The Blood of Angels

by Johanna Sinisalo

  Well then what about bats, winged mammals that also spend the winter as if dead, living in caves and hollows, ambassadors of the underworld? Why don’t they move between worlds in myths? Why not butterflies or any other insect crawling out from under a rock in the spring?

  The life of bees was more closely watched, you say triumphantly, because they were useful animals, prized producers of honey! They may have been the only creatures known to all of our forefathers that withdrew for the winter. That’s why.

  ‘But,’ I say (out loud, even though there’s no one in the cottage to hear me), ‘bees don’t even hibernate.’ Anyone can look in a hive and see that the bees are completely awake in the wintertime; they’ve just formed their winter cluster, with the queen in the middle, and they’re moving and producing heat using the energy from their store of honey.

  Which came first, the symbol or the explanation for the symbol?

  Humans have looked at the world, pried ever deeper into the secrets of the cosmos and come up with bold theories on the nature of time and space – how there are an untold number of possible worlds, all of them overlapping, or side by side, or twined around each other like snakes in winter. To people, these are just theories.

  But not to bees.

  *

  I remember the discussion of Colony Collapse Disorder at a bee-keeping conference in the first decade of the 2000s. One grey-haired bee-keeper kept grinning sarcastically and rolling his eyes whenever any particular theory and its implications came up. But he wasn’t participating in the discussion, and finally one of his younger colleagues lost his temper and said, ‘Does this guy think that CCD isn’t a serious problem?’

  ‘I use the term PPB,’ the old man said.

  We all frowned.

  ‘Piss-poor bee-keeping. Some people said that was the reason Hackenberg’s bees went missing.’

  He cleared his throat and said in a troubled tone, ‘I just think that there’s no point in muddying it up like it’s some mystery. It’s obvious to me. You put them in hot water and they fly the coop.’

  A stunned silence mixed with dismissive murmurings ensued, but the old man continued, ‘Think about it. America is where the collapse is at its most catastrophic. That’s the place where the bees are treated really badly. They’re shipped around like cattle, migrant workers, slaves. A single hive might travel five thousand miles a year in a rumbling truck. They’re constantly finding themselves in unfamiliar territory, the hygiene of their homes minimally maintained, no interest taken in their health until there’s a mass die-off. I went there once on a sort of excursion, and you should have seen the colour of some of the frames those Yanks were using. Black as could be. They hadn’t been washed in living memory. And on top of that there’s the environmental pathogens, poisons, radiation – which even if it doesn’t kill them is bound to weaken them – and once they’ve lost their resistance all you need is a rainy summer or a harmless fungal infection or some random virus, and the hive’s really vulnerable. And then there’s the lack of fragrance. The flowers don’t smell right any more, which has to be tough on the bees …’

  ‘What?’ somebody yelped.

  ‘I read it in the paper somewhere. Some guy named Fuentes researched traffic exhaust and its effect on fragrance molecules at ground level. Smells are dispersing too quickly. They don’t reach more than a couple of hundred metres from the flowers. Before air pollution a bee could smell a flower from a kilometre away or even further. There are these fragrance compounds, and nowadays they oxidize before they’re supposed to. Think about how you would feel …’

  He raised his shoulders and spread out his arms.

  ‘You slave all summer growing provisions for winter to keep body and soul together. You’ve got a barn full of wheat, a cellar filled with stacks of plump, juicy roots, fruits and jams, a woodshed full of more split birch logs than you can count. And then one day as autumn’s coming on some big hand just reaches in and grabs it all and replaces it with a pantry full of bark bread and a shed full of wet sticks, so you manage on that and just barely get by without dying of hunger and losing members of your family to frostbite, and you survive a tough, gruelling winter, and then spring comes and you start up the same backbreaking work because you don’t know what else to do. I for one would get fed up with it before too long.’

  ‘So where do you think they’ve gone?’ somebody asked.

  The old man smiled. ‘I wish I knew.’

  *

  Underneath the craziness there was sense in his theories. Maybe they left because they’d simply had enough; they were fed up, so they threw in the towel, tossed the tongs in the well. And since they had no place else to go they opened a door to another world.

  Our ancestors knew something about bees that we’ve forgotten or refuse to recognize, that bees, with their incomparable senses, can sense the thin spots between worlds and break through; use their efficient little jaws to nibble a hole from one universe to another.

  PERFECTING THE HUMAN SPECIES

  A BLOG ABOUT THE ANIMALIST REVOLUTIONARY ARMY AND ITS ACTIVITIES

  SO NOW I WANNA GO AND LIVE IN THE WOODS?

  In connection with my previous post I received a bunch of comments from the same person, or several very similar people, which can be summed up roughly thus:

  ‘Just how are you alternative types going to survive in actual natural conditions once it takes more than a shopping trip to a pleasant supermarket to stay alive and you’re forced to give up your central heating? The only way to really test whether you have the guts and conviction for an alternative lifestyle is in the wild.’

  This sort of argument is extremely common among opponents of animal rights. There are only two possible extremes: the life they’ve chosen – driving their SUVs to their oil-heated homes filled with the hum of all the newest electronic devices and tables creaking under loads of tenderloin, goose liver and Ecuadorian papaya – or the life we’re suggesting, a life they picture stripped of all modern comforts, including supermarkets and central heating. Opponents of animal rights must assume that if they give our ideas an inch we’ll end up on a slippery slope and we’ll all be sliding straight into a life eating nothing but locally grown organic carrots, wearing itchy hemp clothes and living in a cabin in the woods heated by nothing but an open fire made of scavenged sticks. As if there were no choices in between that a person could achieve without really changing their standard of living: sacrificing a little consumption, enjoying meat in moderation, recycling, promoting renewable energy.

  I also don’t understand this thing about ‘proving you have the guts’. I don’t know a single person who thinks life in ‘natural conditions’ is ideal or desirable or claims they could live on nothing but what they gathered in the wild. On the contrary, it’s the meat-eaters who ought to be proving they’ve got what it takes. If they want to eat other animals they ought to have the guts to go to the woods and get the food for themselves instead of buying factory meat from a supermarket. People who recommend eating more plant-based foods are very aware of the fact that they’re dependent on merchandise produced by other people. They just don’t want other sentient beings to be killed for the sake of their consumer habits.

  Reducing the amount of meat you eat isn’t a return to some primitive ‘golden age’, it’s an alternative for modern humans. We don’t at all want to reject new technology – it’s not like I’m posting this on birch bark, for heaven’s sake – we want to use present-day tools to live in a more humane way. Modern food production is capable of feeding the human race without factory farming of animals.

  Labelling us as opponents of progress is an expression of bad faith and a guilty conscience. It’s a reflection of a lack of responsibility for the environment, an inability to change your life and your way of thinking, a self-inflicted blindness to your own cruelty. ‘Nature is cruel,’ you say. To that I answer with Jonathan Foer’s words: ‘Nature isn’t cruel. And neither are the animals in nature that kill and occasionally e
ven torture one another. Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.’

  LEAVE A COMMENT (total comments: 92)

  USER NAME: Lord give me strength

  If we’re really all going to give up eating farmed meat, what are we supposed to do, in concrete terms? Should all the pigs, cows and chickens be shot and buried in mass graves so the sight of them won’t offend our sense of ethics? That would involve the extinction of many animal species. Do you want that on your conscience? You can’t really set them free, although ARA irresponsibly does so. A cow that’s well cared for has indoor heat, a chance to walk around, a herd, unlimited food and veterinary treatment. What’s a wild cow – an elk? Wouldn’t you defenders of the animals cry if somebody kept cows in the conditions that elk live in? And what way should a cow live that would be ‘normal for its species’? I maintain it’s living in a well-tended herd, being milked and then slaughtered. Every animal dies at some point, me included.

  USER NAME: JesseP

  Have you seen the news lately? It may be that the number of cows and pigs are going to decrease even without our intervention.

  SHOW ALL 90 COMMENTS

  DAY ELEVEN

  I climb up to the loft, resolute.

  I’ve been to check on the overturned coffee cup. The dead queen is still there, sleeping the mysterious sleep of death. Let her be; I’m keeping her in reserve.

  I fetch my old bee suit from the junk room, go into the outer room and put my hand in the pocket. I feel the clip with the other queen in it. It works immediately. At the exact moment that I touch the queen with my hand, just as if someone switched on a projector, there’s the opening in the wall. Colourful and tremulous.

  The queen lies on my palm, fragile, powerful.

  Maybe the dead bee in my hand still has a lingering connection to her swarm, now gone from this world. Invisible, inaudible but as real as a wireless connection. A connection that opens a path for me, too, its accidental bearer.

  Or is the queen dead only to my eyes, my senses? A friend with an interest in ants once told me that ants are basically blind and communicate through pheromones. Ants’ nests have individuals who specialize in keeping the place clean, undertakers like myself, whose job is to convey their dead fellow ants out of the colony. A blind undertaker recognizes a dead body because at the moment of death ants exude something called butyric acid. Some cruel researchers rubbed the same substance on live ants, and the undertakers came and attempted to hustle them out of the anthill and on to the compost heap, kicking and screaming. Since an ant’s life is dominated by smell, information from their other senses can be disregarded as relatively insignificant. I can picture the undertaker saying in an exasperated tone, ‘Please stop your flailing, ma’am. You’re dead.’

  Our own senses might be just as misleading.

  Every bee-keeper knows that even if hives are placed so close together that their entrances are separated by mere centimetres, a bee will unerringly return to its own hive. At close quarters this could be a matter of the unique smell of a bee’s own nest, but you can move the entire hive kilometres away – as is often done in large-scale commercial pollination – and the bees will chart the new territory with lightning speed and return from a trip collecting nectar to their own group just as naturally, even though their entire environment is dramatically different from what it had been the day before.

  Maybe they deliberately leave a queen in the empty nest that’s left behind as a sort of anchor to which they can return if the new world they’ve chosen proves inhospitable.

  I’ve put on a fleece jacket with pockets that can be zipped shut. I can’t take the risk of losing the queen. I slip the clip into a pocket, making sure it’s close against my skin through the fabric. It probably should be as close as possible, in a pocket, either on my skin or at most a millimetre from it, so that it’s possible for me to see the passage way and use it.

  I lift the ladder out of the trapdoor and lower it through the opening.

  Sure and determined, I climb down on to the Other Side.

  *

  I’m not afraid. I have nothing to fear, not any more. And if this is an illusion, so be it. It’s a good – in fact, a splendid – illusion.

  When my feet touch the ground I start walking. The weather is beautiful, much brighter and sunnier than in the world I’ve just left. It’s as if the place is untouched by the changed climate’s inescapable and strangely damp winds, the tropically hot yet cloudy midsummers lying over the landscape like a sweaty palm previously unheard of in Finland. Here the wind is light, limpid. Everything around me is overlaid with the muffled, energetic hum of nectar-gatherers. The wind rouses itself for a moment, and I hear the tiny applause of aspen leaves.

  I head off in the direction that in my world would be the way to the pond at Hopevale. Familiar and safe and painful. I’m interested in whether this world is topographically comparable to my own or altogether different.

  The head-high grass and flourishing willow thickets are quite difficult to push through in places, but my body remembers the way.

  *

  The very first thing I sense is the unmistakable smell of water. After that I see it through the trees, a glimpse of watery blue. It must be Hopevale Lake or its equivalent here. It’s only then that I make sense of what it is that’s swaying in front of me, what the greenery is between me and the water.

  The path to the lake is lined with a row of palm trees. Or two rows, to be precise. Date palms.

  I must recognize them from some picture book I read long ago, their rusty red clusters of blossoms under an umbrella of leaves.

  They form a majestic lane to the lake, as if some sheikh from a fairy-tale has come and planted them on an extravagant whim, here in the wintry latitudes.

  An almost hysterical giggle escapes from my throat.

  They’re totally real, despite the ultra-Finnish landscape shimmering between their trunks, the willowherb growing around their roots. I’m overcome with the same off-kilter feeling I had the first time I saw a woman in a burka lining up at the super market. I’m not critical of immigration. I don’t have particularly strong feelings about foreign ethnic groups or different religious restrictions on dress. It was just hard to fit the sight of it into my everyday circle of existence back then.

  I wade through the willowherb along the avenue between the palm trees, and then something in the landscape stops me. It’s a rather large boulder with a shelf-like protrusion jutting from it. There’s a birch sapling growing from it that doesn’t know that it’s never going to grow large, that its roots are planted in a thin, grey layer of humus and under that is impenetrable stone and under the stone empty space.

  I’ve seen that shelf of rock before, but it was much higher up. When I was a child, it was as tall as my sun-tanned chest. Now it’s somewhere around my groin.

  It’s not just that I’ve grown, not just one of those insurmountable obstacles from childhood become touchingly easy to step over. It’s that I’m seeing the effect of the passage of time. And a lot of time has passed.

  Pupa used to lift me up to sit on that spot on our way to Hopevale Lake. I continued the tradition with Eero. It was a resting spot, where we would relax a bit, take a break, and Eero was always just as excited to be up there as I had been when I was little, to be in a spot I couldn’t get to on my own until my height started to stretch in puberty.

  Now the shelf is lower, because the ground has built up over ages of fallen leaves and twigs, germinating plants that then decomposed, and the shelf of rock is where it would be after many, many years had passed …

  Suddenly my memory speaks to me.

  I was sitting on that tongue of rock on one of my walks with Pupa, and he had brought along dried dates for a snack. They were the kind that come in a flat, sticky slab wrapped in plastic, and we had cut it into pieces and were eating it, the sweetness of the dried fruit so piercing it made my teeth hurt. We
gobbled them down, relishing their syrupy fibres. It was our shared sugar secret, sticking to our fingers, a reckless, manly camaraderie, and the hidden lumps in the middle, the stones that you struck your teeth on – always by surprise, it seemed – we spit out on either side of the path as we walked to the shore of the lake and back. And Pupa sang the Sillanpää March – our marching steps are ringing out as one! – and I with my mouth full of the sweet sugar of togetherness, singing, our forefathers from a faraway soil are gazing at their sons!

  I brought Eero on the exact same walks.

  We had dried dates, too, Eero and I. Those same little sticky, brown bricks with the treacherous stones hiding in the middle.

  And now, from a faraway soil, these palm trees are gazing at their sower.

  *

  I walk along the lane of date palms towards the lake shore.

  The shore is further away than I remember. The ground became higher, the shore turned to marsh and then dried up, or maybe something else has caused the shoreline to retreat.

  Then I see something that is a confirmation.

  Yes, this is Hopevale Lake. I can see the remains of the stone foundation of the boat shed, because I know what to look for – a lumpy, mossy, grass-covered, roughly rectangular bulge. The remains of the boats, if there are any, must be somewhere among these over grown ruins. Nearby a group of pale-leaved trees is growing. At first I think they’re silver willows because of the colour of the leaves, but the trunk is wrong, the crown of leaves a different shape.

  And then I almost smile because, even though I’m taken by surprise again, I’m starting to learn.

  Marja-Terttu used to complain constantly about the fact that the cottage, the former summer cabin and present home, wasn’t on the lake shore. What kind of a summer cabin isn’t next to the lake?! She wanted me to build a pavilion here, a good kilometre from the cabin, next to the boat shed, on a little spit of land that jutted out into the lake, to be a summer house for us. And it wasn’t such a big thing to ask. I remember I enjoyed building it – it was just the right sized project for a cack-handed man like me. A four-square foundation then a few ready-made slabs of flooring from the hardware store and a tent canopy to put over it when summer came, with sides that rolled up. On summer weekends, if the weather was hot and clear, she liked to come here for picnic suppers. We would bring a salad and a bottle of wine in a cooler, kept a kettle grill in a corner of the boat shed with bags of briquettes and lighter fluid. And even though it was always her idea to come down to the shore (although I certainly enjoyed it, too) she always ended up complaining about the insects, and we never stayed for long once the sun had set.