The Beekeeper of Aleppo(72)

‘But Mohammed was playing with it.’

I’m not looking at her now but I hear her exhale again.

‘I don’t know who Mohammed is,’ she says. She hands me the marble.

‘The boy who fell off the boat. Don’t you remember?’

‘A boy did not fall off the boat. There was a girl who kept crying and when her dad went into the water she went in after him and they had to pull her out and wrap her in the women’s scarves. I remember it very well. Her mother told me all of it later when we were on the island by the fire.’ She pushes the marble towards me, urging me to accept it.

I take it, reluctantly.

‘The boy who came with us from Istanbul to Greece,’ I say, ‘Mohammed. The boy who fell off the boat!’

She ignores what I am saying, just gives me that look. She has already answered these questions.

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ I say.

‘Because I thought you needed him,’ she says. ‘This marble, I took it from the floor of our house the day before we left, the day when the men broke everything and threw all his toys on the floor. Do you remember?’

I remember her last words as I make my way through the dark living room and up the stairs, along the corridor to our bedroom. I remember her words as I look at her from the window, sitting there beneath the blossoms of the tree with the sun on her face.

‘Do you remember?’

I don’t know what I remember anymore. I shut the curtains. I lie down on the bed. I close my eyes and hear the sound of the bees deep in the sky.

When I open my eyes and sit up in bed, I see that there is a gold key on the rug. I pick it up and head to the door at the end of the corridor, put the key in the lock and open it. I am high up on the hill again. The noise is louder now; it fills my mind completely. I am on the hill with my house behind me and there is Aleppo stretched vast and wide below, the wall around the city is made of golden jasper while the city is pure glass, the buildings shimmering outlines, every single one of them – the mosques, the markets, the rooftops, the citadel in the distance. It is a ghost of a city in the setting sun. To the left there is a flash – a child running down the hill to the river’s edge. I can see him on the path in his blue shorts and red T-shirt.

‘Mohammed!’ I call. ‘Stop running from me!’

I follow him all the way down to the river, and on as he zigzags through the lanes, round the bends and through the arches and beneath the vines, and then I lose him for a while, but I keep walking until I see him sitting beneath a narenj tree by the water. The tree is alive and laden with fruit. He has his back to me. I approach him and sit down beside him at the river’s edge.

I put my hand on his shoulder and he turns now to face me and his eyes, those black eyes, begin to change, becoming lighter, turning grey, and transparent, so that there is a soul in them now, and his features soften and morph like a swarm of bees, then settle, until I can see his expression and his face and his eyes more clearly. The boy sitting next to me, looking at me fearfully, is not Mohammed.

‘Sami,’ I say.

I want to hold him, but I know that he will disappear, like paint in water, so I sit as still as I can. I realise now that these were the clothes he was wearing the day he died, his red T-shirt and blue shorts. He is holding the marble in his hand and he turns now to face the city of glass. He takes something out of his pocket and hands it to me: a key.

‘What’s this for?’ I say.

‘It’s the key you gave me. You told me it opened a secret house that didn’t break.’

I see that in front of him are pieces of Lego.

‘What are you doing?’ I say.

‘I’m building a house!’ he says. ‘When we go to England we will live in this house. This house won’t break like these do.’

I remember now. I remember him lying in bed, afraid of the bombs, and how I had given him an old bronze key that once opened a shed at the apiaries. I had tucked it beneath his pillow so that he could feel that somewhere in all the ruins there was a place where he could be safe.

Ahead, the glass city shimmers in the sunlight. It looks like a city in a drawing that a child has made, a sketch, pencil outlines of mosques and apartments. He puts his hand in the river, scoops out a stone.

‘Will we fall in the water?’ he says, and he looks up at me with wide eyes. He was asking me this for months before he died.

‘No.’

‘Like the other people?’

‘No.’

‘But my friend said that to leave here we have to cross other rivers and seas, and if we cross those rivers and seas we might fall into the water, like other people did. I know stories about them. Will the wind take the boat? Will the boat turn over into the water?’

‘No. But if it does we’ll have life jackets. We’ll be all right.’

‘And Allah – have mercy on us – will he help us?’

‘Yes. Allah will help us.’

These were Sami’s words. My Sami. He looks at me again, his eyes wider, full of fear. ‘But why didn’t he help the boys when they took their heads off?’

‘Who took their heads off?’

‘When they stood in a line and waited. They weren’t wearing black. That’s why. You said it was because they weren’t wearing black. I was wearing black. Don’t you remember?’