The Beekeeper of Aleppo

by Christy Lefteri

By August it was like trying to resuscitate a corpse, so I watched it all die and merge into the rest of the land.

Even when, at the end of summer, the drones are killed by workers to preserve food resources, they are still working as one entity. They communicate to one another through a dance. It took me years to understand them, and once I did, the world around me never looked or sounded the same again.

At these times, during the quiet of a Saturday evening, he began to overthink things, to contemplate; his mind could never rest, was never still.

No, his dark thoughts came from somewhere else, as if he had already become afraid of losing everything, as if some echo from the future was reaching back and whispering in his ear.

when the air was still and thick, that his face would drop and I knew that he was thinking, that the stillness and darkness of the night had again brought whispers from the future.

but it was Mustafa’s mind that worked like the bees. He was the one with the ideas and the intelligence, while I was the one who made it all happen.

Life was close enough to normal for us to forget our doubts, or at least to keep them locked away somewhere in the dark recesses of our minds while we made plans for the future.

his large hand coming down over his face and his beard, as if he was trying to wipe off the sombre expression he always wore now.

but we had a plan, and Mustafa loved plans and lists and itineraries. They made him feel safe. But I knew this was just talk; Mustafa wasn’t ready to leave the bees.

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.

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

‘I hope you are OK, Mr Ibrahim,’ she says as she leaves. I wish I knew who my enemy was.

Where there are bees there are flowers, and where there are flowers there is new life and hope.

It wasn’t a long walk but there were snipers and I had to be careful. The birds were usually singing. The sound of birdsong never changes. Mustafa told me this many years ago. And whenever the bombs were silent, the birds came out to sing. They perched on the skeletons of trees and on craters and wires and broken walls, and they sang. They flew high above, in the untouched sky, and sang.

Sometimes I think that if I keep walking, I will find some light, but I know that I can walk to the other side of the world and there will still be darkness. It’s not like the darkness of the night, which also has white light from the stars, from the moon. This darkness is inside me and has nothing to do with the outside world.

I shut my eyes too and listened, and in between the gunshots and the thuds of falling bodies, I heard a boy crying. He was calling for his father. The other boys were silent, too afraid to make a sound. There is always one person in a group who has more courage than the rest. It takes bravery to cry out, to release what is in your heart. Then he was silenced.

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.

And in the darkness I remembered the dogs eating human corpses in the fields where the roses used to be, and somewhere else in the distance I heard a wild screech, metal on metal, like a creature being dragged towards death. And I put my hand on her chest, between her breasts, and felt her heart beat, and I slept again.

the women in terror because paramilitaries were on the loose and they feared being raped. But there, beside me, was a damask rose bush in full bloom. When I closed my eyes and breathed in the smell, I could pretend for a moment that I hadn’t seen the things I’d seen.

‘There’ll be no bombs there,’ he’d said, ‘and the houses won’t break like these do.’ I wasn’t sure if he’d meant the Lego houses or the real houses, and then it saddened me when I realised that Sami had been born into a world where everything could break. Real houses crumbled, fell apart. Nothing was solid in Sami’s world. And yet somehow he was trying to imagine a place where the buildings didn’t fall down around him.

This is what I wanted: to be with Afra in a world that was still unbroken.

There is no meat on this boy. It’s like birds have eaten him. He’s like a corpse or a bombed-out building. He catches my eye, holds my gaze for a moment and then looks up to the ceiling at the naked light bulb.

There was a sense of quiet here that was unfamiliar to me; in Syria, silence held danger, it could be shattered at any moment by a shell bomb or the sound of gunfire or the heavy footsteps of the soldiers. Somewhere in the distance, towards Syria, the earth rumbled.

I had forgotten that buildings could still stand, that there was a whole world out there that was not destroyed like Aleppo.

I didn’t tell her about the children on the streets. I didn’t want her to see them in her mind’s eye, to become trapped with them in the inescapable tunnels of her mind.

People are not like bees. We do not work together, we have no real sense of a greater good – I’ve come to realise this now.

It horrifies me that a gift from me can have the power to make her smile now, even if it is so slight as to be almost non-existent. All those times I wanted to be able to affect her, to bring some light to her eyes, and now I hate it that I can, because it means that she loves me and that she has been hoping for me to love her. But I am no longer worthy of her, or her forgiveness.

I look at my face on the dark screen, thinking of what to write – Mustafa, I believe I am unwell. I have no dreams left.

I looked out into the darkness, all this sea and sky, and I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. Is this what Afra saw every day? This absence of form.

A few people are walking their dogs, an attendant picks up rubbish. The aftermath of sunshine. The aftermath of war is something else. There is a sense of calm here, of life continuing. Hope for another sunny day. In the distance, to the left, the faint sound of music comes from the fairground on the pier. It never stops.

‘I want to lie down with you,’ she says, and what she means is, ‘I love you. Please hold me.’ There is an expression on her face I recognise from years ago, and it makes my sadness feel like something palpable, like a pulse, but it makes me afraid too, afraid of fate and chance, and hurt and harm, of the randomness of pain, how life can take everything from you all at once.

It’s amazing, the way we love people from the day we are born, the way we hold on, as if we are holding on to life itself.

Mustafa lost his mother when he was five years old. She and his unborn brother died during labour, and I think he lived forever on the edge of imminent catastrophe, and so he came to appreciate everything with the joy and terror of a child. ‘Nuri,’ he would say as he wiped the sauce from his chin, ‘look what we have created! Isn’t it marvellous? Isn’t it just so marvellous?’ But there in his eyes was a glint of something else, a darkness I had come to recognise as belonging to his childhood heart.

I watch Diomande’s back, the wings that I mistook for shoulder blades, the way they move beneath his T-shirt, the way he brings his hand to his spine now and then, a habit he has probably had all his life. He is always in pain, this boy. But his smile and his laugh are full of light.

when my coffee was brought out I savoured it, sip by sip. I never thought I would be sitting down somewhere, next to other families, drinking coffee, without the sound of bombs, without the fear of snipers.

This thought brings me close to death. We cannot go back, cannot change the decisions we made in the past. I did not kill my son. I try to remember these things because if I don’t I will be lost in the darkness.

I could almost see the ghosts of those people, not so long ago, gagged and chained to their beds. I heard echoes now, not of the children’s laughter, but other sounds, at the edges of the imagination, where humans cease to be human.

I closed my eyes and prayed for Mohammed, the lost boy who was never mine.

Night-time was filled with the cries of the grief-stricken.

I remembered her laughing about this, saying that she felt like an animal, and how she realised that we are less human in our times of greatest love and greatest fear.

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.

Afra always knew too much, burdened with the ability to strip people and places of their masks, to find the remnants of the past in the present.

Inside the person you know there is a person you do not know.

I can see him again, in my mind, Sami, playing beneath the tree in the garden in Aleppo, in our house on the hill, putting worms into the back of a toy truck so that he could take them for a drive. ‘What are you doing?’ I’d said to him. ‘Where are you taking them?’ ‘They have no legs so I’m helping them. I’m going to drive them to the moon!’

I realise I have forgotten to love her. Here is her body, here are the lines on her face, here is the feel of her skin, here is the wound across her cheek that leads into her, like a road, all the way to her heart. These are the roads we take.

And there we both stand, battered by life, two men, brothers, finally reunited in a world that is not our home.

Sometimes we create such powerful illusions, so that we do not get lost in the darkness.