and standing upright. It moves and the light flashes on again. It is a young boy with his back to me. He is looking through a gap in the fence, into the other garden. I knock hard on the glass but he doesn’t turn. I search for the key and find it hanging on a nail behind the curtain. When I approach him, the boy turns to face me, as if he has been waiting for me, looking at me with those black eyes asking for the answers to all the questions in the world.
‘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