The Sound of Language

by Amulya Malladi

  Raihana stared at Layla for a second, unable to understand what she was asking, and then sighed in exasperation. “I told you, his wife died recently and he's still mourning.”

  “Just because someone's wife died doesn't mean they don't try to you know …,” Layla said. “Be careful. If he tries anything, anything inappropriate, you should leave. Promise me, Raihana.”

  Raihana couldn't imagine that sad man would ever do anything improper with her. He barely noticed her, but she knew better than most that people changed and that without reason, those you trust could become enemies.

  “I promise,” she said.

  · · ·

  Gunnar would not have mentioned anything about the Afghan girl if it weren't for Maria's nagging. Why didn't she nag her husband instead?

  She called almost every day and finally, to end her incessant talk about how Gunnar should come live with them in Odense for a while, especially since he was not taking care of bees this season, he told her that he had hired someone to help him.

  “Hired? From where? Who?” Maria asked.

  Reluctant to say much about Raihana, he told her that Christina had recommended someone. He ignored Maria's further questions about the gender, age, and identity of the someone he had hired.

  He felt guilty about having that Afghan girl in his house. She just sat there and wired and wired and cleaned and he did not talk to her at all. She was here to learn Danish and he said about three words to her every day. But then, he reminded himself, that was not his job. He was not a Danish teacher and he hadn't wanted her to come in the first place.

  She came at eight in the morning sharp, wearing some frilly shirt over pants. She didn't wear any headgear like the other Muslim women he saw on the streets and neither did she wear an abaya to cover the rest of her body. She wore sensible shoes, not like the skimpy, high-heeled ones Maria wore. And she brought a cheap-looking black backpack.

  She ate lunch in the kitchen, alone, because the first time she had asked if it was time for lunch, looking hopeful, Gunnar had said she could eat and went inside his bedroom. When he came out there was no trace of her or her food except for the faint smell of exotic spices and garlic. She had also started to pick up after him in the living room, which was now devoid of stained cups of coffee, dirty plates, and crumpled and soiled paper towels.

  In the kitchen, the dishes that had been lying in the sink for days, well, since Peter had last come and cleaned up, had also been taken care of. She had stacked everything neatly in the dishwasher and had even started it.

  He was pleased because it wasn't easy to live in a mess when you had lived most of your life with the ultra-neat Anna. But he was too lazy to clean. And this was quite a perk for having that Afghan girl here, he thought. Maybe she could clean the bedroom and bathroom as well, he would be happy to pay her.

  It wasn't because he was grateful to her for keeping the kitchen, living room, and now dining room clean that he decided to spend some time teaching her how to lay foundation wax on the frames. He did it because he was bored and drinking another cup of coffee could, he feared, erode the last of his stomach lining. He knew he had to do something, so that morning, when Raihana knocked, he told her they'd melt wax today.

  Having the Afghan girl around had certainly changed a few things for Gunnar. She always seemed happy. Content. Far removed from Gunnar's mourning.

  Gunnar wondered if Christina had told him the truth about this girl losing her husband in Afghanistan. She didn't look like someone who had lost a spouse. She was just a girl, about twenty-two, twenty-three? How long could they have been married? Two or three years? Not like him and Anna. Maybe when you were married a short time the impact of a loss was not as great. She grinned at his suggestion that they work together on the frames, decidedly one of the most boring parts of beekeeping.

  Gunnar started the motor of the electrodes and placed them on the wires that ran through the wooden frames. Raihana laid a sheet of foundation wax, which smelled sharply of honey. It was made of the wax from the hives when they were full of honey. These were commercially bought sheets, Gunnar told her, showing her the label on top of the plastic bag that held the sheets.

  Raihana had held a sheet of foundation wax and smelled it eagerly. The sheet was segmented evenly into cells. It had amazed her to read in that black notebook that the bees built their cells exactly on top of the cells on the foundation sheet.

  “Is it going to be melting full?” Raihana asked in distress as the electrodes heated the wires that melted the foundation wax so that it stuck to the wires and became part of the frame. She worried the wax would melt away from the wires and onto the table.

  “It doesn't melt that much,” Gunnar said, a little irritated. Couldn't she wait to see what happened instead of jumping in? She was just like Anna, interrupting instead of waiting and seeing what happened.

  “How do bees know where cells are to building their honey on top?” she asked.

  “They just know,” Gunnar said.

  The Afghan girl looked at him, confused. He simply said, “They are born knowing.”

  It wasn't as hard as he had thought it would be. She was not stupid, though he'd had the feeling that she would be. He had thought she would not understand anything he said. She never got a whole sentence right, but she managed to communicate. Christina had said she had come to Denmark a few months before and had started going to the Sprogcentre just three to four months ago. So Gunnar was surprised at how much Danish she spoke and understood. He had always heard that Danish was a very difficult language to learn —everyone said so—and he assumed a foreigner would have a hard time learning it.

  Once Julie had dated a Scottish man and he had given up learning Danish after a year because it had been so difficult. They had been living in London then and he had tried to learn Danish by taking classes there. Maybe it was easier for this girl because she was in Denmark. Maybe it was easier because she had no choice.

  Gunnar got used to the Afghan girl and he looked forward to the days she came into his house and took some of the loneliness away. He hadn't realized how empty the house had been and now with her forcing her way in three times a week, a part of him wanted to wake up in the morning, drink coffee, have breakfast, even take care of his bees.

  As he cooked a rather luxurious breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, and toast for himself, he marveled at how young she looked —almost painfully young. There was a suppleness to her face, her eyes, and the way she carried herself. Beyond youth it spoke of innocence but he wondered how innocent she could be if she had witnessed any of the atrocities they said the Taliban had committed. He had watched enough TV to know what was happening in Afghanistan, how the United States Army was there, taking revenge for the attacks on their country.

  Just the day before, he had seen a documentary on TV2 in which a British Muslim woman, a journalist, had taken a hidden camera into Afghanistan. He saw a woman being executed in a packed football stadium. For a moment he wondered what was happening and when they shot the woman he had stood up and stared at the television screen. This couldn't be, he thought, you can't just execute someone in public. The Afghan women in the documentary had no faces, no bodies, no feminine shapes, no visible identities as they hid behind black garments.

  Had this Afghan girl also worn that black dress? Had she been scared that she might be executed in a football stadium?

  A Danish journalist who had been to Afghanistan had been interviewed after the documentary was shown and he had, to Gunnar's shock, said that executions were big entertainment in Kabul when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan.

  Gunnar would never have paid this much attention to someplace so far away except that someone from that place was now in his life.

  He sat down and finished the breakfast he'd cooked for himself. Gunnar turned the radio up to keep him company and listened to Danish pop songs and English ones. Almost everyone was calling everyone “baby” these days, he thought as he enjoyed the succulent breakfast
sausages he had taken from the freezer. Maria had made sure over Christmas that the freezer was as well stocked as it had been when Anna was alive.

  Gunnar poured himself another cup of coffee after finishing his breakfast and felt content. The breakfast was flawless, he decided, just like it was when Anna cooked it.

  · · ·

  “Will we saw bees today?” Raihana asked him.

  He had come with her to the garage—because the idea of sitting inside his house after that fabulous breakfast seemed untenable.

  The weather had been quite good this year, which meant that he should have checked on his colonies in February to see if they needed food after the long winter. He was sure some of his colonies had starved to death and those that had survived would have picked up enough pollen and nectar from the first flowers in bloom—the small white snowdrops, vintergoekker, and the bright yellow erantis— that they would be getting ready to swarm. Anna had supersonic ears and she could hear the bees as they got ready to leave the colony and find a new home. Anna was their swarm radar and she and Gunnar had always managed to avoid swarming by adding more boxes in time.

  But this year he had been sitting on his ass doing nothing. It was the end of April. If swarming had begun he hadn't heard it, though he hadn't been out enough to hear any bee activity. Before the bees swarmed, scout bees would start looking for a place for the colony to move. And if he had been watching his colonies he would have seen the bees starting to make a new queen so the colony could split in two.

  A pang went through him: what Anna would think of him ignoring the bees? She would be disappointed.

  “See a honeybees todays?” Raihana asked again because he hadn't really answered, just nodding vaguely while he looked around the garage. Gunnar realized she was trying to get through to him, trying her best to get something out of this praktik.

  “Yes,” Gunnar found himself saying. Christina had told him to correct the Afghan girl's Danish when she said something wrong but he felt self-conscious speaking to her. Let Christina deal with correcting mistakes, he would just… do what? What was he doing with this girl in his house?

  “We shall go see the bees,” he said to her finally and opened the old wooden wardrobe in the garage.

  It had been his mother's and when she died he had inherited it along with other furniture. Maria had wanted some pieces, like the big wooden chest and Arne Jacobsen chairs, and the old rocking chair that had been his father's had gone to Julie. Anna had complained about the cost of shipping it all the way to London but Julie was determined to have the old chair.

  So Gunnar had sanded it and put on a new coat of paint, while Anna had sewn new pillows. She had chosen dark colors so that when something spilled on the cushions they wouldn't stain, even though she knew that Julie would have preferred something light, maybe pale yellow. If there was one thing Gunnar didn't like about Anna, it was how she easily disregarded what others wanted if she felt what she was doing was better.

  “But this is better for you,” Anna would say calmly when Gunnar protested, and he would quietly agree.

  The Afghan girl looked curiously at the white protective suit.

  “Put it on, otherwise bees will sting,” Gunnar said.

  Her eyes wide, she put the suit on. It was a bulky white shirt paired with bulky white pants. The suit had belonged to Anna and Gunnar hadn't wanted to give it to the Afghan girl but he knew it was silly to be so sentimental about the suit. Anna wouldn't have minded.

  Gunnar handed Raihana a hood and veil and blue gloves, which she also put on. She looked a little silly, but everyone did when they put on the protective suits.

  He picked up a bottom board and started piling things on it: extra frames they had just wired, an empty box to add to the colony if it was getting ready to swarm, and packets of white sugar candy for the colonies that needed extra food. Then he got out his tool belt and checked for his knife in the enclosed leather pocket. It was all coming back to him, and the difference between how much he used to love all of this and how cumbersome it felt now didn't escape him.

  “Let's go,” he said.

  She waited as he stuck one of the smokers into his tool belt. “No suit for you?”

  “No,” Gunnar said.

  “Will not the bees be biting you?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “They know me.”

  Did all the bees know him? Raihana wondered. How could they? What about the bees that were born while he was sitting in his dirty house drinking coffee and doing God knows what?

  She had not mentioned to Kabir or Layla about the bottles of whiskey she saw in the trash. She had also not told them that she went inside the house and cleaned it. She knew that if she did Kabir would ask her to stop her praktik. Kabir had spoken with Christina and explained to her that he was not happy about Raihana being alone with a man all day in his house.

  Christina assured him there was no cause for concern, which didn't do anything to quell Kabir's fear. He carried the prejudice most people from Afghanistan and the East did that white men were immoral and without honor. He had read somewhere that two out of three marriages in Denmark ended in divorce and usually adultery was involved. He had shaken his head at that statistic. White men and women had no sense of family, no sense of honor, and they dared look at him like he was scum?

  Raihana had tried to convince Kabir that the Danish man was harmless, which he was. It was even harder to convince the other Afghans, who were not as open as Kabir and Layla.

  “Good Afghan women do not go cavorting about with white men,” Wahida said when she sat with her in class.

  “I am not cavorting with him. I work for him and take care of his bees,” Raihana had said.

  “Take care of his bees,” Wahida repeated sarcastically. “You know, you should wear a hi jab, an abaya, and be a good Muslim woman. My husband organizes prayer every evening, you should come and join us.”

  Raihana looked away from Wahida. Kabir had told her about Wahida's husband, Hamud, who worked with other imams and radical Muslims in Denmark to convert other Muslims into conservatism.

  “I went for evening prayer at Hamud's house once, thought it was a social thing … and then Hamud starts to tell me I should stop smoking and talks about jihad. I didn't go back,” Kabir said.

  Kabir thought Hamud gave refugees a bad name. He had gone to language school as all refugees had to by law, but he had not learned Danish. He had not bothered to find a job and lived off welfare. Hamud only did what he had to in Denmark to not get deported.

  “His brother is the same,” Kabir said to Raihana. “This is a family that dishonors Afghans. They live off charity and never intend to work.”

  Wahida was the same. The slowest to learn Danish in the class, she seemed to not care whether she learned the language or not, despite Christina's best efforts. There were other refugees like Wahida. Kabir told her about a man he knew in Viborg who had brought his entire family to Denmark from Iran and none of them worked. They all lived off welfare. Kabir was baffled that it didn't hurt their pride to not earn a living.

  But for people like Wahida, pride was connected to how religious they believed they were.

  “Raihana, this will end badly,” Wahida warned her.

  “Then that is my problem,” Raihana said, not looking at Wahida, staring at her notebook.

  “How you behave reflects on the entire Afghan community,” Wahida said. “All of us are affected by this. Would you behave like this in Kabul?”

  “Wahida, why did you leave Afghanistan? Why did you leave the perfect world that the Taliban was building there for people like you?” Raihana asked pointedly, turning to face Wahida.

  “My husband's brother was here and he brought us here,” she said defensively. “We were happy in Afghanistan … we just wanted to live someplace else.”

  “Wahida, we are Afghans, the only reason we leave our home is to survive. And — ”

  Christina clapped her hands and interrupted. “Raihana, Wa
hida, vi taler Dansk. Hvad snakker om i?”

  Christina always interrupted conversations in languages other than Danish by saying “We speak Danish in class” and then asking the errant students to tell the class what they had been talking about.

  “Nothing,” Raihana said, picking up her books, and moved away from Wahida. She didn't sit with Wahida again.

  SIX

  ENTRY FROM ANNA'S DIARY

  A Year of Keeping Bees

  17 MAY 1980

  Last year Gunnar got stung all over the face by bees and since then we have a bee suit rule. But now Gunnar is ignoring the rule. He feels more confident than I without the suit. “But they know me,” he says when I scold him, and they do. Our bees know us.

  This morning we found more brood, more pollen, more nectar, and more bees. The queen has worked hard in the past month; our colonies have become thicker, richer, and stronger.

  Sometimes I sit and watch the bees on the frames and every time there is precision. The cells are always one shape and the same size. I am amazed at their precision. So many bees working together in beautiful harmony makes me a little melancholy. Do they all want to be doing what they are doing? Are there bees that don't want to work so hard? I wonder about the personalities of the bees and I wonder if there is a rebel bee, one that wants to run away and find a new life.

  After so many years of nothing to look forward to, the excitement Raihana felt about the bees was new, and fresh, and scary.

  Even Layla had remarked that Raihana seemed happier. “What's going on?” she asked.

  They were shopping in Kvickly while Kabir was with Shahrukh at home. It was a beautiful day and neither of them complained about having to bicycle to the supermarket and then ride back with all the groceries.

  “Nothing,” Raihana said.

  “Something is,” Layla said, picking up two cartons of Aria letmoelk, skim milk.

  “We need cream too,” Raihana said and Layla grabbed a half-liter carton of thick cream, which they ate with sugar and strawberries in the warm evenings.