by Maja Lunde
Three gut-wrenching sobs escaped from him.
His body was in turmoil beneath my hand, straining, as if there were more inside that wanted to come out. I just kept holding on to him. But nothing more came out. The three sobs and no more.
Then he straightened up, drawing the back of his hand across his eyes without looking at me. At that exact moment a gust of wind hurled across the yard, the smoke from the fire surged towards us. And the tears flowed freely.
“Damn smoke,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Damn smoke.”
We stood still, he shook himself a little, pulling himself together. Then he produced his usual grin.
“Well, George, what can I do for you today?”
Gareth was right. The hives arrived right away. Allison approved the loan without blinking, and just two days later a gray truck pulled into my yard. A grouchy guy got out, asked me where I wanted them.
He dumped them on the field before I had time to get there myself. Didn’t say a word, just held out a clipboard with a piece of paper on it and wanted me to sign for the delivery.
There they were. Stiff. Just as steely-gray as the truck they’d arrived on. They smelled of industrial paint. A long row of them. Every single one the spitting image of the next. I felt a cold shudder of distaste, turned away.
Just hoped the bees wouldn’t notice the difference.
But of course they’d notice the difference.
They noticed everything.
TAO
The boy put the fried rice on the table in front of me. The last time there had been a few pieces of vegetables and a little egg mixed in. Today it was flavored only with artificial soy sauce. The scent burned in my nose. I almost had to lean away to keep from gagging. I’d barely eaten in the past few days, although Li Xiara had given me enough money. More than enough. But I didn’t have the stomach for anything other than dry biscuits. Every nerve in my body was burning, my mouth was dry, the skin on my hands cracking. I was dehydrated, perhaps because I barely drank any fluids at all, or perhaps from all of the tears my body had released. I’d cried myself dry now, there were no tears left. I’d cried myself empty to the sound of Li Xiara’s voice. She’d visited me every day, talked and talked, explaining and coaxing me. And slowly, as time passed, her words acquired meaning. I clung to them almost greedily. Maybe I wanted them to acquire meaning. Just to follow her lead, without having to think for myself.
“You have loved him too much,” she said.
“Is it possible to love somebody too much?”
“You were like all parents. You wanted to give your child everything.”
“Yes. I wanted to give him everything.”
“Everything is far too much.”
For fractions of time, seconds, minutes I thought I understood. But then I would encounter meaninglessness again, and what she said became just words, because all I was able to think about was Wei-Wen. Wei-Wen. My child.
Yesterday she came for the last time. We wouldn’t be talking anymore, she said. I had to go home now, put my own grief aside. Duties awaited us. She wanted me to give speeches, talk about Wei-Wen. About the bees that had come back. About our goal, about her goal with them, to cultivate them like useful plants, in controlled surroundings, make every effort to ensure that they would once again reproduce, at such a rapid pace that everything would soon be as before. Wei-Wen was to become a symbol, she said. And I was to be the grieving mother who managed to see the bigger picture, putting aside her own needs for the community. When I, who have lost everything, can, so can you. She didn’t give me any choice. Something inside me understood why. I understood that she, too, was doing what she had to, or thought she had to do. Even though I still didn’t know if I would manage it, if I could cope with what she wanted from me. Because the only thing that had meaning was him. His face. I tried to hang on to it, his face between Kuan’s and my own. He was looking up at us. More. More. One, two, three—jump. The red scarf lifted by the wind.
My departure was the next day. Wei-Wen had to stay behind. Later I might be allowed to give him a burial. But that wasn’t important. The tiny, cold body covered with a layer of frost was not him. That face wasn’t his, not the one I tried to remember all the time.
I pushed the bowl towards the boy.
“It’s for you.”
He gave me a questioning look.
“Aren’t you going to eat anything at all?”
“No. I bought it for you.”
He stood there jiggling one foot.
“Have a seat.” I heard the pleading in my voice.
He quickly pulled out the chair and drew the bowl towards him, looked at it for a moment with something like happiness, before he raised it to his mouth and started shoveling in rice.
It was good to see him eat. To see him keep himself alive. I just sat there studying him while he shoved the rice into his mouth, barely taking time to chew before the next mouthful was on its way.
When the worst of his wolfish hunger was sated, he calmed down, concentrated on guiding the chopsticks more slowly towards his lips, as if an inner etiquette teacher had suddenly reminded him of his manners.
“Thank you,” he said softly.
I smiled in response.
“Do you know anything more?” I asked after allowing him to chew for a bit.
“About what?”
“About your family. Will you stay here?”
“I don’t know.” He looked down at the tabletop. “I just know that Dad has regrets every single day. We thought we were safe here, that this was where we should be, but then everything changed. We’re just a nuisance now.”
“Can’t you leave?”
“Where to? We have no money, nowhere to go.” The feeling of impotence crept through me again. Yet another thing I couldn’t do anything about.
No. This was not insurmountable. This was something I could manage, somebody I could help.
I raised my head.
“Come with me.”
“What do you mean?” He looked at me in astonishment.
“Come back with me.”
“Are you going home?”
“Yes. Now I’m going home.”
“But we aren’t allowed—they’ll refuse. And what about work? Is there work for us there?”
“I promise that I’ll help you.”
“What about food?”
“There is even less here.”
“Yes.” He put down his chopsticks. The bowl of rice was empty. Only a single grain of rice remained on the bottom. He noticed it, picked up the chopsticks to get hold of it, but quickly put them down again when he saw that I was observing him.
“You have to,” I said softly. “If you stay here, you’ll die.”
“Maybe that’s just as well.”
There was something savage in his voice and he avoided my gaze.
“What do you mean?” I forced the words out, I couldn’t take this. Not in him, someone so young.
“It doesn’t make any difference what happens to us,” he said with his head bowed. “To Dad and me. Where we live. Here. Together. Or alone. It’s not important.” His voice became hoarse suddenly. He cleared his throat, removing the huskiness. “Nothing matters anymore. Don’t you see that?”
I couldn’t muster a reply. His words were distortions of Li Xiara’s. Each and every one of us is not important. But she was talking about community; he was talking about loneliness.
I stood up abruptly. I had to make him stop talking. The fragile hope I was clinging to was on the verge of being crushed. I looked in all directions except at him as I walked towards the door.
“You have to pack,” I said in a low voice. “We leave tomorrow.”
Back at my room, I quickly pulled out the bag. It didn’t take long to gather up the few things I had with me. The clothes, some toiletries, an extra pair of shoes. I searched the entire room, wanting to be sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. And then I discovered them. The books. They’d
been there all along, but I hadn’t seen them, they’d become a part of the room. They lay in a pile on the nightstand, I hadn’t touched them since the guard came to get me, hadn’t taken them out to read them, not once, knowing that the words would probably have as little meaning as everything else.
I had to return them, perhaps I could still make it to the library. But I just stood there holding them. I could feel the smooth protective plastic on the book cover at the bottom of the pile sticking to my hands.
I put them down on the bed and picked this one up. It was The History of Bees. I’d never had the chance to finish reading it. But I opened it now.
GEORGE
Emma was crying again. She stood with her back to me, peeling potatoes and crying. She let her tears flow freely, made no attempt to stop them, regularly releasing small sobs. The tears came often these days. She cried as if she were at a funeral, anywhere and at any time, over washtubs, while making dinner or brushing her teeth. Every time it happened, I just wanted to get away. I couldn’t handle it, tried to find excuses to leave.
Luckily I wasn’t inside very often. I worked from morning till night. I had hired Rick and Jimmy full-time. The money, the loan, poured out of the account. Eventually I couldn’t be bothered to check. Couldn’t bear to see the ever-diminishing bank balance. It was a matter of working now. Just working. Without work, no income. I could still save some of the harvest. Make enough money to service the loan.
The pounds melted off my body, ounce after ounce. Day after day. And night after night, because I was sleeping poorly. Emma looked after me, served me, decorating my food with cucumber slices and strips of carrots, but it didn’t help. There was no taste to it; it hit my palate like sawdust. I ate only because I had to, to get the strength to go out again. I knew Emma would have liked to prepare steak every day, but she, too, was trying to save money. We didn’t talk about it, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only one observing the shrinking bank balance.
In fact we didn’t say anything about anything these days. I didn’t know what had happened to us. I missed my wife. She was there, but at the same time, she wasn’t. Or maybe it was actually me who wasn’t there.
She sniffled. I wanted to hold her, the way I always had. But my body resisted. All of her tears collected in this huge pond that separated us.
I backed out of the kitchen, hoped she wouldn’t notice.
But she turned around. “You do see that I’m crying.”
I didn’t answer.
“Come here, won’t you?” she said quietly.
It was the first time she’d asked me. I remained standing where I was all the same.
She waited, still holding the potato peeler in the one hand, a potato in the other. I waited, too. Hoping, I guess, that I could wait the whole thing out. But not this time.
She whimpered softly. “You don’t care.”
“Of course I care,” I said, but couldn’t bear to meet her gaze.
She raised her arms a little more.
“Crying doesn’t help,” I said.
“It doesn’t help that we don’t comfort each other, either.”
She twisted my words around, as she often did.
“We won’t get more hives by my standing here and comforting you,” I said. “No more queens, no more bees. No more honey.”
Her arms dropped. She turned around. “Go and work, then.”
But I just stood there.
“Go and work!” she repeated.
I took a step towards her. And another. I could put a hand on her shoulder. I could. That would definitely help. Help both of us.
I reached out my hand, towards her back. She didn’t see it, was busy peeling, took another potato out of the dirty water in the sink. Scraped off the peel with quick movements, as she had done hundreds of times before.
My hand was suspended in midair, but didn’t reach her.
At that moment the phone rang.
My arm fell. I turned around, went out into the hallway and answered it.
The voice was young, almost girlish, and was asking for me.
“I got your name from Lee,” she said. “We went to school together.”
“Right.” In other words, she couldn’t be as young as she sounded.
She talked quickly, was good with words. She worked for a television channel, they were making a movie, she explained.
“It’s about CCD.”
“Yes?”
“Colony Collapse Disorder.” She pronounced the words slowly and with exaggerated clarity.
“I know what CCD is.”
“We’re making a documentary about the dying bees and the ramifications. I understand you’ve faced this issue on your farm.”
“Did Lee tell you?”
“We’d like to make it personal,” she said.
“Personal. Right,” I said.
“Could we spend a day with you? Would you let us go out with you, so we could hear about your experience of the whole thing?”
“My experience. That can’t be very interesting.”
“Oh yes, to us it is. That’s precisely what we want to show. How this has an impact on each and every one of us. How it can destroy people’s livelihoods. Is that how you’ve experienced it? Has it been rough on you?”
“Well, it hasn’t exactly destroyed my livelihood,” I said. Suddenly I didn’t like her tone. Like she was talking to an injured dog.
“No? Because my understanding was that you’ve lost almost all of your bees?”
“Yes. But now I’ve replaced many of them.”
“Oh.”
She fell silent.
“Worker bees only live for a few weeks in the summer,” I said. “It doesn’t take very long to get new hives up and running.”
“Right. So is that what you’re working on now, getting new hives up and running?”
“That’s right.”
“Great!” she said.
“Really?”
“We can use that. Terrific! Would it be convenient if we came next week?”
I hung up after we arranged a time. The receiver was all sweaty. I was going to be on TV. I’d become someone they “could use.” It was apparently not possible to get out of it. I tried, but she’d talked me into it. Was worse than Emma.
National television. The whole country would be able to see it. Geez Louise.
Emma had come into the room. She was drying her hands on a towel. Her eyes were red, but fortunately also dry.
“Who was that?”
I explained to her who had called.
“Interview us about the bees? Why do we have to?”
“Not we. They’re just going to talk to me.”
“But why did you say yes?”
“It can help influence things. Maybe the authorities will do something,” I said and caught myself copying the words of the woman who had called.
“But why us?”
“Me,” I said severely and turned away from her. Couldn’t take any more questions, any more crying, any more nagging. All of a sudden it came over me again. The fatigue. I hadn’t felt it through all of these weeks. Not since Tom was home last winter. But now it was back. I could have lain down and slept there and then, on the floor in the hallway. The worn wood floor looked tempting. I thought of the teddy bear thermometer, the peeping sound it made. I wished it would show a high temperature, a powerful fever. Then I could lie in bed. Soft pillow, warm quilt, like a lid covering me up. Take the temperature of a fever that never went down.
But I couldn’t go to bed. Couldn’t even sit down.
Because the hives were out there. Empty and gray. Way too light. They had to be filled. And there was nobody else who could do it. And now I was apparently going to be on television. I had to demonstrate that I was hard at work. That I hadn’t allowed CCD to break me.
My coveralls hung limply from their hook. The veil and the hat were directly above them. Underneath were my boots. It looked like a flat man had hidden inside the wall. I took
down the suit and started to change. I pulled up the zipper, made sure everything was closed up, battened down the hatches.
“It’s almost dinnertime,” Emma said. She stood there with her empty hands, her empty arms.
“I can eat later.”
“But it’s meat loaf. I’ve made meat loaf.”
“We have a microwave.”
Her bottom lip trembled, but she didn’t say anything. Just stood there like that, completely silent, while I put on my hat, hung the veil in front of my face and went outside.
I went to the pasture by the Alabast River and stayed there the rest of the day. First I worked. The weather was annoyingly good. It shouldn’t be this good. It didn’t fit. The sun hung large in the sky to the west, above the blossoming field. As beautiful as a picture in a calendar.
But the work became cumbersome. My arms felt almost paralyzed, the fatigue took hold of me. I was unable to do anything but walk. In circles around the new hives. Empty. Gray, a giant mountain.
I stayed there until the bees began to come in. Nature fell silent.
It was only then that I walked across the field. To the other end. My legs just took me there. Towards the old, carnival-colored hives, the ones that still had life in them.
Why had these been spared? Who had decided that these particular bees should be allowed to live? I was breathing heavily and stopped beside a yellow hive. Every single time I was going to check a hive, I sort of cringed inside. Every time I expected to find the same thing. Could already picture the lethargic bees whirring around at the bottom of the hive, the emptiness, the queen alone with a small handful of young bees.
And there was something wrong with this one, too. It was way too quiet. There was something wrong, for sure. I checked the flight board. Just a few bees. Not enough.
I couldn’t bear it.
I had to.
With my eyes closed I grasped the lid. Then I opened the hive. It rushed up at me immediately, the buzzing sound, the whirring. How could I not have heard it? That everything was normal. Completely normal, 100 percent as it should be. The bees buzzing around down there. Some were dancing. I caught a glimpse of the queen, the turquoise mark on her back. I saw the brood. Clear, golden honey. They were working, they were alive. And they were here.