The Beekeeper of Aleppo(16)

‘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 smell 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.