The Beekeeper of Aleppo

by Christy Lefteri

I’m glad she’s blind.

It was my cousin Mustafa who introduced me to beekeeping.

It took me years to understand them, and once I did, the world around me never looked or sounded the same again.

But I knew this was just talk; Mustafa wasn’t ready to leave the bees.

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.

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

Name – My beautiful boy. Cause of death – This broken world. And that was very the last time Mustafa recorded the names of the dead. Exactly a week after this, Sami was killed.

I tell her about my job in Syria, about the bees and the colonies, but she doesn’t really hear me, I can tell. She is preoccupied with the papers in front of her.

I do not want Mustafa to know what has become of me. We are finally in the same country, but if we meet he will see a broken man. I do not believe he will recognise me.

Leave this place, Nuri, it is no longer home.

Aleppo is now like the dead body of a loved one, it has no life, no soul, it is full of rotting blood.

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 that stone face that I now despised.

I asked myself if I should break her neck, put her out of her misery, give her the peace she wanted.

Sami’s grave was in this garden. She would be close to him. She wouldn’t need to leave him. All her self-torture would be over.

There was a time when she wanted to know, when she would ask me what I saw. Now she doesn’t want to know anything at all.

This was where the smuggler had told us to wait.

I knew that I couldn’t force her to stay with me, there was nothing I could say to bring her back once she had disappeared.

I had to let her go and wait for her to come back.

Our sons have gone to where the bees are, Nuri, to where the flowers and the bees are.

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 am waiting for you! The bees are waiting for you!

The boy sitting next to me, looking at me fearfully, is not Mohammed. ‘Sami,’ I say.

I am shaking now. I fight it, push the thought out. I realise I have forgotten to love her.

‘Nuri,’ he says simply, and his voice shakes. And that’s when I begin to sob, my body shaking, and I think that I will never stop, and I feel Mustafa moving, coming over to me, resting his hand on my shoulder, a strong grip, and then he embraces me and he carries the smells of an unknown place.

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

‘You will be coming, won’t you?’ He sounds anxious. ‘Of course.’ ‘Because I can’t do it on my own – it’s not the same.’ ‘If I made it this far,’ I say, ‘then I will make it to Yorkshire.’

‘One day,’ I hear Mustafa say. ‘One day we will go back to Aleppo and rebuild the apiaries and bring the bees back to life.’