diamond pattern.’
I nodded.
‘Then you will come to the shop and I will show you how to make up the curtains – you can watch me the first time.’
I nodded again. He drank his ayran in one go and held the glass up for my mother to refill. But my mother had her back to us at this point.
‘I will do what you want for another month,’ I said.
He put the glass down on the table, still empty.
‘And what will happen after this month?’ His voice was heavy with brooding anger.
‘I will become a beekeeper.’ I said this matter-of-factly, placing my hands on the table.
‘So you are giving me a month’s notice?’
I nodded.
‘As if I am not your father.’
This time I did not nod.
He looked out of the window, the sun blazing in his eyes, making them the colour of honey.
‘And what do you know about beekeeping? Where will you work? How will you earn a living?’
‘Mustafa has taught me—’
‘Ha!’ he said. ‘Mustafa. That boy is wild. I knew he would lead you astray.’
‘He hasn’t led me anywhere. He’s taught me.’
He grunted.
‘We will build beehives together.’
Another grunt.
‘We will have a business.’
This time silence. A long silence and his eyes dropped and for the first time I felt his quiet disappointment and deep guilt in my heart that would haunt me for years to come. As my mother washed up she turned now and then to look at me, to nod, to urge me on, but I couldn’t say anymore after this, and about fifteen minutes passed before my father spoke again.
‘So the shop will die with me,’ he said.
And that was the last thing he would ever say about it. According to him I had made my decision and there was nothing more to discuss. But in the days and weeks that followed I saw him become smaller, and less urgent, less purposeful in his actions, as he cut or sewed or measured. As if he had lost the fire that had driven him. And I thought in that moment, lying there looking up at the Athenian sky, that if I had sacrificed my father’s happiness to become a beekeeper, then I had to find a way to make it to Mustafa. He had found me all those years ago, he had led me out of that dark shop and into the wild fields on the edge of the desert, and now I had to keep my promise to him. I would find a way to get to England.
I woke up in the dead of night. The fire was just a flicker now. The children were sleeping. A baby was crying; it was like the sound was coming from deep in the woods, but it couldn’t have been. Angeliki was wrapped in a blanket, leaning against a tree beside us. Her eyes were wide open, her hands in her lap, her breasts still leaking. I wondered where she had come from, where her family was, who she had left behind. I wanted to ask her again: Angeliki, why did you leave? And what is your real name? And where is your baby girl?
I contemplated these questions here in the moonlit forest, surrounded by the buzzing of the crickets. Now there was a softness to the darkness, like night-time in the stories of the Arabian Nights, the kind my mother used to tell me in the days when she would look out of the window at a country that seethed with power and corruption and oppression, and I would see her frustration, her anger and sometimes her fear while she read.
There was something about the movement of time in these stories that I both loved and feared. Night after night, monsters came out of the sea. Night after night, stories were told in order to delay a beheading. Lives were broken up into nights. Night-time was filled with the cries of the grief-stricken.
Angeliki shifted her hands in her lap. The baby was still crying, but I couldn’t tell where the crying was coming from. I didn’t want to sleep again because this place was not safe. There was something very wrong here. I remembered how Afra’s breasts used to leak when Sami cried. Hearing Sami, smelling him, sitting in the chair where she usually fed him, made Afra’s breasts release milk, as if there was always an invisible cord between them. They communicated without words from the most primitive part of the soul. I remembered her laughing about this, saying that she