken ornament: a crystal bird with the words 99 names of Allah inscribed in gold on an open wing. A wedding present from her grandmother.

  She turned it around in her hands, as she had done with the pomegranate, feeling its lines, its curves. Then, in a soft voice, like the voice of a child resurrected from years past, she began to recite the list engraved in her mind:

  ‘The maker of order, the subduer, the knower of all, the seer of all, the hearer of all, the giver of life, the taker of life …’

  ‘Afra!’ I said.

  She put the ornament down and leant forward, searching the space ahead with her fingers. Now she picked up a toy car. I had put them all away in the cupboard a few weeks after Sami died. Now I couldn’t bear to look at them, broken and strewn across the floor. There was even a jar of chocolate spread there, Sami’s favourite treat, rolling away from Afra and stopping at the foot of the chair. It must have been mouldy by now, but I had kept it in the cupboard with all of the things that reminded me of him. When she realised that she had a toy car in her hand, Afra put it down immediately and turned her head towards me, somehow managing to catch my eye with hers.

  ‘I’m going,’ I said, ‘whether you come or not.’

  I left her side and searched for our bags. I found them in the bedroom, untouched, slung them over my shoulders and returned to the living room, to find her standing in the middle of the room. In her open palms she had colourful pieces of Lego: the remnants of a house that Sami had built – the house we would live in when we got to England, he had said, once he’d agreed that it would be a good thing to go.

  ‘There’ll be no bombs there,’ he’d said, ‘and the houses won’t break like these do.’ I wasn’t sure if he’d meant the Lego houses or the real houses, and then it saddened me when I realised that Sami had been born into a world where everything could break. Real houses crumbled, fell apart. Nothing was solid in Sami’s world. And yet somehow he was trying to imagine a place where the buildings didn’t fall down around him. I had stored the Lego house safely in the cupboard, carefully, to make sure it was exactly as Sami had left it. I’d even thought of taking it apart and reassembling it with glue, so that we could always keep it.

  ‘Nuri,’ Afra said, breaking the silence, ‘I’m done. Please. Take me away from here.’

  And she stood there with her eyes moving about the room, as if she could see it all.

  3

  I WAKE UP FLAT ON MY back in the garden. It has been raining and my clothes are damp. There is one tree in this concrete space, its roots cracking through the paving and poking into my back. I realise that I’m holding some blossoms in my fist. There is someone standing above me, blocking the sun.

  ‘What are you doing there, geezer?’ The Moroccan man looks down at me, a broad smile on his face. He speaks in Arabic. ‘Did you sleep here in the garden, geezer?’ He holds out his hand to me, unreasonably strong for such an old man and stable on his feet as he pulls me up.

  ‘Giza?’ I say, half dazed.

  ‘Geeeeezer,’ he says, and chuckles. ‘The man in the shop says geeeeezer. It means old man.’

  I follow him inside, into the warmth. He tells me that Afra has been looking for me. ‘She’s been crying,’ he says, which I find hard to believe, and when I see her in the kitchen she is already dressed and is sitting stiff at the table just as she was when Lucy Fisher was here. It doesn’t seem to me like she’s been crying, and I haven’t seen or heard her cry since Aleppo. She is holding Mohammed’s marble, twirling it around in her fingers. I’ve tried to take it from her before but she won’t let it go.

  ‘So you can dress yourself then?’ I say. But I immediately regret these words when I see her face drop.

  ‘Where did you go?’ she says. ‘I was up most of the night and I didn’t know where you were.’

  ‘I fell asleep downstairs.’

  ‘Hazim told me you were sleeping in the garden!’

  My body stiffens.

  ‘He is kind,’ she says. ‘He said he would find you and he told me not to worry.’

  I decide to go for a walk. It’s my first time outside. This whole place is strange, the shops standing shabby and proud – Go Go Pizza, Chilli Tuk-Tuk, Polskie Smaki, Pavel India, Moshimo. At the end of the road there is a convenience store where someone is playing Arabic music very loudly. I make my way down to the sea. There is no sand on this beach, only pebbles and shingle, but along the promenade by the seafront there is a huge sandpit for children to play in. A boy in red shorts is making a sandcastle. It’s not hot, but they think it is, so his mother has put him in shorts, and this boy is scooping up sand and placing it carefully into a blue bucket, until it is full. He evens it out with precision, using the handle of his spade.

  Kids are running around with ice cream and lollies the size of their heads. The sandcastle boy has made a whole city – he’s used bits of plastic, bottle tops, sweet wrappers, to add colour to his buildings. He’s made a flag out of a lost sock and a candyfloss stick. He crowns the castle in the middle with a teacup.

  The boy gets up and stands back to admire his creation. It’s impressive, he’s even used the teacup to make houses to surround the castle, and a water bottle looks like a glass skyscraper. He must sense I am staring because he turns and glances at me, for a moment pausing and holding my gaze. He has that innocent, preoccupied look, like the children before the war. For a moment I think he is going to say something to me, but a girl calls him to come and play. She entices him with a ball. He hesitates, taking one last glance at his marvellous creation, looking at me one more time, before he sprints off, abandoning it.

  I sit for a while on the promenade by the sandpit and watch the sun move across the sky. In the afternoon the place is quieter, clouds have gathered, the children have gone. I take the asylum documentation out of my backpack.

  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.

  The sky cracks and there’s a flash of lightning. Thick raindrops fall onto the piece of paper in my hand.

  UK.

  Any part.

  Persecution.

  It rains harder. I put the documents into my backpack and start up the hill towards the B&B.

  Afra is sitting by the double doors in the living room; there are a few other residents milling around and the TV is on full blast. The Moroccan man raises his eyebrows. ‘How’re you doin’, geezer?’ He says the whole sentence in English now, his dark eyes sparkling.

  ‘Not too bad, geezer,’ I say, and force a smile. This satisfies him. He laughs with his chest and slaps his hand on his knee. I sit at the desk again and stare at my reflection in the computer screen. I touch the ke
yboard but I cannot bring myself to check for emails. My eyes keep moving to the glass doors. Whenever the wind picks up and the light comes on, I expect to see the shape of Mohammed in the garden.

  I go out into the courtyard and search for the bee, and eventually I find her crawling over some twigs and fallen petals beneath the tree. When I put my hand out she crawls onto my finger and makes her way to my palm, and there she tucks in her legs and nestles, so I take her inside with me.

  The landlady brings us all tea on a tray, and some Kenyan sweets, yellow with turmeric. She speaks English perfectly, from what I can tell anyway. She is a tiny woman, so small, like she was meant to be a doll. She is wearing shoes with huge wooden blocks at the ends of her skinny legs and, as she clomps around the living room handing out the sweets and tea, she reminds me of a baby elephant.

  The Moroccan man told me that she is an accountant; she works part time in an office in South London and the rest of the time she runs this bed and breakfast. The council gives her money to do this and to keep us here. She scrubs the walls and the floors as if she is trying to wipe away the filth of our journeys. But there is something else about her – her story is not simple, I can tell. There is a mahogany cabinet in the corner of the living room. It is lacquered with a sheen like water, and it is full of glasses for alcohol. Every day she polishes spotless glasses. She stands there with a cloth that looks like a torn-off part of a man’s striped shirt – I have noticed there is even a button on it. She can’t get rid of the green mould on the walls though, or the grease in the kitchen that’s as thick as my skin, but I can see she takes pride in caring for us. She remembers all of our names, which is a great feat considering how many of us come and go. She spends some time talking to the woman from Afghanistan, asking her where she got her hijab, which is handwoven with gold thread.