‘Mohammed,’ I say softly, in case I scare him away.
‘Uncle Nuri,’ he says, ‘See that garden – there’s so much green in there!’
He steps aside so I can take a look. It’s so dark that I can’t see any green. Only the soft shadows of bushes and trees.
‘How did you find me?’ I say, but he doesn’t answer. I feel that I need to be cautious. ‘Would you like to come in?’ But he sits down on the concrete, legs crossed, and peeks through the hole in the fence again. I sit down beside him.
‘There is a seaside here,’ he says.
‘I know.’
‘I don’t like the sea,’ he says.
‘I know. I remember.’ He is holding something in his hand. It’s white and I can smell lemons, though there are no lemons here.
‘What is that?’ I say.
‘A flower.’
‘Where did you get it?’ I open my palm and he places it there. He tells me that he picked it off the lemon tree in
was all dust. Afra wouldn’t leave. Everyone else had gone. Even Mustafa was desperate to go now. But not Afra. Mustafa’s house was on the road that led to the river and I would walk down the hill to visit him. It wasn’t a long walk but there were snipers and I had to be careful. The birds were usually singing. The sound of birdsong never changes. Mustafa told me this many years ago. And whenever the bombs were silent, the birds came out to sing. They perched on the skeletons of trees and on craters and wires and broken walls, and they sang. They flew high above, in the untouched sky, and sang.
As I approached Mustafa’s house I could hear, even from a distance, the faint sound of music. I always found him sitting on the bed in his half-bombed room, vinyl playing on an old record player, biting and sucking at the end of his cigarette, the smoke rising in clouds above him, on the bed beside him a purring cat. But on this day when I arrived, Mustafa was not there. The cat was asleep in the spot where he used to sit, its tail curled around its body. On the bedside cabinet, I found a photograph of the two of us that was taken the year we opened the business together. We were both squinting into the sun, Mustafa at least a foot taller than I was, the apiaries behind us. I knew we were surrounded by bees, though they weren’t visible in the picture. Beneath the photograph was a letter.
Dear Nuri,
Sometimes I think that if I keep walking, I will find some light, but I know that I can walk to the other side of the world and there will still be darkness. It’s not like the darkness of the night, which also has white light from the stars, from the moon. This darkness is inside me and has nothing to do with the outside world.
Now I have a picture of my son lying on that table, and nothing can make it fade. I see him, every time I close my eyes.
Thank you for coming with me every day to the garden. If only we had some flowers to put on his grave. Sometimes in my mind he is sitting at the table and he is eating lakhma. With the other hand he picks his nose and then he wipes it on his shorts and I tell him to stop being like his father, and he says, ‘But you are my father!’ and he laughs. That laughter. I can hear it. It flies above the land and disappears into the distance with the birds. I think this is his soul, it is free now. O Allah keep me alive as long as is good for me, and when death is better for me, take me.
Yesterday I went for a walk to the river, and I watched as four soldiers lined up a group of boys. They blindfolded them and shot them, one by one, and they threw their bodies in the river. I stood back and watched all this and I imagined Firas standing there among them, the fear in his heart, knowing that he would die, the fact that he could not see what was happening and could only hear the gunshots. I hope he was the first in line to die. I never thought I would ever have such a wish. I shut my eyes too and listened, and in between the gunshots and the thuds of falling bodies, I heard a boy crying. He was calling for his father. The other boys were silent, too afraid to make a sound. There is always one person in a group who has more courage than the rest. It takes bravery to cry out, to release what is in your heart. Then he was silenced. I had a rifle in my hand. I found it last week on the side of the street, loaded with three bullets. So I had three shots and there were four men. I waited until their guard was down, till they sat on the bank of the river smoking cigarettes and put their feet in the water where they had thrown the bodies.
My aim was good. I got one in the head, one in the stomach, the third in the heart. The fourth man stood and held his hands up and when he realised I had no shots left, he fumbled for his gun and I ran. He saw my face and they will find me. I have to leave tonight. I must get to Dahab and Aya. I should not have waited this long to leave, but I didn’t want to go without you and abandon you here in hell.