The Beekeeper of Aleppo

by Christy Lefteri

But in Syria there is a saying: inside the person you know, there is a person you do not know.

The sound of birdsong never changes.

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.

Remember the strength you had then.

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.

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.

I remembered how the worker bees would travel to find new flowers and nectar and then come back to tell the other bees. The bee would shake her body – the angle of her dance across the comb told the other bees the direction of the flowers in relation to the sun. I wished that there was someone to guide me, to tell me what to do and which way to go, but I felt completely alone.

man next to me said, ‘When you belong to someone and they are gone, who are you?’

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.

lived forever on the edge of imminent catastrophe,

he came to appreciate everything with the joy and terror of a child.