The Beekeeper of Aleppo(21)
The journey did not go as planned. I travelled through Turkey and Greece and then crossed the border into Macedonia, but things became complicated there – I was caught and deported and put on a train to Bulgaria, which is where I find myself now, in a camp in the woods. I am sending this from the phone of a young man I have met here. There are big tents and we sleep on bunk beds, all stacked next to each other. I think when the wind blows everything will fall over. There is a train station. They are old-fashioned trains that come to this station and people try to jump on and they hang off them because they want to get to Serbia. So far I have not tried to jump onto one of these trains.
The food cart has just arrived and we will wait to be served, sardines and bread. This is what we eat every day. If I make it out of here I will never eat another sardine again.
I hope to hear from you. I am praying for your safety.
Your cousin,
Mustafa
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29/12/2015
My dear Nuri,
I am now in Serbia in a camp near a factory. It is an industrial place at the end of a train track that goes no further. So here I am at the end of the track. I hope this isn’t a sign that my journey will end here. From Bulgaria I boarded a train that took one day and one night and I was brought to this barbed-wired camp just outside a village. I cannot get out of here – the camp is locked and there is a queue to leave. The train has no platform. From the coach coming here I saw people walking across a ladder to get onto it, but at least they are leaving. There is one girl here who has lost her voice – she must be about eighteen, and every day her mother pleads with her to speak, and the girl opens her mouth, but not a sound comes out. I wonder what words are trapped inside her that can’t come out. She is the opposite of the boy by the river who was crying for his father. But who knows what this girl has been through, what she has seen?
There is so much silence here, but the silence is filled with chaos and madness. I try to remember the sound of the bees. I try to find some light by closing my eyes and imagining the field and our beehives. But then I remember the fire, and I remember Firas and Sami. Our sons have gone to where the bees are, Nuri, to where the flowers and the bees are. Allah is keeping them safe for us there, until we see them again once this life is over.
I am tired, Nuri. I am tired of this life, but I miss my wife and daughter. They are waiting for me and I don’t know if I will ever get to them. They are both well in England, waiting to see if they will be granted asylum. If they are it will be easier for me to get there.
I must keep going, and if you are reading this then I urge you to do the same. Spend your money wisely – the smugglers will try to get as much out of you as they can, but keep in mind that there is a longer journey ahead. You must learn to haggle. People are not like bees. We do not work together, we have no real sense of a greater good – I’ve come to realise this now.
The good news is that I haven’t eaten sardines for one week. Here they give us cheese and bread, some days also a banana.
Mustafa
The last email was written in English:
20/01/2016
Dear Nuri,
I spent one day in Austria in a military compound near the German border where they scanned us and took our fingerprints and then we were deported to a German youth hostel in the mountains. The winter here is very cold – we are surrounded by snow in an old house so high up that we are near the clouds. It reminds me of the Anti-Lebanon mountains and of my father and grandfather, of the days I spent with them at the apiaries, learning about the bees. But those mountains were full of sunlight and they looked down on the sea. These mountains are white and silent, and I do not know where they end and where they begin.
I would like to make it to France. One of the guards has kindly offered to send an email from his phone and he is typing this for me. I have also sent an email to my wife, who is waiting for me still, and praying. I pray for her and I pray for you and Afra too. I haven’t heard from you but I will not imagine anything.
Your dear friend,
Mustafa
I sat for a while and imagined what might have happened after Germany. It was now the beginning of February. Did he make it to France? Was he still alive and well? I thought about the first time I had visited the apiaries in the mountains. Yes, it was full of light and you could see the shimmer of the water far below. Mustafa had given me a tour; he was young then, in his late twenties, and I was only eighteen. He walked around in his shorts and flip-flops, unafraid of the bees.
‘Aren’t you scared?’ I’d said, hypervigilant and flinching.
‘I know them,’ he’d replied. ‘I know when they will get angry.’
‘How do you know?’
‘They release pheromones that smell like bananas.’
‘Bananas?!’
He nodded, pleased at my excitement. ‘The other bees smell it and know to attack.’
‘But what will you do if they do get angry?’
‘I will stand very, very still and not move an inch. Pretend to be a tree.’
Then he stood there, like a giant statue, with his hands shielding his eyes, smiling. I copied him, standing as still as I could, holding my breath while the bees flew around me in hundreds, or what felt like thousands, their humming surrounding me, enveloping me, winding itself around me like an invisible web. Not one bee landed on me.
‘You see,’ he whispered. ‘You see, you have to relax and turn into nature. Then you will be fine.’