‘The bee is still alive!’ the Moroccan man says.
I look at him and smile. ‘She’s a fighter,’ I say, ‘and it was raining last night. She won’t survive out there though, not for long, if she can’t fly.’
I take the bee back outside, put her on a flower and I go to bed with Afra. I help her get undressed and I lie down to sleep beside her.
‘Where is Mustafa?’ she says. ‘Have you heard from him?’
‘Not for a long time,’ I say.
‘Have you checked your emails? Maybe he is trying to get hold of you? Does he know we are here?’
There is a strange sound now, a whistle deep in the sky. ‘Can you hear that?’ I say.
‘It’s the rain on the window,’ she says.
‘Not that. The whistling. There is a whistle. It doesn’t stop. Like a dust storm is coming.’
‘There’s no dust storm here,’ she says. ‘Only rain or no rain.’
‘You can’t hear it then?’
She looks concerned now and rests her head on her palm. She is about to say something and I laugh, stopping her. ‘It was cold but sunny today! Now it’s raining! This English weather is like a madman! Maybe you should come out tomorrow? We can go for a walk along the seafront.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I can’t. I don’t want to be out in this world.’
‘But you’re free now, you can go outside. You don’t have to be afraid anymore.’
She doesn’t say anything in response.
‘A boy made the most amazing sandcastle, a whole city, with houses and a skyscraper!’
‘That’s nice,’ she says.
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.
‘We have to contact Mustafa,’ she says.
*
The darkness gets to me, and the way my wife smells gets to me, that mixture of rose perfume and sweat. She puts the perfume on before she goes to bed, takes the glass bottle out of her pocket and dabs it on her wrists and neck. The other residents are still talking in the living room downstairs, that strange combination of tongues. Someone laughs, and there are footsteps on the stairs. The floorboards creak, and I know it is the Moroccan man; I’ve come to recognise the sound of his walk. He has a particular way of pausing. It seems random at first, but there is a specific rhythm to it. He walks past our room, and at that moment I hear a marble rolling over the planks of wood. I know the sound. I jump up and turn on the light. I find Mohammed’s marble moving towards the rug, pick it up and look at the glass under the light, the red vein running through the middle.
‘What is it?’ Afra says.
‘It’s just the marble. It’s nothing. Go to sleep.’
‘Put it on the dressing table next to me,’ she says.
I do as she says and get back into bed, this time lying with my back to her. She puts her hand on my back, presses her palm against my spine as if she is feeling for my breath. My eyes stay open in the dark because I am afraid of the
fell and we were in Bab al-Faraj, in the old city. We were waiting beneath a narenj tree for a Toyota. The corpse of a man was waiting with us. The Toyota was going to be a pickup, no headlights, with metal bars on the sides, the type that usually transports livestock like cows and goats. The dead man was lying on his back with one arm bent over his head. The man was probably in his mid-twenties, wearing a black jumper and black jeans. I didn’t tell Afra that he was there.
This was where the smuggler had told us to wait.
The dead man’s face suddenly lit up. A glow of white light. On and off. There was a phone in his hand, the hand that was bent over his head. His eyes were brown, thick eyebrows. An old scar on his left cheek. The glint of a silver chain, a calligraphy name necklace: Abbas.
‘It’s beautiful here,’ she said. ‘I know exactly where we are.’
There were once vines across this street and at the bottom a set of steps that led to the gated terrace of a school.
‘We’re by that clock,’ she said, ‘and there’s that café around the corner with the rosewater ice cream, where we took Sami that time, remember?’
*
Just behind the buildings, the time on the Bab al-Faraj Clock Tower glowed green. Eleven fifty-five. Five minutes. I stood there helpless, watching her, her expression warm with memory. Since she had laughed and cried she had come back to life, in fragments. A little of her showed through a crack and then she was gone again. Now, standing there with her face so close to mine, I could see the desire, the determination to hold on to an illusion, a vision of life, of Aleppo. The old Afra would have been disgusted by this. I felt suddenly afraid of her. The phone stopped flashing. It was darker now.