The Beekeeper of Aleppo(5)

At the bottom of the hill was the Queiq. The last time I saw the river it was full of rubbish. In the winter they fished out the bodies of men and boys. Their hands were tied. Bullets in their heads. That winter day in Bustan al-Qasr, in the southern neighbourhood, I watched them pull the bodies out. I followed them to an old school, where they were laid out in the courtyard. Inside the building it was dark and there were lit candles in a bucket of sand. A middle-aged woman knelt on the floor next to another bucket, full of water. She was going to clean the faces of the dead men, she said, so that the women who loved them would recognise them when they came searching. If I had been one of the dead men in the river, Afra would have climbed a mountain to find me. She would have swum to the bottom of that river, but that was before they blinded her.

Afra was different before the war. She used to make such a mess all the time. If she was baking, for example, there would be flour on every surface, even on Sami. He would be covered in it. When she painted, she made a mess. And if Sami was painting too, it was even worse, as though they had shaken loaded brushes at the room. Even when she spoke she was messy, throwing words out here, there, taking them back, throwing out different ones. Sometimes she even interrupted herself. When she laughed, she laughed so hard the house would shake.

But when she was sad my world was dark. I didn’t have a choice about this. She was more powerful than I. She cried like a child, laughed like bells ringing, and her smile was the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. She could argue for hours without ever pausing. Afra loved, she hated, and she inhaled the world like it was a rose. All this was why I loved her more than life.

The art she made was amazing. She won awards for her paintings of urban and rural Syria. On Sunday mornings we would all go to the market and set up a stall, just opposite Hamid, who sold spices and tea. The stall was in the covered part of the souq. It was dark and a bit musty there but you could smell cardamom, cinnamon, aniseed and a million other spices. Even in that dim light, the landscapes in her paintings were not still. It was like they were moving, like the sky in them was moving, like the water in them was moving.

You should have seen the way she was with the customers who approached the stall, businessmen and women, mainly from Europe or Asia. At these times she would sit, very quietly, Sami on her knee, her eyes fixed on the customers, while they moved closer to a painting, lifting their glasses, if they wore them, then stepping back, often so far back they bumped into Hamid’s customers, and then they would freeze there for a long time. And often the customers would say, ‘Are you Afra?’ And she would reply, ‘Yes, I am Afra.’ And that would be enough. Painting sold.

There was a whole world in her, and the customers could see this. For that moment, while they stared at the painting and then looked at her, they saw what she was made of. Afra’s soul was as wide as the fields and desert and sky and sea and river that she painted, and as mysterious. There was always more to know, to understand, and as much as I knew, it wasn’t enough, I wanted more. But in Syria there is a saying: inside the person you know, there is a person you do not know. I loved her from the day I met her, at my cousin Ibrahim’s eldest son’s wedding, at the Dama Rose Hotel, Damascus. She was wearing a yellow dress, with a silk hijab. And her eyes, not the blue of the sea, or the blue of the sky, but the inky blue of the Queiq River, with swirls of brown and green. I remember the night of our wedding, two years later, and how she had wanted me to take off her hijab. I removed the hairpins, gently, one by one, unwrapping the material and seeing for the first time her long black hair, so dark, it was like the sky above the desert on a night with no stars.

But what I loved most was her laugh. She laughed like we would never die.

When the bees died, Mustafa was ready to leave Aleppo. We were about to go when Firas went missing, so we waited for him. Mustafa would hardly talk during this time, his mind completely preoccupied, imagining one thing or another. Every so often he would make a suggestion about where Firas might be. ‘Maybe he has gone to find one of his friends, Nuri,’ or, ‘Maybe he can’t bring himself to leave Aleppo – he is hiding somewhere so that we will stay,’ or, one time, ‘Maybe he has died, Nuri. Maybe my son has died.’

Our bags were packed and we were ready, but the days and nights passed with no sign of Firas. So Mustafa worked in a morgue in an abandoned building, where he would record the details and cause of death – bullets, shrapnel, explosion. It was strange to see him indoors, shut away from the sun. He had a black book, and he worked round the clock, writing down with the stub of a pencil the details of the dead. When he found identification on the corpses, his task was easier; other times he would record a distinguishing feature, like the colour of their hair or eyes, the particular shape of their nose, a mole on their left cheek. Mustafa did this until that winter day when I brought his son in from the river. I recognised the teenage boy dead on the slabs in the courtyard of the school. I asked two men with a car to help me take the body to the morgue. When Mustafa saw Firas, he asked us to lay him down on the table, then he closed his boy’s eyes and stood for a long time, unmoving, holding his hand. I stood in the doorway while the other men left, the sound of an engine, the car pulling away, and then there was stillness, such stillness, and the light came in from the window above the table where the boy was lying, where Mustafa was standing holding on to his hand. For a while there was no sound, not a bomb or a bird or a breath.