Love and Obstacles (15 page)

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:

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.