The Beekeeper of Aleppo(14)

‘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.