The Beekeeper of Aleppo(9)

‘I’m not an idiot, you know. I haven’t lost my mind. I just wanted to make him some bread. Is that OK with you? My mind’s sharper than yours, don’t forget that. What did you see?’

‘Do we have to do this every time?’

I watched her. She locked her fingers together.

‘So … the houses,’ I began, ‘they’re like carcasses, Afra. Carcasses. If you could see them you would cry.’

‘You told me that yesterday.’

‘And the grocery store, it’s empty now. But there’s fruit still in the crates where Adnan left them – pomegranates, and figs, and bananas, and apples. And they’re all rotten now, and the flies, thousands of them swarming in the heat. But I rummaged through and I found a good one. And I brought it for you.’ I walked towards her and placed the pomegranate on her lap. She took it, feeling its flesh with her fingers, turning it around, pressing it against her palms.

‘Thank you,’ she said. But there was no expression at all. I’d hoped the pomegranate would reach her. Before she’d spend hours peeling and deseeding them. She’d cut one in half, push out the centre a bit, then start whacking it with a wooden spoon, and when she’d filled the glass bowl to the top, she would smile and say she had a thousand jewels. I wished she would smile. But that was a stupid wish, and a selfish one. She had nothing to smile about. It would have been better to wish for this war to end. But I needed something to hold on to, and if she smiled, if by some miracle she smiled, it would have felt like finding water in the desert.

‘Please tell me.’ She wouldn’t give up. ‘What did you see?’

‘I told you.’

‘No. You told me what you saw yesterday. Not what you saw today. And today you saw someone die.’

‘Your mind’s playing tricks on you. It’s all that darkness.’ I shouldn’t have said that. I apologised, once, twice, three times, but her face didn’t change.

‘I know from the way you were breathing when you came in,’ she said.

‘And how was I breathing?’

‘Like a dog.’

‘I was perfectly calm.’

‘As calm as a storm.’

‘OK, so when I left the grocer’s,’ I said, ‘I took a bit of a detour. I wanted to see if Akram was still here, and I was on the long road that leads to Damascus, just past the bank, by that bend where that red loading van used to stop on Mondays?’

She nodded. She could see it now, in her mind. She needed all the details. I’d come to realise this; she needed the small details so that she could see it all, so that she could pretend that it was her eyes that saw it all. She nodded again, urging me on.

‘So, I came up behind two armed men and overheard them taking bets on something. They were planning to use something for target practice. When they agreed the bets I realised they were talking about an eight-year-old boy who was playing alone on the road. I don’t know what he was doing there to be honest. Why his mother would let him—’

‘What was he wearing?’ she said. ‘The eight-year-old boy. What was he wearing?’

‘A red jumper and a pair of blue shorts. They were jean shorts.’

‘And what colour were his eyes?’

‘I didn’t see his eyes. I suppose they were brown.’

‘Was it a boy I would know?’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I didn’t recognise him.’

‘And what was he playing?’

‘He had a toy truck.’

‘What colour?’

‘Yellow.’

She was postponing the inevitable, holding on to the living boy for as long as possible, keeping him alive. I let her sit in silence for a few moments, while she turned it around in her mind. Perhaps she was memorising the colours, the boy’s movements. She would keep them.

‘Go on,’ she said.

‘I realised too late,’ I said. ‘One of them had taken the bet and shot him in the head. Everyone else ran and the street was deserted.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I couldn’t move. The child was lying on the street. I couldn’t move.’

‘You could have been shot.’

‘It wasn’t a clean shot and he didn’t die right away. His mother was inside the house on the same street and she was screaming. She wanted to go to him, but the men kept firing into the street, shouting. They were shouting, “You can’t get to your child. You can’t get to your child.”’

I cried into my palms. I pressed my palms against my eyes. I wished I could take it away, what I saw. I wanted to take it all away.

Then I felt arms around me, and the smell of bread around me.

*

A bomb dropped in the darkness and the sky flashed and I helped Afra to get ready for bed. She knew her way around the house by now, feeling the walls with her hands, palms open, feet shuffling, and she could make bread, but at night she wanted me to undress her. She wanted me to fold her clothes, to place them on the chair by the bed where she used to put them. I took off her abaya as she lifted her arms over her head like a child. I removed her hijab and her hair fell onto her shoulders. Then she sat on the bed and waited for me while I got ready. It was quiet that night, no more bombs, and the room was full of peace and full of moonlight.