Later, during harvesting season, I would check the hives to see how much honey the bees had produced and then I would put the combs into the extractors and fill the tubs, scraping off the residue to collect the golden liquid beneath. It was my job to protect the bees, to keep them healthy and strong, while they fulfilled their task of making honey and pollinating the land to keep us alive.
It was my cousin Mustafa who introduced me to beekeeping. His father and grandfather had both been keepers in the green valleys, west of the Anti-Lebanon range. Mustafa was a genius with the heart of a boy. He studied and became a professor at Damascus University, researching the precise composition of honey. Because he travelled back and forth between Damascus and Aleppo, he wanted me to manage the apiaries. He taught me so much about the behaviour of bees and how to manipulate them. The native bees were aggressive from the heat, but he showed me how to understand them.
When the university closed for the summer months, Mustafa joined me full-time in Aleppo; we both worked hard, so many hours – in the end we thought like the bees, we even ate like the bees! We would eat pollen mixed with honey to keep us going in the heat.
In the early days, when I was in my twenties and still new to the job, our hives were made of plant material covered with mud. Later we replaced the trunks of cork trees and the terracotta hives with wooden boxes, and soon we had over five hundred colonies! We produced at least ten tonnes of honey a year. There were so many bees, and they made me feel alive. When I was away from them it was like a great party had ended. Years later, Mustafa opened a shop in the new part of town. In addition to honey, he sold honey-based cosmetics, luscious sweet-smelling creams and soaps and hair products from our very own bees. He had opened this shop for his daughter. Though she was young at the time she believed that she would grow up to study agriculture, just like her father. So, Mustafa named the shop Aya’s Paradise and promised that one day, if she studied hard, it would belong to her. She loved to come in and smell the soaps and smother the creams on her hands. She was an intelligent girl for her age, I remember once how she said, ‘This shop is what the world would smell like if there were no humans.’
Mustafa did not want a quiet life. He always strove to do more and learn more. I’ve never seen this in any other human being. However big we got – even when we had big customers from Europe and Asia and the Gulf – I was the one who looked after the bees, the one he trusted with this. He said I had a sensitivity that most men lacked, that I understood their rhythms and patterns. He was right. I learned how to really listen to the bees and I spoke to them as though they were one breathing body with a heart, because, you see, bees work together. Even when, at the end of summer, the drones are killed by workers to preserve food resources, they are still working as one entity. They communicate to one another through a dance. It took me years to understand them, and once I did, the world around me never looked or sounded the same again.
But, as the years passed, the desert was slowly growing, the climate becoming harsh, rivers drying up, farmers struggling; only the bees were drought-resistant, ‘Look at these little warriors,’ Afra would say on the days when she came with Sami to visit the apiaries, a tiny bundle wrapped up in her arms, ‘Look at them still working, when everything else is dying!’ Afra always prayed for rain, because she feared the dust storms and the droughts. When a dust storm was coming we could see, from our veranda, the sky above the city turn purple, and then there was a whistle deep in the atmosphere, and Afra would run around the house closing all the doors, bolting all the windows and shutters.
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Every Saturday we would go to Mustafa’s house for dinner. Dahab and Mustafa would cook together, Mustafa measuring every ingredient, every spice, meticulously on the scales, as if one tiny mistake would ruin the whole meal. Dahab was a tall woman, almost the same height as her husband, and she would stand beside him and shake her head, as I’d seen her do with Firas and Aya. ‘Hurry up,’ she would say. ‘Hurry up! At this rate we will be eating this Saturday’s meal next Saturday.’ He hummed while he cooked, and stopped every twenty minutes or so to smoke, standing in the courtyard beneath the flowering tree, biting and sucking on the end of his cigarette.
I would join him, but he was quiet at these times, his eyes glistening from the heat of the kitchen, his thoughts elsewhere. Mustafa began to fear the worst before I did, and I could see the worry in the lines of his face.
They lived on the bottom floor of a block of flats, and the courtyard was enclosed on three sides by the walls of the neighbouring blocks, so that it was always cool and full of shadows. The sounds from the balconies above tumbled down towards us – scraps of conversations, music, the faint murmur of television sets. There were vines in the courtyard, laden with grapes, and a trellis of jasmine covering one wall, and on another a shelf of empty jars and slices of honeycomb.