Lars Gustaffson
The Death of a Beekeeper
TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH
BY JANET K. SWAFFER AND GUNTRAM H. WEBER,
WITH AN AFTERWORD BY JANET K. SWAFFER
A New Directions eBook
“Dogs! Hangmen’s servants!
Royal torture masters!
Haven’t you understood?
You there, heating tongs over a coal fire!
I’m actually a donkey!
With the heart of a donkey and the bray of a donkey!
I never give up!”
Prelude
Kind readers. Strange readers. We begin again. We never give up. It is early spring 1975, the story begins in the middle of the thaw. The location is North Västmanland.
The former elementary school teacher of Väster Våla, his name is Lars Lennart Westin, but he was often called “Weasel,” was retired early when the school was closed down, the local elementary school in Ennora on the northern shore of the lake. He earns his living doing all kinds of things, primarily selling the honey produced by his beekeeping, which from time to time has been quite extensive. Since his divorce he has been living in a hut on the peninsula on the same latitude as the villages Vretarna and Bodarna, but, of course, on the east side of the lake. He has a small garden, a potato patch, a dog. Sometimes relatives come and visit him. He has a telephone, a television set, and a subscription to the Vestmanlands Läns Tidning. Since obtaining his divorce he has had no notable relationships with women.
The “Weasel” is not particularly old. He was born on May 17, 1936. But he looks much older than forty already, spent, with sparse hair, thin. He wears one of those glasses with narrow steel rims which intensify the impression of leanness. His financial situation is extremely modest, but that is not his problem.
What follows now are the notes he left behind. Left behind: for in this spring of 1975 in the middle of the thaw he finds out that he will not live to see the fall. He has terminal cancer, which, after some time, much too late, has been located in the spleen, with large metastases in the surrounding tissue.
The voice which you are going to hear is his, not mine, and therefore at this point I take my leave of you.
Inventory of Sources
1. The Yellow Notebook
Found on the shelf over the sink, unlined, size 16×6 cm., 80 pages, of which 76 are full. Yellow cover with the legend: NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SWEDISH BEEKEEPERS.
Contains very personal and very impersonal notations. Among the latter are a series of monthly calculations of household expenses, comments and notes concerning the care of the hives. Expediency dictated that only a few indicative samples be used in this edited version.
Begun February 1970.
2. The Blue Notebook
Found on the top row of books in the bookshelf. Legal size, lined, blue cover with the imprint Sjöberg’s Books Västerås. Contains 112 pages, of which 97 have been written on both sides.
Contains various pasted newpaper clippings, excerpts from Westin’s readings, and his own stories.
Begun no earlier than summer 1964.
3. The Damaged Notebook
So-called telephone pad. The bottom half of the cover torn off. Imprint WHO [CALLED?]. Found next to the telephone on the counter across from the sink in the kitchen. Contains local telephone numbers, a very few long distance numbers, and a smaller number of notes referring to the course of the disease.
Begun no earlier than 1970.
1. The Letter
. . . wind rose, yes, a really warm wind was blowing. It was the end of August last year, the dog had taken off, he had just begun this running away business then, and I went looking for him around eleven o’clock in the evening. The sky was overcast, it was so dark that you couldn’t see the treetops anymore, but you could hear the wind moving through them the whole time. It was always the same, continuously strong, strangely warm wind. I remember having experienced something similar before, but I can’t recall precisely when.
When I came to the path to the Sundblads’, which runs along the lake, smelled the scent of the water and heard the waves beating without seeing them in the darkness, I clearly felt a small frog hopping over my shoe.
Then I did something I am sure I hadn’t done since the fifties. I bent down quickly and moved my cupped hands through the wet grass just in front of the spot where it had to be.
This old trick always worked. It hopped straight into my hands, and I could hold it captive in my right hand as if in a cage, it was that small.
For a moment it sat there as if paralyzed, and I put both hands together to make a larger cage.
There I stood now listening to the wind, a frog in my hands as if locked in a cage, and the same warm wind was continuously moving through the trees. A sour smell came from the swamps on the wooded shore. I clearly felt the frog trembling in my hands.
And then suddenly it peed right on my hand.
I believe that is an experience not many people have had.
The pee of a frog is ice-cold. I was so surprised that I opened my hands and let it hop away. Thus I stood there, deeply moved, above me the wind passing through the treetops, and my hand cold from the pee of a frog.
We begin again. We never give up.
(The Yellow Book I:1)
I found the dog at the Sundblads’. He had been there the whole afternoon, had been fed pancakes and water. The really embarrassing thing was: when I tried to take him with me he didn’t want to come. He resisted, planting his paws firmly on the rag rug in the kitchen.
That was embarrassing. They could easily have gotten the impression that I treated the dog so badly that he didn’t dare go home with me. But that simply isn’t true.
It is something else, and I simply don’t understand what it can be. It really seems as if the dog was frightened in some peculiar way, and, in fact, for the third time now within a few weeks. Yet I’m not treating him any differently now than I have been for the past eleven years. It may be that I’m a bit short-tempered sometimes, but certainly not to the point of frightening him. The dog knows me inside and out, he has known me since he was a pup.
There is only one reasonable explanation: the dog is gradually getting so old that certain subtle changes are taking place somehow in the olfactory perceptions stored in his brain. And hence he simply doesn’t recognize me anymore.
On the one hand I think that he can hardly see at all, on the other hand his eyesight is not very important to him.
During the winter in the early sixties I once used a ski track in the hills of Lake Märrsjön. At that time I was still the teacher at the old elementary school in Ennora, before it was moved to Fagersta, and could only go skiing on Saturdays and Sundays. It was a beautiful Sunday in February, a whole lot of people were using the track, and as I came over the crest of a hill I saw a man in a blue hooded jacket only thirty meters ahead of me.
The whole time the dog had been running several meters ahead of me, and he certainly knew that this man was there, he had been registered for several kilometers as a scent profile, as a smell in the smell center of the dog brain.
At this point the man, who is somewhat older, moves to the side to adjust something or maybe only to let me get by since I’m so close behind him.
Confound it, if the dog doesn’t run right into him so that the man almost sat down on his behind right in the middle of the track!
For the dog a man dressed in blue doesn’t exist, there is only an interesting smell which he follows and which gets stronger and stronger, and he relies on it so blindly that he doesn’t even raise his head when he just about runs into the man.
It is definitely connected with the sense of smell. And nothing
can be done about it. He has always been a good dog. And I hope he’ll hold on for a long time yet.
I don’t know what got into him. It really seems as if the dog doesn’t recognize me anymore. Or more precisely: he recognizes me, but only from very close up, when I can bring him to really see me and listen to me instead of going only by the smell.
There is another explanation, of course, but it is so crazy that I can’t believe it.
That all of a sudden I have taken on a different smell in some damnably subtle fashion which only the dog can perceive.
(The Yellow Book I:2)
Last fall quite a bit needed to be done to the beehives, new wood lining, new apertures on some of them, repairs on the frames, insulation material, but for some inexplicable reason I could never make myself do it. I don’t quite understand why this is so. For some reason unclear to me I must have been very lethargic and passive last fall. Thank heavens the winter now, at the end of January, promises to be unusually warm. It is raining every day, and I stay in bed a little longer than usual in the winter darkness simply because it is pleasant to hear the rain falling on the roof.
But what if, in February, it gets cold again over night? What the devil shall I do then? The wooden cover of the hives is soaked with water, the tar paper on the roofs is damaged in many places. They will simply freeze to death. As punishment for my laziness last fall I am going to lose three, four hives.
Financially that would not make any difference since I finally got the lodging allowance raised by the municipality, but then living beings will die, and somehow that hurts.
A peculiar thing I discussed last week on the telephone with Isacsson over in Ramnäs: When a bee population dies, it is virtually as if an animal had died. One misses a personality, almost the way it is with a dog or, at very least, with a cat.
People are completely indifferent to a dead bee; they simply sweep it away.
The peculiar thing is that bees have precisely the same attitude. There is virtually no other animal species which has such a total lack of interest in the death of their kind. If I squash a few bees by carelessly replacing a frame, the others drag them off as if they were dealing with some broken machines. But first they always get the pollen, if there happens to be any.
What now if they experience it in the same way? That it is the swarm that represents the individuality, the intelligence.
There are populations with enormous personality. There are lazy and hard-working, aggressive and gentle bee populations. There are even flighty and unreliable ones, and heaven knows whether there are populations with a sense of humor and others without it.
For example the swarming fever! That is precisely the way it is with a nervous, temperamental, impatient human being. A poor lover; no patience.
And the single bee just as impersonal as a cog in a clockwork.
(The Yellow Book I:3)
In August, when the children were here, they wanted to play badminton with me. For children of divorced parents I think they really had a very pleasant summer vacation. After all, they were here several times. In June and in August.
It was on that particular occasion, at any rate, while we were playing badminton, that it felt just that way.
But at that time I was absolutely certain that it was lumbago and forgot all about it. I naturally thought that I had pulled a muscle in my back. I had to quit playing immediately.
But is there a kind of lumbago that hurts so damned much that you taste blood?
(The Yellow Book I:4)
Are Swedes more patient than other nationalities? That is something I don’t know much about. During my lifetime I haven’t gotten around to much traveling. Two bicycle trips through Denmark at the beginning of the fifties, a ping-pong tournament in Kiel, and several backpacking trips over the border to Norway, way up north near Lake Femund through Orsa and Idre, that isn’t much really. I tend to look at the world outside of Sweden as a literary phenomenon, something that exists in books and magazines.
Large distances frighten me. Paris is something which lives in the Goncourt brothers’ diaries, the most modern London is that of the early novels of Aldous Huxley.
If I really went to these places I presumably wouldn’t be able to get my bearings. I would find them irrelevant. I just read in the local paper that they now have skyscrapers in Paris.
In my system, different times operate in different places. In Paris, for example, the mortar dust of the commune has hardly settled. What kind of a time operates here? The now.
So, are the Swedes more patient than other nationalities? The day before yesterday the waiting room of the X-ray ward in the Västerås district hospital. Pungent odor of woolen clothing, wet wool clothing. Everything full of people, on chairs, on benches, everywhere. A boy with terrible bruises covering the right side of his face. He had had an accident on a moped the evening before and was in pain. An old man from Kolbäck, who had come on the morning bus. He very much hoped that he would be able to catch the last bus of the evening. “They take their time around here.” This was his second visit within a week. Everyone had a numbered ticket in their hand. The mysteries of waiting in line: sometimes the nurse calls in two or three patients at once, sometimes only one. Sometimes everything comes to a halt for an hour at a time. And the way everyone looks up every time the nurse appears.
Like a mechanical Glockenspiel whose figures move once on the hour; a door opens, someone comes out, someone goes in. A stinking drunk fellow with lots of bandaids on his forehead, under his eyes, on his chin, is brought in by two policemen. He gets treated right away.
Most of the sixty or seventy people in the room are in a greater or lesser degree of pain. With some of them you can tell by the way they sit, by the way they get up and pace restlessly back and forth.
But hardly anyone talks about it, they don’t even say that something is hurting them (and this “hurting” can mean anything on a scale ranging from minor complaints to stabbing pains). Instead they talk about poor bus connections, about rail buses, about visits and return visits. It appears as if some of them live only to go to the hospital now and then. They actually feel fairly comfortable there. Their sickness gives them an identity. That goes for some of the oldest and least demanding.
Because of their sickness they arouse an interest which no one had in them when they were healthy.
Something about their patience irritates me terribly, makes me aggressive. They shouldn’t settle for that . . . For what? For waiting so long to be X-rayed, for the strangely impersonal, assembly-line treatment, where nobody cares that they sit there the whole day after waiting so early in the morning at their wintery bus stops, that they sit there waiting to be next, unable to get a bite to eat for fear of losing their place on the waiting list?
And in spite of everything, always a kind of camaraderie, always somebody who is ready to sound the alarm if the nurse should call out your name while you happen to be in the rest room for a cigarette. Or do I think that it is the pain itself that they should protest, that they should not accept? Proletarians of pain, unite!
(The Yellow Book I:5)
WHAT DOESN’T DESTROY ME, MAKES ME STRONGER. (Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher, 1844-1900)
(The Yellow Book I:6)
February 1975 Swedish Crowns
Grocer —375:40
Sugar —42:90
Tobacco —32:50
Nails and misc. hardware —16:00
Doctor —7:00
Oil and gas —75:00 (approx.)
Total expenditures —548:80
National Assoc. of Beekeepers, bonus + 16.—
Grocer, honey +255.—
Health insurance +304.—
repaired Sundblad’s pump motor + 50.—
Gross income in February +625.—
Net 76.—
(The Yellow Book I:7)
When the letter from the district hospital in Västerås finally came, I didn’t want to open it, so I laid it aside, leafed through ne
wspapers and magazines, looked at a few bills and decided that I would not be able to pay them until next month anyway, and ended up taking the dog for a good long walk.
It was gray, pleasant February weather, fairly cold and hence not too damp, and the whole landscape looked like a pencil sketch. I don’t know why I like it so much. It is pretty barren and yet I never get tired of moving about in it. I have spent a fairly considerable portion of my life here.
As long as I was married, I lived in Trummelsberg and drove the car to the schools; there were quite a few transfers over the years. Since I was trained as an elementary school teacher as well as a vocational teacher I could pretty much pick and choose my work during the last few years, as one school consolidation followed the other. And I became more and more a vocational teacher. The classes in elementary school were getting too large, I felt, and besides, I had better working hours that way.
Then, after I obtained my divorce, I moved here, moved deeper into the landscape, so to speak, and at the same time I gave up my teaching profession. There wasn’t any money left over anyway after support payments, and so I simply gave up earning money, and instead I got thirty bee colonies.
Much to my astonishment, that worked just as well. Crises occur only when I have to go somewhere, like now when I have to go to the hospital.
When the letter from the district hospital finally came I simply put it aside and took a walk. I felt very calm and observed very thoroughly all of the bare hardwood trees along the way. I am really in love with these bare branches in front of a lead-colored sky. It is as if they were letters of a strange language, trying to tell me something.
The whole neighborhood with its boarded-up summer houses, snow-covered gardens, boats on racks, is now somehow incomparably more beautiful than in summer. Then the place is swarming with people. I have gotten to know quite a few of them over the years, some even invite me to visit for a game of cards or a little glass of something on the veranda, and that is a pleasant feeling. I am by no means an unsociable person. But here, this is real life. Whether good or bad, whether lonely or beautiful, it is my real life. And now something stronger than I, stronger than all the courts and governments and agencies, is trying to take it away from me.
The Death of a Beekeeper Page 1