Of Bees and Mist

by Erick Setiawan

  “You think you can fool me with that cheap dress and that vulgar lipstick? You think I can’t see how your heart is beating so pitifully in your throat, or how your knees are trying their hardest not to shake? You are never a clever one, and when you try to deceive me, it only shows what a truly foolish child you are. Go to your room and wipe that paste off your face! I will let you know when you can take a husband.”

  Meridia quivered visibly but took hold of herself. “I’m not a child, Papa. You can’t stop me from marrying him.”

  Gabriel burst into a laugh. “Yes, I can. And if you force me, I will.”

  “What have you got against Daniel?”

  “For a start, his father is a middling tradesman, and his mother has a reputation for being a pest. You have nothing in common with them.”

  “It’s not them I’m marrying. Besides, I have met his mother. She’s a perfectly lovely woman.”

  “Then you are even sillier than I thought. Your young man, this so-called Daniel”—Gabriel crinkled his nose in distaste—“has no higher education and no money of his own. How do you expect to start a family with someone who still lives on his father’s bounty?”

  “We’ll get by, Papa. We’ll get by.”

  Gabriel scoffed loudly. “Sure you’ll get by. With my assistance.”

  Stepping forward, Meridia placed her palms on the surface of the desk. “I swear I will never ask you for a penny, even if it costs me my life. We’re in love, Papa. You have no right to stand between us.”

  Gabriel appeared to relish this. Like a scientist entertaining an impossible theory, he leaned back against the chair and locked his hands behind his neck.

  “Ah, love…Tell me, what do you know about it? Judging from the way you speak, you’re barely capable of forming a thought. But please, don’t let that stop you from expressing your mind. What do you know about this love?”

  Meridia shook with anger, but his mocking smile drained all words from her lips. Relenting slightly, Gabriel unlocked his hands and eyed her with a milder gaze.

  “Here is what you’ll do. You will finish school, go on to the university, break a dozen young men’s hearts, and become a real woman. I’m far from being old-fashioned, you see. I give you permission to have as many suitors as you like—I encourage it actually, seeing that you are no longer chaste and can do no more damage to yourself. But by the grace of heaven, do not bore me with talk of love when you don’t have the slightest idea what it is.”

  Meridia reddened. This time, before she could stop them, words had sprung to her lips. “I know that whatever it is, I didn’t learn it from you!”

  Gabriel did not leap to his feet and strike her. On the contrary, his eyes scarcely flickered, and not a muscle moved on his face as he continued to regard her with amusement. This was the moment when she no longer doubted that he was made of ice.

  “You’re right,” he said calmly. “I don’t know the first thing about love, nor do I understand why people lose their heads over it. And if you ask your mother, she will tell you she is cut from exactly the same cloth. Neither of us is capable of loving anyone, or each other, and certainly not you. Given this unfortunate pedigree, what makes you think you can do better with your young man?”

  It was the cruelest thing he had ever said to her, and his smile drove the blade deeper into her flesh. Under his wintry gaze she felt her heart collapse against her ribs, but something inside made her go on.

  “You can’t deny me the happiness you denied Mama. I won’t let you break me the way you broke her!”

  Gabriel considered this by cocking his elegant head a fraction to the left. “Many things have been said about your mother, but one thing she isn’t is broken. If you think I’m cruel and heartless, then you don’t know what your mother is made of. We both know she does nothing but plot my death every second of her life.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to cry out, She wouldn’t hate you if you hadn’t taken a mistress! but she checked herself in time, seeing how it would not help her cause. Instead, she asked him simply, “Why do you hate me, Papa?”

  It was a question she had been dying to ask all her life. As an answer, she received an unequivocal silence. Imploring him with her eyes, she detected a droop in his right shoulder. His hand unconsciously rose to it, tried to correct the imbalance without success. All of a sudden his contempt seemed to desert him, leaving behind a fatigue that charred his countenance of ice. As she watched a lone vein throb on his forehead, the revelation came to her without a warning.

  “She did this to you, didn’t she? The blinding flash and the tumble. It was Mama who put that stoop in your shoulder!”

  Gabriel stood up to his full height, and instantly she knew she was losing him. Like a thing of majesty, his face shut in upon itself, sealing the lines and the tremor, and with a single innocuous blink, his eyes became as inexorable as night.

  “You have wasted my time,” he said. “As long as you are still a child of this house, I forbid you to marry that boy.”

  “Tell me about that night, Papa!” she persisted. “What happened in that room between you and Mama? Papa, tell me!”

  Even before her voice cleared from the air, Gabriel had banished her into a desolated corner of his memory. Meridia could not focus her eyes, could not feel her breath, could not hear her voice. Her perspiring palms, when she finally lifted them from the desk, left no visible prints on the surface of the wood.

  RAVENNA’S KITCHEN WAS NO easier to penetrate than Gabriel’s study. From the doorway, Meridia inspected the iron knot on her mother’s head and hoped that her ear would be more yielding than her back. A glance around the room told her what she was up against: a knife furiously beheading cauliflowers, a teapot shrilling like a banshee, shallots frying on a hot pan, the eyes of a flounder staring in deathless rage. Imperious in solitude, Ravenna reigned over them with her dark and private language, bewitching the shallots, entrancing the cauliflowers, casting a spell over the flounder to preserve her bitterness from the rust of time.

  “Rattling the house like dice before breakfast settled in his stomach! If he wanted to raise the dead with all that racket, he should have warned me to plug my ears! What will the neighbors think? They’re already laughing at him for slinking around every night to see a woman who actually looks worse than a warthog! And now that someone is asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage, he makes himself even more of a laughingstock! Who will want to propose after this? I gave him a clever and beautiful daughter when everyone thought he was as barren as the desert, but did he ever thank me for my trouble? Oh no, he said he wanted a son. Well, he should have advised me of this before my womb dilated so I could make a little arrangement with God! The next thing I knew, before his child could pass her first gas, off he went to suckle that gorilla’s breasts, mounting and riding her like she was the last humpback whale in the sea—”

  “Mama!” Meridia stepped into the kitchen.

  “—Anybody who’s got no more sense than to impale a primate’s ass should be hanged on the street for crows to feast on—”

  “Mama!” Meridia turned off the stove so the banshee would stop shrieking, covered the flounder so the eyes would stop glaring.

  “—Does he think she’s going to give him a son? How can something so old and desiccated produce anything but its own shit—”

  “Mama!” Meridia sidestepped the vegetable crates scattered on the floor and tossed the hissing shallots onto a plate, all the while trying not to breathe that reek and stink of solitude she had come to associate with forgetfulness.

  “—He’s got no shame carrying on like a lecherous goat now that his daughter is old enough to marry—”

  Meridia placed a hand on the small of that ramrod back, not a moment too soon, because the furious chopping of the knife was beginning to sound like thunder.

  “Mama!”

  Ravenna turned in surprise. Holding the knife to her waist, she regarded Meridia without the faintest awareness. Her t
ense eyes were ringed with shadows, and her frown deepened the imminent network of wrinkles she never once fought with creams other mothers purchased by the jars. Despite the strong aroma of shallots, her scent of lemon verbena dominated the air. A full minute passed before her frown eased in recognition.

  “Is everyone in this house trying to burst my eardrums?” she chided, the sleet in her voice slowed into a gentle rain. In the next breath she was off again, registering Meridia’s face for the first time: “Child, you look miserable! Are you unhappy?”

  Meridia tried to speak, but a painful rush of emotion stopped her. She could not remember the last time she had stood this close to Ravenna, breathing her scent and reading her face as if it were a map of another world. There was so much to be said, so many questions unasked, yet already she found herself thrust into the same vacuum that had bound her inside the ivory mist. There was no stopping it. In a second Ravenna would fade, retreat behind her veil of forgetfulness without a trace for her to follow.

  But the veil did not descend. For once in her life, she had her mother’s attention.

  “What is it?” Ravenna laid down the knife in alarm. “What is troubling you?”

  Unable to collect herself, Meridia began to tremble. The words she wrested from the depth of the vacuum sounded frail and hollow.

  “Papa. Why does he hate me, Mama?”

  Ravenna, far from surprised, replied instantly. “Have you gone mad? You know very well he doesn’t hate you. Your father hates me.”

  Her tone was not dismissive, her gaze even tender and patient. Yet it was with a deeper chill that Meridia greeted the distance between them.

  “I’m not a child anymore, Mama. When I was little you always told me that some things are better left as dreams, but I’m old enough now to know the truth. What happened between you two? Why did you stop loving him?”

  “Because he stopped loving me,” said Ravenna on the dot. Then jerking her eyes wide, she raised a hand to Meridia’s temple. “Are you unwell, child? You look rather flushed. What’s gotten into you? Why are you carrying on in this manner?”

  Her heart sinking, Meridia understood that the veil, without her noticing it, had indeed fallen after all. Ravenna would guard her secrets to the grave. What happened next took place in a heartbeat. The sweet scent of lemon verbena, combined with Ravenna’s ghostly look, her shoulders thin as paper and her hair twisted so tightly in a knot, became too much for Meridia to handle. Against all instructions, tears spilled from Meridia’s eyes.

  “I need to know why…you…and Papa…Why, Mama, why?”

  “Child, you’re crying! Have I taught you nothing? Pull your shoulders up. Tilt your chin. Keep your spine stiff.” Ravenna was scouring her daughter’s face with narrowed eyes when the idea hit her like a bolt of lightning.

  “Holy Mother of Heaven, you’re in love!”

  Startled by the tumultuous mechanism of her mother’s mind, Meridia put her hand out blindly. Ravenna took it at once.

  “You do love him, then? This young man the matchmaker proposed?”

  Meridia nodded.

  “Does he love you?”

  She nodded again, propelling tears to slide from her chin.

  Abruptly, Ravenna raised her eyes to the ceiling. Her long, pale throat contracted as she swallowed, and when her eyes returned to Meridia, they were not those of someone absent and forgetful, but of a woman strong enough to drive a stoop into a man’s shoulder.

  “Stop crying this instant,” she commanded. “If it’s marriage you want, then it’s marriage you’ll get.”

  Ravenna turned to the chopping board and pointed her implacable knot at Meridia. Before the knife resumed its beheading, she threw one last lesson over her shoulder.

  “Whatever you do, do not repeat my mistakes.”

  Too stupefied by the turn of events, Meridia could only watch as the dark and private language once again flooded the kitchen. In the midst of her bafflement, she realized that Ravenna had not asked for the name of the boy she wanted to marry.

  THAT EVENING, AS SOON as the yellow mist whisked Gabriel away, Ravenna went down to the kitchen in her plain black dress and stayed there for the next twelve hours. All night long the stove groaned and the oven rumbled, countless bowls clanged, knives clattered, skillets jangled. At midnight, awakened by the commotion, the two maids appeared in the kitchen with metal pokers in their hands, but Ravenna shooed them away with a stern warning not to disturb her. More terrified of their mistress than of thieves, the maids scurried to their beds and drew the blankets up to their heads. The steep drop in temperature told them that the house was bracing for something momentous, and they did not sleep for fear of missing it. Upstairs in her room, Meridia heard nothing, though she spent the night anxious without rest.

  In the morning, when the blue mist delivered Gabriel in his long coat and top hat at the door, Ravenna was waiting for him in the dining room. In sixteen years he had not missed a single breakfast she had prepared for him. Although it was never voiced, their pact went as follows: As long as she still cooked and served him breakfast without the aid of her maids, and he still ate whatever she gave him without burying some in his napkin (these dishes, after all, might contain poison, ground glass, urine, or anything else Ravenna’s resentment and Gabriel’s suspicion could think up), they would remain as husband and wife. During this exercise, neither one spoke or looked at the other. In sixteen years they never modified or questioned their habit, so inured to its rhythm that they no longer knew who held the upper hand on a given morning.

  Gabriel took his seat, spreading the napkin on his lap in one lordly gesture. Ravenna brought the first dish from the kitchen, a broiled snow fish sprinkled with nutmeg. Gabriel raised a quizzical brow, missing his customary ham-and-paprika omelet, but the flat line of her lips silenced him. No sooner had he raised his fork than Ravenna swept up the dish and dumped both plate and content into a large trash can she had set up for that purpose.

  “One year of lies and illusions,” she said calmly without looking at him.

  Before Gabriel could object, Ravenna vanished into the kitchen. A few seconds later she reappeared with a steaming bowl of lentil and octopus soup. Gabriel was about to dip into the creamy surface of the soup when Ravenna snatched the bowl and hurled it into the trash.

  “Two years of sheer and utter waste,” she said.

  Gabriel sat still, uncertain which was troubling him more—the fact that his wife was speaking to him, or that she was discarding good food and expensive china without the slightest pang. A succession of rock cod in lemon-and-pepper sauce, veal garnished with peaches and palm sugar, and cubed chicken simmered in coconut milk soon joined the mass burial in the wastebasket. When Ravenna reached the ninth dish, Gabriel leaned back against the chair. For the first time in years, he stared openly at his wife.

  “Is there a point to this inanity?”

  “Nine years of misery, futility, and devastation,” retorted Ravenna, letting each word sprout its own blade as she relegated the roast lamb to rubbish. Then, serene as a dove, she sailed impassively toward the kitchen.

  Gabriel waited until the next dish met its doom before roaring, “I’m asking you, is there a reason behind this madness?”

  “Ten years of deceit, treachery, and disappointments,” returned Ravenna icily. “What other reason do you need?”

  Gabriel slammed his fist against the table, causing the silverware to leap in trepidation. “What do you want, woman?”

  Ravenna did not shrink, but fixed him a look that drove nails into his eyes. “She wants her freedom, and you will give it to her even if it’s the last thing you do.” And then without wasting another breath, she swept majestically into the kitchen.

  When she reappeared, Gabriel struck again. “I won’t let her marry that good-for-nothing boy. His whole family reeks of commonness and mediocrity.”

  Ravenna slapped a tureen of boiling lobster broth onto the table, prompting Gabriel to retreat lest it overtu
rn. Her eyes blazing with intensity, she told him, “Eleven years of pain and disenchantment. Eleven years of shame and despair and absolute humiliation. She’s a grown woman who knows what she wants, capable of bearing children, responsible enough to merit freedom. Do you think you have the right to decide her life for her?”

  “I most certainly do!” shouted Gabriel, but Ravenna ignored him. She baptized the trash can with the broth and solemnly withdrew into the kitchen.

  For the next six courses, Gabriel fumed while Ravenna remained indifferent. When she placed the eighteenth dish before him, the customary ham-and-paprika omelet, he immediately understood that it was the last. Eighteen dishes, one for each year they had been married.

  “Eighteen years of grief and regret,” said Ravenna. “You owe me that and much more.”

  “I will not deliver her into the hands of these people!”

  Ravenna waved her finger with a withering ease. “She won’t end up worse than I am. Nobody can be damned as low as you have damned me.”

  Gabriel recoiled as if she had exploded a hole in his being. Without thinking, he picked at the omelet, expecting it to be whisked away, but Ravenna made no move.

  “I don’t approve of this,” he said at length. “Don’t expect me to give her money or blessings.”

  Ravenna leaned in and told him in her iciest voice, “What you owe me, I will use to buy her freedom. I will add up all the damage you’ve caused to purchase her passage out of this madhouse.”

  It was at that moment when their eyes met, and the great wings of a feathered thing began to beat in his stomach, that Gabriel felt deceived by the fickleness of his own memories. For sixteen years he had not allowed himself to think of his wife as anything other than vengeful, but at that inexcusable moment of nostalgia, she again became the woman he had loved before the cold wind blew and froze the house over. Despite Ravenna’s older and more gaunt appearance, those were the same lips he had kissed, the same arms and legs that had twined him so intimately that he knew the location of every vein and freckle. Slowly, mournfully, like a man savoring every moment before death, Gabriel dragged the fork to his mouth. In this way, Meridia became engaged to Daniel.