The Beekeeper of Aleppo: A Moving Testament to the Human Spirit
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I WAKE UP WITH AFRA’S HAND resting on my chest. I can feel her fingers on mine, but there is also something else. I remember Mohammed and the key I found in the landlady’s garden. But when I move my hands I see that I am holding a chrysanthemum.
‘You got me another gift?’ she says. There is a question in her voice.
‘Yes,’ I say.
She runs her fingers over the petals and the stem.
‘What colour is it?’ she says.
‘Orange.’
‘I like orange … I thought you would stay downstairs all night. You fell asleep and Hazim helped me up – he didn’t want to wake you.’
There is something desperate in her voice, questions that she is not asking, and I can’t bear the smell of the rose perfume on her body.
‘I’m glad you like it,’ I say, and I remove her hand from my chest, allowing the flower to drop onto the bed.
Later, after I have prayed and dressed Afra, Lucy Fisher arrives. She is in a hurry today, holding two rucksacks as if she is going away somewhere. This time there is another woman with her who I think is a translator; she is dark-skinned and round and holds an old-fashioned handbag.
We sit in the kitchen for just ten minutes. She gives me the new letter with the B&B address printed clearly on it and tells me the date and time of the asylum interview.
‘You have five days,’ she says, ‘to prepare.’
‘As if I am taking an exam,’ I say, and smile. But her face is very serious. She explains that Afra and Diomande will each have their own translators, and there will be one on hand for me too.
‘Diomande’s interview is on the same day?’ I say.
‘Yes, you can travel there together. It’s in South London.’ She continues to talk, opening a map, pointing out the location, opening another train map, explaining things to me, but I’m not really listening. I want to tell her about Diomande’s wings. I want to tell her about Mohammed and the keys, but I’m afraid of her reaction. And then, from the window, something catches my eye. White planes searing through the sky. Too many to count. I hear a whistle followed by a rumbling, as though the world has ripped open. I rush to the window: bombs are falling, planes are circling. The light is too strong, I shield my eyes. The sound is too loud, I cover my ears.
I feel a hand on my shoulder.
‘Mr Ibrahim?’ I hear.
I turn and Lucy Fisher is standing behind me.
‘Are you OK?’
‘The planes,’ I say.
‘The planes?’
I point at the white planes in the sky.
There is a pause and I hear Lucy Fisher exhale. ‘Look,’ she says, very gently. ‘Look, Mr Ibrahim. Look carefully. They are birds.’
I look again and I see seagulls. Lucy Fisher is right. There are no planes circling, only a passenger plane far away, appearing through a wisp of clouds, and above us only seagulls.
‘You see?’ she says.
I nod and she leads me back to my chair.
Lucy Fisher is a very practical woman and gets back to what she was saying almost immediately, after only a slight hesitation and a sip of water. She wants to make sure that everything is in place. And as she runs the tip of a pencil along one of the train lines, I feel grounded, calmer. She says names of places that I’ve never heard of before, and she consults the other map and I imagine the roads and the houses and the side streets and the parks and the people. I imagine what it will feel like to go deeper into the country, away from the sea.
* * *
In the evening we sit in the living room. The Moroccan man is helping Diomande prepare for the asylum interview. They are sitting opposite each other at the dining table, and Diomande has a piece of paper and a pen in front of him so that he can make notes.
‘I want you to explain why you leave your country,’ the Moroccan man says. And Diomande begins to talk, the same story he told us before, but this time with added detail. He mentions the names of his mother and sisters, he describes his job in Gabon and their financial situation and then he is talking about history and politics, about French colonisation, independence in 1960, civil unrest and civil war, increasing poverty. He talks about how Côte d’Ivoire was once a place of economic prosperity and stability, and how things changed after the death of the nation’s first president. He goes on and I stop listening, until the Moroccan man interrupts him.
‘I think, Diomande, that they will want to hear your story.’
‘This my story!’ Diomande insists. ‘How else will they understand if I don’t tell it?’
‘Maybe they know these things.’
‘Maybe they not know. If they not know, how they will understand why I need to be here?’
‘You tell your story. Why you leave.’
‘I am explaining these things!’ Diomande is angry now, and I see that he is sitting more upright. His anger has somehow straightened his spine.
The Moroccan man shakes his head. ‘This anger will not help your case,’ he says. ‘You must make your story. What was your life? How was life there for you and sisters and mother? Only this, Diomande! This is not a history lesson!’
They start the mock interview again. Afra is sitting on the armchair, with the sketch-pad and colouring pencils on her lap, rolling the marble around in her fingers; I watch the vein of the marble, twisting and brightening in the lamplight, and their voices fade into the background. I drift away from the conversation and I begin to think about the bees. I can see them in the summer sky, heading up and out to find the plants and flowers. I almost hear their song. I can smell the honey and see the glimmer of the combs in the sunlight. My eyes begin to close but I see Afra opening the sketch-pad, running her fingers over white paper, taking a purple pencil out of the box.
I wake up to the sound of the marble again, rolling along the floorboards. I know immediately that Mohammed is here and I take a moment to open my eyes, and when I do he is sitting on the floor cross-legged and there is a key beside him.
‘You found the key, Mohammed?’ I say to him.
‘You dropped it when you were climbing over the fence.’ He stands up now, beside me. He has different clothes on today, a red T-shirt and denim shorts, and he seems preoccupied with something. He is looking over his shoulder through the open door of the living room and into the corridor.
‘You’ll get cold dressed like that,’ I say.
He begins to walk away from me and I get up and follow him. We climb the stairs and follow the hallway, past all the bedrooms and the bathroom, until we reach a door at the end of the corridor that I previously did not know existed.
‘Why have you brought me here?’ I say to him, and he hands me the key.
I put the key in the lock, turn it and open the door. An intense light dazzles me, and when my eyes adjust I see that I am high up on the top of a hill, looking down over Aleppo. There is a full moon, close to the horizon, full of the colours of the desert. A blood moon.
I can see far across the city, the ruins and hilltops, the fountains and balconies. In a field to the east there are apiaries, thorn bushes and wildflowers. The bees are silent at this time. Only the nurse bees work by moonlight. Bees become blind before humans. The air is warm and sweet with the smells of heat and soil. There is a path to the left of me, leading down into the city; I follow it until I reach the river. It is trickling out of the city park and struggling across the ravine, and the light of the moon glows and the water shimmers beneath it.
Ahead, someone is running, a flash of red. I follow the sound into the alleyways. It is darker now and the lanterns are on, but in the market stalls there are golden pyramids of baklava. Tables are set up outside cafés, menus and glasses and cutlery, a single flower in a slim vase on each. Shoes are displayed in shop windows, fake designer handbags, rugs and boxes and coffee urns and perfume and leather, and at the end of the row a stall full of headscarves of the finest material, like smoke streaming in the lamplight, blue and ochre and green.
At the end of the alley a purple glow. When I look again, I see Mohammed, turning a corner. I call him, ask him to wait for me, to stop running away from me, ask him where he is going, but he doesn’t slow down, so I walk faster to catch up with him, but when I reach the end of the alley, the world opens, and I am back at the river and the moon is higher in the sky. Mohammed is nowhere to be seen, so I sit down on the ground, close to the water, and wait for
revealed Piraeus, the sky filled with seagulls. We disembarked at the port in Athens and were taken to a concrete yard by the harbour overflowing with tents and overlooked by construction cranes. The people who did not have tents were wrapped in blankets, sitting on the ground. Birds were scavenging on rubbish among them and there was the strong smell of sewage.
We were in the shadow of a rectangular building, heavily graffitied to show a rugged port with huge white waves and an ancient ship with billowing sails. On the rocks of the painted harbour there was a picture of a crane and beneath it people from a distant time. Sami would have loved this painting. He would have made up stories about the people; the ship probably would have been a time-travelling device, or, knowing Sami’s sense of humour, the crane would have been the time-travelling device – it would have lifted people up by their collars and dropped them into another time.
I wished that I didn’t have to move from here, that I could become part of the painting and sit forever on the rocks of the harbour and watch the sea.
Afra and I found some space on one of the blankets on the groud. A woman opposite me had three children hanging off her: one in a sling at the front, one strapped to her back and a toddler holding onto her arm. She had almond-shaped eyes and a hijab draped loosely over her hair. Either the babies were twins or one of them was not hers. She was talking now, saying something to the boy in Farsi, and the boy was shaking his head, pressing his nose against her sleeve. There was a girl nearby with burn marks across her face. I noticed that three of her fingers were missing. She caught my eye, and I looked away. I watched Afra instead, sitting there so silent, safe in her darkness.
Suddenly there was a flash and for a moment my mind was full of light.
When my vision adjusted, I saw a round black object pointed straight at me. A gun. A gun? My breath caught in my throat, I struggled to inhale, my vision blurred, my neck and face felt hot, my fingers numb. A camera.
‘Are you OK?’ I heard the man say. The camera dropped to his side and he seemed suddenly embarrassed, as if it hadn’t occurred to him that he was taking a picture of a real human. He averted his eyes, apologised quickly and moved on.
People came by to check our papers, and we were taken that night by coach to the city centre, downtown Athens, to a crumbling building, an old school where long windows looked down on a courtyard. The courtyard was full of people, some sitting on a raised platform, others in school chairs, or standing beneath lines of washing. Intermingled with all these people were the NGO workers. One of them, a white man with dreadlocks, came to greet us and led us into the building and up two flights of stairs to an abandoned classroom. Afra climbed slowly, careful with each step.
‘It’s nice to be able to speak English to you,’ the man said, ‘but I’m trying to learn Arabic, and a bit of Farsi too. Bloody difficult.’ He shook his head, keeping an eye on Afra. ‘The classrooms downstairs are used for activities. Does your wife speak English too?’
‘Not much.’
‘Will she be all right climbing the stairs?’
‘She’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘We’ve had worse.’
‘You’re lucky. If you’d come two months ago you would have been out on the streets for weeks on end, and in the middle of winter. But the military came and moved a lot of people, so these camps were set up. There’s a huge one at Ellinikon – the old airport – and at the park …’ His voice trailed off as if he had suddenly become distracted, and I got the impression that he didn’t want to say more about it.
He showed us into one of the classrooms, presenting it with an extended arm and open palm and a hint of irony. Inside the classroom were three tents made of bedsheets. I liked him already. There was a glint in his eyes, and he didn’t seem afraid or tired like the others on Leros.
‘I’m Neil, by the way.’ He flashed his name tag. ‘Choose one of the tents. Dinner is in the courtyard later. Check the schedule on the wall on the right as soon as you come in – there’s lessons and stuff in the afternoons for the kids. Where’s your child?’ These last words reached me, quickly, abruptly, like bullets.
‘Where’s my child?’
Neil nodded and smiled. ‘This place is only for families … I assumed … Your exit card … This school is for families with children.’
‘I lost my child,’ I said.
Neil hovered in front of me without moving, and his forehead creased into deep lines. Then he glanced down at the floor, puffed out his cheeks and said, ‘Listen. This is what I can do. You can stay tonight, and I’ll see what we can do about tomorrow night too, so your wife can have a good rest.’ And with that he left us in this old classroom in this abandoned school, returning a few minutes later with another family, a husband, wife and two young children.
I didn’t want to look at these children, a boy and a girl, holding on to their parents’ hands. I didn’t want to acknowledge their presence, and so I didn’t greet them like I normally would. Instead I turned around, and Afra and I climbed into one of the tents, put our bags down, and without saying anything, we both lay on the blankets, facing each other. Before we fell asleep she said, ‘Nuri, can you get me some more paper and pencils tomorrow?’
‘Of course,’ I said.
The other family soon settled themselves as well and the classroom fell into a welcome silence. I could almost believe that I was staying in a grand hotel and the faint creaking and noises above me were the sounds of the other guests. I remembered my mother and father’s old house in Aleppo, how as a child I had been afraid to fall asleep until I could hear my mother’s reassuring footsteps on the landing outside my door. She would peek in, and when I saw the crack of light coming into the dark room, I would feel safe and drift off. In the morning, my mother would help my dad in the fabric shop, and she spent the afternoon hours reading the newspapers, holding the red fan her grandmother had given her. It was made of silk and had a picture of a cherry tree and a bird and there was a Chinese word on it which my mother thought meant fate. She said it was a word that was hard to translate; Yuanfen was a mysterious force that causes two lives to cross paths in a meaningful way.
This always reminded me of how I had met Mustafa. After his mother, my aunt, had died, the families lost touch and at least fifteen years passed without communication. Mustafa’s father lived a solitary life in the mountains, while my mother and father were city people, working in the heat and chaos of the markets, where trade bustled from all over the world. In fact it was an old Chinese merchant who had given my great-grandmother the red fan. He was a fabric maker from Beijing and had made the silk and hand-painted it himself. One day my father had sent me on an errand to get some fruit and I had taken a detour and stopped by the river to rest beneath a tree. I was tired of being locked up in the shop, and my father was eager for me to learn as much as possible, to serve the customers, to speak English well, so even when the shop was quiet I would be sitting there with an English grammar book on my lap because, according to my father, that was the way forward.
I was hot and exhausted and, as it was the middle of August, it felt like we were breathing in the desert. It was a relief to sit by the river, beneath the cool shade of the narenj tree. I must have been there for about fifteen m
inutes when a young man approached me, about ten years older than I was and much darker, as if he lived and worked beneath the sun.
‘Do you know the way to this shop?’ He pointed at the piece of paper in his hand where there was a sketch of a road and a shop with an arrow and the words: Aleppo Honey.
‘The Aleppo Honey Shop?’ I said.
He nodded, then shook his head very quickly, a tic I was to become so familiar with.
‘No?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, smiling, shaking his head again.
‘I’m going that way. Why don’t you follow me? I’ll show you the way.’ And as we walked we began to talk. He immediately told me about the apiaries in the mountains and that his grandfather had sent him to the city to sample different types of honey. He told me he had recently applied to the University of Damascus to study agriculture, and that he wanted to learn more about the composition of honey. I told him a bit about my father’s shop, though not too much, because I wasn’t as talkative as he was, and also because the work didn’t interest me that much. I showed him the shop as we walked past and I took him on to the front door of the honey shop, where we said goodbye.
A week later he came to find me at my father’s shop. He brought a huge jar of honey with him. He had just found out that he had been accepted at the university and so would be visiting Aleppo more often, and he had wanted to say thank you to me for taking him to the shop that day. The moment my mother saw him, standing in the doorway of the shop with the jar of honey in his hand, she dropped her fan and stood up. She walked over and stared at him for a while, then she began to sob.