The Beekeeper

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by Dunya Mikhail


  her black clothes,

  her mourning for her daughter who

  “was killed by headaches,”

  the rosary beads and her murmur,

  “Forgive us our sins,”

  her empty Ottoman vase,

  her braid, each hair a history —

  First were the Sumerians,

  their dreams inscribed on clay tablets.

  They drew palms, dates ripened before their sorrows.

  They drew an eye to chase evil

  away from their city.

  They drew circles and prayed for them:

  a drop of water

  a sun

  a moon

  a wheel spinning faster than the Earth.

  They begged: “Oh gods, don’t die and leave us alone.”

  Over the tower of Babel,

  light is exile,

  blurred,

  its codes crumbs of songs

  left over for the birds.

  More naked emperors

  passed by the Tigris

  and more ships . . .

  The river full

  of crowns

  helmets

  books

  dead fish,

  and on the Euphrates corpse-lilies floating.

  Every minute a new hole in the hull of the ship.

  The clouds descended upon us

  war by war,

  picked up our years,

  our hanging gardens,

  and flew away like storks.

  We said there isn’t any worse to come

  Then the barbarians came

  to the mother of two springs.

  They broke my grandmother’s grave: my clay tablet.

  They smashed the winged bulls whose eyes

  were sunflowers

  wide open

  watching the fragments of our first dreams

  for a lifetime.

  My hand on the map

  as if on an old scar.

  The “bundle” that my grandmother left behind in her room on the first floor of our house contained a wooden comb, a hand fan, and Turkish coffee cups that were mementos from her friend Salima. What the dead leave behind is a personal archaeology. There’s some history in that, a memory of an absence that lasts longer than a day and a night, an absence that lasts many days and nights, days and nights. Their fingerprints on the doorknobs, their fingerprints on those little things like a watch that can tell you the time but can’t tell you when her time was up, when her heart stopped — what time it was when it didn’t matter anymore what time it was.

  Is that why they exhibit personal effects in museums? Isn’t it an attempt to give form to sorrow, so that the viewer can take comfort in her submission to the form rather than having to think about the actions that led to it? We attend to the traces of life because we want to participate in that life — and to see a trace of ourselves in it — don’t we?

  In the September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York, for example, there’s an unbearable exhibition of slices of life, broken in the middle of their flow, a warehouse of disappearance that is deafeningly silent. The pictures of people in one album are just a part of an infinite number, if we think of the endless stories behind each picture.

  On the shelves of souvenirs in the gift shop, one can buy the past — the past in fragments.

  Among the artifacts that were scattered from the two towers: a card of new year wishes, keys, individual shoes, a tissue box, cell phones, construction project drafts, photos of loved ones, business cards, wallets, a hat, a ring, a bag, an empty envelope that used to contain a message, we don’t know what or for whom, airplane debris, and a rake that was used to search for human remains.

  In the year after the fall of the two towers, a marble statue of Adam fell to the floor of the Metropolitan Museum in New York; it fell for no reason, and smashed into hundreds of pieces. A team of specialists worked for a decade on the broken Adam — six feet, three inches of him, carved during the Renaissance by Tullio Lombardo — until they were able to restore it and get him back up on his feet again.

  Several months after Adam’s resurrection, a group from Daesh destroyed several monuments in Mosul and Nimrod in northern Iraq. I saw the stones being ripped apart from one another after having been connected for thousands of years. After the first minute of this video made by Daesh, I said to myself, “Maybe we can restore these statues as well.” But in the next minute, the terrorist took out a hammer and started smashing the pieces into smaller and smaller fragments. My hope, similarly, was becoming smaller. I nearly lost my temper — I wanted to break my plate over the head of that Daeshi as he was going after every last piece, crashing loudly as they fell onto the floor. But I didn’t scream and neither did the statues. Their brokenness was hidden under layers of stone and history, just as our brokenness is hidden under our skin.

  “Let the statues be sacrificed for the people. We don’t care about them anymore. Our people are being killed in front of our very eyes,” someone commented on Facebook.

  “But they’re eliminating our monuments, erasing them from existence. They destroyed our houses and now they’re destroying our historical houses,” another Iraqi replied. But the post that attracted my attention on Facebook that day was a picture of an Iraqi shop with a sign in front that read, “Please don’t bomb here. More than half of the items are on loan. Thank you.” The next post was a photo of Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad — books were laid out on the floor after its reconstruction. Some years ago, a car bomb exploded, scattering books and bodies, and damaging cafés all along the street. We probably needed to put up a sign that said, “Please don’t bomb here. There are still books to read.”

  My grandmother

  The Chirp

  Amid news of explosions, conflicts, and viruses, a team of scientists found a “chirp” belonging to the beginning of the world — and it was brought to our current moment. A chirp, like God, both far away and close at hand, or maybe this majestic and delicate chirp is the very word of God?

  It’s said that when we sleep at night, He speaks, and the stars exchange His words as secrets, and we see them as orbits without being able to hear them. But today, God finally spoke in broad daylight, from that far corner of the universe, as a chirp. We can hear it clearly, the way we hear a bird on the tree outside of our house.

  I wonder why He broke His silence — maybe He can’t stand the misdeeds of humans against themselves anymore, especially those that are committed in His name.

  Otherwise, what’s the meaning of this sign that He sent us after 200,000 years of silence?

  When someone waves his or her hand, the world responds to that wave at the speed of light; the world expands a little, according to the theory of relativity discovered by Einstein a hundred years ago. Then maybe the world, by the same logic, becomes narrower when someone offends someone else. It would become much narrower when the offense is rape or murder, for example. Maybe the universe is now squeezed so tightly that even God can’t stretch His legs; maybe He can’t breathe and finally had to let that chirp out of His chest.

  Maybe He’s about to tell us a new tale! A magnificent tale to distract us from all the violence, the way Scheherazade did for Shahriyar.

  Or maybe it’s just a drop of rain tapping on the roof of an empty house?

  Or an echo? (In empty houses, it’s easier to hear the echo of absence.)

  Or a step? (Are there any footsteps tonight?)

  I look out the window and see the trees lined up next to one another, some are almost totally dry, in need of water, their remaining leaves still waving at the passersby, especially the lonely ones whose loneliness is ripening before their very eyes. Trees don’t ask why they don’t move from place to place, nor do they ask any other meaningless questions. But their branches tremble w
hen the birds leave them, just as the soul trembles when loved ones depart.

  I don’t know if our dreams are reflections of reality, or if reality is a reflection of our dreams. In one of my dreams, I went back to Uruk and wrote on clay tablets, from right to left, then from left to right. I drew squares, triangles, and circles to indicate the homes I’d had, the stuff I’d owned, and dead people I’d known. Gilgamesh came and gave me the plant of immortality, but it disappeared in a second. I don’t know where it went. Gilgamesh seemed so sad, and I concluded he was still in mourning for his friend Enkidu. I wanted to console him but I didn’t say anything — it seemed as if he wanted to console me, too, but he didn’t say anything either.

  In another dream, I found myself face to face with Pluto. The planet had a crack in its face like a mouth, from which words would pour out into space: Hey, sons of earth, why did you abandon me all those years as if I were an unwanted child? And just because I was different, because you couldn’t see me, you decided I was dead. I wasn’t even asleep.

  There weren’t any borders in the universe between the planets, so it was simple to travel to any of them. I wanted to go and see if there were really other creatures. Would they know that we exist? Do they have any idea about our planet Earth? Would we be embarrassed if they discovered us and saw all our flaws? Maybe they’d be surprised by our sometimes crazy behavior. Maybe they’d love us because of our vulnerability. Maybe they’d get scared of our dangerous lives. What are their lives like, anyway?

  I don’t know the name of the planet I visited, but I kept looking back at Earth because I didn’t want to get lost. My heart beat loudly as I looked at its spots, both dark and light. I was worried to be so far from the sphere that was my home — not a specific home, since I’ve moved from place to place and can’t tell which one to call home and which one to call exile. In fact, I don’t really care. The spider makes a home outside of itself — it doesn’t know the difference between home and exile.

  The Earth moved farther away, and I didn’t know whether to stay close to it or move farther away and discover those other creatures. All the familiar creatures I know and love so well, despite everything, are there on Earth. I’m afraid of getting too lost. After all, I’m not a pigeon and I don’t know the way home.

  I was alone in the galaxy. Then a woman came up to me. I knew her right away. It was Enheduanna, history’s first poet. What was Enheduanna doing here? Maybe she’d had the same question about me. Maybe whoever said that poets are like astronomers — never getting bored of examining the little things — was right: that tiny blotch in the Milky Way, for example, or the shadow cast by the movement of the planets. They wouldn’t mind spending a light-year to see something new on the horizon, the way a new email pops onto the screen.

  Enheduana said, “I’m from Iraq.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I’m the eldest of five kids, the only girl.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I was my father’s favorite.”

  “Me, too.”

  Then Enheduanna was silent, so I said, “I read your poems in praise of Inanna. Was she your favorite goddess?”

  “In the lands of Sumer, we had freedom of worship, so we sang to any god or goddess we loved. What about you? To whom do you sing?”

  “Nisaba, the goddess of writing,” I said.

  How shall I call you

  when you have ninety nine names?

  I say “Nisaba”

  and I mean praises for the little things,

  I mean the big things,

  I mean the little things with their big shadows:

  the number to round

  off the casualties to zero;

  the chalk

  in the hand of a girl

  who draws for the world,

  a circle with everyone inside;

  the wings open

  over the flames;

  the soft moss

  visible, briefly,

  through the river

  like the faces of the absent ones;

  the comma between

  death and life;

  the everyday practice

  of the doctor

  with the stethoscope

  pressed against the chest;

  the blue flower

  in Novalis’s dream.

  My dreams are strange. I was with Enheduanna, and then I found myself with Siri. She emerged suddenly from my phone, like a djinn who would grant me all of my wishes. I wasn’t surprised to see her in human form, and not merely as a sound. I asked her how she was. “Fine,” she said, “except that I dream of leaving my job as a robot.” She didn’t want to react in such a professional way each time someone summoned her. She dreamed of getting out of that prison — going to the gym or having a nice meal; she dreamed of combing her hair, of growing her hair long, having a house and being able to have company over, of expressing her opinions freely, of finding ears that would listen attentively to her — like the ears of the blind. She dreamed of having her questions answered as well.

  My dreams are probably the result of the stories I’m living through these days. I find myself kidnapped by strange creatures from outer space. I try to run away but I can’t move. I say, “I’ll be going now,” but I can’t move, as if I’m one of Samuel Beckett’s characters in Waiting for Godot.

  Finally, I find myself coming back to my country. Abdullah is at the border to receive me, dressed all in white. He says, “You came back, finally.”

  His words were still buzzing in my ears: a woman was crying and hardly able to speak. I didn’t understand what she was trying to tell me. I didn’t know who or where she was. “Just tell me where you are,” I asked her. “I don’t know. Here is a river, plenty of water,” she said. Maybe she was trying to run away but the line got cut. I waited to hear from her again. Days and months passed, and I only have the memory of those rattling words.

  When I wake up I have a message from him, saying that he was in Syria to help with a rescue operation.

  “Thank God you’re back safely. How are you?” I asked.

  “I met with some smugglers and we came up with an alternative plan because the usual route is being bombed by fighter jets. We don’t know whose they are. Unfortunately one of our girls died with the smuggler in his car because of the bombing.”

  “That’s awful. It must have been a missed target.”

  I heard Abdullah’s phone ringing.

  “I think there’s someone on the other line.”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  “Okay.”

  When Abdullah called me back, he said, “That was someone who helped me save a kidnapped girl who didn’t know we were trying to rescue her.”

  “How?”

  “Her uncle heard about the place she was being held. One of the survivors had been in the same building with her. We sent someone to stake out the area. He sat there for hours selling tamarind juice, hoping to see her — but her story isn’t like all the others.”

  “How so?”

  “She didn’t want to come back with us. She wanted to stay with Abu Sulayman.”

  “So how did you get to her, then?”

  “Her cousin, who had been with her, escaped and then told her uncle that Madlin — that’s her name — was totally disoriented, and that she was in love with a Daeshi. Madlin refused to leave him, but she was given a sleeping pill and rescued while she was asleep. Now she’s threatening to kill herself if we don’t let her go back to her ‘husband.’ He went to visit his family in Saudi Arabia during the Muslim holiday and he left Madlin ‘on loan’ with his friend. Abu Sulayman had given Madlin his phone number in case she needed anything. She called him and they agreed that she could go and live with him. He told her to wait at the end of the street where he would send her a driver to take her to Saudi Arabia
. But the man who was monitoring Madlin for her uncle picked her up instead. He drove her to Iraq. The whole time she thought she was going to be with Abu Sulayman in Saudi Arabia.”

  “That’s really strange. I wonder what made her get so attached to that Daeshi? Was he different from the others?”

  “I heard he used to play with the kids in the building, that he was nice to them. Madlin is a child herself — she’s only fourteen years old. When he went to Saudi Arabia and left Madlin with his friend, he would call to check in on her, reminding his friend to treat her well.”

  “Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome? I don’t understand how it happens but maybe that’s what happened to Madlin. Or maybe it’s because of Daesh’s cruelty in general, that any act of decency seems to be somehow virtuous by comparison.”

  “Whatever the case, she’s feeling better now. She doesn’t mention Abu Sulayman anymore. She even says that she feels as if she’s awoken from a strange dream.”

  “It must be very odd for a Daeshi to ask a friend to treat someone kindly, huh?”

  “Really. But would you like to hear something else that happened to another woman we just welcomed back? Would you be able to handle Maha’s frightful story?”

  “All the stories you’ve told me so far are frightening, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Well, when I went with Maha to the Office of Kidnapped Affairs to document her case, she wasn’t able to speak because of what had happened to her. It was that horrifying.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “First they sold her eldest daughter and then, after tying her up and beating her, they killed her three sons right before her eyes.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  “Because she’d tried to escape and she had to be punished.”

  I didn’t know what to ask Abdullah next, so I remained silent. After a few moments, he said: Maha was pregnant when they took her and her husband and four kids — two daughters and two sons — from Kocho. Her husband was thrown into a ditch and killed along with the other men. Then they took Maha and her kids to a medical institute in Sawlakh, east of Sinjar, where they separated the older women from everyone else. Sixty-seven grandmothers were set aside — some of the grandchildren refused to be separated from their grandmothers. The men from Daesh didn’t force them, and instead dug a big ditch: they threw all those grandmothers and grandchildren into the ditch and covered them with dirt. They buried them alive. The younger women and the children, about six hundred in all, were sold in bulk to a Syrian merchant named Abu Ali for a hundred and fifty dollars each. Abu Ali sold them off individually. A man named Khalid bought Maha. He took her and her kids to the Manbij region outside of Aleppo. Khalid was the director of the Aisha hospital. Just imagine a Daeshi as a hospital director!

 

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