In the night, when the street dogs woke up, Afra was restless. She slept in the adjoining bedroom with the other women. Every night she dabbed the rose perfume on the soft skin of her wrists and neck as if she was going somewhere in the dark. I had to share a room with ten other men. I missed Afra. It was the first time in years that I hadn’t slept beside her. I missed her silent breathing. I missed resting my hand on her chest to feel her heartbeat. I didn’t sleep much. I thought about my wife. I knew that there were times in the night when she would forget that she wasn’t in Aleppo. Her mind would play tricks on her, and she would walk out into the corridor. I would recognise the sound of her footsteps on the tiles and I’d get up to greet her in the high-ceilinged hallway with the long window.
‘Nuri, is that you? I can’t sleep. Are you awake?’
‘I am now.’
‘I can’t sleep. I want to go for a walk.’
‘It’s late. It’s not safe now. We’ll go tomorrow.’
‘I want to go to see Khamid with his big pants hanging on the washing line.’
Khamid was her great-uncle. He lived down the road opposite a dry field with a metal swing and slide. In the evenings Afra used to take Sami to the swing and they would laugh about Khamid’s giant pants.
I would hold her face in my palms, kiss one eyelid, then the other. Part of me wished I could kill her with those kisses, put her to sleep forever. Her mind terrified me. What she could see, what she could remember, locked up behind her eyes.
After a few days I tried to find some work. There were so many refugees selling life jackets and cigarettes on the streets, everyone working illegally because they had no permits to be there. It wasn’t too difficult to find a job washing cars. Elias joined me. We worked together, scrubbing away the soot and grit of the city. Sometimes we stole small things from the boot or the glove compartment, things that the customers were unlikely to notice or care too much about – packets of chewing gum, half-drunk bottles of water, some loose change. Elias took cigarette butts from the ashtrays. The boss was a sixty-year-old Turkish man who smoked sixty cigarettes a day and paid us very little, but it had already been three weeks since we arrived in Istanbul and the weather was still bad so a bit of extra money and something to pass the time did us both some good.
One afternoon, after finishing work at the car wash, I walked around Taksim Square until I found an Internet café. My phone wasn’t working and I wanted to see if Mustafa had tried to get hold of me. I knew that if he was alive and well he would have sent a message, and sure enough, when I logged into my account, there were three emails from him.
*
22/11/2015
My dear Nuri,
I hope you found the letter I left for you. I have been thinking of you and Afra every day. I am sorry that I had to leave without saying goodbye. If I stayed they would have found me and killed me. I hope you understand and can forgive me.
Each and every day I wonder how we got here, how life can be so cruel. Much of the time I can’t stand to be alive. The thoughts I have poison me and I am alone with them. I know that every other person here is trapped in their own hell – there is one man who holds his knees and rocks himself all through the night, and he sings, Nuri. He sings a lullaby that freezes my heart. I want to ask him who he once sang it to, or who it was that sang it to him. But I am afraid of his answer, and so I offer him cigarettes instead, it’s all I can do, because he stops singing for a few minutes while he smokes. I wish I could escape my mind, that I could be free of this world and everything I have known and seen in the last few years. And the children who have survived – what will become of them? How will they be able to live in this world?
The journey did not go as planned. I travelled through Turkey and Greece and then crossed the border into Macedonia, but things became complicated there – I was caught and deported and put on a train to Bulgaria, which is where I find myself now, in a camp in the woods. I am sending this from the phone of a young man I have met here. There are big tents and we sleep on bunk beds, all stacked next to each other. I think when the wind blows everything will fall over. There is a train station. They are old-fashioned trains that come to this station and people try to jump on and they hang off them because they want to get to Serbia. So far I have not tried to jump onto one of these trains.
The food cart has just arrived and we will wait to be served, sardines and bread. This is what we eat every day. If I make it out of here I will never eat another sardine again.
I hope to hear from you. I am praying for your safety.