Love and Obstacles

by Aleksandar Hemon

  His photography merits a mention, even if its main function was to record the merciless passing of time. Most of his photos are structurally identical despite the change of clothes and background: my mother, my sister, and I facing the camera, the flow of time measured by the increasing amounts of my mother’s wrinkles and gray hair, the width of my sister’s beaming smile, and the thickness of the smirking and squinting on my face.

  One more thing: He once bought a notebook, and on the first page wrote: This notebook is for expressing the deepest thoughts and feelings of the members of our family. It seemed he intended to use those feelings and thoughts as material for a future book, but few were expressed. I, for one, certainly wasn’t going to let my parents or my sister (ever eager to tease me to tears) in on the tumultuous events in my adolescent soul. Thus there were only two entries: a cryptic note from my mother, who probably just grabbed the notebook while on the phone and wrote:

  Friday

  Healthy children

  Thyme

  and a line from my sister, in her careful and precise prepubescent handwriting:

  I am really sad, because the summer is almost over.

  THE REAL BOOK

  Whatever conveyed reality earned my father’s unqualified appreciation. He was suspicious of broadcast news, relentlessly listing the daily triumphs of socialism, but was addicted to the weather forecast. He read the papers, but found only the obituaries trustworthy. He loved nature shows, because the existence and the meaning of nature were self-evident—there was no denying a python swallowing a rat, or a cheetah leaping on the back of an exhausted, terrified monkey.

  My father, I say, was deeply and personally offended by anything he deemed unreal. And nothing insulted him more than literature; the whole concept was a scam. Not only that words—whose reality is precarious at best—were what it was all made from, but those words were used to render what never happened. This dislike of literature and its spurious nature may have been worsened by my intense interest in books (for which he blamed my mother) and my consequent attempts to get him interested. For his forty-fifth birthday I unwisely gave him a book called The Liar—he read nothing of it but the title. Once I read him a passage from a García Márquez story in which an angel falls from the skies and ends up in a chicken coop. After this my father was seriously concerned about my mental capacities. There were other, similar incidents, all of them appalling enough for him to start casually mentioning his plan to write a real book.

  He didn’t seem to think that writing such a book was a particularly trying task—all one needed to do was not get carried away by indulgent fantasies, stick to what really happened, hold on to its unquestionable firmness. He could do that, no problem; the only thing he needed was a few weeks off. But he could never find a time: there was his job, and bees, and things to be built, and the necessary replenishing naps. Only once did he approach writing anything—one afternoon I found him snoring on the couch with his notebook on his chest and a pencil with a broken tip on the floor, the only words written: Many years ago.

  THE WRITER’S RETREAT

  My father began writing in Canada, in the winter of 1994. They had just landed, after a couple of years of exile and refugee roaming, the years I spent working low-wage jobs and pursuing a green card in Chicago. They had left Sarajevo the day the siege began and went to my deceased grandparents’ house in the countryside, ostensibly to escape the trouble. The real reason was that it was time for the spring works in my father’s apiary, which he kept at the family estate. They spent a year there, on a hill called Vuijak, living off the food they grew in the garden, watching trucks of Serbian soldiers going to the front. My father occasionally sold them honey, and toward the end of that summer started selling mead, although the soldiers much preferred getting drunk on slivovitz. My parents secretly listened to the radio broadcast from the besieged Sarajevo and feared a knock at the door in the middle of the night. Then my mother had a gallbladder infection and nearly died, so they went to Novi Sad, where my sister was attempting to complete her university degree. They applied for a Canadian immigration visa, got it, and arrived in Hamilton, Ontario, in December 1993.

  From the window of the fifteenth-floor unfurnished apartment they moved into they could see piles of snow, the smokestacks of the Hamilton steel mills, and a vacant parking lot. It was all black and white and bleak and gray, like an existentialist European movie (which my father found unreal without exception, and morbidly boring on top of it). He started despairing as soon as he set foot on Canadian soil: he didn’t know where they had landed, how they were going to live and pay for food and furniture; he didn’t know what would happen to them if one of them got terribly sick. And it was perfectly clear to him that he would never learn the English language.

  My mother, on the other hand, let her stoic self take over—partly to counterbalance my father’s darkest fears, partly because she felt so defeated that it didn’t matter anymore. It was okay now to give herself to the tragic flow of things and let happen whatever was going to happen. My mind stores an image of her patiently and unfalteringly turning a Rubik’s Cube in her hands, while a report on a Sarajevo massacre is on TV, completely unfazed by the fact that she is not, and never would be, anywhere close to the solution.

  Soon enough, my mother set up the apartment with the used furniture her English teacher had given them. The place still looked hollow, devoid of all those crumbles of a lived life that lead you back home: the heavy green malachite ashtray Father brought back from Zaire; a picture of me and my sister as kids, sitting in a cherry tree, smiling, my sister’s cheek pressing against my arm, me holding on to a branch with both of my hands like a chimpanzee (I fell off the tree and broke my arm the instant after the picture was taken); a spider brooch my mother kept in a heavy crystal ashtray; a moisture stain on a bathroom pipe that looked like an unshaven, long-haired Lenin; honey jars with labels that had little bees flying out of the corners toward the center, where the words “Real Honey” stood out in boldface—none of those things was there, now slowly fading into mere memories.

  My father dropped out of his English class, furious at the language that randomly distributed meaningless articles and insisted on having a subject in every stupid sentence. He made cold calls to Canadian companies and in unintelligible English described his life, which included being a diplomat in the world’s greatest cities, to perplexed receptionists who would simply put him on indefinite hold. He nearly got sucked into a venture set up by a shady Ukrainian who convinced him there was money in smuggling Ukrainian goose down and selling it to the Canadian bedding industry.

  Sometimes I’d call from Chicago and my father would pick up the phone.

  “So what are you doing?” I’d ask.

  “Waiting,” he’d say.

  “For what?”

  “Waiting to die.”

  “Let me talk to Mom.”

  And then, one day, when his woe became so overwhelming that his soul physically hurt, like a stubbed toe or a swollen testicle, he decided to write. He wouldn’t show his writing to my mother or sister, but they knew he was writing about bees. Indeed, one day in the early spring of 1994, I received a manila envelope with another envelope inside, on which was written, in a dramatic cursive, The Bees, Part 1. I have to confess that my hands trembled as I flipped through it, as if I were unrolling a sacred scroll, uncovered after a thousand years of sleep. The sense of sanctity, however, was diminished by a huge, sticky honey stain on page six.

  THE BEES, PART 1

  There is something faithfully connecting our family and bees, my father starts his narrative. Like a member of the family, the bees have always come back.

  He then proudly informs the reader that it was his grandfather Teodor (the reader’s great-grandfather) who brought civilized beekeeping to Bosnia, where the natives still kept bees in straw-and-mud hives and killed them with sulfur, all of them, to get the honey. He remembers seeing straw-and-mud hives in the neighbors’ backyards
, and they looked strange to him, a relic from the dark ages of beekeeping. He recounts the story of the few hives that arrived with the family from the hinterlands of Ukraine to the promised land of Bosnia—the only thing promised was plenty of wood, which enabled them to survive the winters. The few hives multiplied quickly, the development of beekeeping in northwestern Bosnia unimpeded by World War One. My grandfather Ivan, who was twelve when he arrived in Bosnia (in 1912), became the first president of the Beekeeping Society in Prnjavor. My father describes a photograph of the Society’s founding picnic: Grandfather Ivan stands in the center of a large group of nicely dressed peasants with a then fashionable long mustache and dandily cocked hat. Some of the peasants proudly exhibit faces swollen with bee stings.

  Sometimes there were interesting mischiefs with bees, my father writes, failing to mention any mischiefs. The sudden sentence is one of his many stylistic idiosyncrasies: his voice wavers from establishment of the historical context with a weighty, ominous phrase like War was looming across that dirt road or Gods of destruction pointed their irate fingers at our honey jars to the highly technical explanations of the revolutionary architecture of his father’s hives; from the discussion of the fact that bees die a horrible death when they sting (and the philosophical implications thereof) to the poetical descriptions of hawthorn in bloom and the piping of the queen bee the night before the swarm is to leave the hive.

  Father devotes nearly a page to the moment he first recognized a queen bee. A hive contains about 50,000 bees, he writes, and only one queen. She’s noticeably bigger than other bees, who dance around her, swirl and move in peculiar, perhaps even worshipful ways. His father pointed at the queen bee on a frame heavy with bees and honey, and, my father writes, it was like reaching the center of the universe—the vastness and the beauty of the world were revealed to him, the logic behind it all.

  In an abrupt transition, he asserts that the most successful period of our beekeeping ended in 1942, during World War Two, when we for the first time lost our bees. It is clear that was a major catastrophe for the family, but my father keeps everything in perspective, probably because of what was going on in the besieged Sarajevo at the time of his writing. There are worse things that can happen to you. A whole family, for example, can perish without a trace, he writes. We didn’t perish, which is excellent.

  He then draws a little map at the center of which is the hill of Vuijak, near the town of Prnjavor, whose name appears at the fringe of the page. He draws a straight line from Prnjavor to Vuijak (6 kilometers, he writes along the line), ignoring the creeks, the forests, and the hills in between (including the hill I tumbled down). He places little stars around the page, which seem to represent different villages and people in that area. It was a truly multinational place, he says, wistfully. Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Italians, Serbs, Muslims, Croats, and all the mixed ones. He calculates that there were seventeen different nationalities—there was even a tailor in Prnjavor who was Japanese. Nobody knew how he got there, but when he died, there were only sixteen nationalities left. (Now, I have to say that I’ve inquired about the Japanese tailor, and no one else remembers him or has heard about him.) In 1942, lawlessness was rampant, and there were roaming gangs of Serbs and Croatian fascists and Tito’s partisans too. All those others, who had no units of their own, save the Germans, were suspect and vulnerable. One day, two semi-soldiers showed up at the door of the family’s house. They were their neighbors, ordinary peasants, except for their rickety rifles and caps with the partisan red star in the front and the Chetnik insignia (an ugly eagle spreading its mighty wings) in the back—they switched according to need. There was going to be a great battle, the peasants said, the mother of all battles. They said we should be well advised to leave. The peasants said they would padlock everything, and they showed us a huge key, for which obviously no padlock existed. They suggested, touching the knives at their belts as if inadvertently, that we take only what we could carry. Father begged them to let us take a cow; my mother, five sisters, and two brothers wept. Winter was around the corner. Perhaps it was the weeping that made these neighbors take pity and let my father’s family bring a cow, although it was the sick one—her shrunken udder would not provide any milk or solace. And we left thirty beehives behind.

  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.

  THE CONDITIONS OF PRODUCTION

  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.