The Beekeeper of Aleppo(48)

There was a frown on the man’s face as he abruptly stopped playing and continued to fine-tune. After a while he put the instrument down by his feet and rolled a cigarette. I got up and sat beside him in the shadow of the statue. There was something warm about this man’s face, inviting, even in its silence.

‘Good morning,’ he said in Farsi, in a voice as deep and melodic as his music, and he offered me the cigarette he had just rolled.

‘No, thank you,’ I said, in Arabic. ‘I don’t smoke.’ And in that moment we both started to laugh at the strangeness of our situations. Here we found ourselves in Greece, one man speaking Arabic, the other Farsi.

‘Do you speak English?’ I said.

The man’s eyes lit up. ‘Yes! Not very, very good, but yes! Thanks gods, we have found same language!’ There was real humour in this man – he sang as he talked.

‘Where are you from?’ I said.

‘Afghanistan, outside Kabul. You are from Syria?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

His fingernails were long, and although he was not a bulky man, there was a suggestion of strength in his movements.

‘I like your guitar,’ I said.

‘This instrument is rebab. It means “door of the soul”.’ Then he told me his name was Nadim.

I remained perched on the step beside him as he picked up the rebab and began to play again, a slow quiet melody that trickled through the air in deep waves. I watched Afra as she woke up and unfolded herself from the blanket, feeling around with her hand to see if I was there. When she didn’t find me, her features tightened and she called for me. I went over immediately and touched her hand and watched as her face softened. There was a part of me that was pleased to see this fear in her when she thought she’d lost me, because it meant that she still loved me, that even when she was locked inside herself she still needed me. I unwrapped the sandwiches that had been left for us and handed one to her.

After a while she said, ‘Nuri, who is playing the music?’

‘A man called Nadim.’

‘It’s beautiful.’

And as the hours passed the music washed over us, and when Nadim stopped playing and took a nap the absence of the music suddenly opened a door to other sounds: twigs snapping and breaking in the woods and murmurings and whispers and children playing. I wanted to wake him and tell him to play his music forever so that I would never hear anything else but the moving melody of the rebab until the day that I died. And if Angeliki was right, if we could never leave this place, then Afra and I would die here with the predators of the night and the heroes of a battle unknown to us.

When the sun set the campfire was lit and the place filled with smoke and the smell of burning wood. People gathered around its warmth and I was reminded of Farmakonisi. But the people were different on that island. Here it was as if we were all living in the darkest shadow of a solar eclipse.

Afra had been even more quiet than usual. I believed that she was listening to the sounds in the woods, that she could sense the danger there, but she didn’t ask any questions. Most of the time she sat wrapped in a thick blanket.

Nadim had been gone for a while and he returned some time later, taking his usual place beneath the statue. But he didn’t pick up his rebab, although I waited for the music; I needed it like water. My mind was so full of cracks.

The mother with the blue hijab was trying to breastfeed her baby; little Mahsa had her mouth around the nipple and she was sucking a bit but it seemed that there was no milk and the woman was pressing her breast with her hand, frustrated, with a flushed angry face. And then Mahsa gave up and went back to being listless. The woman began to cry and she wiped the tears away with the back of her hand.

Seeing the mother’s tears and the ease with which they fell, I realised that Afra had not cried about Sami. Apart from that day in Aleppo when we were hiding in the hole in the garden, she had not shed a tear. She did not cry when Sami died. Instead her face had turned to stone.

Nadim came and sat next to me on the blanket and stared for a while at Afra. I wondered if he realised that his eyes were fixed on her, or if he was just lost in his own thoughts. Either way, I broke his gaze.

‘So, where did you say you came from?’

Nadim’s face suddenly changed and came to life. ‘Kabul!’

‘You liked it there?’

‘Of course. Was my home. Kabul is very nice.’

‘Why did you leave?’

‘Because Taliban does not like us to play music there. They do not like music.’ But there was more, I could tell by the way he stopped abruptly and picked up a pine cone for no reason, examining it before throwing it into the woods.

‘That’s the reason you left?’ I said.

There was some hesitation as if he was contemplating whether to say more and at the same time inspecting me. After not too much time, and with a deliberately lower voice, he said, ‘I was in Ministry of Defence. Then Taliban threaten me. I told them I cannot kill people. I cannot even kill ant – how do you expect me to kill people?’

And then he stopped again, and that was all. He had thrown me tiny fragments of a much larger and longer story. And then Nadim was quiet, but there was something uncomfortable in this man’s silence, and so I was pleased when he spoke again, with that sing-song voice that seemed now to distract from something else.