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

by Christy Lefteri

‘We have five hours and forty-four minutes left. I will count.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  He started to count, but by the time he got to the fifth minute he was fast asleep with his head on my shoulder.

  I still had one hand on Afra’s arm and one hand in the water. I looked out into the darkness, all this sea and sky, and I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. Is this what Afra saw every day? This absence of form.

  A girl started to cry. ‘Shh!’ the mother said. ‘Shh! We have been told no noise!’

  ‘But we are in international waters!’ the girl cried. ‘I’m allowed now!’

  At this the mother started to laugh. She laughed from her stomach and the girl switched suddenly from crying to laughing too. Finally, the mother caught her breath and said, ‘No, we aren’t yet in international waters.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘OK. When we get to that place, will you let me know?’

  ‘So that you can cry?’

  ‘Yes. I need to cry loudly,’ the girl said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because that’s how scared I am.’

  ‘Go to sleep now,’ the mother said.

  And then there was silence. There were no more prayers, no chanting, no whispers.

  And maybe I fell asleep too, because I saw in front of me a series of images:

  Colourful Lego pieces scattered about the floor

  Blue tiles with black flowers

  Afra wearing a yellow dress

  Sami playing with the Lego in the living room, building a house

  The apiaries in the field beneath the midday sun

  The burned hives and the dead bees

  Mustafa sitting in the middle of the field

  Bodies floating in the river

  Firas lying on the table at the morgue

  Mustafa holding his hand

  Afra at the souq with Sami on her knee

  Sami’s eyes

  Then there was darkness

  I startled awake because there was panic.

  The waves were bigger.

  One man was shouting, ‘Get the water out! There is too much water!’

  There were torches flashing, and hands scooping out the water, and children crying. Mohammed was wide-eyed and helping to empty out the water. I watched as men leapt into the sea, the boat immediately buoyant once again.

  ‘Nuri!’ Afra said. ‘Are you on the boat?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘We are.’

  ‘Stay on the boat. Don’t go into the water.’

  Mohammed was still scooping the water with his hands; everyone else on the boat was doing the same. The girl began to cry now. She was calling out to the men in the sea, calling them to come back onto the boat.

  The water continued to rise and more men jumped out of the boat. Every child was crying except Mohammed. I could see his face, serious and determined, between the flashes of light.

  There was a moment of complete darkness, and when the light of the torch flashed again, he was gone. Mohammed was not on the boat. I scanned the water, the black waves, as far as I could see, and then, without thinking, I jumped in. It was freezing but the waves weren’t as big as I’d thought, and I swam around, flashing the torch across the surface.

  ‘Mohammed!’ I called. ‘Mohammed!’ But there was no answer.

  I could hear Afra’s voice from the boat. She was calling, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I continued to search the water, which was as black as ink. How would I see Mohammed with his black clothes and black hair?

  ‘Mohammed!’ I called. ‘Mohammed!’

  The torch flashed over the men’s faces. I plunged into the black silence, but even with the torch I could barely see anything. I stayed under for as long as I could, feeling with my hands in case I should catch onto something, an arm or a leg; when there was no air left in my lungs, when the pressure of death was pushing down on me, I came back up gasping into the darkness and the wind.

  I was about to take a deep breath and go back under when I saw a man holding Mohammed, lifting him up into the boat. The women took the coughing and spluttering boy into their arms, removing their headscarves and wrapping them around him.

  We were deep into international waters now; the smuggler was right, the water did change, the waves were different, their rhythms foreign. Then everyone flashed their torches, hoping a coastguard would see, hoping we were close enough to Greece that somebody would save us. These lights in the darkness were like prayers, because there was no sign of anyone coming. The men couldn’t get back onto the boat – there was still too much water inside. I could feel my body becoming numb. I wanted to sleep, wanted to rest my head upon the moving waves and sleep.

  ‘Nuri!’ someone was calling. ‘Nuri!’

  I saw the stars above, and Afra’s face.

  ‘Nuri, Nuri, there is a boat!’ There was a hand on my arm. ‘Uncle Nuri, a boat is coming!’

  Mohammed was staring down at me, pulling me. My life jacket had started to deflate but I began to kick my legs to stay afloat, to get the blood moving in my body again.

  In the distance there was a bright light moving towards us.

  6

  THIS TIME WHEN I WAKE up on the concrete floor of the garden, the Moroccan man is already standing over me holding out his hand.

  ‘How’re you doin’, man?’ he says in English as he pulls me to my feet. Then he tells me in Arabic that Afra is inside waiting for me, that she seems even more upset than last time. When I go upstairs, I find her sitting on the bed, with her back to the door and the bowl of blossoms on her lap.

  ‘Where were you?’ she says, before I’ve even had a chance to speak.

  ‘I fell asleep downstairs.’

  ‘In the garden again?’

  I don’t reply.

  ‘You don’t want to sleep next to me.’

  I ignore her comment. I give her the sketch-pad and colouring pencils, placing them on her lap, bringing her hands to them so that she can feel what they are.

  ‘Another gift?’ she says.

  ‘Remember what you did in Athens?’ I say, and although she smiles, she puts them down on the floor beside her.

  ‘You’re already dressed, so I’m going to go for a walk. Would you like to come with me?’

  I wait for a while, standing there listening to her silent response, and when I can see that she’s not going to reply, I head downstairs and out into the light. I go to the place where the sandcastle city was. The sand is lumpy, with colourful bits and pieces embedded in it. I pick up a piece of transparent pink plastic, probably part of a broken cup, and toss it into the sea. The waves swallow it up.

  Just behind me, there is an old woman sitting in a deckchair reading a book. She is under an umbrella with a sun hat on, a bottle of sunscreen by her side. She doesn’t seem to notice that the sun has gone and it might even rain.

  A few people are walking their dogs, an attendant picks up rubbish. The aftermath of sunshine. The aftermath of war is something else. There is a sense of calm here, of life continuing. Hope for another sunny day. In the distance, to the left, the faint sound of music comes from the fairground on the pier. It never stops.

  The sun pushes through the clouds and the sea suddenly shimmers.

  ‘Excuse me,’ a voice says behind me. I turn around and see that the woman is frowning, her skin so leathery and brown she looks as if she’s been sunbathing on Syria’s dust plains.

  ‘Yes?’ I say.

  ‘Would you mind kindly moving out of my light, please? Thank you.’ She’s thanked me for moving before I’ve even moved. It’s difficult getting used to British manners – I can understand the Moroccan man’s confusion. Apparently queuing is important here. People actually form a single line in a shop. It’s advisable to take your place in the queue and not try to push your way to the front, as this usually pisses people off! This is what the woman in Tesco told me last week. But I don’t like their q
ueues, their order, their neat little gardens and neat little porches and their bay windows that glow at night with the flickering of their TVs. It all reminds me that these people have never seen war. It reminds me that back home there is no one watching TV in their living room or on their veranda and it makes me think of everything that’s been destroyed.

  I ask for directions to the GP surgery and find it on a hill on one of the side streets leading up from the sea. The place is full of children with colds. A mother is holding a tissue to her son’s face and telling him to blow his nose. Some children play with toys on a mat in the corner of the room. The adults read magazines or watch the monitor, waiting for their names to come up.

  I stand in the queue at the receptionist’s desk. There are five people in front of me. There is a yellow line on the floor with the words: ‘Queue behind this line.’

  The woman at the front is handing the receptionist a urine sample. The receptionist pulls a pair of red-framed glasses out of a mass of tiny curls. She inspects the container, types something in the system, seals the jar of urine into a cellophane bag and calls out, ‘Next!’

  It takes about fifteen minutes for me to get to the front and I have the asylum letter ready. When I put it on the desk, she lowers her glasses onto her nose and reads it through.

  ‘We can’t register you,’ she says.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because the asylum letter doesn’t have an address.’

  ‘Why do you need an address?’

  ‘In order to register you, we need to see an address.’

  ‘I can tell you the address.’

  ‘It needs to be on your letter. Please come back when you have all the correct documentation.’

  ‘But my wife needs to see a doctor.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ she says. ‘That’s our policy.’

  ‘But the NHS guidelines clearly say that a practice cannot refuse a patient because they do not have identification or proof of address.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she says, putting her glasses back into her curls, her mouth a tight line, ‘that’s our policy.’

  The woman behind me tuts politely. The receptionist pushes the papers apologetically towards me. I stand there looking at them, and in that moment something crushes me. It’s just a piece of paper. It’s just a receptionist in a doctor’s surgery. But the sounds of chattering, people moving around me, phones ringing from the cubicles behind the desk, children laughing … I hear the sound of a bomb ripping through the sky, glass shattering …

  ‘Are you OK, sir?’

  I look up. There is a flash and a crashing sound. I kneel down and cover my ears. I feel a hand on my back, then there is water.

  ‘I really am sorry, sir.’ the receptionist says, once I’ve stood up and drunk the water, ‘There’s nothing I can do. Could you get the correct paperwork together and come back?’

  I follow the road that twists away from the sea, with its row of identical brown-bricked houses side by side, and I head back to the B&B.

  I find Afra on our bed again, now with some of the blossoms in her hands. I kneel down in front of her and look into her eyes.

  ‘I want to lie down with you,’ she says, and what she means is, ‘I love you. Please hold me.’ There is an expression on her face I recognise from years ago, and it makes my sadness feel like something palpable, like a pulse, but it makes me afraid too, afraid of fate and chance, and hurt and harm, of the randomness of pain, how life can take everything from you all at once. Although it’s only early afternoon I lie down next to her on the bed and I let her put her arm around me and press her palm onto my chest, but I won’t touch her. She tries to hold my hand and I edge it away. My hands belong to another time, when loving my wife was a simple thing.

  When I wake up it is dark, and the darkness pulsates. I’ve had a dream about something vague, not of murder this time; in my mind there is a glimpse of corridors and staircases and footpaths that make a grid, somewhere far away from here, and a picture of the sky in the morning and a red

  flickered on the beach at dawn. Like driftwood washed ashore, we were left on the tiny military island of Farmakonisi. We were wet and shivering and the sun had just begun to rise. Mohammed’s face was white and blue, he still had the women’s headscarves wrapped around his body and for some reason he was now holding Afra’s hand. They did not speak to each other though; not a word passed between them. They just stood there on the shore with the sea behind them and the sun rising up to greet them. One of the men had collected the life jackets and made a huge fire with them. The flames warmed us and we gathered around.

  ‘I fell into the water,’ Mohammed said, holding onto my hand now.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I died a little bit.’

  ‘It was close.’

  ‘But I died a little bit.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I saw my mum. She was holding my hand in the water and pulling me and pulling me, and she was telling me not to go to sleep, because if I fell asleep I would sleep forever and I wouldn’t be able to wake up again and play. So I think I died a little bit but she told me not to.’

  I wondered what had happened to his mother, but I didn’t want to ask. Apparently another NGO vessel would be coming to pick us up, to take us to another island; in the meantime we had to wait here on the shore. There was a large shipping container, but this was already full of people; the story going around was that they’d arrived earlier that night from another part of Turkey, further along the coast. They were meant to go to another island but the engine had stopped working and their boat had drifted towards Farmakonisi. The coastguard had found them, and brought them back here. Some of the men and children came outside to talk to us and to warm themselves by the fire.

  ‘Uncle Nuri!’ Mohammed said, a huge smile revealing a missing tooth. ‘This place is called Biscuit Island! The girl from the container told me!’

  It was a cold morning and gulls and pelicans dipped down to the sea. On the safety of this land and in the warmth of the fire and the sun, people began to fall asleep. Mohammed was lying flat on his back. He was not asleep; he was looking up at the vast blue sky, squinting his eyes against the brightening light. In his hand he held his tiny marble, rolling it around in his fingers. Afra was sitting on the other side of me. She had her head on my shoulder and her hand grasping my arm as if I might slip away. She was holding on to me so tight that even when she fell asleep her grip didn’t loosen, and I remembered Sami when he was a baby, the way he used to fall asleep with Afra’s nipple in his mouth, his little hand still clutching the material of her scarf. It’s amazing, the way we love people from the day we are born, the way we hold on, as if we are holding on to life itself.

  ‘Uncle Nuri?’ Mohammed said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you tell me a story so that I can fall asleep? My mum used to tell me a story when I couldn’t sleep.’

  I remembered a tale my own mother used to tell me when I was a little boy in the room with the blue tiles. I remembered her with her head in the book, a red fan flickering in her right hand; eating kol w Shkor, her beloved Aleppo sweet.

  ‘Come on, Uncle Nuri!’ Mohammed said. ‘Come on, or I will fall asleep by myself and not hear a story!’

  I was suddenly irritated with the boy. I wanted to stay in my own mind, with my mother’s voice, with the fan flickering in the lamplight.

  ‘If you can fall asleep, why do you want a story?’

  ‘So that I can fall asleep better.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘The story goes like this: a wise caliph sends his servants – I can’t remember exactly how many there were – on a quest to find the mysterious City of Brass in the far desert wastes, which no one has ever entered. The journey takes two years and a few months and it is full of hardship. The servants take one thousand camels and two thousand cavalry. This I remember.’

  ‘That’s a lot! What would anybody do with a thousand camels?’

  �
��I know, but that is how the story goes. They pass an inhabited land and ruins and a desert with a hot wind and no water and no sound.’

  ‘How can there be no sound?’

  ‘There just isn’t.’

  ‘What – no birds or wind or talking?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Mohammed sat up. He was more awake than before. Perhaps I’d chosen the wrong story to tell him.

  ‘Come on!’

  ‘OK,’ I continued. ‘One day, they come to a wide plain. They see something on the horizon, tall and black with smoke rising to the sky. When they come closer they see that it is a castle, built of black stone with a door of steel.’

  ‘Wow!’ Mohammed’s eyes had widened now, full of curiosity and wonder.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’re getting sleepy now?’

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking my arm so I would go on.

  ‘OK. So beyond is the City of Brass, protected by a towering wall. Behind the wall is a shiny paradise of mosques and domes and minarets and high towers and bazaars. Can you imagine it?’

  ‘I can. It’s beautiful!’

  ‘It is very beautiful and gleaming with brass and jewels and precious stones and yellow marble. But … but …’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But the whole place is empty. There is no movement, no sound. The men find no people. In the shops, in the homes, on the streets … only emptiness. There is no life in this place. Life is as useless as dust. Nothing can grow here. Nothing can change.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Listen. In its midst is a very big pavilion with a dome rising high in the air. They come to a place with a long table which has words etched onto the surface. It says, “At this table have eaten a thousand kings blind in their right eye, and a thousand kings blind in their left eye, and a thousand kings blind in both eyes, all of whom have departed the world and have gone to tomb and catacomb.” Every king who ever ruled this place was blind, in one way or another, so that they left it full of riches and devoid of life.’

  I watched Mohammed’s face, saw the thoughts moving behind his eyes. There was a pause, as if he was holding his breath. Then he exhaled.