I put my hand in hers and she sits forward into the light and positions my hand across her eyes. Then she tells me to move it from left to right, making a shadow sweep across her face.
‘Now it’s light,’ she says, smiling, ‘now it’s dark.’
I want to show her that what she is saying is making me happy, but I can’t.
‘And I can see some colour!’ she says. ‘Over there.’ She points at a red bucket in the corner of the garden. ‘What is that? A rose bush?’
‘It’s a bucket,’ I say.
She lets go of my hand and her face drops. I see that she is rolling that marble in her fingers, running it along her palm and wrist. The red blade in the middle catches the light and becomes translucent. There is a gentle buzzing in the distance that gradually becomes louder, as if a swarm of bees is making its way to this concrete courtyard.
‘I missed you,’ I hear her say. ‘I was so scared.’ And the wind blows and shakes the blossoms and sends them swirling around her. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’ Her voice is full of sadness. I watch the marble.
‘You have forgotten Mustafa,’ she says.
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Have you forgotten about the bees and the flowers? I think you’ve forgotten about all that. Mustafa is waiting for us and you haven’t even mentioned him. You’re lost in a different world. You’re not here at all. I don’t know you anymore.’
I don’t say anything.
‘Close your eyes,’ she says.
So I close my eyes.
‘Can you see the bees, Nuri? Try to see them in your mind. Hundreds and thousands of them in the sunlight, on the flowers, the hives and the honeycomb. Can you see it?’
In my mind I picture first the fields in Aleppo and the golden yellow bees in the apiaries, and then I see the fields of heather and lavender, the black bees that Mustafa described.
‘Can you see it?’ she says.
I don’t reply.
‘You think it’s me who can’t see,’ she says.
We sit in silence for a long time.
‘Won’t you tell me?’ she says. ‘Won’t you describe to me what’s wrong?’
‘Why do you have Mohammed’s marble?’ I say.
Her hands become suddenly still.
‘Mohammed’s?’ she says.
‘Yes. The little boy we met in Istanbul.’
She leans forward as if she is in pain and exhales.
‘This marble was Sami’s,’ she says.
‘Sami’s?’ I say.
‘Yes.’
‘But Mohammed was playing with it.’
I’m not looking at her now but I hear her exhale again.
‘I don’t know who Mohammed is,’ she says. She hands me the marble.
‘The boy who fell off the boat. Don’t you remember?’
‘A boy did not fall off the boat. There was a girl who kept crying and when her dad went into the water she went in after him and they had to pull her out and wrap her in the women’s scarves. I remember it very well. Her mother told me all of it later when we were on the island by the fire.’ She pushes the marble towards me, urging me to accept it.
I take it, reluctantly.
‘The boy who came with us from Istanbul to Greece,’ I say, ‘Mohammed. The boy who fell off the boat!’
She ignores what I am saying, just gives me that look. She has already answered these questions.
‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ I say.
‘Because I thought you needed him,’ she says. ‘This marble, I took it from the floor of our house the day before we left, the day when the men broke everything and threw all his toys on the floor. Do you remember?’
I remember her last words as I make my way through the dark living room and up the stairs, along the corridor to our bedroom. I remember her words as I look at her from the window, sitting there beneath the blossoms of the tree with the sun on her face.
‘Do you remember?’
I don’t know what I remember anymore. I shut the curtains. I lie down on the bed. I close my eyes and hear the sound of the bees deep in the sky.
When I open my eyes and sit up in bed, I see that there is a gold key on the rug. I pick it up and head to the door at the end of the corridor, put the key in the lock and open it. I am high up on the hill again. The noise is louder now; it fills my mind completely. I am on the hill with my house behind me and there is Aleppo stretched vast and wide below, the wall around the city is made of golden jasper while the city is pure glass, the buildings shimmering outlines, every single one of them – the mosques, the markets, the rooftops, the citadel in the distance. It is a ghost of a city in the setting sun. To the left there is a flash – a child running down the hill to the river’s edge. I can see him on the path in his blue shorts and red T-shirt.