The Beekeeper of Aleppo(4)

‘When will I get it back?’ Firas would say.

‘When it snows in the desert.’

And by the time coffee was on the table, the phone would be out of the honey jar and back in Firas’s hands. ‘Next time, Firas, I will not put it an empty jar!’

As long as Mustafa was cooking or eating, he was happy. It was later, when the sun had set and the scent of the night jasmine engulfed us, especially when the air was still and thick, that his face would drop and I knew that he was thinking, that the stillness and darkness of the night had again brought whispers from the future.

‘What is it, Mustafa?’ I said, one evening when Dahab and Afra were loading the dishwasher after dinner, Dahab’s booming laugh sending the birds up past the buildings and into the night sky. ‘You don’t seem yourself lately.’

‘The political situation is getting worse,’ he said. I knew he was right, though neither of us really wanted to talk about it. He stubbed out his cigarette and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

‘Things will get bad. We all know it, don’t we? But we’re trying to continue living like we did before.’ He stuffed a dough ball in his mouth as if to prove his point. It was late June, and in March of that year the civil war had just begun with protests in Damascus, bringing unrest and violence to Syria. I must have looked down at this point, and maybe he saw the worry on my face, for when I glanced up again, he was smiling.

‘I’ll tell you what, how about we create more recipes for Aya? I have some ideas – eucalyptus honey with lavender!’ And his eyes gleamed as he began considering his new soap product, calling Aya to bring his laptop outside so that, together, they could work out the exact composition. Although Aya was only thirteen at the time, Mustafa was determined to be her teacher. Aya was busy playing with Sami – how the child loved her! He was always desperate to be close to her, always scanning for her with his large, grey eyes. They were the colour of his mother’s eyes. Stone. Or the colour of a newborn baby’s eyes before they change to brown, except his didn’t change, and they didn’t turn bluer either. Sami would follow Aya around, pulling at her skirt, and she would pick him up, high in her arms, to show him the birds in the feeders, or the insects and lizards that crawled over the walls and across the concrete patio.

With each recipe, Mustafa and Aya would consider the pigments and acids, the minerals in each type of honey, in order to create a combination that worked perfectly, as he put it. Then they would calculate the sugar density, granulation, tendency to absorb moisture from air, immunity from spoilage. I would give suggestions, and they would accept them with kind smiles, but it was Mustafa’s mind that worked like the bees. He was the one with the ideas and the intelligence, while I was the one who made it all happen.

And for a while on those evenings, with the apricot sweets and the smell of night jasmine, Firas on his computer and Aya sitting beside us with Sami in her arms while he chewed her hair, and Afra and Dahab’s laughter reaching us from the kitchen, on those nights, we were still happy. Life was close enough to normal for us to forget our doubts, or at least to keep them locked away somewhere in the dark recesses of our minds while we made plans for the future.

When the trouble first started, Dahab and Aya left. Mustafa convinced them to go without him. As his fears began to be confirmed, he very quickly made plans, but he needed to stay a while longer to see to the bees. At the time I thought he was being too hasty, that his mother’s death when he was a child – which had haunted him for as long as I knew him – had somehow made him overprotective of the women in his life, and as a result Dahab and Aya were among the first to leave the neighbourhood and were fortunately spared from what was to come. Mustafa had a friend in England, a professor of sociology who had moved there some years ago on account of work, and this man had telephoned Mustafa and urged him to make his way to the United Kingdom; he was convinced the situation would get worse. Mustafa gave his wife and daughter enough money to see them through the journey, while he stayed in Syria with Firas.

‘I can’t just abandon the bees, Nuri,’ he’d said one night, his large hand coming down over his face and his beard, as if he was trying to wipe off the sombre expression he always wore now. ‘The bees are family to us.’

Before things became really bad, Mustafa and Firas would join us for dinner in the evenings and we would sit on the veranda together and watch the city below and hear the rumble of a distant bomb, see the smoke rising into the sky. Later, as the situation worsened, we started to talk about leaving together. We would gather around my illuminated globe in the half darkness of early evening while he traced with his finger the journey Dahab and Aya had made. It had been easier for them. In a thick leather wallet, Mustafa had the names and numbers of various smugglers. We went through the books, checking the finances, making calculations about the possible cost of our escape. Of course it was hard to predict, smugglers changed their rates on a whim, but we had a plan, and Mustafa loved plans and lists and itineraries. They made him feel safe. But I knew this was just talk; Mustafa wasn’t ready to leave the bees.

One night, late in the summer, vandals destroyed the hives. They set fire to them, and by the time we got to the apiaries in the morning they were burned to char. The bees had died and the field was black. I will never forget the silence, that deep, never-ending silence. Without the clouds of bees above the field, we were faced with a stillness of light and sky. In that moment, as I stood at the edge of the field where the sun was slanting across the ruined hives, I had a feeling of emptiness, a quiet nothingness that entered me every time I inhaled. Mustafa sat down on the ground in the middle of the field with his legs crossed and his eyes closed. I walked around scanning the ground for live bees and stamped on them because they had no hives or colony. Most of the hives had crumbled completely but a few stood like skeletons with their numbers still visible: twelve, twenty-one, one hundred and twenty-one – the colonies of grandmother, mother and daughter. I knew because I had split the hives myself. Three generations of bees. But they were all gone now. I went home and tucked Sami into bed, sitting for a while beside him as he slept, then I went to the veranda and watched the darkening sky and the brooding city below.