Hope vs. Delusion Theme Analysis

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.

“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.

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.

“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.

“[…]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.

“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.

“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.