The History of Bees

Chapter 7 TAO

“Will you turn off the light?” Kuan turned around to face me, pale with sleepiness.

“Just want to finish reading this.”

I continued with the old book about early-childhood education. My eyes were sore, but I didn’t want to go to sleep yet. Didn’t want to sleep, wake up and then have to go out into a new day.

He sighed beside me. Pulled the blanket over his head to shut out the light. A minute passed. Two.

“Tao… please. In six hours we have to get up.”

I didn’t answer, merely did as he asked.

“Good night,” he said softly.

“Good night,” I said and turned to face the wall.

Sleep was just taking me away when I felt his hands creeping under my camisole. I reacted to them instinctively, unable to refrain from taking pleasure in his caresses, but I tried to push them away all the same. Wasn’t he tired? Why had he asked me to turn off the light if this was what he wanted?

His hands disappeared, but his breathing was still shallow. Then he cleared his throat, as if he had something on his mind. “How… How did things go today?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve forgotten what day it is.”

“No. I haven’t forgotten.”

I didn’t say that I’d hoped he had forgotten so I wouldn’t have to have this conversation.

He stroked my hair, tenderly now, not seductively. “Have you been OK?”

“Every year it gets a little easier,” I said, because that was certainly what he wanted to hear.

“Good.”

He stroked my hair one more time, then his hand disappeared back under his own blanket.

The mattress undulated slightly when he turned over, perhaps onto his stomach, that’s how he liked to sleep. Then he mumbled good night again. Judging from how it sounded, he had turned over with his back to me. Soon he was sleeping deeply. But I lay awake in bed.

Five years.

Five years had passed since my mother left.

No. Not left. Was sent away.

My father died when I was nineteen. He was just a little over fifty, but his body was much older. Shoulders, back, joints, all of him was worn out from all of the years in the trees. He moved more heavily with each passing day. Perhaps his blood circulated more poorly as well, because one day when he got a splinter in his palm, the cut wouldn’t heal.

He put off seeking help for too long, being the man that he was. And when the doctor had finally received approval to give him antibiotics, even though my father was actually too old to be given priority for this type of expensive treatment, it was already too late.

My mother recovered surprisingly quickly after his death. Said all the right things, was optimistic. She was still young, she said, and smiled bravely, had a long life ahead of her. Perhaps she would even meet another man one day.

But they were just words. Because she fluttered away, the way petals blow away when the blossoming season is over. There was wind in her gaze, impossible to capture.

Soon she failed to show up for work in the fields. She just stayed home. She had been thin before, and now she ate almost nothing. Began sniffling, coughing, grew more and more lethargic, and soon she developed pneumonia.

One day when I came to look in on her she didn’t open the door. I rang the bell several times, but nothing happened. I had an extra key that I took out and unlocked the door with.

The flat was neat and clean, all that remained were the old furnishings that belonged to the household. All of her things were gone; the pillow she used to lean her back against on the couch, the bonsai tree she tended with such diligence, the embroidered blanket she liked to fold up and spread across her thighs, as if she felt a particular chill right there.

The same afternoon I found out that she’d been sent north. She was fine, the district’s health supervisor assured me, and gave me the name of the nursing home. I was shown a choppy presentation film from there. Bright and beautiful, large rooms, high ceilings, smiling personnel. But when I asked about leave so I could go and visit her, I was told that I would have to wait until the blossoming season was over.

A few weeks later word came that she had departed.

Departed. That was the word they used, as if she had in fact gotten out of bed and left. I tried not to think about how her final days had been. A rasping cough, feverish, frightened and alone. To think she had to die like that.

But there was nothing I could have done. Kuan said so as well. There was nothing I could have done. He said it again and again, and I continued saying it to myself.

Until I almost believed it.