The Beekeeper of Aleppo(43)

A week later he came to find me at my father’s shop. He brought a huge jar of honey with him. He had just found out that he had been accepted at the university and so would be visiting Aleppo more often, and he had wanted to say thank you to me for taking him to the shop that day. The moment my mother saw him, standing in the doorway of the shop with the jar of honey in his hand, she dropped her fan and stood up. She walked over and stared at him for a while, then she began to sob.

‘Mustafa,’ she said, ‘it is you, isn’t it? How old were you when I last saw you? You were just a little boy. But that face, it hasn’t changed!’ She said later that it was as if she had seen the reincarnation of her sister. And there our friendship began, by the river and later with a pot of honey. A mysterious force that I could never understand had brought my cousin into my life, had led him to find me sitting by the river with no hope in my heart for my future career, and from that moment on my life was changed forever. Yuanfen. Yuanfen, flickering in the red heat, beneath my mother’s eyes.

I ran through the memory three times in my mind, repeating it as if I was rewinding and replaying a videotape, until I slipped off to sleep.

But I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of screaming, and a whistling in the sky, a bomb tearing through the darkness. I sat upright, my body wet, my head pounding, the darkness around me pulsating. I saw the faint outline of a window through a bedsheet, the light of the moon streaming in. I saw Afra’s face fuzzy in the darkness and slowly remembered where I was. I reached out to hold her hand. There were no bombs. We were not in Aleppo. We were safe in Athens, in an old school. The heartbeat in my head subsided, but the screaming continued, and when it stopped abruptly a few moments later, there were other sounds, echoes from other rooms on other floors, desperate adult sobs, creaking floorboards, footsteps and whispers and laughter. The laughter seemed to be coming from outside, from the courtyard below – the laughter of a woman.

I stepped out of the tent, out of the classroom and into the long corridor. At the far end, by the window, a woman was pacing up and down, her flip-flops slapping against the marble, her eyes to the floor. Her body paused, jerked, started up again, like a mechanical toy. I approached her, hesitant for a moment, and put my hand on her arm, hoping to calm her movements, to ask her if she needed any help, but when she glanced up at me I saw that she was asleep. She looked straight through me with wide fearful eyes, shimmering with tears. ‘When did you come back?’ she said.

I didn’t answer. I knew that you should never wake a person who is sleepwalking, in case they should die from shock. I left her there to walk around in her nightmare.

I heard the laughter again, shrill and abrupt, cutting through the sleep sounds. In one of the classrooms above, someone was snoring; in another a child was crying. I followed the laughter down the stairs and out into the courtyard, and was shocked to find so many people still awake. It must have been 2 o’clock in the morning. The first thing I saw was a huddle of boys and girls in a corner on wooden chairs beneath a climbing-wall. They were passing around a paper bag, inhaling some substance from it.

One of the girls glanced at me, held my gaze for a moment. Something was wrong with her, her pupils dilated so that her eyes were almost black. Nearby, two men were sitting on the ground with their backs against the wall, smoking. On the platform, which must have once been used as a stage, two boys were kicking a ball beneath the only floodlight. At the entrance of the courtyard, three men were having a heated discussion; they were speaking a different type of Arabic and had much darker skin. One of them pushed the other’s shoulder, and another man came over and separated them, raised his voice and then slid the bolts of the entrance, pushing open the heavy door, and the three left.

When the door was closed again – its metallic sound which reverberated around the courtyard had died – I was left facing a huge blue heart painted across the double panels, outlined on both sides with red wings. The top of the heart was flat, and there was an island and a palm tree and a yellow sun rising out of it. On the cool green background of the old school walls, the heart almost pulsated in the flickering floodlight.

And from behind me, again, the sound of laughter. I turned away from the heart. At the far end of the courtyard, on the only deckchair, beneath a line of washing, was the laughing woman.

She was a young black woman with cornrows gathered into a high ponytail. As I walked towards her I noticed that her breasts were leaking milk into her white top. She caught my eye and self-consciously folded her arms across her chest.

‘Is because they took her,’ she said in English.

‘They took who?’

She didn’t answer at first. Her eyes darted around.

‘I no live here. I come here at night sometimes to be safe.’

I sat down on the ground beside her. She turned to me and showed me her arm. There were dozens of tiny round wounds.

‘It’s my blood,’ she said. ‘They poisoned it.’

‘Who did?’

‘I was staying in a room, and then he try to kill me. He got my head and bash it on the floor. And I lost my breath. My breath it stop then, and I didn’t get it back. I have no breath in me now. I am dead.’

And yet her eyes were full of life.

‘I want to go to Germany mostly. Or to Denmark,’ she went on. ‘I need to leave here. Is not easy because Macedonia has shut border. Athens is the heart. Everyone comes here on the way to wherever. Peoples are get stuck here.’ She seemed more troubled now, a deep frown between her brows. ‘This the place where people die slowly, inside. One by one, people die.’