Grief, Memory, and Coping Mechanisms 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.

The bees were an ideal society, a small paradise among chaos.

And for a while on those evenings […] we were still happy. Life was close enough to normal for us to forget our doubts, or at least to keep them locked away somewhere in the dark recesses of our minds while we made plans for the future.

“We have to go, Afra,” I said.

“I’ve already told you. No.”

“If we stay—”

“If we stay, we’ll die,” she said.

“Exactly.”

“Exactly.” Her eyes were open and blank now.

“You’re waiting for a bomb to hit us. If you want it to happen, it will never happen.”

“Then I’ll stop waiting. I won’t leave him.”

“There’ll be no bombs there,” he’d said, “and the houses won’t break like these do.” I wasn’t sure if he’d meant the Lego houses or the real houses, and then it saddened me when I realized that Sami had been born into a world where everything could break. Real houses crumbled, fell apart. Nothing was solid in Sami’s world. And yet somehow he was trying to imagine a place where buildings didn’t fall down around him.

Afra was talking about Aleppo like it was a magical land out of a story. It was like she’d forgotten everything else, the years leading up to the war, the riots, the dust storms, the droughts, the way we had struggled even then, even before the bombs, to stay alive.

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.

I catch sight of my face in the mirror above the sink, and I pause with my hands by my ears. I look so different now, but I can’t quite put my finger on how. Yes, there are deep lines that were not there before, and even my eyes seem to have changed—they are darker and wider, always on the alert, like Mohammed’s eyes, but it’s not that; something else has changed, something unfathomable.

I put the key in the lock, turn it, and open the door. An intense light dazzles me, and when my eyes adjust I see that I am high up on the top of a hill, looking down over Aleppo. There is a full moon, close to the horizon, full of the colors of the desert. A blood moon.

“It’s so beautiful.”

For some reason, when I said this, she stopped drawing, so that the right side of the picture was left without color. Strangely this reminded me of the white crumbling streets once the war came. The way the color was washed out of everything. The way the flowers died. She handed it to me.

“It’s not finished,” I said.

“It is.”

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.

“[…]sometimes our bodies can find ways to cope when we are faced with things that are too much for us to bear. You saw your son die, Mrs. Ibrahim, and maybe something in you had to shut down.”

Where was home now? And what was it? In my mind it had become a picture infused with golden light, a paradise never to be reached.

“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.

“I’m building a house!” he says. “When we go to England we will live in this house. This house won’t break like these do.”

I remember now. I remember him lying in bed, afraid of the bombs, and how I had given him an old bronze key that once opened a shed at the apiaries. I had tucked it beneath his pillow so that he could feel that somewhere in all the ruins there was a place where he could be safe.

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.