me to take off her hijab. I removed the hairpins, gently, one by one, unwrapping the material and seeing for the first time her long black hair, so dark, it was like the sky above the desert on a night with no stars.
But what I loved most was her laugh. She laughed like we would never die.
When the bees died, Mustafa was ready to leave Aleppo. We were about to go when Firas went missing, so we waited for him. Mustafa would hardly talk during this time, his mind completely preoccupied, imagining one thing or another. Every so often he would make a suggestion about where Firas might be. ‘Maybe he has gone to find one of his friends, Nuri,’ or, ‘Maybe he can’t bring himself to leave Aleppo – he is hiding somewhere so that we will stay,’ or, one time, ‘Maybe he has died, Nuri. Maybe my son has died.’
Our bags were packed and we were ready, but the days and nights passed with no sign of Firas. So Mustafa worked in a morgue in an abandoned building, where he would record the details and cause of death – bullets, shrapnel, explosion. It was strange to see him indoors, shut away from the sun. He had a black book, and he worked round the clock, writing down with the stub of a pencil the details of the dead. When he found identification on the corpses, his task was easier; other times he would record a distinguishing feature, like the colour of their hair or eyes, the particular shape of their nose, a mole on their left cheek. Mustafa did this until that winter day when I brought his son in from the river. I recognised the teenage boy dead on the slabs in the courtyard of the school. I asked two men with a car to help me take the body to the morgue. When Mustafa saw Firas, he asked us to lay him down on the table, then he closed his boy’s eyes and stood for a long time, unmoving, holding his hand. I stood in the doorway while the other men left, the sound of an engine, the car pulling away, and then there was stillness, such stillness, and the light came in from the window above the table where the boy was lying, where Mustafa was standing holding on to his hand. For a while there was no sound, not a bomb or a bird or a breath.
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