The Beekeeper of Aleppo

by Christy Lefteri

  ‘The bee is still alive!’ the Moroccan man says.

  I look at him and smile. ‘She’s a fighter,’ I say, ‘and it was raining last night. She won’t survive out there though, not for long, if she can’t fly.’

  I take the bee back outside, put her on a flower and I go to bed with Afra. I help her get undressed and I lie down to sleep beside her.

  ‘Where is Mustafa?’ she says. ‘Have you heard from him?’

  ‘Not for a long time,’ I say.

  ‘Have you checked your emails? Maybe he is trying to get hold of you? Does he know we are here?’

  There is a strange sound now, a whistle deep in the sky. ‘Can you hear that?’ I say.

  ‘It’s the rain on the window,’ she says.

  ‘Not that. The whistling. There is a whistle. It doesn’t stop. Like a dust storm is coming.’

  ‘There’s no dust storm here,’ she says. ‘Only rain or no rain.’

  ‘You can’t hear it then?’

  She looks concerned now and rests her head on her palm. She is about to say something and I laugh, stopping her. ‘It was cold but sunny today! Now it’s raining! This English weather is like a madman! Maybe you should come out tomorrow? We can go for a walk along the seafront.’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘I can’t. I don’t want to be out in this world.’

  ‘But you’re free now, you can go outside. You don’t have to be afraid anymore.’

  She doesn’t say anything in response.

  ‘A boy made the most amazing sandcastle, a whole city, with houses and a skyscraper!’

  ‘That’s nice,’ she says.

  There was a time when she wanted to know, when she would ask me what I saw. Now she doesn’t want to know anything at all.

  ‘We have to contact Mustafa,’ she says.

  * * *

  The darkness gets to me, and the way my wife smells gets to me, that mixture of rose perfume and sweat. She puts the perfume on before she goes to bed, takes the glass bottle out of her pocket and dabs it on her wrists and neck. The other residents are still talking in the living room downstairs, that strange combination of tongues. Someone laughs, and there are footsteps on the stairs. The floorboards creak, and I know it is the Moroccan man; I’ve come to recognise the sound of his walk. He has a particular way of pausing. It seems random at first, but there is a specific rhythm to it. He walks past our room, and at that moment I hear a marble rolling over the planks of wood. I know the sound. I jump up and turn on the light. I find Mohammed’s marble moving towards the rug, pick it up and look at the glass under the light, the red vein running through the middle.

  ‘What is it?’ Afra says.

  ‘It’s just the marble. It’s nothing. Go to sleep.’

  ‘Put it on the dressing table next to me,’ she says.

  I do as she says and get back into bed, this time lying with my back to her. She puts her hand on my back, presses her palm against my spine as if she is feeling for my breath. My eyes stay open in the dark because I am afraid of the

  fell and we were in Bab al-Faraj, in the old city. We were waiting beneath a narenj tree for a Toyota. The corpse of a man was waiting with us. The Toyota was going to be a pickup, no headlights, with metal bars on the sides, the type that usually transports livestock like cows and goats. The dead man was lying on his back with one arm bent over his head. The man was probably in his mid-twenties, wearing a black jumper and black jeans. I didn’t tell Afra that he was there.

  This was where the smuggler had told us to wait.

  The dead man’s face suddenly lit up. A glow of white light. On and off. There was a phone in his hand, the hand that was bent over his head. His eyes were brown, thick eyebrows. An old scar on his left cheek. The glint of a silver chain, a calligraphy name necklace: Abbas.

  ‘It’s beautiful here,’ she said. ‘I know exactly where we are.’

  There were once vines across this street and at the bottom a set of steps that led to the gated terrace of a school.

  ‘We’re by that clock,’ she said, ‘and there’s that café around the corner with the rosewater ice cream, where we took Sami that time, remember?’

  * * *

  Just behind the buildings, the time on the Bab al-Faraj Clock Tower glowed green. Eleven fifty-five. Five minutes. I stood there helpless, watching her, her expression warm with memory. Since she had laughed and cried she had come back to life, in fragments. A little of her showed through a crack and then she was gone again. Now, standing there with her face so close to mine, I could see the desire, the determination to hold on to an illusion, a vision of life, of Aleppo. The old Afra would have been disgusted by this. I felt suddenly afraid of her. The phone stopped flashing. It was darker now.

  In the distance I could see the citadel on its elliptical mound, like the tip of a volcano.

  The wind blew and brought with it the smell of roses.

  ‘Can you smell roses?’ I said.

  ‘I’m wearing the perfume,’ she said.

  She rummaged in her pocket and pulled out a glass bottle. She held it in her palm. I had it made it for her the year we got married. A friend of mine owned a rose distillery and I’d selected the roses myself.

  She was whispering now. She wanted to come back in spring when the flowers were in bloom. She would wear the perfume and her yellow dress, and we would walk together. We would start at our house and move through the city and up the hill to the souq. Then we would wander through the covered lanes of the old market, the alleyways of spices and soaps and teas and bronze and gold and silver and dried lemons and honey and herbs, and I would buy her a silk scarf.

  I suddenly felt sick. I’d already told her that the souq was empty, some of the alleys bombed and burnt, only soldiers and rats and cats wandered through the lanes where all those traders and tourists once walked. All the stalls had been abandoned, apart from one where an old man sold coffee to the soldiers. The citadel was now a military base, occupied by soldiers and surrounded by tanks.

  The al-Madina Souq was one of the oldest markets in the world, a key post on the Silk Road, where traders would travel from Egypt and Europe and China. Afra was talking about Aleppo like it was a magical land out of a story. It was like she’d forgotten everything else, the years leading up to the war, the riots, the dust storms, the droughts, the way we had struggled even then, even before the bombs, to stay alive.

  The dead man’s phone flashed again. Someone was desperate to speak to him. A hoopoe bird was sitting in the narenj tree, its inky eyes shimmering. The bird opened its wings, and black and white stripes caught the phone’s light. I became afraid of the light. I knelt down and peeled the phone from the man’s stiff fingers and stuffed it into my rucksack.

  The clock struck twelve. From the distance, the soft rumble of an engine. Afra straightened up, her face full of fear. A Toyota took the bend, lights off, wheels churning the ash. The driver got out, rough features, bearded, bald head, black T-shirt, army boots, army trousers, bumbag, handgun at his waist. He was a replica of a regime fighter: he’d shaved his head, his beard too. A trick in case he got caught by Assad’s Shabiha.

  He stood there for a moment, inspecting me. Afra moved her feet in the dust, but the man didn’t look at her.

  ‘You can call me Ali,’ he said finally, and he smiled, a broad smile, so wide that his whole face creased into folds. But something about his smile made me uncomfortable; it reminded me of another smile, a windup clown that Sami’s grandmother had bought him from the market. The smile suddenly faded and Ali’s eyes now darted around in the darkness.

  ‘What is it?’ I said.

  ‘I was told three people.’

  I gestured to the man on the ground.

  ‘Too bad.’ There was an unexpected tone of sadness in Ali’s voice and he stood for a moment over the man’s body, head bent, before he knelt down and took a gold wedding band from the dead man’s finger, placing it neatly on his own. He sighed and looked up at the clock tower, then
at the sky. I followed his gaze.

  ‘It’s a clear night. We are in a dome of stars. We have four hours before sunrise. We have to make it to Armanaz by three if you’re going to get across the border by four.’

  ‘How long does the journey take?’ Afra said.

  Ali looked at her now as if he was seeing her for the first time, but he replied with his eyes fixed on me, ‘Just under two hours. And you’re not going to sit with me. Get in the back.’

  There was a cow in the back of the pickup, the floor scattered with its faeces. I helped Afra in and the driver instructed us to sit low so we wouldn’t be seen. If we were caught, the snipers would shoot the cow instead. The cow stared at us. The engine started and the Toyota moved as quietly as possible through the ash streets, bumping over rubble.

  ‘There’s a phone ringing,’ Afra said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I can feel it vibrating on my leg, in your bag. Who’s calling us?’

  ‘It’s not my phone,’ I said. ‘I switched mine off.’

  ‘Whose phone is it then?’

  I took the phone from the rucksack. Fifty missed calls. It rang again.

  Zujet Abbas: the Wife of Abbas.

  ‘Who is it?’ Afra said. ‘Answer it.’

  ‘Give me your hijab,’ I said.

  Afra unwrapped the hijab from her head and handed it to me. I covered my head with it and answered the phone.

  ‘Abbas!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where are you now, Abbas?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, I’m not Abbas.’

  ‘Where is he? Can I talk to him? Did he get picked up? Did they pick him up?’

  ‘Abbas isn’t here.’

  ‘But I was talking to him. We got cut off.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Not long. About an hour. Please let me speak to him.’

  Just then the pickup stopped, the engine was turned off, footsteps approached. The driver pulled the hijab off me, threw it in the back, and I felt metallic cold between my eyebrows.

  ‘Are you stupid?’ Ali said. ‘Do you have a death wish?’ He pushed the gun into my forehead, his eyes gleaming. From the phone the wife of Abbas was saying, ‘Abbas, Abbas …’ again and again and again.

  ‘Give me that!’ the smuggler said, and so I handed him the phone and we set off again.

  We were heading to Urum al-Kubra, about twenty kilometres west of Aleppo. We meandered through the ruins of the old city; the western neighbourhoods were held by government forces, the rebels had the east. The river could see it all, running now through the no-man’s-land between the opposing front lines. If something was tossed in the Queiq on the government side, eventually it made its way to the rebels. As we reached the edge of the city we passed an enormous billboard of Bashar al-Assad, his blue eyes bright, like jewels, even in the darkness. The poster was intact, completely untouched.

  We reached the dual carriageway and the world suddenly opened up, black fields all around us, mulberry trees and olive trees blue under the moon. I knew that battles had been fought between rebels and Syrian troops amid the Dead Cities, the hundreds of long-abandoned Greco-Roman towns that littered the countryside outside Aleppo. In this blue emptiness, I tried to forget the things I knew, the things I’d heard. I would try to imagine that it was all untouched. Just like Bashar al-Assad’s blue eyes. What was lost would be lost forever. The Crusader castles, mosques and churches, Roman mosaics, ancient markets, houses, homes, hearts, husbands, wives, daughters, sons. Sons. I remembered Sami’s eyes, the moment the light fell away and they turned to glass.

  Afra was silent. Her hair loose now, the colour of the sky. I watched her as she sat there, picking at her skin, her white face paler than usual. My eyes began to close, and when I opened them I saw that we had arrived in Urum al-Kubra and in front of us was the skeleton of a bombed-out lorry. Our driver was pacing around. He said we were waiting for a mother and child.

  The place was empty. Unrecognisable. Ali was agitated. ‘We have to make it before sunrise,’ he said. ‘If we don’t make it before the sun, we will never make it.’

  From the darkness, between the buildings, a man appeared on a bicycle.

  ‘Let me do all the talking,’ Ali said. ‘He could be anyone. He might be a spy.’

  When the man came close I could see that he was as grey as concrete, it didn’t seem possible that this man could be a spy, but Ali wasn’t taking any chances.

  ‘I was wondering if you had any water,’ the man said.

  ‘It’s OK, my friend,’ Ali said. ‘We have some.’ He took a bottle from the passenger seat and gave it to this man, who drank it as if he’d been thirsty for a hundred years.

  ‘We have some food too.’ From a bag Ali took a tomato.

  The man held out his hand, palm open, as if he was receiving gold. Then he stood there like that, unmoving, with the tomato on his palm, inspecting each of us, one by one. ‘Where are you off to?’ he said.

  ‘We’re going to visit our aunt,’ Ali said. ‘She is very sick.’

  He pointed at the road ahead to indicate which way we were heading. Then, without saying another word, the man put the tomato into a basket on his bike, climbed on and headed off, but instead of riding away, he made a big circle in the road and came back to us.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the man said, ‘I forgot, I need to tell you something.’ He dragged his hand over his face, wiping away some of the dust so there were now finger tracks across his cheeks, revealing white skin.

  ‘I would not feel like a good man if I took your water and tomato and left without telling you. I would go to sleep tonight and wonder if you were dead or alive. If you take the road you said, you will find a sniper on top of a water tank about five kilometres away. He will see you. I would advise you strongly to take this road instead.’ He pointed to a dust road that led to a country lane, and he explained which way to go from there so that we would eventually get back on the right route.

  Ali would not wait for the mother and child any longer, and we decided to trust this man and take the detour, a right turn onto the country road that would take us between the towns of Zardana and Maarat Misrin.

  ‘Where are we?’ Afra said as we rattled along the country lanes. ‘What do you see?’

  ‘There are vines and olive trees for many miles around. It’s dark but very beautiful.’

  ‘Like it used to be?’

  ‘Like it has never been touched.’

  She nodded and I imagined that there was no war, that we were really going to see our sick aunt and that when we arrived the houses and the streets and the people would be as they always were. This is what I wanted: to be with Afra in a world that was still unbroken.

  As the pickup bumped almost soundlessly along the country track, I forced myself to stay awake, to breathe in the Syrian night with its untouched stars and untouched vines. I caught the smell of night jasmine and from further away the scent of roses. I imagined a great field of them, flashes of red in the moonlight in the sleeping fields, and at dawn the workers would arrive and the thick petals would be packed into crates. And then I could see my apiaries in the adjoining field, inside the hives rows of honeycomb, each tray containing delicate golden hexagons. On top were the roofs and from the holes in the sides the workers hummed, in and out, secreting wax from their glands, chewing it up and creating row after row of symmetrical polygons, five millimetres in diameter, as though they were laying down crystals. The queen bee in the queen cage, along with her few attendants, her royal scent acting like a magnet to the swarm. And the humming, that quiet musical humming that went on forever, and how the bees flew around me, past my face, getting caught in my hair, pulling themselves free, and off again.

  Then I remembered Mustafa, on the days that he arrived at the apiaries from the university in his suit, holding a flask of coffee and a rucksack full of books and papers. He would change and put on his protective gear and join me, checking the honey combs, the consistency and sme
ll and taste of the honey, dipping his finger in and tasting it. ‘Nuri!’ he would call. ‘Nuri! You know, I think our bees make the best honey in the world!’ And later, when the sun set, we would leave the bees and head home through the traffic of the city. Sami would be waiting by the window, with a look on his face like he’d done something wrong, and Afra would open the front door.

  ‘Nuri. Nuri. Nuri.’

  I opened my eyes. ‘What is it?’

  Afra’s face was close to mine. ‘You were crying,’ she said. ‘I heard you crying.’ And with both of her hands she wiped away my tears. She looked into my eyes, as if she could see me. In that moment I could see her too, the woman inside, the woman I’d lost. She was there with me, her soul open and present and clear as light. For those few seconds I was no longer afraid of the journey, of the road ahead. But in the next moment her eyes darkened, they died, and she sank down and away from me. I knew that I couldn’t force her to stay with me, there was nothing I could say to bring her back once she had disappeared. I had to let her go and wait for her to come back.

  We skirted around Maarat Misrin and then rejoined the dual carriageway, we crossed a mountain and then the valley between Haranbush and Kafar Nabi and eventually we approached Armanaz, and there, ahead, were the great spotlights of the Turkish border, shining across the flat land like a white sun.

  Between Armanaz and the border is the Asi River. It separates Turkey from Syria and I knew that we would need to get across. The driver stopped the pickup in a dark place beneath some trees and he led us along a path through a wood. Afra was holding my hand so tight, sometimes tripping and falling, and I had to keep lifting her and holding her around the waist. But I could barely see in that darkness and things moved in the leaves and branches. Not too far away I could hear voices and then, as we came out of the woods, I saw thirty or forty people standing like ghosts on the riverbank. A man was lowering a young girl into a large saucepan – the kind that we normally used to boil couscous. There was a long cable attached to it so that men on the other side of the river could pull it across. This man was trying to help the girl into the saucepan, but she was crying and had both arms wrapped around his neck and wouldn’t let go.