The Beekeeper of Aleppo(15)

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.