Love and Obstacles

by Aleksandar Hemon

  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.

  FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS

  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.

  A DIFFERENT STORY

  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.

  THE MESSAGE

  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:

  Shortly before his death, Father summoned me and my brothers for a meeting on the family beekeeping tradition. His message

  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.

  THE WELL

  My father found a job in a Hamilton steel mill, filling wagons with scrap metal. The mill was hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and when he worked night shifts, he would sometimes fall asleep waiting for a green light at the wheel of a used, decrepit Lincoln Town Car. He’d say that his Lincoln brought him home while he was sleeping, like a faithful horse. He hated the job, but had no choice
.

  One day, surveying the ads in the papers, pursuing a perfect garage sale, he found an ad selling honey. He called the number and told the man outright that he had no money to buy the honey, but that he would love to see his bees. Because there is such a thing as beekeepers’ solidarity, the man invited him over. He was a Hungarian, a retired carpenter. He let my father help him with the bees, gave him old copies of Canadian Beekeeping, which my father tried to read with insufficient help from my mother’s dictionary. After a while, the Hungarian gave him a swarm and an old hive to start his own apiary. He admonished my father for refusing to wear beekeeping overalls and hat, even gloves, but my father contended that stings were good for all kinds of pain. I still can’t figure out what language they might have been speaking to each other, but it almost certainly wasn’t English.

  My father has twenty-three beehives now and collects a few hundred pounds of honey a year, which he cannot sell. “Canadians don’t appreciate honey,” he says. “They don’t understand it.” He wants me to help him expand into the American market, but I assure him that Americans understand honey even less than Canadians do.

  He has recently decided to write another true book. He already has the title: The Well. There was a well near their home when he was a boy. Everybody went there to get water. The Well would be a story about people from the village and their cattle, their intersecting destinies. Sometimes there were “interesting incidents.” Once, he remembers, somebody’s mule escaped and came to the well, sensing water. But its head was tied to its leg—that’s how people forced the mules to graze. The mule got away, found water, but then was unable to drink. It lingered around the well, furiously banging its head against the trough, dying of thirst, the water inches away. And it brayed, in horrible pain. It brayed all day, my father says. All day and all of the night.

  American Commando

  When I was in grammar school, I most loved the weeks when I was the redar, the one in charge of cleaning the chalkboard. My job was to keep the sponge wet and to wipe the chalkboard when the teacher demanded it. I took pleasure in erasing everything, in the smell of moistened chalk and the dryness of my hands afterward, and I loved leaving the classroom to wash the sponge in the bathroom. The hallway would be silent and empty, redolent of clean children and floor wax. I relished the squeaking of my shoes, the echoes in the void; I walked to the bathroom slowly, adjusting my steps to produce a screechy rhythm. There was something exhilarating about being free and alone in that vacant space while the rest of the kids were interned in the classrooms, to be released only at the break. I would wash the sponge without urgency, then walk back extending every step to delay my return to class. Now and then, I would stop by the door of a classroom and eavesdrop on what was going on inside. I would hear the murmur of the compliant children and the steady, solemn voice of the teacher. What gladdened me was that nobody knew I was out there unbound, listening. They could not see me, but I could hear everything; they were inside, and I was outside.

  “Why was that so exciting?” Alma asked, and looked at the little digital camera screen, as though to check whether I was still there.

  “I don’t know. I felt free,” I said. “There, but not there.”

  She’d said she was a great admirer of my work and, as a fellow Bosnian, she’d felt that in my books I was speaking directly to her. She’d spoken directly to me via my website and at first I ignored her message, but then she sent me another one threatening with her disappointment. Ever reluctant to disappoint people, I responded. Her name was Alma B.; she was a film student at NYU and a Bosnian, therefore interested in questions of “identity”; she wanted to make films about “the Bosnian experience.” Which brought her to the real reason for contacting me: for her final project, she wanted to make a film about me, to tell the story of my life and displacement, the loss and the transformation, my complicated identifications.

  All of my identities are at your disposal, I cleverly wrote back.

  We went on corresponding, and she asked me many thorny questions. It usually took me days to answer them, in long, repetitive e-mails, rambling about anything that came to my mind: my family history and the war crimes of the Bush regime; my thoughts on rock ’n’ roll and quantum physics; my theory of soccer and poetry; the epistemology of Conrad and Rimbaud and myself. I told her the stories of my life, embellishing here, flatly making things up there, for I frankly wanted to help her write a good script and get the funding for her project. I even meekly nudged her toward a short film in which I could play myself in various situations from my life—one of those brainy postmodern setups everybody likes so well because it has something to do with identity—but she gently rejected the idea. I flirted with her too, for, as everybody knows, the job of the writer is to seduce his readers. For some reason I kept all of our exchanges.

  When her project proposal was finally approved, I suggested that she fly to Chicago to meet me, but she thought she ought to start from the beginning, find out more about me and talk to my parents first. So she drove up to Hamilton, Ontario, on a weekend. My parents took her to be a friend of mine and therefore another one of their children; on arrival she had to promise that she would stay overnight. Mother dug deep into her repertoire of cakes and pies, for she knew you could not fool a real Bosnian with bad Canadian food; Father summoned our kin, including a cousin with an accordion, to sing a selection of songs and drink to her health and the health of her family, then to her health again. And she videotaped the whole thing: their drunken singing, my father telling her about the film he had once directed, my mother telling her about my troubled adolescence—it must have been a catastrophe, I thought when I heard about it. It was not hard to imagine my intoxicated family seriously undermining the image of the noble, worldly misfit who found his salvation in writing, the image I had so carefully and publicly established. They told Alma everything, things I was amazed they could recall at all: they told her about the time I had been caught stealing hubcaps; about our young, pretty neighbor taking me by the ear to my parents so I could admit I had leapt at her from the darkness and grabbed one of her rather large breasts; about my suffering from a crew of bullies, whose meanness eventually compelled one of my classmates (Predrag was his name, I believe) to blow his brains out. And to me it wasn’t even about the damage to my image, it was that if those stories should have ever been told, I was the only one who was supposed to do that—I was the only professional storyteller in the family.

  I tried to find out from my parents how Alma had reacted to their divulgations—for I did not want to disappoint her before I even met her—but they assured me there was nothing to worry about. Even when telling potentially compromising stories they rendered me lovingly and likably; my parents were (and still are) conventional and reasonable, always willing to dismiss any kind of alarmingly refractory behavior as “a phase.” And they did also convey their warm memories of our quaint summer vacations by the sea, and how they had let me swim in the deep waters, confident that I would come back to the shallows the moment I heard their whistle. (I remember the damn whistle: black, smelling of spit, with a baffling chickpea inside.) Alma later showed me the footage of them tearing up while recollecting our winter vacations, our mountain cabin, to which I went alone in the summer, they told her, to devour fat books and write stories and poems.

  My parents liked Alma quite a bit. She was a true Bosnian girl, they thought: respectful of the elderly, kindhearted and polite, still unspoiled by America. “She can talk to anybody and everybody,” my mother said. “She doesn’t think she’s special.” They practically offered to adopt her; indeed, ever worried about my procreation, they suggested not so abashedly that we could be a good match. When I called them after Alma’s visit, they both got on the phone to laud her.

  “She came to America alone. She had an aunt in New York,” my mother said. “She was only thirteen when she arrived. She is very smart.”

  “Where you throw her, there she lands,” my father said. “But
she didn’t have an aunt in New York, she had an older brother. And she was sixteen when she arrived.”

  “No, no, she said her brother was killed by a sniper in Sarajevo. And her father had a heart attack in the war, and her mother died of cancer right after the war,” my mother said, and sighed. “Your father never pays any attention.”