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

by Christy Lefteri

  Sometimes I forgot that I was one of these people. Like the dogs, I sat everyday on the same bench and watched the yellow cabs circling the red poppies on the roundabout. I took in the smells from the grill houses and kebab shops, with their spits and wood fires, and the wonderful smells of the dough rings, fresh from the ovens, or from the vendors who circled the square each day. There were raw burgers in glass display cases and in the storefront windows women in traditional dress made hand-rolled crêpes. I watched how the refugee children learnt to adjust, how they mastered the art of survival – these little entrepreneurs, the lucky ones. What would Sami have thought of these streets? Of the market stalls and restaurants and streetlights on Istiklal Avenue, just down the road from the slums and ghettos. He would have dragged me by the hand into the chocolatiers, and Afra would have loved the boutiques, bookstores and patisseries.

  From the day we arrived at the smuggler’s apartment, Afra again refused to go outside. When I returned to her after walking the streets, I would tell her about the Ottoman buildings, about the cars and the noise and the chaos and the food and the dogs. If I had some change, I would buy her a dough ring with sesame seeds. She loved them, especially when they were still warm, and she would break it in half to share with me. Afra would never eat anything without sharing it – that was her way. I didn’t tell her about the children on the streets. I didn’t want her to see them in her mind’s eye, to become trapped with them in the inescapable tunnels of her mind.

  In the night, when the street dogs woke up, Afra was restless. She slept in the adjoining bedroom with the other women. Every night she dabbed the rose perfume on the soft skin of her wrists and neck as if she was going somewhere in the dark. I had to share a room with ten other men. I missed Afra. It was the first time in years that I hadn’t slept beside her. I missed her silent breathing. I missed resting my hand on her chest to feel her heartbeat. I didn’t sleep much. I thought about my wife. I knew that there were times in the night when she would forget that she wasn’t in Aleppo. Her mind would play tricks on her, and she would walk out into the corridor. I would recognise the sound of her footsteps on the tiles and I’d get up to greet her in the high-ceilinged hallway with the long window.

  ‘Nuri, is that you? I can’t sleep. Are you awake?’

  ‘I am now.’

  ‘I can’t sleep. I want to go for a walk.’

  ‘It’s late. It’s not safe now. We’ll go tomorrow.’

  ‘I want to go to see Khamid with his big pants hanging on the washing line.’

  Khamid was her great-uncle. He lived down the road opposite a dry field with a metal swing and slide. In the evenings Afra used to take Sami to the swing and they would laugh about Khamid’s giant pants.

  I would hold her face in my palms, kiss one eyelid, then the other. Part of me wished I could kill her with those kisses, put her to sleep forever. Her mind terrified me. What she could see, what she could remember, locked up behind her eyes.

  After a few days I tried to find some work. There were so many refugees selling life jackets and cigarettes on the streets, everyone working illegally because they had no permits to be there. It wasn’t too difficult to find a job washing cars. Elias joined me. We worked together, scrubbing away the soot and grit of the city. Sometimes we stole small things from the boot or the glove compartment, things that the customers were unlikely to notice or care too much about – packets of chewing gum, half-drunk bottles of water, some loose change. Elias took cigarette butts from the ashtrays. The boss was a sixty-year-old Turkish man who smoked sixty cigarettes a day and paid us very little, but it had already been three weeks since we arrived in Istanbul and the weather was still bad so a bit of extra money and something to pass the time did us both some good.

  One afternoon, after finishing work at the car wash, I walked around Taksim Square until I found an Internet café. My phone wasn’t working and I wanted to see if Mustafa had tried to get hold of me. I knew that if he was alive and well he would have sent a message, and sure enough, when I logged into my account, there were three emails from him.

  * * *

  22/11/2015

  My dear Nuri,

  I hope you found the letter I left for you. I have been thinking of you and Afra every day. I am sorry that I had to leave without saying goodbye. If I stayed they would have found me and killed me. I hope you understand and can forgive me.

  Each and every day I wonder how we got here, how life can be so cruel. Much of the time I can’t stand to be alive. The thoughts I have poison me and I am alone with them. I know that every other person here is trapped in their own hell – there is one man who holds his knees and rocks himself all through the night, and he sings, Nuri. He sings a lullaby that freezes my heart. I want to ask him who he once sang it to, or who it was that sang it to him. But I am afraid of his answer, and so I offer him cigarettes instead, it’s all I can do, because he stops singing for a few minutes while he smokes. I wish I could escape my mind, that I could be free of this world and everything I have known and seen in the last few years. And the children who have survived – what will become of them? How will they be able to live in this world?

  The journey did not go as planned. I travelled through Turkey and Greece and then crossed the border into Macedonia, but things became complicated there – I was caught and deported and put on a train to Bulgaria, which is where I find myself now, in a camp in the woods. I am sending this from the phone of a young man I have met here. There are big tents and we sleep on bunk beds, all stacked next to each other. I think when the wind blows everything will fall over. There is a train station. They are old-fashioned trains that come to this station and people try to jump on and they hang off them because they want to get to Serbia. So far I have not tried to jump onto one of these trains.

  The food cart has just arrived and we will wait to be served, sardines and bread. This is what we eat every day. If I make it out of here I will never eat another sardine again.

  I hope to hear from you. I am praying for your safety.

  Your cousin,

  Mustafa

  * * *

  29/12/2015

  My dear Nuri,

  I am now in Serbia in a camp near a factory. It is an industrial place at the end of a train track that goes no further. So here I am at the end of the track. I hope this isn’t a sign that my journey will end here. From Bulgaria I boarded a train that took one day and one night and I was brought to this barbed-wired camp just outside a village. I cannot get out of here – the camp is locked and there is a queue to leave. The train has no platform. From the coach coming here I saw people walking across a ladder to get onto it, but at least they are leaving. There is one girl here who has lost her voice – she must be about eighteen, and every day her mother pleads with her to speak, and the girl opens her mouth, but not a sound comes out. I wonder what words are trapped inside her that can’t come out. She is the opposite of the boy by the river who was crying for his father. But who knows what this girl has been through, what she has seen?

  There is so much silence here, but the silence is filled with chaos and madness. I try to remember the sound of the bees. I try to find some light by closing my eyes and imagining the field and our beehives. But then I remember the fire, and I remember Firas and Sami. Our sons have gone to where the bees are, Nuri, to where the flowers and the bees are. Allah is keeping them safe for us there, until we see them again once this life is over.

  I am tired, Nuri. I am tired of this life, but I miss my wife and daughter. They are waiting for me and I don’t know if I will ever get to them. They are both well in England, waiting to see if they will be granted asylum. If they are it will be easier for me to get there.

  I must keep going, and if you are reading this then I urge you to do the same. Spend your money wisely – the smugglers will try to get as much out of you as they can, but keep in mind that there is a longer journey ahead. You must learn to haggle. People are not like bees. We do not work togeth
er, we have no real sense of a greater good – I’ve come to realise this now.

  The good news is that I haven’t eaten sardines for one week. Here they give us cheese and bread, some days also a banana.

  Mustafa

  The last email was written in English:

  20/01/2016

  Dear Nuri,

  I spent one day in Austria in a military compound near the German border where they scanned us and took our fingerprints and then we were deported to a German youth hostel in the mountains. The winter here is very cold – we are surrounded by snow in an old house so high up that we are near the clouds. It reminds me of the Anti-Lebanon mountains and of my father and grandfather, of the days I spent with them at the apiaries, learning about the bees. But those mountains were full of sunlight and they looked down on the sea. These mountains are white and silent, and I do not know where they end and where they begin.

  I would like to make it to France. One of the guards has kindly offered to send an email from his phone and he is typing this for me. I have also sent an email to my wife, who is waiting for me still, and praying. I pray for her and I pray for you and Afra too. I haven’t heard from you but I will not imagine anything.

  Your dear friend,

  Mustafa

  I sat for a while and imagined what might have happened after Germany. It was now the beginning of February. Did he make it to France? Was he still alive and well? I thought about the first time I had visited the apiaries in the mountains. Yes, it was full of light and you could see the shimmer of the water far below. Mustafa had given me a tour; he was young then, in his late twenties, and I was only eighteen. He walked around in his shorts and flip-flops, unafraid of the bees.

  ‘Aren’t you scared?’ I’d said, hypervigilant and flinching.

  ‘I know them,’ he’d replied. ‘I know when they will get angry.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘They release pheromones that smell like bananas.’

  ‘Bananas?!’

  He nodded, pleased at my excitement. ‘The other bees smell it and know to attack.’

  ‘But what will you do if they do get angry?’

  ‘I will stand very, very still and not move an inch. Pretend to be a tree.’

  Then he stood there, like a giant statue, with his hands shielding his eyes, smiling. I copied him, standing as still as I could, holding my breath while the bees flew around me in hundreds, or what felt like thousands, their humming surrounding me, enveloping me, winding itself around me like an invisible web. Not one bee landed on me.

  ‘You see,’ he whispered. ‘You see, you have to relax and turn into nature. Then you will be fine.’

  1/02/2016

  My dearest Mustafa,

  Your last email was sent in January and there are no more messages after this so I wonder if you made it to France. More than anything I wish that you are in England with your wife and daughter. I just remembered the first time I visited the beehives in the mountains. It is like a moving picture in my mind. We were so young. If only we knew then what life would bring. But if we had known, what would we have done? We would have been too afraid to live, too afraid to be free and to make plans. I wish I could go back to that moment and stand there surrounded by the bees, learning with every second that passed that they were not my enemy.

  I am in Istanbul now. Afra and I are staying in a smuggler’s flat with twenty other people and we are waiting to leave for Greece but the wind is too strong at the moment. There is a young boy here, the same age as Sami. He is alone and I’m not sure what has happened to his family. I dread to think. But he trusts me, and I am looking after him.

  I know that I have a long journey ahead. Some days I think I cannot take another step, but I have a dream in my mind of meeting you in England. This is what keeps me moving forward. I have money and passports. I feel lucky to have these as I see that some people have nothing. I will be waiting for your response.

  Nuri

  When I returned to the smuggler’s flat in the evening, I gave the things I had found to Mohammed: chewing gum, mints, a penknife, a pen, a key ring, a glue stick and a road map.

  The map was Mohammed’s favourite item; he opened it out on the floor and traced his finger along the lines of roads and mountains. He found stones in the plant pots on the balcony and, using the pen, he drew faces on them. He made a whole family of stones, gliding them across the map as if they were on a journey: father, mother, grandmother, a brother and two sisters. That night I found him fast asleep on the map, so I picked him up, draped him over my shoulder, and then carried him to the bedroom and laid him down gently on the blanket. Mohammed didn’t even stir; he was lost in his dreams.

  ‘We’ll be leaving soon,’ I said to Elias the following night. He stood like a great ancient statue on the balcony, opening a fresh packet of cigarettes. He put one to his mouth and lit it, looking out into the woods. Now that he’d been eating more and working hard his frame had fleshed out and it was easier to see the natural physical strength of this man.

  ‘The smuggler says two more days.’

  Elias considered until he finished his cigarette and lit another. ‘I don’t want to go. I’ll stay here.’

  ‘Haven’t you already paid the smuggler? Where will you stay?’

  ‘I’ll find somewhere. Don’t worry about me. I don’t want to go on – I’ve travelled too far already. I’m done.’ His eyes were sad but his smile was different now; there was life in his face and an internal strength. We both stood there, silent, for a long time, listening to the night sounds of the wind and the cars and the dogs.

  5

  WHEN AFRA WAKES UP IN the morning she asks me why she can smell flowers.

  ‘It’s probably your perfume,’ I say.

  ‘But these aren’t roses. They smell faint, like blossoms.’ She reaches over to the bedside cabinet and I remember the bowl of keys. She feels around until she is touching the bowl and then she sits up and rests it on her lap, leaning over it, inhaling deeply, putting both of her hands in, and that’s when I realise that the bowl is filled not with keys but with handfuls of white blossoms.

  ‘Did you pick these for me?’ she says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Another gift!’ Her eyes are full of the morning light. I don’t want to see this. I hate to see her like this and I’m not sure why. I get up and close the gap in the curtains and watch their shadow move across her face. ‘You haven’t brought me one for a while,’ she says, and she brings the flowers up to her face, breathing in their scent, and in that moment a small smile appears on her lips, as faint as the smell of the flowers.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Where did you find them?’

  ‘There’s a tree in the garden.’

  ‘Is it a big garden?’

  ‘No, it’s small like a courtyard and mostly concrete, but there’s this one tree in it.’

  ‘I thought you’d never bring me a gift again.’

  She puts the bowl back onto the bedside cabinet and checks to make sure that the marble is there. I take her to the bathroom and sit on the toilet while she brushes her teeth, then I help her to get dressed. Taking the abaya off the hanger, slipping it down over her arms, over her body, over the bulge of her stomach, over her scar from the caesarean section – a permanent smile across her abdomen – over the fine hairs on her thighs. I smell her. Roses and sweat. The scar and the crinkling of her skin around her stomach are constant reminders to me that she carried our child, brought him into this world, and I don’t want to touch her. I tie up her hair and wrap the hijab around her head, securing the hairpins where she wants me to. I try not to be abrupt, not to push her fingers away. The smile still seems to be lingering on her lips and I don’t want to spoil it. It horrifies me that a gift from me can have the power to make her smile now, even if it is so slight as to be almost non-existent. All those times I wanted to be able to affect her, to bring some light to her eyes, and now I hate it that I can, because it means that she
loves me and that she has been hoping for me to love her. But I am no longer worthy of her, or her forgiveness.

  We have another meeting with Lucy Fisher later that afternoon, so find ourselves back where we were before, sitting opposite her at the kitchen table. Afra still won’t turn to face her, and clasps her hands on the table, looking like she’s staring out of the window.

  Lucy Fisher seems happier today. She has brought with her the paperwork to prove that we are claiming asylum. She is very efficient – she ticks boxes and makes quick notes in a ring binder.

  ‘I’m glad we don’t need a translator for you,’ she says, preoccupied, glancing up at me quickly with her big blue eyes. Her hair is down today. She has very soft fine hair which reminds me of feathers, unlike Afra’s, which is thick and heavy and was once as black as tar.

  There is a lightness about Lucy Fisher that I like. She is proud of herself for keeping things in order. And when things do not go as she wishes, her face fires up and she becomes beautiful. I wonder if she knows this. Right now though, she is calm and her face is ordinary. She reminds me of a newsreader. Her voice does too. Remembering her reaction the other day, I try to imagine how many people she has worked with, how many she has seen sent back, how many questions people have asked her, how everyone must hold on to her as if she is a lifeboat on a stormy sea.

  ‘Will you be sending the Moroccan man away?’ I say.

  ‘Which one?’ she says.

  ‘The old man.’

  ‘Hazim?’ she says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s confidential information. I’m not permitted to discuss any of the clients’ cases. And not yours either.’ She smiles at me again and closes the file before continuing. ‘So what you need to do is take this letter to the GP’s office, the address is on this piece of paper.’ She points at it. ‘You’ll have no problem,’ she says, ‘and when you’re there you can make an appointment for your wife, and also for yourself. It might be a good idea to have a quick check-up.’ She glances at Afra, and I can see that my wife is uncomfortable.