The Beekeeper of Aleppo(42)

‘Not much.’

‘Will she be all right climbing the stairs?’

‘She’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘We’ve had worse.’

‘You’re lucky. If you’d come two months ago you would have been out on the streets for weeks on end, and in the middle of winter. But the military came and moved a lot of people, so these camps were set up. There’s a huge one at Ellinikon – the old airport – and at the park …’ His voice trailed off as if he had suddenly become distracted, and I got the impression that he didn’t want to say more about it.

He showed us into one of the classrooms, presenting it with an extended arm and open palm and a hint of irony. Inside the classroom were three tents made of bedsheets. I liked him already. There was a glint in his eyes, and he didn’t seem afraid or tired like the others on Leros.

‘I’m Neil, by the way.’ He flashed his name tag. ‘Choose one of the tents. Dinner is in the courtyard later. Check the schedule on the wall on the right as soon as you come in – there’s lessons and stuff in the afternoons for the kids. Where’s your child?’ These last words reached me, quickly, abruptly, like bullets.

‘Where’s my child?’

Neil nodded and smiled. ‘This place is only for families … I assumed … Your exit card … This school is for families with children.’

‘I lost my child,’ I said.

Neil hovered in front of me without moving, and his forehead creased into deep lines. Then he glanced down at the floor, puffed out his cheeks and said, ‘Listen. This is what I can do. You can stay tonight, and I’ll see what we can do about tomorrow night too, so your wife can have a good rest.’ And with that he left us in this old classroom in this abandoned school, returning a few minutes later with another family, a husband, wife and two young children.

I didn’t want to look at these children, a boy and a girl, holding on to their parents’ hands. I didn’t want to acknowledge their presence, and so I didn’t greet them like I normally would. Instead I turned around, and Afra and I climbed into one of the tents, put our bags down, and without saying anything, we both lay on the blankets, facing each other. Before we fell asleep she said, ‘Nuri, can you get me some more paper and pencils tomorrow?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

The other family soon settled themselves as well and the classroom fell into a welcome silence. I could almost believe that I was staying in a grand hotel and the faint creaking and noises above me were the sounds of the other guests. I remembered my mother and father’s old house in Aleppo, how as a child I had been afraid to fall asleep until I could hear my mother’s reassuring footsteps on the landing outside my door. She would peek in, and when I saw the crack of light coming into the dark room, I would feel safe and drift off. In the morning, my mother would help my dad in the fabric shop, and she spent the afternoon hours reading the newspapers, holding the red fan her grandmother had given her. It was made of silk and had a picture of a cherry tree and a bird and there was a Chinese word on it which my mother thought meant fate. She said it was a word that was hard to translate; Yuanfen was a mysterious force that causes two lives to cross paths in a meaningful way.

This always reminded me of how I had met Mustafa. After his mother, my aunt, had died, the families lost touch and at least fifteen years passed without communication. Mustafa’s father lived a solitary life in the mountains, while my mother and father were city people, working in the heat and chaos of the markets, where trade bustled from all over the world. In fact it was an old Chinese merchant who had given my great-grandmother the red fan. He was a fabric maker from Beijing and had made the silk and hand-painted it himself. One day my father had sent me on an errand to get some fruit and I had taken a detour and stopped by the river to rest beneath a tree. I was tired of being locked up in the shop, and my father was eager for me to learn as much as possible, to serve the customers, to speak English well, so even when the shop was quiet I would be sitting there with an English grammar book on my lap because, according to my father, that was the way forward.

I was hot and exhausted and, as it was the middle of August, it felt like we were breathing in the desert. It was a relief to sit by the river, beneath the cool shade of the narenj tree. I must have been there for about fifteen minutes when a young man approached me, about ten years older than I was and much darker, as if he lived and worked beneath the sun.

‘Do you know the way to this shop?’ He pointed at the piece of paper in his hand where there was a sketch of a road and a shop with an arrow and the words: Aleppo Honey.

‘The Aleppo Honey Shop?’ I said.

He nodded, then shook his head very quickly, a tic I was to become so familiar with.

‘No?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said, smiling, shaking his head again.

‘I’m going that way. Why don’t you follow me? I’ll show you the way.’ And as we walked we began to talk. He immediately told me about the apiaries in the mountains and that his grandfather had sent him to the city to sample different types of honey. He told me he had recently applied to the University of Damascus to study agriculture, and that he wanted to learn more about the composition of honey. I told him a bit about my father’s shop, though not too much, because I wasn’t as talkative as he was, and also because the work didn’t interest me that much. I showed him the shop as we walked past and I took him on to the front door of the honey shop, where we said goodbye.