The History of Bees

Chapter 2 WILLIAM

Maryville, Hertfordshire, England, 1851

Everything around me was yellow. Endlessly yellow. It was over me, under me, around me. Blinding me. The yellow color was completely real, nothing I was imagining. It came from the brocade tapestry my wife, Thilda, had stuck up on the walls when we moved in a few years ago. We’d had a lot of space at that time. My little seed shop on Maryville’s main street was thriving. I was still inspired, still thought I would manage to combine the business with that which really meant something, my natural science research. But that was a long time ago. Long before we became the parents of an inordinate number of daughters. And a very long time before the final conversation with Professor Rahm.

Had I known the kind of anguish the yellow tapestry would cause, I would never have gone along with it. The yellow color did not settle for remaining on the tapestry. If I closed my eyes, or kept them open, it was there, every bit as furious. It followed me into my sleep and never let me get away, it was like the sun’s highlights from foliage in the forest. The color kept forcing me to return there, to the forest of my childhood. In there I became blind to the rest of the world.

I forced my eyes open, did not want to go in there again. Compelled myself to be present. To listen.

It was late afternoon; from the kitchen the sound of the rattling of pots and the burner rings being moved about on the stove could be heard. Perhaps it was the sound of food being prepared that awakened my stomach, twisting it into knots. I collapsed into a fetal position.

I looked around. An untouched piece of bread and a dried slice of cured ham lay on a plate beside the half-empty water glass. When had I last eaten?

I sat up halfway, grabbed the glass of water. Let it run through my mouth and down my throat, washing away the taste of old age.

The saltiness of the ham was rancid on my tongue; the bread dark and heavy. The food found its way to my stomach, which settled.

But I still could not find a comfortable position in bed. My back was one large blister, my hips worn to the bone from lying on my side.

An agitation in my legs, a prickling.

The house was all of a sudden silent. Had they all left? Nothing but the crackling of coke burning in the hearth. But then, suddenly, singing. Clear voices from the garden.

Would it be Christmas soon?

In recent years, the region’s different choirs had begun singing at people’s doors during Advent, not for money or gifts, but in the spirit of Christmas, solely to bring joy to others. There was a time when I’d found it beautiful, when these small performances could ignite a light in me that I was no longer certain existed. It felt ever so long ago.

The bright voices flowed towards me like meltwater:

I placed my feet on the floor. Beneath the soles of my feet it felt unusually hard. I myself was the infant, the newborn, whose feet were not yet accustomed to the ground, but instead still shaped for dancing on my toes. That’s how I remembered Edmund’s feet, with a high instep and just as soft and arched underneath as on top. I could stand with them in my hands, just look and feel, as one did with one’s firstborn. I thought that I would become something else for him, be something else for you, something else entirely, than my father had been for me. That’s how I stood with him until Thilda snatched him away from me under the pretext of a feeding or diaper change. The infant feet moved slowly towards the window. Every step hurt. The window grew before me, huge and white.

Then I saw them.

All seven of them. For it wasn’t a choir of strangers from the village. It was my own daughters.

The four tallest in the back, the three shorter ones in the front. Dressed in their dark winter clothes. Wool coats, too tight and too short, or too big and with ever more patches, the threadbare quality disguised behind cheap ribbons and pockets in odd places. Brown, dark blue or black wool bonnets with white lace trim framed narrow, winter-pale faces. The song became frost in the air before them.

How thin they had grown, all of them.

A path showed where they had walked, footsteps through deep snow. They must have waded through it far above the knees and had certainly gotten wet. I could feel the sensation of damp wool stockings against bare skin, and the frost penetrating up from the ground through the thin soles of their shoes—none of them had more than this one pair of boots. I walked closer to the window. I half expected to see others in the garden, an audience for the choir, Thilda, or perhaps some of the neighbors. But the garden was empty. They weren’t singing for anyone. They were singing for me.

All of their gazes were focused intently on my window, but they had not yet discovered me. I stood in the shadows, at the back of the room, and the sun shone on the windowpane. They probably could only see the reflection of the sky and the trees.

I took one step closer.

Fourteen-year-old Charlotte, my eldest daughter, was standing at the far end. Her eyes were on the window, but she was singing with all of her body. Her chest rose and fell in time with the melody. Perhaps it was her idea, all of it. She had always sung, hummed her way through childhood, with her head in her schoolwork or bent over the dishes, a melodious murmuring, as if the soft notes were a part of her movements.

She was the one who discovered me first. A light slid across her face. She nudged Dorothea, the precocious twelve-year-old. She quickly nodded to eleven-year-old Olivia, who turned her wide-open eyes towards her twin sister, Elizabeth. The two did not in any sense resemble each other in appearance, only in temperament. Both gentle and kind, and dumb as posts—they couldn’t understand arithmetic even if you were to nail the numbers onto their foreheads. In front of them a restlessness had begun in the ranks. The young ones were also about to discover me. Nine-year-old Martha squeezed seven-year-old Caroline’s arm. And Caroline, who always sulked because she really wanted to be the youngest, gave little Georgiana, who would have liked to have escaped being the youngest, a hard shove. No great cheer to the heavens above, they didn’t allow themselves that, not yet. Only the slightest irregularity in the singing betrayed that they had seen me. That, and weak smiles, to the extent that their singing, O-shaped mouths would allow.

A childish lump pushed forward in my chest. They did not sing badly. Not at all. Their narrow faces glowed, their eyes shone. They had arranged it all just for me. And now they thought that they had succeeded. That they had pulled it off—they had gotten father out of bed. When the song was over they would release the cheer. They would run jubilantly light-footed through the freshly fallen snow into the house and tell me about their own homespun miracle. We sang him well again, they would crow. We sang father well!

A cacophony of enthusiastic girls’ voices would echo in the hallways, bouncing back at them from the walls: Soon he will return. Soon he will be with us again. We showed him God, Jesus—the born-again. Hark, the herald angels sing, glory to the newborn king. What a brilliant, yes, truly dazzling idea it was to sing for him, to remind him of beauty, of the message of Christmas, of everything he had forgotten while bedridden, with the thing we call illness, but which everyone knows is something else entirely, although mother forbids us to speak about it. Poor Father, he is not well, he is as thin as a ghost, we have seen it, through the cracked-open door as we have crept past, yes, like a ghost, just skin and bones, and the beard he has let grow, like the crucified Jesus. He is beyond recognition. But now he will soon be among us once more, soon he will be able to work again. And we will once more have butter on our bread and new winter coats. That is in truth a real Christmas present. Christ is born in Bethlehem! But it was a lie. I couldn’t give them that gift. I did not deserve their cheers. The bed drew me towards it. My legs trembled, my new-born legs were unable to hold me upright any longer. My stomach knotted again. I gritted my teeth, wanted to crush the pressure in my throat. So I slowly pulled away from the window.

And outside the singing subsided. There would be no miracle today.