The Beekeeper of Aleppo(6)

Then Mustafa moved away from the table, put on his glasses and carefully sharpened the small pencil with a knife, and, sitting down at his desk, he opened the black book and wrote:

Name – My beautiful boy.

Cause of death – This broken world.

And that was very the last time Mustafa recorded the names of the dead.

Exactly a week after this, Sami was killed.





2




THE SOCIAL WORKER SAYS SHE is here to help us. Her name is Lucy Fisher and she seems impressed that I can speak English so well. I tell her about my job in Syria, about the bees and the colonies, but she doesn’t really hear me, I can tell. She is preoccupied with the papers in front of her.

Afra won’t even turn her face towards her. If you didn’t know she was blind you would think that she was looking out of the window. There’s a bit of sun today and it’s reflecting off her irises, which makes them look like water. Her hands are clasped together on the kitchen table and her lips are sealed tight. She knows some English, enough to get by, but she won’t talk to anyone except me. The only other person I heard her speak to was Angeliki. Angeliki, whose breasts were leaking with milk. I wonder if she managed to find her way out of those woods.

‘How is the accommodation, Mr and Mrs Ibrahim?’ Lucy Fisher with the big blue eyes and silver-rimmed glasses consults her papers as if the answer to her question is in them. I’m struggling to see what the Moroccan man was talking about.

She looks up at me now and her face is a burst of warmth.

‘I find it very clean and safe,’ I say, ‘compared with other places.’ I don’t tell her about these other places, and I definitely don’t tell her about the mice and cockroaches in our room. I fear it would appear ungrateful.

She doesn’t ask many questions, but explains that we will soon be interviewed by an immigration officer. She pushes her glasses up the ridge of her nose and reassures me in a soft and precise voice that once we receive the papers to prove we are claiming asylum, Afra will be able to see a doctor about the pain in her eyes. She glances at Afra and I notice that Lucy Fisher’s hands are clasped in front of her in exactly the same way. There is something about this that I find odd. Then she hands me a bunch of papers. A packet from the Home Office: information about claiming asylum, eligibility, notes about screening, notes about the interview process. I skim through and she waits patiently, watching me.

To stay in the UK as a refugee you must be unable to live safely in any part of your own country because you fear persecution there.

‘Any part?’ I say. ‘Will you send us back to a different part?’

She frowns, pulling at a strand of her hair, and her lips tighten as if she has eaten something horrible.

‘What you need to do now,’ she says, ‘is get your story straight. Think about what you’re going to say to the immigration officer. Make sure it’s all clear and coherent and as straightforward as possible.’

‘But will you send us back to Turkey or Greece? What does persecution mean to you?’ I say this louder than I meant to and my arm begins to throb. I rub the thick line of tight flesh and red tissue, remembering the edge of the knife, and Lucy Fisher’s face is blurred, my hands are shaking. I undo the top button of my shirt. I try to keep my hands still.

‘Is it hot in here?’ I say.

She says something I cannot hear, I see only that her lips are moving. She is standing up now, and I can feel Afra shifting in her seat beside me. There is the sound of running water. A rushing river. But I see a sparkle, like the edge of a very sharp knife. Lucy Fisher’s hand turning the handle of the tap, walking towards me, placing the glass in my hands and lifting it up to my face as if I am a child. I drink the water, all of it, and she sits down. I can see her clearly now and she looks frightened. Afra places her hand on my leg.

The sky cracks. It is raining. Torrential rain. Worse even than Leros where the land was saturated with rain and sea. I realise that she’s spoken, I hear her voice through the rain, I hear the word enemy, and she stares at me, frowning, and her white face looks flushed.

‘Excuse me?’ I say.

‘I said we’re here to help you as much as we can.’

‘I heard the word enemy,’ I say.

She thrusts her shoulders back and purses her lips, she glances again at Afra, and in the spark of anger that fires up her face and eyes, I see what the Moroccan man was talking about. But it’s not me she’s angry with; she can’t really see me.

‘All I said was that I’m not your enemy.’ Her voice is apologetic now, she shouldn’t have said that, it slipped out, there is pressure on her, I can see it in the way she tugs at that strand of hair. But the words ring out still in the room, even as she packs her things together, even as she speaks to Afra, who now nods her head very slightly at her, if only to acknowledge her presence.

‘I hope you are OK, Mr Ibrahim,’ she says as she leaves.

I wish I knew who my enemy was.

Later, I step out into the concrete garden and sit on the chair beneath the tree. I remember the humming of the bees, the sound of peace, I can almost smell the honey, lemon blossoms and aniseed, but this is suddenly replaced by the hollow smell of ash.

There is a buzzing. Not a collective sound like thousands of bees in the apiaries, but a single buzz. On the ground by my feet there is a bee. When I look closely I see that she has no wings. I put my hand out and she crawls onto my finger, making her way onto my palm – a bumblebee, plump and furry, such soft pile, with broad bands of yellow and black and a long tongue tucked under her body. She is crawling over the back of my wrist now so I take her inside with me and sit in the armchair and watch her as she nestles into my hand, preparing to sleep. In the living room the landlady brings us tea with milk. It’s busy in here tonight. Most of the women have gone to bed, apart from one, who is talking in low whispers to a man beside her in Farsi. I can tell from the way she is wearing her hijab loose over her hair that she is probably from Afghanistan.