The Beekeeper of Aleppo(56)

Angeliki continued, ‘Athens, this the place where people get caught in dangerous things – they are called to those things and they can’t help it, so they go.’

I noticed that Ryad and Ali were not on their blankets. They still hadn’t returned, and I didn’t want to think about where they had gone and what they might be doing. I looked at Angeliki’s blood-soaked green wrap on my arm, at her tufts of unruly frizzy hair, full of life, at Afra’s hair spread out around her without her hijab. Angeliki had drifted off quickly and both women were sleeping now. I remembered what Angeliki had said about Odysseus when we had first arrived here, how he had travelled to all those places, made such a journey to distant lands, in order to find his way home. But there was no home for us.

I touched the letter that Mustafa had written to me, which was still in my pocket. I took out the photograph of us both and looked at it by the light of the fire.

Where was home now? And what was it? In my mind it had become a picture infused with golden light, a paradise never to be reached. I remembered one evening, about ten years ago, it was Eid, and to celebrate the end of Ramadan Mustafa and I had organised a party for all our employees at the Martini Dar Zamaria Hotel in Aleppo. It was held in the inner yard – there were palm trees and lanterns and plants hanging from the balconies overhead. Above us a square of night sky, full of stars.

The hotel had prepared a feast of meat and fish dishes, with rice and grains and vegetables on the side. We prayed together and we ate with our employees, our friends and our families. Children ran around among the adults. Afra looked beautiful in a red and gold abaya, making her way around the room, holding Sami by the hand, greeting the people who arrived with a smile that held within it all the warmth in the world.

Firas and Aya and Dahab were there, and even Mustafa’s father had made a trip down from the mountains; a quiet, unassuming man, nothing like his own father, but he was proud of his son’s achievements and he relished the food and the company, speaking to me freely about his apiaries. The scene was magical – the leaves of the trees glistened, the smoke of the shisha rose into the night in ribbons of silk, the plants in the hanging baskets suddenly bloomed with glowing flowers, infusing the courtyard with their sweet scent. It became a place in a storybook, the type my mother used to read to me in the room with the blue tiles.

In the morning I woke up and I realised that I hadn’t kept my promise, I did fall asleep on the tree, and Angeliki had left. The green headscarf was saturated with blood and the pain in my arm was worse. The old women were handing out food packages, and I noticed a few NGO workers walking around. I raised my hand and called to one, a woman in her early twenties. I held out my arm and she stood over me and flinched. She hovered there for a few moments, not knowing what to do, and then she told me to wait, to not go anywhere, that she would get someone who could help me, that she only worked with the children and had no medical experience, but she could find someone who would know what to do.

I thanked her and she left, and the day passed but the young NGO worker didn’t return. So I took off the green headwrap and saw that the wound was deep and still bleeding. I cleaned it with some drinking water and then I wrapped it back up with the same headscarf.

It was later in the afternoon that I saw the NGO worker coming through the woods towards me. Behind her was an older woman with a rucksack on her shoulders. They stopped beside me and talked between themselves for a while in a language I didn’t recognise. Perhaps it was Dutch or Swiss or German, I couldn’t tell. The older woman then knelt down beside me and opened the rucksack, putting on some latex gloves, unwrapping the scarf and pursing her lips when she saw the wound.

‘How did you do this?’

‘Somebody did it to me,’ I said.

She gave me a concerned look but said nothing. She spent a long time cleaning the wound with antiseptic wipes and then closing it with butterfly stitches, placing each one delicately over the cut with a pair of tweezers.

‘I need to leave from here,’ I said.

She said nothing.

‘How do people leave?’

She gave me a long look, pausing with the tweezers in her hand, but then she continued with her task, lips tight. When she began to cover the wound with a clean bandage, her shoulders relaxed and she started to speak again.

‘I would have told you to go to Scopje,’ she said, blowing her hair away from her face, ‘but people are fighting with the police there to cross into Macedonia. They’ve closed the borders. No one is getting through now. You’ll get stuck there.’

‘What else can I do?’

‘You can take the coach to the villages. There is priority for people from Syria. It comes once a week.’

‘And then what happens?’

‘You stay there.’

‘For how long?’

There was no response. She pushed her hair back, twisting it into a bun and releasing it. I noticed that she was wearing an identity badge around her neck. Her name was Emily. Underneath her handwritten name was a small logo.

She began to pack her things away.

‘What about the woman from Africa, and there are two teenage boys in trouble. Can they go to the villages?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. Then, ‘No. I don’t think so. God, you really shouldn’t be asking me. I can’t take responsibility. There are advisors.’