the Moroccan man.’
‘But … I …’
‘I’m going for a walk with him and Diomande.’
‘OK,’ she says quietly. ‘Have a nice time.’ I can still hear her words – there was so much sadness in her voice – even as we walk along the wooden pier and enter the fairground, swept up in a tornado of slides and roller coasters and bumper cars. ‘Have a nice time’ echoes in my mind, even when Diomande is talking about the Ivory Coast.
‘The sea is like the crystal,’ he says, ‘not like this one. This one look like shit. No! Sea there is like the sky. So clear! You could see all the little fishes swimming. Is like glass. And when sun set everything is red – the sky, the sea. You should see this! Everything red.’ He sweeps his hand across the sky and I remember Afra’s paintings. We walk by the seawall, so that we’re close to the water.
We sit in a café in the arcade. It smells like vinegar and sherbet. The Moroccan man has some change in his pocket so he buys us all a bright red drink so that we can think about the sky of the Ivory Coast. The drink tastes like cherry-flavoured plastic and is made of crushed ice.
‘You be very quiet,’ Diomande says to me, his dark eyes illuminated by the sun so that they are a warm brown now.
‘What is the sea like in Syria?’ the Moroccan man asks.
‘I live by the desert,’ I say. ‘The desert is as dangerous and as beautiful as the sea.’
Then the three of us sit there silent for a long time, staring out across the water, imagining our own homes, I guess, what we have lost, what has been left behind.
By the time we head back, the sun is setting and a strong wind blows across the pier so that its foundations squeak and rattle.
At the B&B, Afra is not in the living room or the kitchen. I find her in the bedroom, lying on the bed this time, her face still wet with tears. She is holding the marble in her fingers and twirling it around. Sometimes she rolls it over her lips, or along her wrist.
She doesn’t speak to me when I enter the room, but when I lie down next to her she says, ‘Nuri, have you heard from Mustafa?’
‘Won’t you stop asking me?’ I say.
‘No. He is the reason we are here!’
I don’t say anything.
‘You are lost in the darkness, Nuri,’ she says. ‘It is a fact. You’ve got completely lost somewhere in the dark.’
I look at her eyes, so full of fear and questions and longing, and I had thought it was her who was lost, that Afra was the one stuck in the dark places of her mind. But I can see how present she is, how much she is trying to reach me. I stay there until I know she is asleep and then I head downstairs.
The living room is quiet tonight, the Moroccan man is in the kitchen on the phone, pacing, and now and then raising his voice. Diomande took a shower after the fair and has stayed in his room. There are two or three residents sitting around the dining table playing cards. I sit down at the computer. The light of the TV is flickering in the room.
I log into my emails quickly before I have a chance to change my mind. There is a message there from Mustafa.
11/05/2016
Dearest Nuri,
I wonder if you made it out of Athens. It is hard for me to sit here not knowing if you and Afra are safe. I hope that you are making your way to us. It was raining today, all day, and I miss the desert and the sunshine. But there are good things here too, Nuri, and I wish that you were here to see. It is a colourful place, full of flowers now in spring. I have just given the third of my weekly workshops to volunteers. One was a Syrian woman who arrived here with her mother and son, another a Congolese refugee who has memories of gathering honey in the jungle, and an Afghan student is already asking how to get her first queen!
At the moment I have six hives to demonstrate beekeeping and the project is growing week by week. These bees are gentle, not like the Syrian bees. I can even collect the honey without protective gear – I know when they are