Dehumanization vs. Connection Theme Analysis

I am scared of my wife’s eyes. She can’t see out and no one can see in. Look, they are like stones, gray stones, sea stones. […] Look at the folds of her stomach, the color of desert honey, darker in the creases, and the fine, fine silver lines on the skin of her breasts, and the tips of her fingers with the tiny cuts, where the ridges and valley patterns were once stained with blue or yellow or red paint. Her laughter was gold once, you would have seen as well as heard it. Look at her, because I think she is disappearing.

People are not like bees. We do not work together, we have no real sense of a greater good—I’ve come to realize this now.

But I don’t like their queues, their order, their neat little gardens and neat little porches and their bay windows that glow at night with the flickering of their TVs. It all reminds me that these people have never seen war. It reminds me that back home there is no one watching TV in their living room or on their veranda, and it makes me think of everything that’s been destroyed.

Although it’s only early afternoon I lie down next to her on the bed, and I let her put her arm around me and press her palm onto my chest, but I won’t touch her. She tries to hold my hand, and I edge it away. My hands belong to another time, when loving my wife was a simple thing.

“What happened to her?” he said to me, and there was an unmistakable note of curiosity in his voice. I could suddenly imagine him collecting horror stories—real-life tales of loss and destruction. His glasses were fixed on me now.

“A bomb,” I said.

And then, from the window, something catches my eye. White planes searing through the sky. Too many to count. I hear a whistle followed by a rumbling, as though the world has ripped open. I rush to the window: bombs are falling, planes are circling. The light is too strong, I shield my eyes. The sound is too loud, I cover my ears.

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.

I began to feel that fear again, the kind that had consumed me in Aleppo, alert to every movement and sound, imagining danger everywhere, expecting that at any moment the worst would happen, that death was near. I felt exposed, as if people were watching me from the woods, and when the wind blew it brought with it whispers: murderer, Nadim is dead, murderer.

“How did it go?” she asks.

I don’t reply. I cannot speak.

“Please,” she says, “don’t lose hope. That’s the thing.” There is a tone of resignation in her voice, and she is pulling at the strand of hair. “This is what I always tell people, you see. Never, never, never lose hope.”

“You are lost in the darkness, Nuri,” she says. “It is a fact. You’ve gotten 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 she 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.

“You’re lost in a different world. You’re not here at all. I don’t know you anymore.”

I don’t say anything.

“Close your eyes,” she says.

So I close my eyes.

“Can you see the bees, Nuri? Try to see them in your mind. Hundreds and thousands of them in the sunlight, on the flowers, the hives, and the honeycomb. Can you see it?”

[…]

I don’t reply.

“You think it’s me who can’t see,” she says.

He speaks with the enthusiasm of a child again, but can detect an undertone of desperation. I know him, and what he is really saying is this: this is how the story must end; our hearts can bear no more loss.

[…]

He wants to give me something to hope for, I can tell. Mustafa has always given me something to hope for.