I cannot wait here to say goodbye. You must convince Afra to leave. You are too soft, too sensitive. This is an admirable quality when it comes to working with bees, but not now. I will be making my way to England, to find my wife and daughter. 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 have a memory of the first time you came to my father’s apiaries in the mountains and you were standing there surrounded by bees, without protective gear, your hands shielding your eyes, and you said to me, ‘Mustafa, this is where I want to be,’ even though you knew your father wouldn’t be happy. Remember that, Nuri. Remember the strength you had then. Take Afra and come and find me.
Mustafa
I sat down on the bed and cried, sobbed like a child, and from that day I kept the photograph and letter in my pocket, but Afra wouldn’t leave, so I would go out every day and forage in the ruins for food and return with a gift for her. I’d find so many odd bits, broken or unbroken pieces of people’s lives: a child’s shoe, a dog’s collar, a mobile phone, a glove, a key. Interesting to find a key when there are no doors to open. Come to think of it, even stranger to find a shoe or a glove when there is no longer a hand or a foot to fit it.
These were sad gifts. Nonetheless I’d offer them to her, place them on her lap, and wait for a reaction that never came. But I would keep trying. It was a good distraction. Every day I went out and found a new thing. One day, I found the best gift of all: a pomegranate.
‘What did you see?’ she said to me as I stood by the door.
She was sitting on the camp bed, where Sami used to sleep, facing the window, with her back against the wall. She reminded me of a cat, in her black hijab, with that white stone face and large grey eyes. No expression at all. I could only understand how she was feeling from her voice, or when she picked at her skin so hard she made it bleed.
The room smelled of warm bread, of normal life. I began to speak but stopped, and she turned her ear to me, a slight twitch of her head.
I saw that she’d made bread again. ‘You made khubz?’ I said.
‘I made it for Sami,’ she said. ‘Not for you. But what did you see?’
‘Afra …’
‘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?’