The History of Bees

Chapter 16 WILLIAM

“Do you want me to do it?” Thilda asked. She stood at the door with the shaving things and a mirror in her hands.

“You could cut yourself on the razor,” I replied.

She nodded. She knew, as I did, that she’d never been particularly steady-handed.

A bit later she came in with a bowl of water, some soap and a brush. She put all of it on the bedside table, which she then shoved up against the bed, so that I had a good working angle. Finally she put the mirror there. She stood waiting while I lifted it up. Was she worried about how I would react?

It was another man who stared back at me. I should have been frightened, but I felt only a sense of wonder. Gone was the feeble chubbiness. Gone was the pleasant shopkeeper. The man who stared back at me was someone else, someone who had experienced something. A paradoxical idea, in that I’d been lying in bed for months and had not experienced anything besides my own vile thoughts. Still, the reflection in the mirror said nothing about this. The man staring back at me reminded me of an ocean voyager who had returned after months at sea, or perhaps a miner who came up after a long shift, or a scientist on the way home from a long and dramatic research trip in the jungle. His features were clearly defined, he was slender, hardened into elegance. He was life lived.

“Do you have a pair of scissors?” I said.

Thilda looked at me in confusion.

“I can’t start with the razor, there’s too much.”

She nodded and understood.

Soon she was back with the sewing scissors. They were awkwardly small, made for dainty women’s fingers, but I was able to cut away the worst of the shaggy growth.

Slowly I dipped the brush in the water and rubbed it against the soap. It foamed with the fresh scent of juniper.

“Where is the razor?” I looked around. She just stood there with her hands folded in front of her apron and her eyes fixed on the floor. “Thilda?”

Finally she handed me a razor that she’d had in her pocket. Her hand trembled slightly, as if she didn’t quite want to surrender it. I took it and started shaving. The razor scraped against my skin; the blade needed sharpening.

Thilda stood watching me.

“Thank you. You can leave now,” I said to her.

But she stayed. Her eyes were on my hand, on the razor. And suddenly I understood what she was standing there and worrying about. I let my hand drop.

“Isn’t it a healthy sign that I’m shaving?”

She had to think, as usual.

“I am so very grateful that you have the energy for this,” she replied finally, but remained standing there all the same.

If one was going to do something like that, it was a matter of finding a method that would give the impression of death by wholly natural causes. That way I would spare Edmund. I had several procedures in mind—I’d had a lot of time to plan them—but of course Thilda didn’t know that. She just assumed that if she left me alone in a room with a sharp instrument, I would take advantage of the opportunity, as if it were the only one. That’s how simple she was.

If I wanted to put an end to it all, I would have long since walked out into the snow, wearing only a nightshirt. Then I would be found frozen to death the next day, with ice in my beard and eyelashes, and my death would be just that: the seed merchant lost his way in the dark and froze to death, poor wretched soul.

Or a mushroom. The woods were full of them and some of them had last autumn found their way down into a top drawer of the bureau furthest to the left in the shop, duly locked, with a key to which I alone had access. The effect of the mushroom was quick, in the course of a few hours one grew lethargic and dull, then unconscious, followed by a few days during which the body was quickly broken down before it collapsed. A doctor would hold that the cause of death was organ failure. Nobody would know that it was self-inflicted.

Or drowning. There was a strong current in the river behind our property even in the winter.

Or Blake’s dog farm, with seven savage mutts snapping against the fence.

Or the steep cliff in the woods.

There were many possibilities, but now here I was, shaving off my beard and did not have the slightest intention of implementing any of these methods, including the razor I held in my hand. Because I had gotten out of bed, and I would never consider such a course of action again.

“Don’t let me keep you,” I said to Thilda. “I’m sure you have work to do out there.” I pointed towards the door, in reference to the rest of the house, with its relentless demands for dusting, cooking and scrubbing of clothing and floors and everything else that women at all times maintain must be cleaned.

She nodded and finally she left.

There were times when I had the impression that Thilda would have been more than grateful if I took a razor blade or perhaps preferably a carving knife, put it against my throat and let the blood pump out of the main artery until there was nothing left of me but an empty shell, an abandoned cocoon, on the floor. She had never said as much, but she and I had both come to curse the sunlight that found its way to precisely her nose in the assembly hall more than seventeen years ago. It could have found its way to so many others, or no one at all.

I was twenty-five years old; about a year had passed since I’d arrived in the village. I don’t know if there was something about the weather that month, perhaps a dry wind had long been blowing across the region, so her lips were red and dry and she continually moistened them with saliva, or she had been secretly chewing on them, the way young girls do to produce alluring mouths, but on that particular day I didn’t in any sense notice that she was virtually without lips. I only remember that I was in the middle of my lecture when I saw her.

I was extremely well prepared. First and foremost because of Rahm. I wanted nothing more than to make a stunning impression on him. I knew I was fortunate; many of my classmates had received far less interesting tasks. As a recent graduate I could make few demands, to be taken under the wing of a well-recognized scientist was the greatest possible opportunity for success. At this time in my life, Rahm was the only person who meant something to me. From the moment I stepped over the threshold to his study, my mind was made up: he would be my most important relationship. He would not be just my soul mate and mentor, but also my father. I no longer had contact with my own and didn’t wish to have any, at least that was what I told myself over and over again. But under the professor’s guidance I could grow and flourish. He would turn me into what I actually was. I had never given a lecture before so I had prepared well. When Rahm asked me to make a contribution at his modest zoological evening for the residents of Maryville, I first regarded it as unimportant. But as the days went by, it built up inside me, grew into something almost uncontrollable. How would it feel? To stand there in front of so many people, everyone listening to my voice, everyone’s attention directed at me? Although the people of the village were of a simpler sort, to put it tactfully, than my peers at the university, it was nonetheless a scientific lecture. Would I be equal to carrying out such a task?

It wasn’t just the fact that I would be giving a lecture for the first time in my life, but also the meaning it could have for others that filled me with awe. The natural sciences were an unfamiliar subject for the village population; their view of the world was based on the Bible, which was the only book they had faith in. It struck me that I would have the opportunity to show them something more, to present connections between the small and the large, between the power of creation and creation itself, that I now had the opportunity to open their eyes and change their view of the world, yes, even of existence itself.

But how to best demonstrate this? Choosing a topic became an immense task, one that had me going in circles. Just about any topic was of interest when viewed from the perspective of the natural sciences. The earth’s crops, the discovery of America, the seasons. So many options!

In the end it was Rahm who made the decision. He put his cool hand on top of my clammy one, and smiled at my confused enthusiasm. “Tell them about the microscope,” he said. “The possibilities it has given us. Most of them don’t even know what such a device is.”

It was a brilliant idea; I would never have come up with it myself, so of course that decided it.

The day arrived, with this dry wind and sun from a towering sky. We were uncertain about how many would come. Several of the older villagers pointed out that what we were doing was ungodly, that one didn’t need any books other than the Bible. But curiosity had apparently titillated the majority, because the assembly hall was soon so crowded that it heated up to a summer temperature, despite the chilly April weather outdoors. It was out of the ordinary that little Maryville hosted events such as this.

I would be presenting my work first; that was what Rahm wanted. Perhaps he wanted to show me off, as if I were his own newborn child, perhaps he was still proud of me at this time. After a few long minutes, my voice trembling in time with my knees, I found my confidence. I leaned on the words that were so thoroughly prepared, discovered that they carried, that they absolutely did not lose their credibility as they left the paper and were dispersed into the air between the audience and me, but instead made it all the way to their destination.

I began by quickly summarizing the history, spoke briefly of the condenser lens that came into use all the way back in the sixteenth century, about the compound optical microscope, described by Galileo Galilei in 1610. To demonstrate the microscope’s significance in practice I had decided to tell them about one specific individual. I had chosen the Dutch zoologist Jan Swammerdam. He had lived in the seventeenth century and was never properly recognized by his contemporaries, was poor and lonely, but for posterity he was a true monument in natural history, perhaps precisely because he made a connection between creation and creativity at such an early stage.

“Swammerdam,” I said and allowed my gaze to sweep across the assembly. “Never forget his name. His work has shown us that the different stages in the life of an insect, the egg, larvae and pupae, are in fact different forms of the same insect. Swammerdam developed a microscope which enabled him to study the insects in detail. During these studies he produced drawings unlike anything else we have seen.”

With a dramatic hand gesture, which was well rehearsed, I pulled down a chart I had hung up behind me.

“Here you can see Swammerdam’s illustration of the anatomy of the bee, as he has drawn it in his work Biblia Naturae.”

I allowed myself a dramatic pause, let my gaze come to rest on the assembly, while they took in the extraordinarily detailed drawings. At that exact moment the spring sun in its passage over the roof of the assembly hall hit the window on my left, a lone ray of sunshine fell through, spread out towards the rows of benches and fell upon the person sitting furthest to the left, beside two female friends: Thilda.

Afterwards I’ve understood that it hadn’t been as much a surprise for her as for me. I was of course on the minds of many young women; the young natural scientist, educated in the capital, dressed in modern garments, well spoken, a bit short, perhaps, not the most athletic—to tell the truth I had already begun struggling with weight gain, but what I lacked in physical attributes, I made up for intellectually. The eyeglasses on my nose alone were testimony of this. I usually wore them pushed down a bit, so I could gaze sagely over the frames. When I got them, I had spent an entire evening working out the perfect position for the glasses, finding the precise spot on my nose where they were securely in place and which simultaneously made it possible to look people right in the eye, without having to look through the small oval lenses, well aware as I was that the concave lenses made my eyes look smaller. I also knew that many women found my lush mane of hair attractive. I kept my hair at medium length, which showed it off to its best advantage. Perhaps Thilda had already observed me for a long time, assessing me, comparing me with other young men in the village. Perhaps she had seen the kind of respect I was treated with, deep bows and humble looks, wholly different from the other young men she had in her circle, who were probably always coarse in both their dress and conduct and were treated accordingly.

Thilda was wearing her Sunday best, something blue, a dress, or perhaps a blouse, that was nicely fitted across her bosom. On either side of her round face corkscrew curls descended towards her shoulders, the virtually uniformlike hairstyle she had in common with all of her female companions, and which was also to be seen on many married women—even though one might think they should be past the need for that kind of tomfoolery with their appearances. It was, however, neither the curls nor the clothing that made such an impression on me. What the lone ray of sunshine wormed its way forward to, through the heavy air of the assembly hall, was an unusually straight and well-proportioned nose, like an illustration in a textbook on anatomy. It was a classical nose; I immediately got the urge to draw it, study it, a nose with a shape corresponding exactly with its function. Or so I thought. The function of her nose was regrettably not in keeping with its form, as I would later find out, in that it was always red and runny from an eternal cold. But on this day it beamed in my direction, neither shiny nor red, just extremely interested in me and my words, and I was unable to take my eyes off of it.

The dramatic pause grew too long. The audience began to move restlessly, and I became aware of the sound of a long and affected clearing of the throat from Rahm, who was standing behind me. The chart still hung there, dangling and neglected.

I hastened to point at it. “Swammerdam spent five whole years studying the life found in a beehive. All of this was done through the microscope, which gave him the possibility to include every single tiny detail… so here… here you can see the queen bee’s ovaries. Through his studies Swammerdam determined that a single queen bee in fact lays the eggs for all three of the different types of bees—drones, worker bees and new queens.”

The members of the audience stared at me, some squirmed a little, nobody appeared to understand. “This was groundbreaking in its time, in that many until then had believed that it was a king bee, in other words, a male bee, that led the hive. But with genuine fascination, truly great enthusiasm, Swammerdam undertook studies of the male bee’s organs. And here you can see the results.” I pulled out another chart.

“This is the genitalia of the male bee.”

Blank faces out there.

The audience moved restlessly. Some directed their gazes towards their laps to study a loose thread in the fabric of their dresses carefully, while others showed a sudden interest in the irregular cloud formations in the sky outside.

It suddenly occurred to me that they probably didn’t know what either ovaries or genitalia were, and I felt a compelling urge to help them understand. Now came the part of the lecture that never became a part of the story that Thilda told our children, and neither had it ever once been mentioned between her and me. For years the thought of what happened afflicted me with a burning sense of shame.

“Ovaries are the same as… I mean to say, that is, the reproductive system, where the eggs are produced… which become larvae.”

When the words came out, I suddenly understood what I’d embarked upon, but I couldn’t stop now. “And genitalia are thus the same as umm… the male bee’s reproductive organs. These are wholly necessary in the process of ahem… producing new bees.”

A gasp went through the room as they understood what the drawings they were looking at depicted. Why had I not understood it myself, the effect the subject would have on them? For me it was a given part of the natural sciences, but for them this was something sinful, something one kept to oneself, something one never talked about. In their eyes, my passion for this was dirty.

But nobody left, nobody stopped me, had only somebody done so, just soft noises told of how badly this was going, bottoms shifting upon the wooden benches, boots scraping against the floor, the soft sound of throats being cleared. Thilda bowed her head. Was she blushing? The mutual gazes of her female companions froze as they stared at one another in shock and I, simpleton that I am, I continued, in hopes that the rest of the lecture would move the focus away from the words I had just said and over to what was really important.

“He has dedicated three whole pages to these in his life’s work, Biblia Naturae, or Nature’s Bible, if you will. Here we see some of his incredibly detailed illustrations of the male bee’s, the drone’s… geni… genitalia.” The word was heavy in my mouth. “The different stages, how they open, unfold and ahem… expand to their full potential.” Had I really said that? A fleeting glance at the assembly informed me that that was precisely what I had done. I forced my eyes down into the lecture again, continued reading, even though it just got worse and worse.

“Swammerdam himself described them as… exotic sea monsters.”

They giggled now, the ladies.

I didn’t dare look at them. Instead I took out Swammerdam’s work and quoted the fabulous words that I personally had pondered so much over, clung to the book, hoped the audience would finally understand and recognize the true passion.

“If the reader looks at the admirable structure of these organs, he will discover exquisite art, and he will understand that God, even in the smallest insect, even in its tiny organs, has hidden overwhelming miracles.” I ventured to look up and it was extremely clear that I’d lost, because the faces that stared back at me were at best upset, some even angry, and finally I understood, took in fully what I’d had done. I had not succeeded in any sense in telling them about the wonders of nature; I had stood here and spoken about the vilest of the vile, and on top of that had mixed God up in all of it.

I didn’t tell the rest of the story; that poor Swammerdam never managed to do anything else after this, that his career was over, the studies of the bee chased him into a maelstrom of religious musings, because the bees’ perfection frightened him and he had to remind himself all the time that only God, and not these small creatures, was worthy of his investigations, love and attention. Confronted with the bee it was difficult to believe that something else existed out there that was more perfect, not even God. The five years he virtually lived inside a beehive destroyed him forever.

But I realized there and then that if I told them this, I would not only be ridiculed, I would become somebody they hated, because one does not question the Almighty.

I folded up my manuscript, while the blush rose in my face and I stumbled like a little boy as I stepped off the podium. Rahm, whom I wanted to impress more than anybody else, was clearly struggling to contain his laughter, because his face was frozen in a strange smile. He reminded me of my father, my real father.

I shook hands with several of those who’d attended after the lecture was over. Many of them didn’t know what to say and I noticed how people were whispering around me, some snickering in disbelief, others reacting in anger and shock. The blush spread from my face, slid down my spine, planted itself in my shins and found expression in an uncontrollable trembling, which I vainly sought to hide from my surroundings. Rahm must have seen it, because he rested a hand on my shoulder and said softly: “You must understand that they are imprisoned by trivialities. They will never become like us.”

The consolation didn’t help, it just emphasized the difference between him and me; he would never have chosen examples that offended his listeners. He understood what they could stand, held sway over the balance between us and them, understood that the world of science and the world of human beings were two different places. As if to stress what he’d said and my obvious lack of understanding of my audience, he suddenly laughed. It was the first time I heard his laughter, it was short and low, but it startled me all the same. I turned away, was unable to look at him, his laughter weighed too heavily upon me, it took all the importance away from his consolation, stung so intensely that I had to turn away and take a step away from him. And there she was.

Perhaps it was weakness, the poorly concealed vulnerability in me on this day; I was no longer simply the mysterious visitor who worked with something grand and incomprehensible out there with the professor, and this enabled Thilda to become forward. Because she didn’t laugh. She proffered a gloved hand, curtsied and thanked me for the “ahem… marvelous” lecture. In the background her female companions were still giggling. But the sound faded away, they faded away, and I didn’t notice Rahm, either, just the hand. I held it in my own for a long time, felt the warmth of her skin emanate through the glove, how my strength came back through this hand. She didn’t mock me, she didn’t laugh at me, and I was so infinitely grateful to her. Her eyes sparkled above the beautiful nose; they were wide-set, so open to the world and life, but first and foremost, to me. Imagine, to me! Never before had a young woman looked at me like that, it was a gaze that allowed me to understand that she was willing to surrender herself completely, to give me everything, and just me, because she didn’t look at any of the others around us in the same way. This thought caused my knees to start wobbling again and I finally looked down. It was like cutting a cord; it was physically painful and I wanted nothing more than to resume this eye contact and forget about the world around me.

It took months for people in the village to stop talking about my performance. While I had previously been met exclusively with respect and deference, there were now several people who grasped my hand harder, pounded me on the back, the men in particular, and spoke to me with a half smile and poorly disguised sarcasm. And the words expand to their full potential, Nature’s Bible and exotic sea monsters pursued me for years. Nobody ever forgot Swammerdam, either, and his name was later used in many and extremely diverse contexts. When the horses mated on the meadow, it was described as “Swammerdam-like activity.” Drunk men who had to relieve themselves at the tavern in the evening said that they were going out to “air the Swammerdam,” and the local bakery’s signature dish, an oblong meat-filled pie, was suddenly only called “Swammer pie.”

It bothered me astonishingly little. In a way my decline in status was worth it. At least that’s what I thought when a few months later Mathilda Tucker and I were wed. I had long since had the opportunity to notice her narrow, typically British lips, by the time we walked down the aisle of the church. I had ventured to steal a kiss during the proposal and discovered to my dismay that they did not have the ability to open up like a large, secret, sticky flower, or perhaps a Swammerdam sea monster, as I had fantasized about in the late-night hours. They were just as dry and stiff as they appeared. And the nose was, truth to be told, a smidgen too big. But nonetheless, my cheeks were flushed when our marriage was blessed by the priest. I was, after all, getting married, and truly becoming part of adult life, without understanding then that adulthood contained features that made most of my dreams impossible, that forced me away from the world of science. Because Rahm was right—although I continued with some half-hearted research projects, I had opted out, abandoning my passion for the discipline.

But I was so certain, so completely convinced that Thilda was the one for me. Her sedateness fascinated me enormously, she always thought carefully before she answered a question. Her pride as well; I was filled with admiration for how she truly stood behind what she believed, a quality one seldom found in young women. It was only later, though not much later, only a few months into our marriage, that I understood she actually considered each answer for so long because she was not especially bright and I recognized the pride for what it actually was: an indomitable stubbornness. She never gave in, as it would turn out. Never.

But the most important reason of all for why I wanted to marry her was one I wouldn’t even admit to myself, but which I only now, in my sickbed, could bear to take in, a recognition that was about my still being just as primitive and greedy as a ten-year-old child: the fact that she was a living, soft body. That she was mine, that she would be accessible to me. That very soon I would have the chance to squeeze up against this body, lay it down beneath me, pound my body against it, as if it were raw, moist earth.

Unfortunately, that part didn’t turn out as I had imagined, either, but was instead a dry and hurried affair with far too many buttons and ribbons, corset wires, prickly wool stockings and a sour smell of armpits. I was nonetheless drawn to her with the instinct of an animal, a drone. Again and again, ripe for procreation, even though the last thing I wanted were descendants. Like the drone, I sacrificed my life for procreation.