The Beekeeper of Aleppo(12)

I held my breath and I held her tight so that she couldn’t move. I thought of covering her mouth with my hand. I didn’t trust her not to speak, not to call out. It was her choice now: to live or to die. Above, there was movement and shuffling and mumbled words, and then, finally, the footsteps retreated. It wasn’t until Afra released her breath that I realised she still had an instinct to live.

It was morning when I decided that the men must have left, there had been no sound for a few hours and light spilled through at the edges of the metal roof, illuminating the mud walls. I pushed up the roof and saw the sky, vast and unscathed: the blue of dreams. Afra was awake but silent, lost in her black world.

When we entered the house I wished I was blind too. The living room was trashed and the walls covered in graffiti. We win or we die.

‘Nuri?’

I didn’t reply.

‘Nuri … what have they done?’

I watched her stand there among the broken things, a dark ghost of a figure, erect and unmoving and blind.

But I remained silent and she took a step forward and knelt down, searching with her hands. From the floor she picked up a broken ornament: a crystal bird with the words 99 names of Allah inscribed in gold on an open wing. A wedding present from her grandmother.

She turned it around in her hands, as she had done with the pomegranate, feeling its lines, its curves. Then, in a soft voice, like the voice of a child resurrected from years past, she began to recite the list engraved in her mind: ‘The maker of order, the subduer, the knower of all, the seer of all, the hearer of all, the giver of life, the taker of life …’

‘Afra!’ I said.

She put the ornament down and leant forward, searching the space ahead with her fingers. Now she picked up a toy car. I had put them all away in the cupboard a few weeks after Sami died. Now I couldn’t bear to look at them, broken and strewn across the floor. There was even a jar of chocolate spread there, Sami’s favourite treat, rolling away from Afra and stopping at the foot of the chair. It must have been mouldy by now, but I had kept it in the cupboard with all of the things that reminded me of him. When she realised that she had a toy car in her hand, Afra put it down immediately and turned her head towards me, somehow managing to catch my eye with hers.

‘I’m going,’ I said, ‘whether you come or not.’

I left her side and searched for our bags. I found them in the bedroom, untouched, slung them over my shoulders and returned to the living room, to find her standing in the middle of the room. In her open palms she had colourful pieces of Lego: the remnants of a house that Sami had built – the house we would live in when we got to England, he had said, once he’d agreed that it would be a good thing to go.

‘There’ll be no bombs there,’ he’d said, ‘and the houses won’t break like these do.’ I wasn’t sure if he’d meant the Lego houses or the real houses, and then it saddened me when I realised that Sami had been born into a world where everything could break. Real houses crumbled, fell apart. Nothing was solid in Sami’s world. And yet somehow he was trying to imagine a place where the buildings didn’t fall down around him. I had stored the Lego house safely in the cupboard, carefully, to make sure it was exactly as Sami had left it. I’d even thought of taking it apart and reassembling it with glue, so that we could always keep it.

‘Nuri,’ Afra said, breaking the silence, ‘I’m done. Please. Take me away from here.’

And she stood there with her eyes moving about the room, as if she could see it all.





3




I WAKE UP FLAT ON MY back in the garden. It has been raining and my clothes are damp. There is one tree in this concrete space, its roots cracking through the paving and poking into my back. I realise that I’m holding some blossoms in my fist. There is someone standing above me, blocking the sun.

‘What are you doing there, geezer?’ The Moroccan man looks down at me, a broad smile on his face. He speaks in Arabic. ‘Did you sleep here in the garden, geezer?’ He holds out his hand to me, unreasonably strong for such an old man and stable on his feet as he pulls me up.

‘Giza?’ I say, half dazed.

‘Geeeeezer,’ he says, and chuckles. ‘The man in the shop says geeeeezer. It means old man.’

I follow him inside, into the warmth. He tells me that Afra has been looking for me. ‘She’s been crying,’ he says, which I find hard to believe, and when I see her in the kitchen she is already dressed and is sitting stiff at the table just as she was when Lucy Fisher was here. It doesn’t seem to me like she’s been crying, and I haven’t seen or heard her cry since Aleppo. She is holding Mohammed’s marble, twirling it around in her fingers. I’ve tried to take it from her before but she won’t let it go.

‘So you can dress yourself then?’ I say. But I immediately regret these words when I see her face drop.

‘Where did you go?’ she says. ‘I was up most of the night and I didn’t know where you were.’

‘I fell asleep downstairs.’

‘Hazim told me you were sleeping in the garden!’

My body stiffens.

‘He is kind,’ she says. ‘He said he would find you and he told me not to worry.’

I decide to go for a walk. It’s my first time outside. This whole place is strange, the shops standing shabby and proud – Go Go Pizza, Chilli Tuk-Tuk, Polskie Smaki, Pavel India, Moshimo. At the end of the road there is a convenience store where someone is playing Arabic music very loudly. I make my way down to the sea. There is no sand on this beach, only pebbles and shingle, but along the promenade by the seafront there is a huge sandpit for children to play in. A boy in red shorts is making a sandcastle. It’s not hot, but they think it is, so his mother has put him in shorts, and this boy is scooping up sand and placing it carefully into a blue bucket, until it is full. He evens it out with precision, using the handle of his spade.