The Sound of Language

by Amulya Malladi

  Layla looked at Raihana suspiciously. Raihana was thrilled about her praktik but she couldn't share it with Layla, who might misunderstand. Every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Raihana felt she was on an adventure when she went to the Danish man's house —she never knew what new thing she would learn about the bees.

  There were twenty-six boxes in the Danish man's backyard, neatly arranged in rows of three. Raihana assumed that the Danish man's dead wife had been responsible for this because he did not seem the neat kind.

  According to the black diary Raihana had found in the garage, as the colonies grew, they would place more boxes on top of the existing ones to give the colonies more room to grow. More boxes meant more honey and she couldn't wait to look into the boxes and see what was happening.

  · · ·

  The Danish man seemed confused when they reached the bees, as if unsure of what to do. He pulled out a lighter from his tool belt and lit the fuel in the smoker and shut it, shaking the smoker to kill the flames so that only smoke poured out. Raihana had looked inside the smokers in the garage and had found small pieces of sackcloth inside. She noticed that the smoke coming out of the smoker was cold.

  “Always use a smoker,” he told Raihana as he pumped the handle. “Smoke makes the bees think there is a fire, so they eat as much honey as they can and then they don't sting.”

  “Because the bee stomach is full with honey?” Raihana asked.

  “Yes, they don't sting when their stomachs are full,” said Gunnar.

  He put everything he had brought from the garage on an old wooden table that stood for this purpose in the backyard. The table was worn, the wood weathered from harsh winters and steady Danish rain.

  He had brought a wooden base with a mesh-like frame and put that on the ground. He picked up the first brown box full of bees and set it on the wooden base.

  “Never put the box with the bees on the ground,” he said but didn't explain why. Below the box was another board, a wooden base, in which lay several dead bees.

  Bees were everywhere, Raihana noticed. They were crawling out of holes in the boxes and going back in. The sound of the bees was almost overwhelming, like being in the middle of a busy supermarket where everyone was speaking Danish in loud whispers.

  The man bent down and looked at the dead bees and sighed.

  “Many have died,” he said. “I am too late in feeding them. I should've given them sugar.”

  Raihana was not sure if he was talking to her. She didn't understand why they had died but she could see he blamed himself.

  He upended the base and let the dead bees fall on the ground. Then he turned to the first box, which was clamped shut with a metallic bolt, and lifted open the lid. Immediately he pumped the smoker onto the mesh top and Raihana stepped back. There were a billion bees in there and they were all buzzing angrily.

  It had been a sport while Raihana was growing up to throw a stone at wild beehives on tall trees. The hives would be in a semicircle, totally covered with bees, and Raihana used to feel an impulse to run all the bees off. The way they were packed next to one another always made her want to separate them.

  Every time a stone hit the hive, the bees would rush in furious swirls and Raihana and her friends would run as fast as they could to get inside a house before the bees could catch up to them.

  The Danish man was moving the bees around with his bare hands and looking into their hive. Raihana felt secure in her white protective suit, but the Danish man wore nothing and seemed quite comfortable, not afraid of getting stung.

  He pulled a frame from the box, just like the ones she had been wiring. The cells in the frame were dark, seemed full, and were raised from the base. The bees had built their cells right on top of the foundation.

  He ran his finger gently over the cells and looked the frame up and down. He picked up one frame and then another.

  “Not enough bees in this colony now,” he said.

  He opened the second box and that one didn't have many bees either. He took the frames with the bees from the second box and added them to the first.

  “They will grow together and become a better colony,” he said. Raihana didn't understand so she didn't respond, and he didn't try to make it clear.

  Then he picked out a frame and showed her a bee. It didn't look different from the other bees except that it had a small yellow mark on its back. “That is a queen bee.”

  Raihana nodded. She knew about queen bees.

  “She lays eggs and makes more bees,” he said, putting the frame back.

  He pulled out another frame and showed her yet another bee, this one with a blue mark on its back. “This is also a queen bee but she is younger than the other one,” he said. “The yellow one was made in 1997 and the blue one in 2000.”

  He had to repeat himself twice before she understood him.

  “How bee know to be yellow in 1997 and blue in 2000?” Raihana asked. Gunnar seemed amused.

  “I paint the bee,” he said. “The bee doesn't change color.”

  “You paint bee? Why?” she asked, bewildered.

  He explained something about coloring bees every year, or was it coloring queen bees every year in a different color?

  “There can only be one queen in a colony,” he said. “If there are two, they will fight and only one will live.”

  “How do you know what is queen bee?” she asked.

  He tried again, slowly, but she didn't understand him completely. She had figured out that they looked different but she couldn't really see the difference and the buzzing, added to him speaking in Danish, was driving her crazy.

  “You understand?” he asked after he finished speaking.

  Raihana wanted to nod as she did when Christina talked too fast for Raihana to comprehend her, but she didn't want to lie to Gunnar.

  “Jeg kan ikke forstår,” she said honestly.

  Gunnar said that it was okay that she couldn't understand, because she would soon. “Du vii snan.”

  Raihana smiled at his confidence in her. She didn't believe she would ever learn Danish, not like Kabir had. It was one of the hardest things about being in this country, not being able to speak the language, to understand what people said. She couldn't get a real job until she spoke Danish. It grated on her that she got money from the Danish government. She was helpless here with no language, no education, no husband, nothing. That was why this praktik had come to mean so much to her. Even if she and the Danish man weren't talking, she was learning Danish from the little black book. She labored with the book in the evenings and wrote the sentences she didn't comprehend in her notebook. The next day she'd ask Christina for help. She hoped Aamir would be proud of her, proud that she was working this hard at learning a new language.

  Aamir had insisted on her learning English for the day they would get out of Afghanistan and build a new life. That was why she had taken English classes at the refugee camp. Aamir couldn't have guessed that she would end up in a country where they spoke yet another language, a language that she thought was even harder than English.

  He had been such an idealist, just like his sister and brother-in-law. Raihana was still surprised that Aamir had agreed to marry her, his poor and uneducated relative. But Aamir had confessed that he had fallen love with her at first sight. One look and he knew she would be his wife.

  Everyone told her that she was lucky to get a young, handsome, and educated husband. And she had been fortunate to have a husband who loved her so much and so well.

  Gunnar carefully arranged the new colony he made from his two failed ones in the brown box. He shifted them to make sure there was enough room between the frames and checked to make sure these two colonies could thrive as one.

  They had lost colonies before. It happened. One winter three of Anna's colonies had been attacked by mice. By the time they had found out in early spring, the mice had been stung to death but not before they had eaten a good part of the honey and the brood.

  They had al
so lost a few colonies, mostly Gunnar's, to swarming when they went on vacation to Italy. It had been Lars's fault because he hadn't checked on the bees as often as he'd promised. By the time they got back, the colony had grown so much that there just wasn't enough room. Half the bees had gone off to find a new home. Anna and Gunnar never went on vacation outside Denmark after that.

  He opened another colony and was relieved to see it thriving. There were larvae in several of the frames. This colony would need more room, he knew, as he pulled out another frame filled with larvae. Larvae became pupae, which became adult bees. Large number of larvae meant a thriving colony and more honey at the end of the season.

  “Larvae,” he said to Raihana and showed her the wriggly worms lying inside translucent shells. “Baby bees,” he added when she seemed unsure.

  Her eyes lit up when she saw the larvae. When one broke free from its shell and started to crawl out, she gasped.

  Gunnar couldn't help but smile. It had been a long time since he had taken pleasure in the simple aspects of beekeeping. He and Anna had gotten so caught up in their hives doing well and the honey production that they often forgot to enjoy the process as they had in the early years.

  Gunnar added a few empty frames in the box with the thriving colony to give the bees more room to grow. He knew the next time he was here he would have to add a new box to the colony so they could grow more, beyond their one box.

  Gunnar put the plastic queen bee excluder on top of the frames. There was a debate among beekeepers in Denmark about using queen bee excluders. Since the queen bee was bigger than all other bees, she couldn't get past the separator, but the other bees could. This ensured that the queen stayed in the lower boxes of the colony and didn't contaminate the top boxes with larvae. Anna and Gunnar wanted to keep the larvae out of the honey in the top boxes.

  Other Danish beekeepers felt it was wrong to restrict the motion of the queen and it was important to let her wander and lay her eggs wherever she wished. Anna had done research and talked to people and had decided they would use queen bee excluders.

  Gunnar went to his supplies on the table and found a packet of white sugar candy. Yes, this colony needed more food and more room to thrive. He was relieved because this was one of Anna's colonies and he wanted to take better care of them than his own. As long as her colonies were not the ones dying, maybe she wouldn't come back to haunt him.

  Gunnar cut a small piece of the plastic cover holding the white sugar candy and then put the packet of sugar, cut-side down, on top of the queen bee excluder. The worker bees could now wiggle through the spaces in the plastic mesh to get food.

  The Danish man cut open a rectangular piece of the sugar bag and lay it on the frames so the bees could get to the sugar through the hole in the bag. He then put the wire mesh frame on top and closed the box.

  “Food for the bees,” he said.

  Raihana wanted to ask if the bees couldn't get enough food from flowers but she didn't know the right words. She was also worried that he would get upset with all her questions, especially when she often didn't understand his answers. So she remained silent.

  As Gunnar opened more boxes, he became more and more cheerful. The bee colonies in the next boxes were healthy and growing, so much so that they might swarm soon.

  As he opened more boxes, he showed her the baby bees and the white waxy substance on top of the hives, beeswax. “It is used to make candles,” he told her.

  Whenever he put in a frame she had wired, Raihana felt proud that she had been of some use.

  Gunnar stuck his finger into the hives, turned and twisted the frames, scraped things off. He sometimes smiled and sometimes sighed. Raihana stood in her encumbering white suit and watched. As he went from frame to frame and box to box, her excitement abated and she was actually getting a little bored wondering when she could go home.

  Kabir had been to Hamburg over the weekend and bought four Hindi movies and one Iranian TV show on DVD. She and Layla were looking forward to seeing the new Akshay Kumar movie as they had heard the songs from the movie on the Internet and liked them very much. Neither of them spoke much Hindi but they understood just fine and in the cold foreign world they lived in, entertainment from back home was like a thick blanket they wrapped around themselves to keep warm.

  Raihana was trying to glance at her watch when he suddenly pulled up a frame and then looked at her.

  “Take your hood off,” he said, pointing at it.

  Raihana looked around at the bees. She didn't want to get stung but he seemed to think it was okay. He asked her again to take her hood off. Despite being scared, she finally took the hood off. The Danish man stuck his finger into the lush hive, breaking the intricate cells the bees had made, and pulled out some honey. He held it up to her mouth and Raihana looked wide-eyed at his finger covered with the golden and sticky liquid around it. Did he think she would lick his finger?

  As if suddenly realizing what he had done, he pulled his finger back and stuck it in his mouth. He held up the frame toward her and she gingerly took a glove off, now wary of both the hive and the bees buzzing around them. What if they saw her take their food and destroy their home, wouldn't they get upset and sting her?

  “Try, come on,” the Danish man encouraged.

  Raihana put a finger into the hive as he had and the warmth inside shot through her finger. It was wonderful. Her finger was floating in richness and as she pulled out a sticky glob of honey, she smelled its rich and unique perfume. She put her finger in her mouth and the flavor exploded. It was like waking up, she thought giddily.

  Greedy for more, she dipped her finger in again, and as she pulled it out a bee stung her on the cheek.

  SEVEN

  ENTRY FROM ANNA'S DIARY

  A Year of Keeping Bees

  1 JUNE 1980

  We have been keeping bees for two years now and I have never been stung. Bees sting because we are not careful, not because they are aggressive— that is beekeeper fact. Today we had record temperatures. The weather was beautiful and in the afternoon I lay down on the terrace to soak up some sun. The kids were with Gunnar's parents for the weekend and it was just us and the bees.

  Gunnar came home after dropping off the kids and started to talk about the weeds and the way the hedge was growing outrageously. We had had constant arguments with our neighbors about not cutting the hedge properly. Their side was always too high and I like it trim and proper.

  It happened right outside the garage. A bee was resting on one of my Karen Blixen roses. I was trying to wrench out a hoe from its hook to start work in the garden, and I don't how the bee got hit, but it spun around and stung me on my hand, right below my thumb. It hurt, but not as much as I always feared it would. And I had no allergic reaction, which was a relief. It wouldn't do for a beekeeper to have a serious reaction to a bee sting.

  It was all in all quite an eventful day. My first bee sting and the neighbors actually cut their hedge properly for the first time in ten years.

  For days after, he remembered how the Afghan girl had winced and tears had filled her eyes when the bee stung her. But it could have been worse: she could have been allergic to the sting. As it was there was only a little pain, some irritation, and some inconvenience.

  The rest of her face had looked so pale compared with the harsh redness of the sting. She said nothing when he grabbed her cheek to force out the venom. She looked suspiciously at the onion Gunnar raced to get from the kitchen and then held to her cheek.

  “It's good for the sting,” he said, letting go of the onion so she could hold on to it. After a while she put the onion away and told him uneasily that her cheek was feeling better.

  He suggested that he drive her home instead of her riding back on her bicycle but she had refused, saying that she was fine.

  He felt horrible because he was the one who made her take off her hood and veil. But he'd wanted to share that first taste of honey in the spring with her. It was a taste he used to crave in
the cold winter, the warmth of it, the freshness of the honey. There was nothing quite like it, he and Anna had agreed. But now the Afghan girl had a big bee sting and a swollen, red right cheek.

  By the next week, the swelling had gone down and only a small brown mark was left behind. She said she was fine but didn't suggest they go out to the bees. Instead she cleaned the house like she used to in the early days of her praktik.

  He didn't press her. The Afghan girl cleaned up the kitchen, living room, and dining room. She even folded the clothes that lay in the washroom. She did some basic gardening—pulling weeds and sweeping out the leaves—but she didn't go to the backyard where the bees were.

  Gunnar had not gone back since she had been stung either. There was no joy in going back alone. He wanted to go with her and show her everything, teach her about harvesting honey and making heather honey. She was so interested in everything he had to say; it made him feel good to have someone hang on to his words so carefully.

  But the house was sparkling clean, which even Peter noticed when he came for a visit on the weekend. He also remarked that it was a pleasure to see Gunnar sober after so long.

  “It's that girl Christina hired through the praktik program. She cleans. She isn't supposed to but she does anyway,” he told Peter.

  “What girl?” Peter asked.

  Gunnar had been sure that either Ole or Christina would have mentioned something to Peter and their other beekeeping friends. So he explained about the Afghan girl and her praktik.

  “You have some Afghan girl here all day? Are you mad?”

  “She comes just three times a week and she's not here all day,” Gunnar said, feeling a little defensive and surprised that Peter was reacting this way. First there was Christina, who had made him feel guilty for not helping the girl, and now Peter was making him feel guilty for having her here.

  “Don't you know anything about these refugee types? All they want is EU citizenship and to gouge money out of our welfare system,” Peter said vehemently. “What will you do if she says that you treated her improperly?”