The Beekeeper of Aleppo(3)

Mustafa did not want a quiet life. He always strove to do more and learn more. I’ve never seen this in any other human being. However big we got – even when we had big customers from Europe and Asia and the Gulf – I was the one who looked after the bees, the one he trusted with this. He said I had a sensitivity that most men lacked, that I understood their rhythms and patterns. He was right. I learned how to really listen to the bees and I spoke to them as though they were one breathing body with a heart, because, you see, bees work together. Even when, at the end of summer, the drones are killed by workers to preserve food resources, they are still working as one entity. They communicate to one another through a dance. It took me years to understand them, and once I did, the world around me never looked or sounded the same again.

But, as the years passed, the desert was slowly growing, the climate becoming harsh, rivers drying up, farmers struggling; only the bees were drought-resistant, ‘Look at these little warriors,’ Afra would say on the days when she came with Sami to visit the apiaries, a tiny bundle wrapped up in her arms, ‘Look at them still working, when everything else is dying!’ Afra always prayed for rain, because she feared the dust storms and the droughts. When a dust storm was coming we could see, from our veranda, the sky above the city turn purple, and then there was a whistle deep in the atmosphere, and Afra would run around the house closing all the doors, bolting all the windows and shutters.

*

Every Saturday we would go to Mustafa’s house for dinner. Dahab and Mustafa would cook together, Mustafa measuring every ingredient, every spice, meticulously on the scales, as if one tiny mistake would ruin the whole meal. Dahab was a tall woman, almost the same height as her husband, and she would stand beside him and shake her head, as I’d seen her do with Firas and Aya. ‘Hurry up,’ she would say. ‘Hurry up! At this rate we will be eating this Saturday’s meal next Saturday.’ He hummed while he cooked, and stopped every twenty minutes or so to smoke, standing in the courtyard beneath the flowering tree, biting and sucking on the end of his cigarette.

I would join him, but he was quiet at these times, his eyes glistening from the heat of the kitchen, his thoughts elsewhere. Mustafa began to fear the worst before I did, and I could see the worry in the lines of his face.

They lived on the bottom floor of a block of flats, and the courtyard was enclosed on three sides by the walls of the neighbouring blocks, so that it was always cool and full of shadows. The sounds from the balconies above tumbled down towards us – scraps of conversations, music, the faint murmur of television sets. There were vines in the courtyard, laden with grapes, and a trellis of jasmine covering one wall, and on another a shelf of empty jars and slices of honeycomb.

Most of the courtyard was taken up by a metal garden table positioned right beneath the lemon tree, but there were bird feeders along the edges and a small vegetable patch in a square of soil, where Mustafa tried to grow herbs. Mostly they wilted because there was not enough sunlight. I watched my cousin as he pressed one of the lemon blossoms between his thumb and forefinger and breathed in the scent.

At these times, during the quiet of a Saturday evening, he began to overthink things, to contemplate; his mind could never rest, was never still. ‘Do you ever imagine what it would be like to have a different life?’ he asked me on one such evening.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It scares me sometimes to think how life can go one way or another. What if I was working somewhere in an office? What if you had listened to your father and ended up in his fabric shop? We have a lot to be grateful for.’

I didn’t respond to this. While my life could easily have taken a different turn, there was no chance that Mustafa could have ended up in an office. No, his dark thoughts came from somewhere else, as if he had already become afraid of losing everything, as if some echo from the future was reaching back and whispering in his ear.

Much to Mustafa’s annoyance, his son Firas would never get up from the computer to help with the meal. ‘Firas!’ Mustafa would call, heading back to the kitchen, ‘Get up before you become glued to that seat!’ But Firas would stay on the wicker chair in the living room, in his T-shirt and shorts. He was a lanky boy of twelve with a long face and slightly overgrown hair, and when he smiled, in defiance of his father, for a moment he resembled a Saluki hunting dog, the type you find in the desert.

Aya, who was just a year older than her brother, would hold Sami by the hand and set the table; by this time he was three and he trotted about like a little man on a mission. She would give him an empty plate or a cup to hold so that he would feel that he was helping her. Aya had long golden hair, like her mother, and Sami would pull at her curls whenever she bent down and giggle as they sprang back up. And then we would all get involved, even Firas – Mustafa would drag him from his chair by a skinny arm – and we would take steaming plates and colourful salads and dips and bread to the table in the courtyard. Sometimes we had red lentil and sweet potato soup with cumin, or kawaj with beef and courgettes, or stuffed artichoke hearts or green been stew, or parsley and bulgur salad, or spinach with pine nuts and pomegranate. Later, honey-soaked baklava and lugaimat dough balls dripping with syrup or preserved apricots in jars that Afra had prepared. Firas would be on his phone and Mustafa would snatch it from his hands and put it in one of the empty honey jars, but he would never really get angry with his son – there was a certain humour between them, even when they were in battle with each other.