Love and Obstacles

The Bees, Part 1

Many years ago my sister and I went to see a movie with our parents. The movie was about a handsome lad on a treasure hunt in Africa, in the course of which he meets a beautiful young lady he seems to get along with. Mother passed out instantly — moving pictures regularly put her to sleep. Father snorted derisively a few times, whispering into my ear: “This is stupid.” He started turning to people around him, touching them as if to make them snap out of their dreams, imploring them: “People, don’t believe this! Comrades! This is not real!” The audience, deeply invested in the trials and tribulations of the hero, who was presently dangling topsy-turvy over a pit of ravenous crocodiles, did not respond well to my father’s prodding. An usher came by and tried, in vain, to silence him. My sister and I pretended to be focused on the screen, while our mother was woken by the ruckus only to find herself in the middle of an embarrassment. In the end, Father stormed out furiously, dragging my sister and me, Mother apologizing to the peevish audience in our wake. We took a departing look at the screen, as distant as a sunset: the hero and the disheveled (yet fair) damsel, deep in the jungle teeming with invisible villains, riding a pair of comically trotting mules.

My father developed his hatred of the unreal back when he was at university. One morning in his dorm room he emerged from his slumber with a clearly remembered nightmare. He immediately described it to his two roommates, the experience still disturbingly fresh in his mind. The dream involved danger, pain, and mystery, although there was also an encounter with a woman. His roommates were transfixed listening to him, while he led them down the steep, untrodden paths of his subconscious. But a moment before the face of the woman was to be revealed and the dream resolved, my father came to.

The following night, the nightmare resumed just where it had ended — the woman was beautiful and held my father’s head in her lap while he wept. Then he wandered and roamed in absurdly changing landscapes; he came across talking animals, including a dog from his childhood whom his father had killed with an ax blow to the head; there were more women, including his dead mother. Then he held a watermelon with the distorted face of someone he knew but could not recognize, and when it broke open, he found a letter addressed to him. He was just about to read it when he woke up.

My father’s roommates, who skipped their morning classes to hear the new developments in his troubling dreams, were sorely disappointed not to find out what was in the letter. In their afternoon classes, recounting Father’s nightmare to their fellow students, they kept speculating— titillated by the fact that it all meant something they could not grasp — what could have been in the letter, and whether the beautiful woman would ever return.

When my father woke up the following morning, the room was full of people sitting in silence, patiently waiting, their breathing slow and deep. Many eyes stared at him, as if trying to read the denouement from his face. Whatever dream my father might have had evaporated the instant his roommates asked him what was in the letter. Father did not dare disappoint them, so he opened the letter and made up the content — there was a woman who was kept in a dark dungeon by an evil man. Thence my father spun an epic narrative, obviously influenced by the archetypal picaresque stories he had read and the horror movies he had seen at the university cinema hall. Yet, even making it up, he didn’t know how to end his nightmare narrative. He reached the point of confronting the evil man, but could not think of what to say, so he insisted he had to hurry to his international relations class.

And so it went on: My father would wake up to face an audience simultaneously demanding the resolution and hating the prospect thereof. But he got entangled in all his subplots and minor narratives and kept evading the conclusion, hoping it would come to him eventually. His audiences dwindled, until one of his roommates (Raf, who was to become a manic-depressive flight controller) accused him of lying. It hurt my father, for he was an honest man, but he knew that he could not say that Raf was not right. He was trapped by his own imagination, my father; he slid down the slippery slope of unreality and could not crawl back up. That was when he learned his lesson, he said. That’s when he became committed to the real.

One day Father came back from work with a Super 8 camera, which he had borrowed from one of his coworkers (Božo A., who had a black belt in karate and a budding brain tumor — he died before my father could return the camera). The camera was smaller than I had imagined, possessing a kind of technological seriousness that suggested only important things could be recorded with it. He announced his desire to make a film that would not lie. When my mother asked what the movie would be about, he dismissed the question as immature. “The truth,” he said. “Obviously.”

Nevertheless, Father wrote the script for his film in a week, at the end of which he declared that it would be the story of his life. I was cast to play the young him, and my sister to play his sister (he didn’t say which one — he had five), and my mother would be his assistant. She instantly resigned from her assistant director position, as she wanted to spend her vacation reading, but the shooting was scheduled for the middle of June 1986, when we were supposed to go to the country to visit my grandparents — we would shoot, as they say, on location.

My father refused to show us the script, uninterested in the fact that the actors normally get to see scripts: he wanted life itself to be our inspiration, for, he reminded us, this film was to be real. Nevertheless, during our regular inspection of his desk (my sister and I went through our parents’ documents and personal things to keep apprised of their development), we found the script. I’m able to reproduce it pretty accurately, since my sister and I read it to each other a few times, with a mixture of awe and hilarity. Here it is:

MY LIFE

1. I am born.

2. I walk.

3. I watch over cows.

4. I leave home to go to school.

5. I come back home. Everybody’s happy.

6. I leave home to go to university.

7. I’m in class. I study at night.

8. I go out for a stroll. I see a pretty girl.

9. My parents meet the pretty girl.

10. I marry the pretty girl.

11. I work.

12. I have a son.

13. I’m happy.

14. I keep bees.

15. I have a daughter.

16. I’m happy.

17. I work.

18. We are by the seaside, then in the mountains.

19. We are happy.

20. My children kiss me.

21. I kiss them.

22. My wife kisses me.

23. I kiss her.

24. I work.

25. The End

The first scene we were supposed to shoot (and the only one that was ever shot) was Scene 4. The location was the slope of the hill on top of which my grandparents’ house was perched. I, in the role of my father at the age of sixteen, was supposed to walk away from the camera with a bundle hanging from a stick on my shoulder, whistling a plaintive melody. I was to turn around and look past the camera, as if looking at the home I was leaving — and then I would wave, bidding farewell. My father would pan to my grandparents’ house, though, strictly speaking, that house was not the home he’d left.

The first take failed because I didn’t wave with enough emotion. My hand, my father said, looked like a limp plucked chicken. He needed more emotion from me — I was leaving my home never to return.

The second take was interrupted as my father decided to zoom in on a bee that just happened to land on a flower nearby.

My two aunts suddenly appeared in the third take, as my father was panning from my poignant good-bye to the house. They stood grinning, paralyzed by the lens for a moment, then casually waved at the camera.

Each time, I had to walk uphill to my starting position, so I could walk away downhill in the next take. My legs hurt, I was thirsty and hungry, and I could not help questioning my father’s directorial wisdom: Why wasn’t he/I taking a bus? Didn’t he/I need more stuff than what could fit in a bundle? Didn’t he/I need some food for the road?

During the fifth take, the camera ran out of film.

The sixth take was almost perfect: I walked away from home, my shoulders slouching with sorrow, my pace aptly hesitant, the bundle dangling poignantly from the convincingly crooked stick. I turned around, completely in character, and looked at the home and life I was about to leave for good: the house was white with a red roof; the sun was setting behind it. Tears welled up in my eyes as I waved at the loving past, before heading toward an unknowable future, my hand like a metronome counting the beats of the saddest adagio. Then I heard a bee buzzing right around the nape of my neck. My metronome hand switched to allegro as I flaunted it around my head trying to defend myself. The bee would not go away, revving furiously its little engine, and the sting was imminent. I dropped the stick and started running, first uphill, toward the camera, then downhill, until my heels were kicking my butt, my arms flailing, all semblance of rhythm abandoned. The bee pursued me relentlessly and unflinchingly, and I was more terrified by its determination than the forthcoming pain: it would not quit even as I was hollering, throwing in the air all the arms I could muster, lunging at incredible speed, a manic mass of discordant movements. And the more I ran, the farther I was from any help and comfort. It was in the moment before I tripped and tumbled head over heels that I realized the bee was entangled in my hair — the attempt to escape was meaningless. I felt the sting as I was rolling downhill, toward the bottom I would never reach. I was stopped by a thornbush, where the sting became indistinguishable from many a thorn.

Need I say that my father kept filming it all? There I am, verily flapping my arms, as if trying to take off, a clueless Icarus leaping downhill farther from the skies, while a cow watches me, masticating with a sublime absence of interest, suggesting that God and his innocent creatures would never give a flying fuck about the fall of man. Then I tumble and hit the bush of thorns, and my father, with a cold presence of his directorial mind, my father fades me out.

To my father’s creative biography I should add his carpentry, which frequently reached poetic heights: more than once we witnessed him caressing or kissing a piece of wood he was about to transform into a shelf, a stool, or a beehive frame; not infrequently, he forced me to touch and then smell a “perfect” piece of wood; he demanded that I appreciate the smooth knotlessness, its natural scent. For Father, a perfect world consisted of objects you could hold in your hand.

He built all kinds of things: structures to hold my mother’s plants, toolboxes, beds and chairs, beehives, et cetera, but his carpenterial masterpiece was a nailless kitchen table he spent a month building. He paid a price: one afternoon he emerged from his workshop, his palm sliced open with a chisel, the blood gushing and bubbling from its center, as from a well — a detail worthy of a biblical miracle. He drove himself to the hospital, and afterward the car looked like a crime scene.

He also liked to sing anything that allowed his unsophisticated baritone to convey elaborate emotional upheavals. I remember the evening I found him sitting in front of the TV, with a notebook and an impeccably sharpened pencil, waiting for the musical show that was sure to feature his favorite song at the time: “Kani Suzo, Izdajice”—“Drop, You Traitor Tear.” He wrote down the words, and in the days that followed he sang “Kani Suzo, Izdajice” from the depths of his throat, humming through the lyrics he couldn’t recall, getting ready for future performances. He sang at parties and family gatherings, sometimes grabbing a mistuned guitar from someone’s hand, providing accompaniment that comprised the same three chords (Am, C, D7) regardless of the song. He seemed to believe that even a severely mistuned guitar provided “atmosphere,” while the harmonic simplification enhanced the emotional impact of any given song. There was something to be said for that: it was hard to deny the power of his baritone against the background of the discordant noise worthy of Sonic Youth, a tear glimmering in the corner of his eye, on the verge of committing betrayal.

His photography merits a mention, even if its main function was to record the merciless passing of time. Most of his photos are structurally identical despite the change of clothes and background: my mother, my sister, and I facing the camera, the flow of time measured by the increasing amounts of my mother’s wrinkles and gray hair, the width of my sister’s beaming smile, and the thickness of the smirking and squinting on my face.

One more thing: He once bought a notebook, and on the first page wrote: This notebook is for expressing the deepest thoughts and feelings of the members of our family. It seemed he intended to use those feelings and thoughts as material for a future book, but few were expressed. I, for one, certainly wasn’t going to let my parents or my sister (ever eager to tease me to tears) in on the tumultuous events in my adolescent soul. Thus there were only two entries: a cryptic note from my mother, who probably just grabbed the notebook while on the phone and wrote:

Friday

Healthy children

Thyme and a line from my sister, in her careful and precise prepubescent handwriting:

I am really sad, because the summer is almost over.

Whatever conveyed reality earned my father’s unqualified appreciation. He was suspicious of broadcast news, relentlessly listing the daily triumphs of socialism, but was addicted to the weather forecast. He read the papers, but found only the obituaries trustworthy. He loved nature shows, because the existence and the meaning of nature were self-evident — there was no denying a python swallowing a rat, or a cheetah leaping on the back of an exhausted, terrified monkey.

My father, I say, was deeply and personally offended by anything he deemed unreal. And nothing insulted him more than literature; the whole concept was a scam. Not only that words — whose reality is precarious at best — were what it was all made from, but those words were used to render what never happened. This dislike of literature and its spurious nature may have been worsened by my intense interest in books (for which he blamed my mother) and my consequent attempts to get him interested. For his forty-fifth birthday I unwisely gave him a book called The Liar—he read nothing of it but the title. Once I read him a passage from a García Márquez story in which an angel falls from the skies and ends up in a chicken coop. After this my father was seriously concerned about my mental capacities. There were other, similar incidents, all of them appalling enough for him to start casually mentioning his plan to write a real book.

He didn’t seem to think that writing such a book was a particularly trying task — all one needed to do was not get carried away by indulgent fantasies, stick to what really happened, hold on to its unquestionable firmness. He could do that, no problem; the only thing he needed was a few weeks off. But he could never find a time: there was his job, and bees, and things to be built, and the necessary replenishing naps. Only once did he approach writing anything — one afternoon I found him snoring on the couch with his notebook on his chest and a pencil with a broken tip on the floor, the only words written: Many years ago.

My father began writing in Canada, in the winter of 1994. They had just landed, after a couple of years of exile and refugee roaming, the years I spent working low-wage jobs and pursuing a green card in Chicago. They had left Sarajevo the day the siege began and went to my deceased grandparents’ house in the countryside, ostensibly to escape the trouble. The real reason was that it was time for the spring works in my father’s apiary, which he kept at the family estate. They spent a year there, on a hill called Vuijak, living off the food they grew in the garden, watching trucks of Serbian soldiers going to the front. My father occasionally sold them honey, and toward the end of that summer started selling mead, although the soldiers much preferred getting drunk on slivovitz. My parents secretly listened to the radio broadcast from the besieged Sarajevo and feared a knock at the door in the middle of the night. Then my mother had a gallbladder infection and nearly died, so they went to Novi Sad, where my sister was attempting to complete her university degree. They applied for a Canadian immigration visa, got it, and arrived in Hamilton, Ontario, in December 1993.

From the window of the fifteenth-floor unfurnished apartment they moved into they could see piles of snow, the smokestacks of the Hamilton steel mills, and a vacant parking lot. It was all black and white and bleak and gray, like an existentialist European movie (which my father found unreal without exception, and morbidly boring on top of it). He started despairing as soon as he set foot on Canadian soil: he didn’t know where they had landed, how they were going to live and pay for food and furniture; he didn’t know what would happen to them if one of them got terribly sick. And it was perfectly clear to him that he would never learn the English language.

My mother, on the other hand, let her stoic self take over — partly to counterbalance my father’s darkest fears, partly because she felt so defeated that it didn’t matter anymore. It was okay now to give herself to the tragic flow of things and let happen whatever was going to happen. My mind stores an image of her patiently and unfalteringly turning a Rubik’s Cube in her hands, while a report on a Sarajevo massacre is on TV, completely unfazed by the fact that she is not, and never would be, anywhere close to the solution.

Soon enough, my mother set up the apartment with the used furniture her English teacher had given them. The place still looked hollow, devoid of all those crumbles of a lived life that lead you back home: the heavy green malachite ashtray Father brought back from Zaire; a picture of me and my sister as kids, sitting in a cherry tree, smiling, my sister’s cheek pressing against my arm, me holding on to a branch with both of my hands like a chimpanzee (I fell off the tree and broke my arm the instant after the picture was taken); a spider brooch my mother kept in a heavy crystal ashtray; a moisture stain on a bathroom pipe that looked like an unshaven, long-haired Lenin; honey jars with labels that had little bees flying out of the corners toward the center, where the words “Real Honey” stood out in boldface — none of those things was there, now slowly fading into mere memories.

My father dropped out of his English class, furious at the language that randomly distributed meaningless articles and insisted on having a subject in every stupid sentence. He made cold calls to Canadian companies and in unintelligible English described his life, which included being a diplomat in the world’s greatest cities, to perplexed receptionists who would simply put him on indefinite hold. He nearly got sucked into a venture set up by a shady Ukrainian who convinced him there was money in smuggling Ukrainian goose down and selling it to the Canadian bedding industry.

Sometimes I’d call from Chicago and my father would pick up the phone.

“So what are you doing?” I’d ask.

“Waiting,” he’d say.

“For what?”

“Waiting to die.”

“Let me talk to Mom.”

And then, one day, when his woe became so overwhelming that his soul physically hurt, like a stubbed toe or a swollen testicle, he decided to write. He wouldn’t show his writing to my mother or sister, but they knew he was writing about bees. Indeed, one day in the early spring of 1994, I received a manila envelope with another envelope inside, on which was written, in a dramatic cursive, The Bees, Part 1. I have to confess that my hands trembled as I flipped through it, as if I were unrolling a sacred scroll, uncovered after a thousand years of sleep. The sense of sanctity, however, was diminished by a huge, sticky honey stain on page six.

There is something faithfully connecting our family and bees, my father starts his narrative. Like a member of the family, the bees have always come back.

He then proudly informs the reader that it was his grandfather Teodor (the reader’s great-grandfather) who brought civilized beekeeping to Bosnia, where the natives still kept bees in straw-and-mud hives and killed them with sulfur, all of them, to get the honey. He remembers seeing straw-and-mud hives in the neighbors’ backyards, and they looked strange to him, a relic from the dark ages of beekeeping. He recounts the story of the few hives that arrived with the family from the hinterlands of Ukraine to the promised land of Bosnia — the only thing promised was plenty of wood, which enabled them to survive the winters. The few hives multiplied quickly, the development of beekeeping in northwestern Bosnia unimpeded by World War One. My grandfather Ivan, who was twelve when he arrived in Bosnia (in 1912), became the first president of the Beekeeping Society in Prnjavor. My father describes a photograph of the Society’s founding picnic: Grandfather Ivan stands in the center of a large group of nicely dressed peasants with a then fashionable long mustache and dandily cocked hat. Some of the peasants proudly exhibit faces swollen with bee stings.

Sometimes there were interesting mischiefs with bees, my father writes, failing to mention any mischiefs. The sudden sentence is one of his many stylistic idiosyncrasies: his voice wavers from establishment of the historical context with a weighty, ominous phrase like War was looming across that dirt road or Gods of destruction pointed their irate fingers at our honey jars to the highly technical explanations of the revolutionary architecture of his father’s hives; from the discussion of the fact that bees die a horrible death when they sting (and the philosophical implications thereof) to the poetical descriptions of hawthorn in bloom and the piping of the queen bee the night before the swarm is to leave the hive.

Father devotes nearly a page to the moment he first recognized a queen bee. A hive contains about 50,000 bees, he writes, and only one queen. She’s noticeably bigger than other bees, who dance around her, swirl and move in peculiar, perhaps even worshipful ways. His father pointed at the queen bee on a frame heavy with bees and honey, and, my father writes, it was like reaching the center of the universe—the vastness and the beauty of the world were revealed to him, the logic behind it all.

In an abrupt transition, he asserts that the most successful period of our beekeeping ended in 1942, during World War Two, when we for the first time lost our bees. It is clear that was a major catastrophe for the family, but my father keeps everything in perspective, probably because of what was going on in the besieged Sarajevo at the time of his writing. There are worse things that can happen to you. A whole family, for example, can perish without a trace, he writes. We didn’t perish, which is excellent.

He then draws a little map at the center of which is the hill of Vuijak, near the town of Prnjavor, whose name appears at the fringe of the page. He draws a straight line from Prnjavor to Vuijak (6 kilometers, he writes along the line), ignoring the creeks, the forests, and the hills in between (including the hill I tumbled down). He places little stars around the page, which seem to represent different villages and people in that area. It was a truly multinational place, he says, wistfully. Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Italians, Serbs, Muslims, Croats, and all the mixed ones. He calculates that there were seventeen different nationalities — there was even a tailor in Prnjavor who was Japanese. Nobody knew how he got there, but when he died, there were only sixteen nationalities left. (Now, I have to say that I’ve inquired about the Japanese tailor, and no one else remembers him or has heard about him.) In 1942, lawlessness was rampant, and there were roaming gangs of Serbs and Croatian fascists and Tito’s partisans too. All those others, who had no units of their own, save the Germans, were suspect and vulnerable. One day, two semi-soldiers showed up at the door of the family’s house. They were their neighbors, ordinary peasants, except for their rickety rifles and caps with the partisan red star in the front and the Chetnik insignia (an ugly eagle spreading its mighty wings) in the back — they switched according to need. There was going to be a great battle, the peasants said, the mother of all battles. They said we should be well advised to leave. The peasants said they would padlock everything, and they showed us a huge key, for which obviously no padlock existed. They suggested, touching the knives at their belts as if inadvertently, that we take only what we could carry. Father begged them to let us take a cow; my mother, five sisters, and two brothers wept. Winter was around the corner. Perhaps it was the weeping that made these neighbors take pity and let my father’s family bring a cow, although it was the sick one — her shrunken udder would not provide any milk or solace. And we left thirty beehives behind.

My father’s handwriting changes at the beginning of the next paragraph; the thick letters thin out; his cursive becomes unstable; there are a couple of crossed-out sentences. Under the shroud of fierce scratching I can make out several words and discontinuous phrases: urine. . aspirin. . belonging to. . and skin. . scythe.

I was six years old, he continues after the interruption, and I was carrying a meat grinder. His mother was carrying his youngest brother—he hung to her chest like a little monkey. His brother was sobbing and clutching a picture of two children crossing a bridge over troubled water, a chubby angel hovering over them.

Only after a few months did all the details of the pillaging and pilfering done by the neighbors come to light, but my father doesn’t list the details. After they had emptied the house and the attic and the barn, they finally got to the bees. All they wanted was honey, even if there was not much, just enough to help the bees survive the winter. They opened the hives and shook the bees off the frames. The bees were helpless: this was late October, it was cold, and they couldn’t fly or sting. They dropped to the ground in absolute silence: no buzz, no life; they all died that night. When the family returned home, my father saw a mushy pile of rotting bees. Before they died, they crawled closer together to keep warm.

A few hives were stolen by Tedo, a neighbor, who also was a beekeeper. Grandfather Ivan knew that Tedo had some of our bees, but he never asked for them. Tedo came by one day and, unable to look Grandfather Ivan in the eye, claimed that he was only taking care of the bees while the family was away. He offered to give them back. I remember going with my father to retrieve our hives. We went on a sleigh and we had to be careful not to shake our two hives, lest the bees unfurl their winter coils, which kept them warm. My father sat between the hives, holding them, on their way back. It was a cold night, with stars glittering like ice shards. If they were careful and patient, his father told him, these two hives would breed many more. The following year they had six hives, and then twice as many, and in a few years they had twenty-five.

I ought to respect my father’s desire — indeed, his need — to produce a real book. Hence I must spend a few paragraphs on the conditions of his truth production. Of course, I wasn’t there at the time, so I have to use the accounts of reliable witnesses (my mother, mainly). Thus: He wrote mainly in the afternoon, with a pencil, on filler paper, in a diplomat’s slanted cursive. He sharpened his pencil with a Swiss Army knife (his duty-free present to himself from years before), littering the bedroom floor with shavings, sitting on the bed with the nightstand between his legs. The pencils, bought in a dollar store, broke their tips frequently, and he snapped them, infuriated. Over the phone, I had to listen to elaborate laments and retroactive appreciation of “our” pencils, which would last and which you could trust. Sometimes he’d just sit there staring at the smokestacks of Hamilton or hissing at the pigeons on the balcony, attracted by the bread crumbs my mother had left for them. He’d often interrupt his inspiration-gathering time by getting himself a slice of bread with butter and honey. Eventually he would start writing, and would sometimes keep at it for as long as forty-five minutes — an eternity for someone who had a heart rate perpetually above normal, someone as impatient and miserable as my father.

I’m holding his manuscript in my hand right now, and I can see the ebb and flow of his concentration; I can decode his back pain increasing and decreasing: smooth, steady handwriting at the top of, say, page ten, which then meanders on page eleven; random words written in the margins (dwarf. . horsemen. . watermelon. . slaughter); complete sentences pierced by the straight lance of the writer’s discontent (Beekeeping was an attractive summer activity); adjectives keeping company with lonely, arid nouns (stinky wafting around feet; classic accompanying theft; golden melting over honey). Toward page thirteen, one can sense longer breaks between sentences, the thickly penciled words thinning out after a sharpening session. There are mid-sentence breaks, with syntactical discrepancies between independent and dependent clauses, suggesting his thought splitting, the splinters flying off in different directions. Sometimes the sentence simply ceases: We know, then nothing; It must be said, but it is impossible to know what must be said.

And something troubling and strange happens around page seventeen. My father is in the middle of conveying a humorous story about Branko, a neighbor, yet again a victim of a bee attack. At this point in the narrative, Grandfather Ivan is in charge of a socialist-collective apiary, because all his hives have been taken away by the co-op. He is in charge of about two hundred hives — far too many to keep in one place, but an order is an order. My father, thirteen at the time, is helping him. The day is gorgeous; the birds are atwitter; there is an apple tree in the center of the apiary, its branches breaking with fruit. They work in complete, profound silence, interrupted only by the occasional thud of a ripe apple falling to the ground. A swarm of bees is hanging from one of the branches, and they need to get the bees into a hive. Grandpa Ivan will shake the branch, while my father holds the hive under it, and when the swarm hits the hive, it’ll just settle in, following the queen. But I might be too weak to hold the hive, and if the swarm misses it, they might just fall on me. Now, they don’t sting when they’re swarming, but if they fall down with their stings first, they might still hurt me. What’s more, we would have to wait for them to gather again. My father is contemplating the situation. Here comes Branko, clearly up to no good. He hates bees, because he’s been stung so many times, but he offers his help. He probably hopes he’ll be able to steal something, or spy on Grandpa Ivan, who accepts his help. So Branko stands under the swarm, fretfully looking up at the bees, trotting around in a small circle, trying to center the hive. As he’s still moving, Grandpa Ivan shakes the branch with a long, crooked stick, and the swarm falls directly on Branko. Before a single sting breaks his skin, Branko is screaming and shaking his head and shoulders and sides as if possessed by a host of demons.

The paragraph breaks off as Branko stampedes out of the apiary, then crashes through a hedge and throws himself into a mud puddle, while a humongous sow, the mud-puddle proprietress, looks at him, lethargically perplexed. My father is rolling on the ground with laughter, while a twitch that could be a smile surfaces on Grandpa Ivan’s face, then quickly vanishes.

In the next paragraph, in cursive so tense and weak that it seems evanescent, my father talks about an epidemic that attacked the co-op hives, rapidly spreading, as they were much too bunched up, and decimating the bee population. He describes the harrowing image of a thick layer of dead bees glimmering in the grass. Grandpa Ivan is squatting despondently, leaning on a tree, surrounded by rotting apples that beckon hysterical flies. This is life, my father concludes, struggle after struggle, loss after loss, endless torment.

It took me a while to find out what had happened between the paragraphs. My source confirmed that the break was one month long, at the beginning of which time my father received a call from Nada, his first cousin Slavko’s daughter, who had emigrated, alone, from Vrbas, Yugoslavia, and ended up in Lincoln, Nebraska. She had gone to college there, majoring in library science and minoring in theology. Slavko grew up with my father — they were the same age — and had recently died as an accomplished alcoholic. Nada called my father, because, she said, her father had told her childhood stories: the games, the adventures, the poverty — their childhood, he’d said, was golden. My father was delighted, told her to call anytime, for “family is family.” There followed a few phone calls, but they were too expensive, for both Nada and my father, so they started exchanging letters. Instead of writing The Bees, my father reminisced in letters to Nada, fondly recalling his and Slavko’s childhood mischiefs, implicitly listing his losses. My mother said that if Nada hadn’t been his family and thirty or so years younger, she would’ve thought that my father was in love. There was now someone he could paint his life for, practically from the first scratch, someone to whom he could tell the true story. I’ve never seen Nada’s letters, but my mother says they were often ranting, bemoaning the fact that, despite the golden childhood, her father ended up a weak, bitter man. And her mother was overly receptive to the attention of other men. And her brother was not very smart and she never had anything in common with him. She also hated America and Americans, their provincialism, their stupid, rootless culture of cheeseburgers and cheap entertainment. She was clearly wretched, my mother said, but my father was by and large oblivious of that. His letters were rife with apples of indescribable taste (unlike the apples you got in Canada, which tasted as if they had been dry-cleaned) and family gettogethers where everybody sang and hugged and licked honey from the tips of their fingers.

Then, after a break in correspondence and many un-returned messages my father left on her voicemail, Nada faxed an unfinished sixty-five-page letter in the middle of the night — my parents were woken by an avalanche of paper slithering out of their fax machine. In the fax, her father was upgraded to a child molester, her mother to a cheap prostitute, her brother to a compulsive, shameless masturbator. America had evolved into a filthy inferno of idiocy and nothingness run by the Jews and the CIA. Her roommate (a Latina whore) was trying to kill her; her professors discussed her with her classmates when she was not around, showing secretly taken pictures of her naked body, before which frat boys frantically masturbated. Her physician tried to rape her; they refused to sell her milk in the supermarket; in the INS office, where she went to apply for her green card, the woman who interviewed her was touching herself under the desk and had hooves instead of feet; and somebody was changing the words in the books she was studying from — every day, the books were full of new lies, lies, lies. She had first believed that she was persecuted by jealous people, who hated her because she was virginally pure, but now she believed that God had become evil and begun purging the innocent. The only hope I have is you, she wrote on page sixty. Could you come and take me from this pit of hell? Then, in the last few pages, before the fax abruptly ended, she warned my father about me, reminded him of the Oedipus myth and the fact that I lived in the United States, which meant that I was corrupt and untrustworthy. Keep in mind, she wrote, that God preferred sons to fathers and daughters.

I had never met Nada or her father. At the peril of being maudlin, or appearing malicious, let me note that her name translates as “hope.” I have since seen this fax from hell: its hysterical letters and exclamation points are faded, because of fax toner shortage and the passing of time.

My father kept calling Nada, receiving no answer, until her meretricious roommate, one Madrigal, picked up the phone and told my father that Nada had been “institutionalized.” He did not understand the word, and could not pronounce it for me to translate it, so I called Madrigal. “She just went nuts,” Madrigal told me. “In the library. She heard voices coming from the books, spreading hateful rumors about her.”

My father was devastated. He called someone at the University of Nebraska and in his Tarzan English asked this person to visit Nada at the institution and tell her that he had called. “We don’t do that,” the anonymous Nebraskan said. Father sat at his nightstand, frantically sharpening his pencil, but not writing, until it was reduced to a stump he could barely hold between his fingers. He called every member of the family he could reach, as if they could pool their mental waves and send a telepathic remedy to Nada. He called me almost every day and then demanded that I immediately call him back, as they could not afford those calls. He gave me reports of his futile attempts to reach Nada, and finally asked me to go to Lincoln and track her down, but I couldn’t do it. “You’ve become American,” he said disconsolately. But that’s a different story.

After the break, his story trickles away with unmentioned sorrow. My father flies through an incident in which Grandpa Ivan was stung by hundreds of bees, and consequently spent a few days in what by all accounts must have been a coma. But he never again felt the back pain that had tortured him for years.

He devotes a paragraph to beekeeping in the sixties and seventies, which could be considered the second golden age of family beekeeping, even if Father was going completely blind. When Grandpa Ivan eventually lost his sight, the bees slowly died off, and shortly before his death there were only three hives left. My father couldn’t help with the beekeeping. Traveling and working around the world, mainly in the Middle East and Africa, I could barely manage to see my parents three times a year, and there was no way I could devote any of my time to the bees.

There is a presence of regret in the space between the previous sentence and the next (and last) one:

Shortly before his death, Father summoned me and my brothers for a meeting on the family beekeeping tradition. His message

And there The Bees, Part 1 ends, no message ever delivered, though it is easy to imagine what it might have been. My grandfather died, my grandmother too, my father, along with his brothers, kept the bees. They (the bees) survived a varroa epidemic, a drought, and the beginning of the war in Bosnia. When the family emigrated to Canada, they left behind twenty-five hives. Shortly after their departure, a horde of their neighbors, all drunken volunteers in the Serbian army, came at night and kicked the hives off their stands, and when the bees feebly tried to escape (it was night, cold again, they crept on the ground), the neighbors threw a couple of hand grenades and laughed at the dead bees flying around as though alive. The neighbors then stole the heavy frames, and left a trail of dripping honey in their wake.

My father found a job in a Hamilton steel mill, filling wagons with scrap metal. The mill was hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and when he worked night shifts, he would sometimes fall asleep waiting for a green light at the wheel of a used, decrepit Lincoln Town Car. He’d say that his Lincoln brought him home while he was sleeping, like a faithful horse. He hated the job, but had no choice.

One day, surveying the ads in the papers, pursuing a perfect garage sale, he found an ad selling honey. He called the number and told the man outright that he had no money to buy the honey, but that he would love to see his bees. Because there is such a thing as beekeepers’ solidarity, the man invited him over. He was a Hungarian, a retired carpenter. He let my father help him with the bees, gave him old copies of Canadian Beekeeping, which my father tried to read with insufficient help from my mother’s dictionary. After a while, the Hungarian gave him a swarm and an old hive to start his own apiary. He admonished my father for refusing to wear beekeeping overalls and hat, even gloves, but my father contended that stings were good for all kinds of pain. I still can’t figure out what language they might have been speaking to each other, but it almost certainly wasn’t English.

My father has twenty-three beehives now and collects a few hundred pounds of honey a year, which he cannot sell. “Canadians don’t appreciate honey,” he says. “They don’t understand it.” He wants me to help him expand into the American market, but I assure him that Americans understand honey even less than Canadians do.

He has recently decided to write another true book. He already has the title: The Well. There was a well near their home when he was a boy. Everybody went there to get water. The Well would be a story about people from the village and their cattle, their intersecting destinies. Sometimes there were “interesting incidents.” Once, he remembers, somebody’s mule escaped and came to the well, sensing water. But its head was tied to its leg — that’s how people forced the mules to graze. The mule got away, found water, but then was unable to drink. It lingered around the well, furiously banging its head against the trough, dying of thirst, the water inches away. And it brayed, in horrible pain. It brayed all day, my father says. All day and all of the night.