Firas and Aya and Dahab were there, and even Mustafa’s father had made a trip down from the mountains; a quiet, unassuming man, nothing like his own father, but he was proud of his son’s achievements and he relished the food and the company, speaking to me freely about his apiaries. The scene was magical – the leaves of the trees glistened, the smoke of the shisha rose into the night in ribbons of silk, the plants in the hanging baskets suddenly bloomed with glowing flowers, infusing the courtyard with their sweet scent. It became a place in a storybook, the type my mother used to read to me in the room with the blue tiles.
In the morning I woke up and I realised that I hadn’t kept my promise, I did fall asleep on the tree, and Angeliki had left. The green headscarf was saturated with blood and the pain in my arm was worse. The old women were handing out food packages, and I noticed a few NGO workers walking around. I raised my hand and called to one, a woman in her early twenties. I held out my arm and she stood over me and flinched. She hovered there for a few moments, not knowing what to do, and then she told me to wait, to not go anywhere, that she would get someone who could help me, that she only worked with the children and had no medical experience, but she could find someone who would know what to do.
I thanked her and she left, and the day passed but the young NGO worker didn’t return. So I took off the green headwrap and saw that the wound was deep and still bleeding. I cleaned it with some drinking water and then I wrapped it back up with the same headscarf.
It was later in the afternoon that I saw the NGO worker coming through the woods towards me. Behind her was an older woman with a rucksack on her shoulders. They stopped beside me and talked between themselves for a while in a language I didn’t recognise. Perhaps it was Dutch or Swiss or German, I couldn’t tell. The older woman then knelt down beside me and opened the rucksack, putting on some latex gloves, unwrapping the scarf and pursing her lips when she saw the wound.
‘How did you do this?’
‘Somebody did it to me,’ I said.
She gave me a concerned look but said nothing. She spent a long time cleaning the wound with antiseptic wipes and then closing it with butterfly stitches, placing each one delicately over the cut with a pair of tweezers.
‘I need to leave from here,’ I said.
She said nothing.
‘How do people leave?’
She gave me a long look, pausing with the tweezers in her hand, but then she continued with her task, lips tight. When she began to cover the wound with a clean bandage, her shoulders relaxed and she started to speak again.
‘I would have told you to go to Scopje,’ she said, blowing her hair away from her face, ‘but people are fighting with the police there to cross into Macedonia. They’ve closed the borders. No one is getting through now. You’ll get stuck there.’
‘What else can I do?’
‘You can take the coach to the villages. There is priority for people from Syria. It comes once a week.’
‘And then what happens?’
‘You stay there.’
‘For how long?’
There was no response. She pushed her hair back, twisting it into a bun and releasing it. I noticed that she was wearing an identity badge around her neck. Her name was Emily. Underneath her handwritten name was a small logo.
She began to pack her things away.
‘What about the woman from Africa, and there are two teenage boys in trouble. Can they go to the villages?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. Then, ‘No. I don’t think so. God, you really shouldn’t be asking me. I can’t take responsibility. There are advisors.’
‘Where are they?’
I could see that she was struggling with herself, her eyes sparkling with grievance, her face flushed with anger.
‘If you go to Victoria Square—’
‘I’ve heard about Victoria Square.’
‘If you go there, there is a centre on Elpidos Street – the Hope Centre. They help mothers and children and unaccompanied boys. They will advise you.’ She said this in one breath and then forced a smile.
That night Angeliki returned. She sat down beside the tree and covered her face with talcum powder. She was wearing a black headwrap with silver sequins that sparkled in the light of the fire. She took small purposeful sips of water from a bottle and inspected the wounds on her arms. When Afra sensed her presence, she sat up, more alert, edging closer to her.
‘What you doing?’ Afra said.
‘They say me to drink a lot of water,’ Angeliki replied. ‘Because of my poison blood.’
Afra shook her head.
‘It is, I am telling you. I tell you all about it yesterday! I tell you, my breath it stop and it does not come back. My breath it stop, and they took it. Some people, they want to take your breath. And then they put something in my blood. They poison it, and now my mind is ill.’
Although Afra probably didn’t understand all of what Angeliki was saying, I could see that she was moved by the words and her tone of voice, and when Angeliki stopped talking, Afra reached out and put her hand on Angeliki’s arm.
Angeliki breathed slower now and said, ‘I am glad you are here with me, Afra.’
From deep in the woods came the sound of the rebab, beautiful and full of light, even in the darkness. The notes seemed to touch the flames of the fire, causing them to flicker, and the music was carried away by the wind, deeper into the woods. The sound calmed my mind, but as soon as he stopped playing I was reminded immediately of Nadim’s long nails, of the sharp edge of the knife and the heat across my wrist. The twins had not returned since last night and I wanted to go and find them. I contemplated going back to the empty well to see if they were there or to ask if anyone had seen them, but fear was stopping me from venturing into the woods again. I needed to stay alive for Afra. I waited instead, hoping that the boys would emerge from the shadows and return to their blanket beneath the tree.
It was Mohammed I saw in my nightmares that night, on the boat, his face serious and determined, between flashes of torchlight. Just like that night, there was a moment of darkness, and when the light came back on, he was gone.
It was almost exactly as it had happened that night. I was scanning the water, the black waves, as far as my eye could see in every direction, and then I jumped in, and the waves were high, and I was calling his name and I could hear Afra’s voice from the boat. I went under into the black silence and stayed 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. But in my dream one detail was different: Mohammed was not saved by the man, he was not on the boat; in his place, wrapped up in the women’s arms and headscarves, was a little girl with eyes like the night.
I woke up to the sound of shouting. A young boy was screaming something in Farsi, there was movement and noise in the darkness, people waking up and running towards the boy. I got up too, moved towards the commotion. The boy was crying and struggling to breathe and pointing into the woods. A group of men appeared with baseball bats as if they had been waiting for this moment, and they began to run in the direction the boy was pointing. I ran with them, and I soon realised that they were chasing someone. They pounced on him as if they were one huge animal, knocking him to the ground.
That’s when somebody handed me a bat. I looked at this man squirming, trying to free himself, and I saw that it was Nadim. He looked so different there on the ground, his face full of fear. The men held him down and others took turns beating him. I stood motionless and watched as they beat him until his eyes were rolling in his skull and his face was broken, until his legs and arms twitched.
‘Why are you just standing there?’ one man said, nudging me. ‘Don’t you know this man is the devil?’ And so I took a step closer to take my turn, and I heard the cheers of the men and then everything and everyone around me seemed to van
ish and all I could see was Nadim’s face looking up at me. For a moment his focus cleared, his eyes fixed on mine and he said something to me that I couldn’t hear, while a voice from behind urged me on and I felt the throb of my wound and remembered the innocent faces of the twins and some other anger grew in me, one that I did not recognise, and I brought the bat down onto his skull.
Then he was motionless. I dropped the bat and stepped back. One man kicked him and another spat on him, and then they all ran off, in all directions, into the woods or back to the campsite.
I dragged his body deeper into the woods, where the trees were closer together, where the noises of the city and the noises of the campsite were far away, and I sat beside him until the sun began to rise.
By the dim light of dawn, I made my way back to the camp. I came upon two men having a heated discussion. I recognised them immediately and quickly stepped into the shadows. One of them was sitting on the splintered log where Nadim had once sat; the other was restless, pacing up and down, stepping over a baseball bat.
‘What the hell are you feeling guilty about?’
‘We killed someone.’
‘He was taking those boys. You know what he was doing, right?’
‘I know. I know that.’
‘What if it had been your son?’
The man on the log didn’t reply.
‘I mean, can you imagine?’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘He was evil. The worst kind of evil there is.’
‘Did you not hear what happened to Sadik’s son?’
This wasn’t really a question, and the man sitting down lowered his eyes, running his hand over his face.
There was silence for a while and I didn’t dare to move, to even take a breath. The wind picked up and leaves on the trees rustled above us and I could hear footsteps in the woods and the sounds of laughter and faint music.
The man sitting on the log stood up now to face the other man. ‘What leads a man to do such things?’
I didn’t hear the reply because a group of boys walked between us, about five or six of them. One held a football in his hands, another had an Arabic song playing on his phone and a few of the boys sang along to the chorus. The two men took this as their cue and began to walk back to the camp. I took their place on the log, and felt its ridges and grooves with my fingers. I imagined Nadim; I could see him, as if he was sitting right there beside me, penknife in his hand, slicing his skin, that look in his eyes, full of rage.
‘What happened to you, Nadim?’ I said out loud. ‘What led you to do such things?’
And the wind replied, it lifted the fallen leaves, it tossed them about around me and then dropped them and the laughter and the music faded now completely, the boys lost to the depths of the woods.
Then I returned to the camp. Angeliki had gone now and I lay down beside Afra.
‘Where did you go?’ she whispered.
‘There was a problem.’
‘What kind of problem?’
‘You don’t want to know, trust me. It’s finished now.’
I remembered a verse from the Qur’an:
Be merciful to others and you will receive mercy. Forgive others and Allah will forgive you.
I then recalled some words from the Hadith:
The prophet would not respond to an evil deed with an evil deed but rather he would pardon and overlook.
And I looked at my hands, turned them over as if I was seeing them for the first time: one wrapped in a bandage, the other that had held the bat. I began to feel that fear again, the kind that had consumed me in Aleppo, alert to every movement and sound, imagining danger everywhere, expecting that at any moment the worst would happen, that death was near. I felt exposed, as if people were watching me from the woods, and when the wind blew it brought with it whispers: murderer, Nadim is dead, murderer.
I placed my palm on Afra’s chest, feeling her chest rise and fall, matching my breath to hers, slower, steadier. I recalled Mustafa’s British black bees and kept my eyes closed tight until I could see purple fields and rolling hills of lavender and heather, spilling over the edge of the world.
* * *
When I woke up, it was the afternoon. I looked at the step where Nadim should have been sitting, rolling a cigarette. I looked at the white statue – the head and shoulders of a bearded man, the inscription in Greek and the date: 1788–1825, and wondered what kind of a man he was. In my anxious state, I remembered vaguely the stories my mother used to tell me. In these tales statues were not objects of art or reverence – they were evil-averting talismans or guardians of treasure, or human beings or animals who had been turned to stone. In some stories demons entered the statues and spoke through them.
Afra sat beside me and I wished that she could see, wished that she could be the woman she used to be, because Afra had always had a deep understanding of the world; she had a way of seeing things. Afra always knew too much, burdened with the ability to strip people and places of their masks, to find the remnants of the past in the present. I noticed that Nadim had left his rebab on the step of the statue. I walked over and picked it up. I strummed the strings and remembered the beautiful melody that had washed over me and through me like water, quenching the scorched cracks in my mind, like the feeling of the first drop of water on my tongue when the sun sets during the month of Ramadan. That was what Nadim’s music felt like, and this thought alone twisted my mind, distorted my thoughts. I closed my eyes and focused instead on the sound of children playing, laughing, kicking a ball.
11
IT IS THE DAY OF our interview. Afra is sitting beside me on the train and I know that she is nervous. Diomande is standing, holding the rail; there is a free seat for him but he won’t sit down. His tall distorted body is even more prominent in this public place. He looks like a character from a fairy tale, and I find it strange that out of all the people in the carriage I am the only one who knows his secret. Diomande is reading the advice in his notebook, muttering under his breath. ‘This is not a history lesson,’ he says in English, ‘and they do not need to know too much about the last president, unless they ask.’
Eventually we arrive in a place called Croydon. Lucy Fisher meets us at the station and takes us to the centre. It is a tall building on a brown street. Inside we go through checkpoints, barriers, security, where they scan us, search us and get us to sign in. Then we sit in a waiting area with people who look as frightened as we do. And so we wait. Diomande goes in first. Next is Afra, and a few minutes later I am taken to a room at the end of a long corridor.
There are two people sitting in this room, a man and a woman. The man is probably in his early forties; he has shaved off his hair because he is balding on top. He doesn’t look into my eyes, not once. He asks me to sit down, says my name as if he knows me, but his eyes wander. And yet there is an arrogance about him, a subtle smirk on his lips. The woman beside him is a bit older with curly hair. She is sitting very upright and trying to look welcoming. They are both immigration officers. He offers me tea or coffee and I refuse.
He runs through the procedure and says that the interview is being recorded. He reminds me that there will be a second interview. First, he asks me to confirm my name and date of birth and where I was born and where I was living when the war started. Then the questions start to become strange.
‘Are there any landmarks in Aleppo?’ he says.
‘Of course.’
‘Can you name some of these?’
‘Well, there’s the citadel. The Umayyad Mosque, Khan al-Jumruk, al-Firdaws Madrasa, which means “the school of paradise”, al-Otrush Mosque, the Bab al-Faraj Clock Tower … do you want more?’
‘Thank you, that should be sufficient. Is the old souq in the north or east of the city?’
‘It’s central.’
‘What do they sell at the souq?’
‘Thousands of things!’
‘Such as?’
‘Fabrics, silks and linen. Carpets and l
anterns and silver, gold and bronze, and spices and teas and herbs and my wife used to sell her paintings there.’
‘What’s your country’s name?’
‘Syria. Don’t you want to know how I got here?’
‘We’ll get there soon. These are just standard questions, part of the procedure.’
He pauses for a moment and consults his papers. Then he scratches his shiny head.
‘Have you seen Daesh?’
‘No, not personally.’
‘So you’ve never come in contact with anyone from this group?’
‘No. Of course I’ve seen them on the streets or wherever, but I’ve never had any personal contact with them.’
‘Were you ever held prisoner by Daesh?’
‘No.’
‘Did you work with Daesh?’
‘No.’
‘Are you married?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is your wife’s name?’
‘Afra Ibrahim.’
‘Do you have children?’
‘Yes.’
‘How many?’
‘One, a boy.’
‘Where was he born?’
‘In Aleppo.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He died in Syria.’
He pauses for a moment and stares at the desk. The woman next to him looks sad. I’m starting to feel agitated.
‘Can you say something special about him? Something you remember about him?’
‘Who?’
‘Your son. I understand this is difficult, Mr Ibrahim, but could you please try to answer the question. It’s important that you do.’
‘OK. Once, when he was riding his bike down the hill – I’d told him not to because there was such a steep hill going down to the city from our bungalow – well, he fell off it and broke his finger and it didn’t really mend and he had this little bend in his finger.’
The Beekeeper of Aleppo: A Moving Testament to the Human Spirit Page 18