It was much later, after Neil had left and the darkness had closed in around us, that I began to notice what was wrong with this place. First, men gathered in gangs like wolves; Bulgarians and Greeks and Albanians. They were watching and waiting for something; I could see it in their eyes. They were the eyes of intelligent predators.
The night was cold. Afra was shivering and saying nothing. She was frightened here. I wrapped as many blankets around her as I could. We did not have a tent, just a large umbrella that blocked the wind from the north. A campfire close by gave out a little warmth, but not enough to be comfortable.
There was noise and laughter and movement all around. Some children played football in an open space between the trees, boys and girls kicking up the soil. Others played cards, or chatted outside their tents. A group of teenagers sat in a circle on a blanket. They were telling one another stories, tales they remembered from childhood. One girl was speaking, the rest listening attentively, legs folded, eyes catching the light of the dwindling fire.
As I watched, an NGO worker approached them, a small blond man holding two white plastic bags, one in each hand. The girl stopped talking and they all turned to face him, the whole group erupting with excitement, talking over one another. The NGO worker put down the bags and they all waited with anticipation as he pulled out cans of Coca-Cola which the teenagers grabbed, one by one. Once they each had a can, they opened them, laughing with excitement at the tssssk and pshhhhhhhh.
Then they all drank, at the same time.
‘That’s my first sip of Coke in three years!’ one of them said.
I knew that Daesh had banned Coca-Cola because it was an American multinational brand.
‘It’s even better than I remember!’ said another.
The NGO worker saw me watching them. He took out one last can from the bag and came over. He was younger than I thought, with blond spikey hair and small dark eyes. He brought the laughter and the joy with him as he handed me the can, a beaming smile on his face.
‘Amazing, eh?’ he said.
‘Thank you.’ I opened the can and took a small sip, savouring the sweetness. Then I handed it to Afra, who was still shivering, wrapped up in the blanket. She took a huge gulp.
‘Wow, Coca-Cola?’ she said. It seemed to bring some colour to her face. So we passed the can between us and listened to the stories the youngsters told.
Later, past midnight, when Afra was finally asleep and her body had stopped shaking, I noticed some older men hanging around, watching the boys and the girls. One of them was leaning on crutches, the stump of his leg bare and visible even in the darkness. The emaciated man on the step of the statue was now playing a guitar. A sad and beautiful song as soft as a lullaby.
‘They bring you here too?’
I looked up and saw the black woman from the night before. She had a blanket around her shoulders and a piece of bread in her hand.
‘Make sure you get food in the morning,’ she said. ‘They bring food from the church but is finish quickly. They bring medicines too.’
She spread the blanket out on the ground and sat down beside me. She was wearing a headwrap the green of an emerald.
Suddenly, from nowhere, a violent wind swept through the camp, as if the gods of the place had awoken. Leaves and dry soil streaked past us, but she just waited for it to settle, which suggested to me she was used to these unexpected and short-lived blasts of weather. Then she plunged her hand into a small linen bag and pulled out a container of talcum powder, shook a perfumed cloud into her palm and smeared it all over her face and hands. This had the strange effect of making her look grey, the life and light in her cheeks suddenly extinguished. She was watching me the whole time.
‘They steal children here,’ she said. ‘They snatch them.’
From among the foliage, men’s eyes gleamed in the moonlight.
‘Why would they do that?’
‘To sell their organs. Or for sex.’ Again she said this casually, as if she had become immune to such things. I didn’t want to listen to this woman, and I wished I couldn’t see the shadows moving in the woods. I noticed again that her breasts were leaking, fresh wet patches on her white top.
‘My mind is ill,’ she said, tapping her forehead. Then, pinching the skin on her inner arm, ‘I am a dead. I’m turn black inside. Do you know what that means?’
Her dark eyes glimmered in the firelight, the whites slightly yellow. There was a roundness to her features, a wholeness, a softness, a transparency; it was in her expressions and her hand movements, and yet I wanted to get away from her, because I didn’t want to know. There was too much in my head now; there was no room for more. The wet stains on her top kept catching my eye, it was worse on the left, as if her heart was leaking, and I tried not to look.
‘You cannot leave this place. Do you know that?’ she said.
I said nothing in response. I was thinking about Mohammed now. Seeing these men in the woods brought new questions to my mind. Did someone take him? Did they tempt him away or snatch him in the night while he was sleeping?
‘The borders have been closed, you know.’ she continued. ‘Everyone is coming and not many is leaving, and I can’t go back. I am a dead. I want to leave from here. I want to find work. But nobody want me.’
Beneath a tree one of the older men was talking to a young girl. She was probably about eleven or twelve, but the way she was standing made her look much older; there was something overtly sexual in the way she was leaning against the tree.
‘Do you know why Odysseus make his journey?’ the woman said now, nudging me, and I wished she would be quiet. I turned to her for a second, and when I looked back the man and the girl had disappeared. I felt sick.
‘He went from Ithaca to Calypso to god knows where – all of this journey, to find what?’
There was an intensity to her – the way she leant into me, the way she pushed my leg if I took my eyes off her.
‘I don’t know,’ I said to her.
‘To find his home again,’ she said. And then she remained silent for a long time, perhaps she had sensed that I didn’t really want to talk, and she sat there with her hands folded in her lap. She had a fierce presence, her eyes wide, fully alert. As much as I tried to shut her out and pretend that she was not there, I couldn’t.
‘What’s your name?’ I said.
‘Angeliki.’
‘That’s a Greek name.’
‘Yes. It means “Angel”.’
‘Where are you from?’
And again this question seemed to disturb her. She gathered up her blanket, wrapped it around her shoulders and wandered off into the night, picking up something from the ground along the way.
I lay down beside Afra but I couldn’t sleep. Deep in the woods I could hear strange cries – of foxes or cats or people. The man who was sitting on the step of the statue was still there. In the light of the dying fire, I noticed that he had scratches on his arms. Red raw wounds as if an animal had got to him.
And although my mind was restless, I closed my eyes tight. I didn’t want to see or know anything more.
In the morning there was prayer and later Pedion tou Areos was like a playground. The sun glowed through the leaves of the trees, a canopy of emerald so that I was reminded of Angeliki sitting here the night before in her green headscarf. There were locals among the refugees, old women with bags of food; they walked around handing out packages.
I noticed one young mother sitting on a blanket, a sky-blue hijab draped loosely over her head. In her arms she held a tiny baby, probably just a few weeks old – its hands and legs like twigs, sticking out of the blanket. It was like she was holding a dead thing, rocking a dead thing in her arms, as if her eyes knew this but her body didn’t. An old Greek woman knelt down on the ground beside them, helping the mother give bottled milk-formula to the baby, but the baby would not feed. The old woman gave up, and instead she poured a big glass of condensed milk and filled a paper plate with chocolate bis
cuits and gave it to the mother, encouraging her to eat and drink, pushing the cup up to her mouth whenever she stopped.
‘Pies to olo – all of it,’ the old woman said, in Greek and English, and the young mother seemed to understand one of them and she gulped it down now and held the cup out for more. The old woman gave her another glass, then, when she was done, the old woman took the mother’s hands in hers and cleaned them with baby wipes and massaged them with cream. The mother’s eyes were sad, blue as the sea and far away.
‘Beautiful Mahsa,’ the old lady said, and kissed the baby’s forehead.
Mahsa. The baby was a girl. I watched the ease between the women, the way they interacted with such few words. They knew each other – the old lady had probably been here many times before.
‘Den echies gala?’ the old woman said, and in response the mother pressed her breast with her palm and shook her head. ‘Ochi,’ she said.
I noticed again the man on the step of the statue. He had his guitar on his lap: a beautiful instrument, almost a lute, but not exactly. He plucked the strings and then played a short melody. It produced a wash of sound, a sudden harmony like a rain shower on a sunny day, echoing softly from its wooden chamber.
There was a frown on the man’s face as he abruptly stopped playing and continued to fine-tune. After a while he put the instrument down by his feet and rolled a cigarette. I got up and sat beside him in the shadow of the statue. There was something warm about this man’s face, inviting, even in its silence.
‘Good morning,’ he said in Farsi, in a voice as deep and melodic as his music, and he offered me the cigarette he had just rolled.
‘No, thank you,’ I said, in Arabic. ‘I don’t smoke.’ And in that moment we both started to laugh at the strangeness of our situations. Here we found ourselves in Greece, one man speaking Arabic, the other Farsi.
‘Do you speak English?’ I said.
The man’s eyes lit up. ‘Yes! Not very, very good, but yes! Thanks gods, we have found same language!’ There was real humour in this man – he sang as he talked.
‘Where are you from?’ I said.
‘Afghanistan, outside Kabul. You are from Syria?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
His fingernails were long, and although he was not a bulky man, there was a suggestion of strength in his movements.
‘I like your guitar,’ I said.
‘This instrument is rebab. It means “door of the soul”.’ Then he told me his name was Nadim.
I remained perched on the step beside him as he picked up the rebab and began to play again, a slow quiet melody that trickled through the air in deep waves. I watched Afra as she woke up and unfolded herself from the blanket, feeling around with her hand to see if I was there. When she didn’t find me, her features tightened and she called for me. I went over immediately and touched her hand and watched as her face softened. There was a part of me that was pleased to see this fear in her when she thought she’d lost me, because it meant that she still loved me, that even when she was locked inside herself she still needed me. I unwrapped the sandwiches that had been left for us and handed one to her.
After a while she said, ‘Nuri, who is playing the music?’
‘A man called Nadim.’
‘It’s beautiful.’
And as the hours passed the music washed over us, and when Nadim stopped playing and took a nap the absence of the music suddenly opened a door to other sounds: twigs snapping and breaking in the woods and murmurings and whispers and children playing. I wanted to wake him and tell him to play his music forever so that I would never hear anything else but the moving melody of the rebab until the day that I died. And if Angeliki was right, if we could never leave this place, then Afra and I would die here with the predators of the night and the heroes of a battle unknown to us.
When the sun set the campfire was lit and the place filled with smoke and the smell of burning wood. People gathered around its warmth and I was reminded of Farmakonisi. But the people were different on that island. Here it was as if we were all living in the darkest shadow of a solar eclipse.
Afra had been even more quiet than usual. I believed that she was listening to the sounds in the woods, that she could sense the danger there, but she didn’t ask any questions. Most of the time she sat wrapped in a thick blanket.
Nadim had been gone for a while and he returned some time later, taking his usual place beneath the statue. But he didn’t pick up his rebab, although I waited for the music; I needed it like water. My mind was so full of cracks.
The mother with the blue hijab was trying to breastfeed her baby; little Mahsa had her mouth around the nipple and she was sucking a bit but it seemed that there was no milk and the woman was pressing her breast with her hand, frustrated, with a flushed angry face. And then Mahsa gave up and went back to being listless. The woman began to cry and she wiped the tears away with the back of her hand.
Seeing the mother’s tears and the ease with which they fell, I realised that Afra had not cried about Sami. Apart from that day in Aleppo when we were hiding in the hole in the garden, she had not shed a tear. She did not cry when Sami died. Instead her face had turned to stone.
Nadim came and sat next to me on the blanket and stared for a while at Afra. I wondered if he realised that his eyes were fixed on her, or if he was just lost in his own thoughts. Either way, I broke his gaze.
‘So, where did you say you came from?’
Nadim’s face suddenly changed and came to life. ‘Kabul!’
‘You liked it there?’
‘Of course. Was my home. Kabul is very nice.’
‘Why did you leave?’
‘Because Taliban does not like us to play music there. They do not like music.’ But there was more, I could tell by the way he stopped abruptly and picked up a pine cone for no reason, examining it before throwing it into the woods.
‘That’s the reason you left?’ I said.
There was some hesitation as if he was contemplating whether to say more and at the same time inspecting me. After not too much time, and with a deliberately lower voice, he said, ‘I was in Ministry of Defence. Then Taliban threaten me. I told them I cannot kill people. I cannot even kill ant – how do you expect me to kill people?’
And then he stopped again, and that was all. He had thrown me tiny fragments of a much larger and longer story. And then Nadim was quiet, but there was something uncomfortable in this man’s silence, and so I was pleased when he spoke again, with that sing-song voice that seemed now to distract from something else.
‘Do you know the name of this park?’ he said.
‘Yes, Pedion tou Areos …’
‘Pedion means “square”. Areos was god of war. He loved murder and blood. Did you know this? The old lady who bring food tell me.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘He loved murder and blood,’ Nadim repeated these words slowly, placing emphasis on each. ‘And look,’ he said, ‘they made a park for him!’ He spread his arm, palm open, in the way Neil had done when he had presented me and Afra with our temporary room in the school, and the raw bloody wounds on the fine skin of Nadim’s forearm glimmered like red ribbons in the firelight. A wind blew and clouds gathered and the darkness around us became more apparent, threatening to suffocate the light of the fire. I had a strange feeling that I needed to be nice to this man.
‘When did you learn to play the rebab?’ I said.
My question had the effect of producing a wide grin on Nadim’s face and he leant forward with sparkling eyes. I had the odd sensation of watching someone sharpen a knife.
‘Listen to story,’ he said. ‘My father, in Kabul, he was musician. Very good, famous. He play the tabla.’ Nadim tapped his hands on invisible drums. ‘So I sit and watch him. Every day I watch him play the tabla, I look and listen.’ He touched his ear purposefully, followed by the edge of his eye. ‘One day, when I was nine or eight, my uncle ask him for help outside and I sit at the tabla and begi
n to play. My father, he come inside with eyes and mouth open. He was so much shock! He say to me, “Nadim! How you learn to play, my son?” How learn to play?! Because I watch him. I watch him and I listen all these years. How I not learn to play? You tell me this!’
I found myself lost in the story, captivated by Nadim’s sing-song voice, engrossed in the images of the boy in a house in Kabul playing the tabla, and I forgot for a moment the question I had asked, which remained unanswered. But Nadim was tapping his foot to a silent rhythm, pleased with himself. He rolled a cigarette and lit it, and although he leant back, his body seemingly relaxed, his eyes stayed sharp. They scanned people, they penetrated the shadows, looking and waiting, just like the men in the woods.
The crickets sang in unison, then fell silent for a brief moment, an interval, as if they were one breathing body that suddenly stopped, before the sound began again, a thick pounding buzzing noise that stretched far beyond and carved out the depths of the woods and the unknown.
Groups of men were hovering again by the trees, some sitting on benches smoking. There was banter and laughter tonight. Nadim was holding a lit cigarette without smoking it, his arm casually resting on his leg, and I couldn’t help noticing again those wounds, the deep red lines in the fine skin of his forearms, like the violent scratch-marks of wild animals. He took his phone out of his pocket and was typing a message. I waited for him to finish and asked him if he had an Internet connection.
‘I do,’ he said.
‘Would you mind if I checked my emails?’
Without hesitation, Nadim unlocked his phone and handed it to me. Then he sat there quietly and lit his cigarette.
Once again, there were emails from Mustafa:
15/03/2016
Dearest Nuri,
I haven’t heard from you in a while and I hope that you have made it to Athens safely.
It has taken me time to find my feet. I am waiting to find out if I have been granted asylum and in the meantime I have been volunteering at a beekeepers’ association in the town where I am living. I have made some friends there, but I am a beekeeper without bees. I only need one hive to start, so I have posted an advertisement on Facebook asking if anyone has a hive to donate. I am waiting eagerly to see if there is a response.
The Beekeeper of Aleppo: A Moving Testament to the Human Spirit Page 15
