This always reminded me of how I had met Mustafa. After his mother, my aunt, had died, the families lost touch and at least fifteen years passed without communication. Mustafa’s father lived a solitary life in the mountains, while my mother and father were city people, working in the heat and chaos of the markets, where trade bustled from all over the world. In fact it was an old Chinese merchant who had given my great-grandmother the red fan. He was a fabric maker from Beijing and had made the silk and hand-painted it himself. One day my father had sent me on an errand to get some fruit and I had taken a detour and stopped by the river to rest beneath a tree. I was tired of being locked up in the shop, and my father was eager for me to learn as much as possible, to serve the customers, to speak English well, so even when the shop was quiet I would be sitting there with an English grammar book on my lap because, according to my father, that was the way forward.
I was hot and exhausted and, as it was the middle of August, it felt like we were breathing in the desert. It was a relief to sit by the river, beneath the cool shade of the narenj tree. I must have been there for about fifteen minutes when a young man approached me, about ten years older than I was and much darker, as if he lived and worked beneath the sun.
‘Do you know the way to this shop?’ He pointed at the piece of paper in his hand where there was a sketch of a road and a shop with an arrow and the words: Aleppo Honey.
‘The Aleppo Honey Shop?’ I said.
He nodded, then shook his head very quickly, a tic I was to become so familiar with.
‘No?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, smiling, shaking his head again.
‘I’m going that way. Why don’t you follow me? I’ll show you the way.’ And as we walked we began to talk. He immediately told me about the apiaries in the mountains and that his grandfather had sent him to the city to sample different types of honey. He told me he had recently applied to the University of Damascus to study agriculture, and that he wanted to learn more about the composition of honey. I told him a bit about my father’s shop, though not too much, because I wasn’t as talkative as he was, and also because the work didn’t interest me that much. I showed him the shop as we walked past and I took him on to the front door of the honey shop, where we said goodbye.
A week later he came to find me at my father’s shop. He brought a huge jar of honey with him. He had just found out that he had been accepted at the university and so would be visiting Aleppo more often, and he had wanted to say thank you to me for taking him to the shop that day. The moment my mother saw him, standing in the doorway of the shop with the jar of honey in his hand, she dropped her fan and stood up. She walked over and stared at him for a while, then she began to sob.
‘Mustafa,’ she said, ‘it is you, isn’t it? How old were you when I last saw you? You were just a little boy. But that face, it hasn’t changed!’ She said later that it was as if she had seen the reincarnation of her sister. And there our friendship began, by the river and later with a pot of honey. A mysterious force that I could never understand had brought my cousin into my life, had led him to find me sitting by the river with no hope in my heart for my future career, and from that moment on my life was changed forever. Yuanfen. Yuanfen, flickering in the red heat, beneath my mother’s eyes.
I ran through the memory three times in my mind, repeating it as if I was rewinding and replaying a videotape, until I slipped off to sleep.
But I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of screaming, and a whistling in the sky, a bomb tearing through the darkness. I sat upright, my body wet, my head pounding, the darkness around me pulsating. I saw the faint outline of a window through a bedsheet, the light of the moon streaming in. I saw Afra’s face fuzzy in the darkness and slowly remembered where I was. I reached out to hold her hand. There were no bombs. We were not in Aleppo. We were safe in Athens, in an old school. The heartbeat in my head subsided, but the screaming continued, and when it stopped abruptly a few moments later, there were other sounds, echoes from other rooms on other floors, desperate adult sobs, creaking floorboards, footsteps and whispers and laughter. The laughter seemed to be coming from outside, from the courtyard below – the laughter of a woman.
I stepped out of the tent, out of the classroom and into the long corridor. At the far end, by the window, a woman was pacing up and down, her flip-flops slapping against the marble, her eyes to the floor. Her body paused, jerked, started up again, like a mechanical toy. I approached her, hesitant for a moment, and put my hand on her arm, hoping to calm her movements, to ask her if she needed any help, but when she glanced up at me I saw that she was asleep. She looked straight through me with wide fearful eyes, shimmering with tears. ‘When did you come back?’ she said.