Home, Displacement, and the Refugee Experience Theme Analysis

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

“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.

As I stood there with Afra and Mohammed and the other families, I felt lost, as if I was out alone in a dark cold sea with nothing to hold on to. This was the first time in a long time that I had felt any safety, any security, and yet in this moment the sky felt too big, the rising dusk held an unknown darkness.

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.”

“[Odysseus] went from Ithaca to Calypso to god knows where—all of this journey, to find what?”

There was an intensity to her—the way she leaned into me, the way she pushed my leg if I took my eyes off her.

“I don’t know,” I said to her.

“To find his home again,” she said.

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.

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.

“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.