‘Ha!’ he said. ‘Mustafa. That boy is wild. I knew he would lead you astray.’
‘He hasn’t led me anywhere. He’s taught me.’
He grunted.
‘We will build beehives together.’
Another grunt.
‘We will have a business.’
This time silence. A long silence and his eyes dropped and for the first time I felt his quiet disappointment and deep guilt in my heart that would haunt me for years to come. As my mother washed up she turned now and then to look at me, to nod, to urge me on, but I couldn’t say anymore after this, and about fifteen minutes passed before my father spoke again.
‘So the shop will die with me,’ he said.
And that was the last thing he would ever say about it. According to him I had made my decision and there was nothing more to discuss. But in the days and weeks that followed I saw him become smaller, and less urgent, less purposeful in his actions, as he cut or sewed or measured. As if he had lost the fire that had driven him. And I thought in that moment, lying there looking up at the Athenian sky, that if I had sacrificed my father’s happiness to become a beekeeper, then I had to find a way to make it to Mustafa. He had found me all those years ago, he had led me out of that dark shop and into the wild fields on the edge of the desert, and now I had to keep my promise to him. I would find a way to get to England.
I woke up in the dead of night. The fire was just a flicker now. The children were sleeping. A baby was crying; it was like the sound was coming from deep in the woods, but it couldn’t have been. Angeliki was wrapped in a blanket, leaning against a tree beside us. Her eyes were wide open, her hands in her lap, her breasts still leaking. I wondered where she had come from, where her family was, who she had left behind. I wanted to ask her again: Angeliki, why did you leave? And what is your real name? And where is your baby girl?
I contemplated these questions here in the moonlit forest, surrounded by the buzzing of the crickets. Now there was a softness to the darkness, like night-time in the stories of the Arabian Nights, the kind my mother used to tell me in the days when she would look out of the window at a country that seethed with power and corruption and oppression, and I would see her frustration, her anger and sometimes her fear while she read.
There was something about the movement of time in these stories that I both loved and feared. Night after night, monsters came out of the sea. Night after night, stories were told in order to delay a beheading. Lives were broken up into nights. Night-time was filled with the cries of the grief-stricken.
Angeliki shifted her hands in her lap. The baby was still crying, but I couldn’t tell where the crying was coming from. I didn’t want to sleep again because this place was not safe. There was something very wrong here. I remembered how Afra’s breasts used to leak when Sami cried. Hearing Sami, smelling him, sitting in the chair where she usually fed him, made Afra’s breasts release milk, as if there was always an invisible cord between them. They communicated without words from the most primitive part of the soul. I remembered her laughing about this, saying that she felt like an animal, and how she realised that we are less human in our times of greatest love and greatest fear. In those early days of motherhood she didn’t paint; she was exhausted and preoccupied entirely with Sami. Later when she took to the canvas again in the hours when Sami was asleep, these landscapes were the most beautiful, the most alive, with greater depth to the darkness and a luminous shimmer to the light.
When the crying stopped, Angeliki’s eyes closed completely. I was thinking about Nadim now and the way he had slipped the money into those boys’ hands. My thoughts turned to Mohammed, and now I was more afraid for him than ever before. And then, worst of all, I thought about Sami. First his smile. Then the moment the light fell from his eyes and they turned to glass. I didn’t want to think about Sami. I never want to think about Sami. I looked up at the vast sky and stars and they morphed into images that I could not dispel from my mind.
Night after night, the predators came out of the woods. Nadim became more and more friendly with the two boys, and as the nights passed the boys disappeared and reappeared again, in the same spot, each time looking more troubled than before. But they had new shoes, and even a new phone, and they bantered with each other and fought and laughed, and they clung to each other, especially in the early hours of the morning when they returned from wherever they had been. Then they slept, late into the afternoon, even when the sun was beaming down on them, their bodies immovable, their minds switched off.