‘You should bring your bed out here.’ I turn and the Moroccan man is standing there with a huge smile on his face. ‘What a beautiful day,’ he says looking up at the sky, ‘and they say this country is all rain.’
In the living room, in the evening, the Moroccan man and Diomande play hangman using English words. It’s a total disaster, but I don’t say anything, and I don’t correct their spellings, and soon the other residents have joined in. The Afghan woman is very competitive and claps loudly when she wins. The man she always speaks to, who I understand now to be her brother, is a bit younger than she is and wears a lot of gel in his hair and has a wonky goatee. They are both very intelligent. In the nights when I’ve sat here listening to them talk, I’ve heard them speak Arabic, Farsi, English and even a bit of Greek.
I watch Diomande’s back, the wings that I mistook for shoulder blades, the way they move beneath his T-shirt, the way he brings his hand to his spine now and then, a habit he has probably had all his life. He is always in pain, this boy. But his smile and his laugh are full of light. He is arguing with the Moroccan man about how to spell ‘mouse’。 The Moroccan man thinks there is a ‘w’ in it. Diomande is whacking his hand on his forehead.
My eyes close and the voices begin to merge together and when I open them again I can hear the bees, thousands of them working like they used to. The noise is coming from outside. The room is quiet now, apart from the sound of the marble rolling on the floorboards. Mohammed is sitting on the floor.
‘Uncle Nuri!’ he says when he hears me moving. ‘You’ve been sleeping for such a long time.’
The clock on the wall says 3 a.m.
‘Did you find the key?’ he says.
‘There was no key. They were flowers.’
‘You went to the wrong place,’ he says. ‘It’s not that tree – it’s in the other garden. The green garden. It’s one of the small trees. The key is on there. I can see it through the hole.’
‘What do you need the key for?’ I say.
‘I need to get out,’ is all he says. ‘Will you fetch it for me?’
I unlock the patio doors, and the sound of the bees hits me. The air is thick and full, but I see not even one bee. The darkness is empty. Mohammed follows me out into the courtyard.
‘Do you hear that?’ I say. ‘Where is it coming from?’
‘Just look in the other garden, Uncle Nuri, and you will find the key.’
I look through the hole, but it’s so dark that I can barely see the trees, let alone a key.
‘You have to go over the fence,’ he says above the noise, this constant buzzing coming from the deepest place of the atmosphere, like waves or memory. I get the stepladder and climb over into the landlady’s garden. I am suddenly surrounded by the softness of the black trees and flowers, blurred shapes rustling in the breeze. The small bicycle is leaning against the wall, and I recognise the outline of the sandpit and walk around it. I can hear Mohammed guiding me now, he is telling me to turn left, and eventually I see what he is talking about, a small shrub, and this time there is one key hanging from a branch. It catches the light of the moon. I have to pull hard to take it off, it’s tangled in the foliage, and then I put the bicycle next to the fence so that I can step on it to climb back over.
When I’m back in the courtyard, Mohammed has gone. I close the patio doors against the noise and head upstairs and climb into bed. Afra is asleep with both hands resting beneath her cheek. She is breathing slowly and deeply. I lie on my back this time and hold the key close to my chest. The buzzing is distant now. I think I can hear
of the Aegean were calm in the late afternoon. The fire had been extinguished, and we were aboard a marine vessel heading to the island of Leros.
‘This is the second time I have been on a boat,’ Mohammed said. ‘The first time was a bit scary, don’t you think?’
‘Just a bit.’ I immediately thought of Sami. Sami had been on a boat once when we’d taken him to visit his grandparents on the Syrian coast, a small town in the shadow of the Lebanon mountains. He was afraid of the water – he cried and I held him in my arms and soothed him by pointing out the fish in the water. Then he stared at the streaks of silver fish beneath the surface with tears in his eyes and a smile on his face. He was always afraid of water; even when we washed his hair, he didn’t want it in his ears or in his eyes. He was a boy of the desert. He only knew the water in the evaporating streams and irrigation ponds. He and Mohammed were the same age – if he was here they would have been friends. Mohammed would have looked after Sami because Sami was a more sensitive, more fearful boy, and Sami would have told Mohammed stories. How he loved to tell stories!