The Beekeeper of Aleppo(30)

When we had so many colonies we couldn’t manage them on our own we hired workers who would help us build new hives, raise queen bees, check the colonies for infestations and also collect the honey. In the field where Mustafa stood, our employees were also smoking the colonies, and puffs of smoke rose from their cans and into the blue sky where the sun blazed down upon us all. Mustafa prepared lunch for everyone – usually lentils or bulgur with salad or pasta and egg stew, followed by baladi soft cheese with honey. We had a small hut with a kitchen and outside a canopy with fans to provide some relief from the heat. We sat together to eat, Mustafa at the head of the wooden table, stuffing food into his mouth after the morning’s hard work, dipping bread into the tomato sauce. He would be so proud, proud and grateful for what we had achieved together, but a part of me always wondered if this gratitude also came from fear, a fear of the unknown, of some future disaster.

Mustafa lost his mother when he was five years old. She and his unborn brother died during labour, and I think he lived forever on the edge of imminent catastrophe, and so he came to appreciate everything with the joy and terror of a child. ‘Nuri,’ he would say as he wiped the sauce from his chin, ‘look what we have created! Isn’t it marvellous? Isn’t it just so marvellous?’ But there in his eyes was a glint of something else, a darkness I had come to recognise as belonging to his childhood heart.





7




IN THE MORNING, WHEN I get up to use the bathroom, I see that Diomande’s door is wide open and he is collecting scattered sheets of paper from the floor. The Qur’an is open on his unmade bed. He puts the pile of paper in a drawer, opens the curtains so that the sunlight floods into the room and sits down on the edge of the bed. He is wearing only tracksuit bottoms, his body is hunched over and he is holding a T-shirt in his hands.

He hasn’t noticed me standing in the doorway. His mind is elsewhere, and he turns slightly towards the window so that I see a strange deformity jutting out of the skin of his back where his shoulder blades should be. As if he’s just hatched out of an egg, there are small white wings, tight and muscular, like scrunched-up fists. It takes a moment for my mind to catch up with my eyes. He quickly pulls the T-shirt over his head. I shift my feet and he turns to face me.

‘Nuri – this is your name?’ The sudden sound of his voice startles me. ‘I met Lucy Fisher,’ he says. ‘She is very nice lady. I think maybe she is worried for me. I tell her not to worry, Mrs Fisher, don’t worry! There are opportunities in this country. I will find job! My friend told me if I want to be safe and if I want to stay living I should come to UK. But she look more worry than before and now I am worrying too.’

I stand there staring at him. I can’t find my voice to reply.

‘When my dad died, we had very difficult time, there was no work, money was very little, and not much food for two sisters, and my mother she told me, “Diomande, I will find some money and you will go, you will go from here and find a way to help us!”’

He hunches over further now so that the bulges rise up, and he puts his long fingers on his knees and pushes himself to stand.

‘On the night before I left, she make me best food in the world: kedjenou!’ He licks his fingers and rolls his eyes. ‘I no have kedjenou for many months, but on this night she make special for me.’

I watch his back, the movement of the wings beneath his T-shirt as he leans down to line up a pair of sandals, which he slips on over his socks. He seems to be in pain.

‘What is wrong with your back?’ I say.

‘I have bent spine from when I was a baby,’ he says.

I must be staring at him in an odd way because he pauses for a moment and looks at me. He’s so tall that even when he’s standing he is hunched over, and when he meets my gaze I notice that he has the eyes of an old man.

‘Will you be coming to have the tea with milk?’ he says. ‘I like it very much.’

‘Yes,’ I say, and my voice comes out in a rasp. ‘I will see you downstairs soon.’

I lock the door of the bathroom so that the Moroccan man will not come in again. I wash my face and hands as far as the elbows and wipe my head and my feet to the ankles. I am sweating and I can’t draw my mind away from the wings to think about the words of the prayer. As I stand on the mat to say ‘Allahu abkar’ I catch sight of my face in the mirror above the sink and I pause with my hands by my ears. I look so different now, but I can’t quite put my finger on how. Yes, there are deep lines that were not there before, and even my eyes seem to have changed – they are darker and wider, always on the alert, like Mohammed’s eyes, but it’s not that; something else has changed, something unfathomable.

The door handle rattles. ‘Geezer!’

I don’t reply but let the water run so that the bathroom steams up, hoping to see Mohammed, but he is not here.

I take my time dressing Afra. I’m not sure why she won’t do it herself, but she stands there, sometimes with her eyes closed, as I pull her dress down over her body, as I wrap her hijab around her head. This time she does not guide my fingers when I put in the hairpins, she just stays silent, and I can see in the mirror that her eyes are still closed, and I wonder why they are shut, if she can’t see anyway. But I don’t ask her. She is holding the marble so tightly that her knuckles are white. Then she lies down on the bed, reaching for the sketch-pad on the bedside cabinet, and she places it on her chest and stays there in silence, in her own world, breathing slowly.