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

by Christy Lefteri

  I hope to hear from you soon. There is not a day that goes by that I do not think of you and Afra.

  Mustafa

  * * *

  25/03/2016

  Dear Nuri,

  A woman from a town not too far from here replied to my advertisement! She offered not only a hive but a colony of British black bees, believed until recently to be extinct. This is like a treasure! I plan to split the hive seven times. My aim is to cooperate with the community to improve the strain. Beekeepers from Britain usually have Italian honeybees exported from New Zealand, but these native bees are much more able to withstand the crazy climate here. There has been such a collapse of colonies; the European bee is not surviving well. I believe this black bee could be the answer, and I already know there are others who agree. And, Nuri, in this country there are rapeseed fields and banks of heather and lavender! Because it rains so much it is full of flowers. And so much green. More than you could ever imagine. Where there are bees there are flowers, and where there are flowers there is new life and hope.

  Do you remember the fields surrounding the apiaries? They were beautiful, weren’t they, Nuri? Sometimes I remember the day of the fire but I try not to think of these things. I do not want to get lost in that darkness.

  I hope to hear from you soon, we have things to do together! I am waiting for you! The bees are waiting for you!

  Mustafa

  ‘The message has made you smile,’ Nadim said.

  For a minute I had forgotten where I was. I looked up to see the Athenian sun beaming through the trees.

  ‘My cousin is in England,’ I said. ‘He is urging me to go there.’

  ‘It is a difficult journey,’ Nadim said, chuckling. ‘He is a lucky man that he made it there.’

  There was silence between us for a while and I could think of nothing else but the rapeseed fields and the banks of heather and lavender. I could see it all in my mind as clear and as vibrant as one of Afra’s paintings. But the sounds of the crickets invaded my thoughts.

  ‘It sounds like the woods go on forever,’ I said.

  ‘No. They don’t. All around is the city. Civilisation.’ Nadim grinned now with a kind of glee, and there was the sudden flash of a different personality, a kind of mocking or malice that comes from someone who knows more than he is letting on.

  ‘Have you been here a long time?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’ But this word seemed final, and I didn’t even know what ‘a long time’ meant anymore. Was it weeks or months or years or centuries like these heroes of antiquity cast here in stone?

  Just then I noticed something very strange. It was so fast that if I had looked away for a moment I would have missed it. One of the men on a nearby bench, sitting with his back to us, turned his head, over his shoulder, and caught Nadim’s eye. There was familiar acknowledgement, a quick nod, followed by a sudden change in Nadim’s movements, a nervousness, a twitching of the fingers and the skin around the eyes. This made me pay more attention. Nadim waited a while, tapping his foot on the ground to his secret rhythm, and finally he got up, took a bottle of water from where he had been sitting earlier, poured some into his hands and ran his hands through his hair. This wasn’t so unusual, but it was what happened after this that seemed the strangest of all.

  Still running his hands through his wet hair, Nadim approached two teenage boys, twins, who had arrived the day before. They were sitting on a blanket beneath a tree, their clothes tattered, their skin dirty; they were new here and frightened, but there was a boyish playfulness between them; one would say something, and the other would laugh and they would nudge each other. I watched as Nadim sat down beside them on their blanket, introducing himself, shaking their hands.

  By this time, the man beneath the tree, the one who had nodded at Nadim, had gone.

  Nadim then put his hand into the pocket of his jeans and took out some money. He gave the twins about forty euros each, from what I could see. This was a huge amount for two boys who’d probably been living off food scavenged from bins.

  ‘Nuri,’ Afra said, drawing my attention away, ‘what are you doing?’

  ‘Just watching.’

  ‘Watching who?’

  ‘I don’t like it here,’ I said.

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘Something is wrong.’

  ‘I know.’ And just those words, coming from the mouth and the mind of my wife, calmed me. I held onto her hand, squeezed it, kissed it. With every kiss I said, ‘I love you. I love you, Afra, I love you, I love you.’

  I told her about Mustafa in England, what he had written about his beehive and the British black bees, and she lay on her back and listened to me and for the first time I saw a small smile appear on her lips.

  ‘What kinds of flowers are there?’

  ‘There are fields of lavender and heather.’

  Then she was silent for a while. ‘I think the bees are like us,’ she said. ‘They are vulnerable like us. But then there are people like Mustafa. There are people like him in the world and those people bring life rather than death.’ She was silent again, thoughtful, and then she whispered, ‘We will get there, won’t we, Nuri?’

  ‘Of course we will,’ I said, though I didn’t really believe it then.

  That night I tried to imagine that the crickets were bees. I could hear them all around me. The air and the sky and the trees were full of bees the colour of the sun. I realised that I hadn’t replied to Mustafa – something about Nadim had distracted me, something I couldn’t explain that had drawn me away from what I had needed to do. And the crickets sang and I pushed the sound away and imagined the bees. I thought of my mother again, and her red silk fan. Yuanfen. Fate. A force that draws two people together.

  It was my mother who had supported me when I wanted to become a beekeeper. My father’s disappointment had made him shrink – in the weeks after I announced that I wouldn’t be working in the shop, that I wouldn’t be taking over the family business, he seemed to become a much smaller man. We’d been sitting in the kitchen after an evening meal. It was June, already very hot, and he was drinking ayran with salt and mint. The ice cubes clinked in the glass. My mother was emptying the leftovers into the bin. It was as if he knew I had something to say that he wouldn’t like, for he kept looking at me over the rim of the glass, a frown on his face, his gold wedding band gleaming in the light of the setting sun. He was already a small man, hardly any fat on him, with bulging knuckles and a prominent Adam’s apple that moved visibly when he talked, but his presence was big, his silence and contemplation often filled the room.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Well?’ I replied.

  ‘I want you to go to the wholesaler’s early tomorrow morning – we need more of the yellow silk with the diamond pattern.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Then you will come to the shop and I will show you how to make up the curtains – you can watch me the first time.’

  I nodded again. He drank his ayran in one go and held the glass up for my mother to refill. But my mother had her back to us at this point.

  ‘I will do what you want for another month,’ I said.

  He put the glass down on the table, still empty.

  ‘And what will happen after this month?’ His voice was heavy with brooding anger.

  ‘I will become a beekeeper.’ I said this matter-of-factly, placing my hands on the table.

  ‘So you are giving me a month’s notice?’

  I nodded.

  ‘As if I am not your father.’

  This time I did not nod.

  He looked out of the window, the sun blazing in his eyes, making them the colour of honey.

  ‘And what do you know about beekeeping? Where will you work? How will you earn a living?’

  ‘Mustafa has taught me—’

  ‘Ha!’ he said. ‘Mustafa. That boy is wild. I knew he would lead you astray.’

  ‘He hasn’t led me anywhere. He’s taught me.’

  He gru
nted.

  ‘We will build beehives together.’

  Another grunt.

  ‘We will have a business.’

  This time silence. A long silence and his eyes dropped and for the first time I felt his quiet disappointment and deep guilt in my heart that would haunt me for years to come. As my mother washed up she turned now and then to look at me, to nod, to urge me on, but I couldn’t say anymore after this, and about fifteen minutes passed before my father spoke again.

  ‘So the shop will die with me,’ he said.

  And that was the last thing he would ever say about it. According to him I had made my decision and there was nothing more to discuss. But in the days and weeks that followed I saw him become smaller, and less urgent, less purposeful in his actions, as he cut or sewed or measured. As if he had lost the fire that had driven him. And I thought in that moment, lying there looking up at the Athenian sky, that if I had sacrificed my father’s happiness to become a beekeeper, then I had to find a way to make it to Mustafa. He had found me all those years ago, he had led me out of that dark shop and into the wild fields on the edge of the desert, and now I had to keep my promise to him. I would find a way to get to England.

  I woke up in the dead of night. The fire was just a flicker now. The children were sleeping. A baby was crying; it was like the sound was coming from deep in the woods, but it couldn’t have been. Angeliki was wrapped in a blanket, leaning against a tree beside us. Her eyes were wide open, her hands in her lap, her breasts still leaking. I wondered where she had come from, where her family was, who she had left behind. I wanted to ask her again: Angeliki, why did you leave? And what is your real name? And where is your baby girl?

  I contemplated these questions here in the moonlit forest, surrounded by the buzzing of the crickets. Now there was a softness to the darkness, like night-time in the stories of the Arabian Nights, the kind my mother used to tell me in the days when she would look out of the window at a country that seethed with power and corruption and oppression, and I would see her frustration, her anger and sometimes her fear while she read.

  There was something about the movement of time in these stories that I both loved and feared. Night after night, monsters came out of the sea. Night after night, stories were told in order to delay a beheading. Lives were broken up into nights. Night-time was filled with the cries of the grief-stricken.

  Angeliki shifted her hands in her lap. The baby was still crying, but I couldn’t tell where the crying was coming from. I didn’t want to sleep again because this place was not safe. There was something very wrong here. I remembered how Afra’s breasts used to leak when Sami cried. Hearing Sami, smelling him, sitting in the chair where she usually fed him, made Afra’s breasts release milk, as if there was always an invisible cord between them. They communicated without words from the most primitive part of the soul. I remembered her laughing about this, saying that she felt like an animal, and how she realised that we are less human in our times of greatest love and greatest fear. In those early days of motherhood she didn’t paint; she was exhausted and preoccupied entirely with Sami. Later when she took to the canvas again in the hours when Sami was asleep, these landscapes were the most beautiful, the most alive, with greater depth to the darkness and a luminous shimmer to the light.

  When the crying stopped, Angeliki’s eyes closed completely. I was thinking about Nadim now and the way he had slipped the money into those boys’ hands. My thoughts turned to Mohammed, and now I was more afraid for him than ever before. And then, worst of all, I thought about Sami. First his smile. Then the moment the light fell from his eyes and they turned to glass. I didn’t want to think about Sami. I never want to think about Sami. I looked up at the vast sky and stars and they morphed into images that I could not dispel from my mind.

  Night after night, the predators came out of the woods. Nadim became more and more friendly with the two boys, and as the nights passed the boys disappeared and reappeared again, in the same spot, each time looking more troubled than before. But they had new shoes, and even a new phone, and they bantered with each other and fought and laughed, and they clung to each other, especially in the early hours of the morning when they returned from wherever they had been. Then they slept, late into the afternoon, even when the sun was beaming down on them, their bodies immovable, their minds switched off.

  Night after night, Angeliki slept against the tree beside us. I think she felt safe next to us. I wondered if she still went to the old school. It seemed so far away now, so long ago, though it had probably been only a week or maybe two since we had come to this place.

  I had given Afra the pencils and notepad, but she would not take them this time; she pushed them away, even in her sleep. Her mind was exhausted and preoccupied. She listened to the sounds around her, she responded to the children’s playing and crying with facial expressions. She was afraid for them. She asked me sometimes who was hiding in the woods. I told her that I didn’t know.

  Some days people packed their few belongings and left, though I had no idea where they were heading. In Leros, people were chosen by their country of origin. There was a ranking. Refugees from Syria had priority; that was what we had been told. Refugees from Afghanistan and the African continent had to wait longer or maybe forever. But here in the park it seemed as if everyone had been forgotten. Some days new people arrived, dragged in by an NGO worker holding new blankets. Adults and children with startled eyes and sea-swept hair.

  10

  I TAKE AFRA TO THE GP for her appointment. It’s a big clinic and there is a doctor here who speaks Arabic. Dr Faruk is a short, round man, probably around fifty. He has his glasses on the table in front of him next to a bronze plaque with his name on it, his eyes are lit up by the screen of the computer. He wants to record some details, he says, get Afra’s history, before he examines her. He asks her questions about the type of pain in her eyes: Is the pain sharp or dull? Is it in both eyes? Do you have headaches? Do you see flashing lights? Afra answers his questions, and then he pulls up a chair and sits beside her. He takes her blood pressure and listens to her heart with a stethoscope and finally he shines a tiny flashlight into each eye. First the right eye, pausing there for a moment, then the left, pausing again, then back to the right. He repeats the procedure a few more times and then sits there watching her for a moment, as if in contemplation or confusion.

  ‘Did you say you can’t see anything at all?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  He shines the torch into her eyes again. ‘Can I ask you if you can see anything now?’

  ‘No,’ she says, keeping very still.

  ‘Can you make out any change? A shadow or some movement or light?’

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘nothing at all.’

  I can hear a tremor in her voice, she is getting upset, and the doctor may have also picked up on it, as he puts the flashlight down and asks no more questions. He sits again at his desk, scratching the side of his face.

  ‘Mrs Ibrahim,’ he says, ‘can you explain to me how you became blind?’

  ‘It was a bomb,’ she says.

  ‘Can you tell me a bit more about it?’

  Afra shifts in her chair, rolling the marble around in her fingers.

  ‘Sami, my son,’ she says, ‘he was playing in the garden. I let him play there beneath the tree, but I was watching him from the window – there’d been no bombs for two days and I thought it would be all right. He was a child, he wanted to play in the garden with his friends, but there were no children left. He couldn’t be inside all the time, it was like a prison for him. He put on his favourite red T-shirt and jean shorts and he asked me if he could play in the garden, and when I looked into his eyes I couldn’t say no, because he was a boy, Dr Faruk, a boy who wanted to play.’ Afra’s voice is strong and steady.

  ‘I understand,’ he says. ‘Please go on.’

  ‘I heard a whistle first, in the sky, and I ran outside to call him.’ She stops talking and inhales sharply as
if she has just surfaced from beneath water. I wish she would stop talking now. ‘As I reached the door, there was a loud explosion and bright light, in the back of the garden, I’m sure, not right near Sami, but the force was strong. It was so loud the sky ripped open.’

  I notice the sound of chairs moving in other rooms, the laughter of a child.

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was holding Sami in my arms, and my husband was beside me and I could hear his voice, but I couldn’t see anything at all.’

  ‘What was the last thing you saw?’

  ‘Sami’s eyes. They were looking up at the sky.’

  Afra begins to cry in a way that I have never seen her cry. She is bent over and crying from her chest and the doctor gets up from his desk and sits beside her, and I feel that I am far away, that there is a growing desert between me and them. I can see the doctor offering her a tissue, then giving her some water, and I can see Afra’s body folded over, but I can’t hear her, and he is saying something, gentle words, sorry words, but my heart is thumping too loud for me to hear anything on the outside and I am so far from them. His voice is louder now and I try to focus. He is sitting at his desk with his glasses on, looking straight at me. I can tell that he has said something I didn’t hear. Then he looks at Afra.

  ‘Mrs Ibrahim, your pupils are reacting to the light, dilating and constricting in exactly the way I would expect them to if you could see.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ she says.

  ‘I’m not sure at the moment. You will need to have some X-rays taken. There is a possibility that the force of the explosion or the bright light damaged the retina in some way, but it is also possible that the blindness you are experiencing is the result of severe trauma – sometimes our bodies can find ways to cope when we are faced with things that are too much for us to bear. You saw your son die, Mrs Ibrahim, and maybe something in you had to shut down. In a way something similar happens when we faint out of shock. I can’t tell you for sure. We will only have the answer when you have more tests.’ For that brief moment, just as he finishes his words, he looks much smaller, hands clasped together, eyes darting now and then to the left of the room at a photograph on a cabinet of a beautiful girl in her twenties in a hat and graduation gown. He catches my gaze and looks away.