The Beekeeper of Aleppo(2)
In the evenings the landlady brings us tea with milk. The Moroccan man is old, maybe eighty or even ninety. He looks and smells like he’s made of leather. He reads How to Be a Brit, and sometimes smirks to himself. He has his phone on his lap, and pauses at the end of each page to glance down at it, but no one ever calls. I don’t know who he’s waiting for and I don’t know how he got here and I don’t know why he has made such a journey so late in his life, because he seems like a man who is waiting to die. He hates the way the non-Muslim men stand up to piss.
There are about ten of us in this rundown B&B by the sea, all of us from different places, all of us waiting. They might keep us, they might send us away, but there is not much to decide anymore. Which road to take, whom to trust, whether to raise the bat again and kill a man. These things are in the past. They will evaporate soon, like the river.
I take Afra’s abaya from the hanger in the wardrobe. She hears it and stands, lifting her arms. She looks older now, but acts younger, like she has turned into a child. Her hair is the colour and texture of sand since we dyed it for the photos, bleached out the Arabic. I tie it into a bun and wrap her hijab around her head, securing it with hairpins while she guides my fingers like she always does.
The social worker will be here at 1 p.m., and all meetings take place in the kitchen. She will want to know how we got here and she will be looking for a reason to send us away. But I know that if I say the right things, if I convince her that I’m not a killer, then we will get to stay here because we are the lucky ones, because we have come from the worst place in the world. The Moroccan man isn’t so lucky; he will have more to prove. He is sitting in the living room now by the glass doors, holding a bronze pocket watch in both of his hands, nestling it in his palms like it’s a hatching egg. He stares at it, waiting. What for? When he sees that I’m standing here, he says, ‘It doesn’t work, you know. It stopped in a different time.’ He holds it up in the light by its chain and swings it, gently, this frozen watch made of
was the colour of the city far below. We lived in a two-bedroom bungalow on a hill. From so high up we could see all the unorganised architecture and the beautiful domes and minarets, and far in the distance the citadel peeking through.
It was pleasant to sit on the veranda in the spring; we could smell the soil from the desert and see the red sun setting over the land. In the summer though, we would be inside with a fan running and wet towels on our heads, and our feet in a bowl of cold water because the heat was an oven.
In July the earth was parched, but in our garden we had apricot and almond trees and tulips and irises and fritillaries. When the river dried up, I would go down to the irrigation pond to collect water for the garden to keep it alive. By August it was like trying to resuscitate a corpse, so I watched it all die and merge into the rest of the land. When it was cooler we would take a walk and watch the falcons flying across the sky to the desert.
I had four beehives in the garden, piled one on top of the other, but the rest were in a field on the outskirts of eastern Aleppo. I hated to be away from the bees. In the mornings I would wake up early, before the sun, before the muezzin called out for prayer. I would drive the thirty miles to the apiaries and arrive as the sun was just rising, fields full of light, the humming of the bees a single pure note.
The bees were an ideal society, a small paradise among chaos. The worker bees travelled far and wide to find food, preferring to go to the furthest fields. They collected nectar from lemon blossoms and clover, black nigella seeds and aniseed, eucalyptus, cotton, thorn and heather. I cared for the bees, nurtured them, monitored the hives for infestations or poor health. Sometimes I would build new hives, divide the colonies or raise queen bees – I’d take the larvae from another colony and watch as the nurse bees fed them with royal jelly.
Later, during harvesting season, I would check the hives to see how much honey the bees had produced and then I would put the combs into the extractors and fill the tubs, scraping off the residue to collect the golden liquid beneath. It was my job to protect the bees, to keep them healthy and strong, while they fulfilled their task of making honey and pollinating the land to keep us alive.
It was my cousin Mustafa who introduced me to beekeeping. His father and grandfather had both been keepers in the green valleys, west of the Anti-Lebanon range. Mustafa was a genius with the heart of a boy. He studied and became a professor at Damascus University, researching the precise composition of honey. Because he travelled back and forth between Damascus and Aleppo, he wanted me to manage the apiaries. He taught me so much about the behaviour of bees and how to manipulate them. The native bees were aggressive from the heat, but he showed me how to understand them.
When the university closed for the summer months, Mustafa joined me full-time in Aleppo; we both worked hard, so many hours – in the end we thought like the bees, we even ate like the bees! We would eat pollen mixed with honey to keep us going in the heat.
In the early days, when I was in my twenties and still new to the job, our hives were made of plant material covered with mud. Later we replaced the trunks of cork trees and the terracotta hives with wooden boxes, and soon we had over five hundred colonies! We produced at least ten tonnes of honey a year. There were so many bees, and they made me feel alive. When I was away from them it was like a great party had ended. Years later, Mustafa opened a shop in the new part of town. In addition to honey, he sold honey-based cosmetics, luscious sweet-smelling creams and soaps and hair products from our very own bees. He had opened this shop for his daughter. Though she was young at the time she believed that she would grow up to study agriculture, just like her father. So, Mustafa named the shop Aya’s Paradise and promised that one day, if she studied hard, it would belong to her. She loved to come in and smell the soaps and smother the creams on her hands. She was an intelligent girl for her age, I remember once how she said, ‘This shop is what the world would smell like if there were no humans.’