[Bee, Μέλισσα]
B
Before them, under the garden wall,
Forward and back,
Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,
Draping each hive with a shred of black.
Trembling, I listened: the summer sun
Had the chill of snow;
For I knew she was telling the bees of one
Gone on the journey we all must go!
-“Telling the bees,” John Greenleaf Whittier, 1858
She could still see him grimace, now, in her mind’s eye. It was a little like the squint one makes when blinded by the light. “How do you say melissa in English?” Grimace, trying to find something to say, something that might interest her.
“Bee. Melissa is bee. Barely any different from the verb to be.” And then after a brief pause, “Tu bi or not tu bi.” Gibberish.
“Come again?” he said. In trying to understand, he must have made the same grimace.
To bee or not to bee. Because, ever since he’d been widowed, the bees were for him synonymous with life.
She’d had a hard time explaining it to him. The verb to be made him feel ashamed. It was pathological, incomprehensible to others, but not to her. Part of this shame he’d passed down to her. It could be the genes, or the years he’d been training her in life exclusively by his own method.
To bee or not to bee. It was the only phrase he’d ever learned in English.
Even at his funeral the verb to be must have made him feel ashamed. In a way he was still here; the crowd had come for him. People introduced themselves to her. She’d found their names in a spiral address book but she was meeting most of them for the first time. A meager crowd, as if he’d relayed to them himself that there was no reason, really, for them to come; that he didn’t want to cause a hassle, not in this rain.
“And what about the bees?” one of them asked her with concern. He had striking, full lips, though full didn’t necessarily mean sensual.
“The bees . . .”
She didn’t know how to respond.
He shook his head. He must have been younger than her father, even though her father was no longer old. His name had seemed vaguely familiar. “My father mentioned you,” she said to him tensely, and then he grabbed her hands. Holding onto them, without melodramatics, he pronounced:
“My last friend has died.”
The weight of this sentence was exorbitant, especially compared to the one that had preceded it which she could no longer recall. Her father mentioned him—plain. She wondered whether it had occurred to him at all, while he held her hands, on a day like today, that she had noticed his lips and where they might have led her.
After the funeral, she made a trip to the house. She found it strange not to find him inside, but that was all: she found it strange. She didn’t feel sad. She felt, maybe, some sort of relief. His latest illness had not lasted long, because her father had refused to see a doctor. Neglected incident, of his own doing or his caretakers. This is what the chief of the unit had said at Evangelismos hospital and she’d opted not to comment. Neglect. The truth was, that she hadn’t managed to convince her father to see a doctor. She hadn’t managed to convince him of hardly anything.
She opted to postpone looking through his papers. Not to endeavor to see if he’d kept any of the things she’d sent him now and then from England. After her mother’s death, when he’d thrown himself into beekeeping, she had translated some verse for him, from the poem Telling the Bees. She’d told him about the custom of shrouding the hives in black during mourning. Because she, too, had tried to find something to say to him, something that might interest him. He hadn’t seemed compelled, back then. After fifteen years though, there were some things that even she had forgotten.
And what about the bees?
So she went to see them. A line of stacked blue boxes—what kind of blue was lilac? They matched the autumn, with its moistened trunks, its cinnamon-red leaves. She stood close by, listening to the hum and watching the bees steal in and out of the boxes. Landing boards were where they scrambled out of the hive. She remembered. One of the bees was most likely dancing inside the dark hive right now. Because bees communicate by dancing. Animals have languages too—there, bees have a language. They can’t blather on, of course, because their language is limited: through dancing, a scout tells the others at what distance and from which direction from the sun a source of nectar can be found. Their language itself filters out any superfluities, in other words, limited here means superior, her father had said. Chomsky’s theoretical framework of generative grammar and the purported structural superiority of human languages had left him indifferent, unimpressed.
She was not about to tie black rags from the hives. Anyhow, bees don’t see black—they can’t distinguish it from red. Black, red: they see as one color. She had found this out from a book of her father’s that recounted the first experiments. They’d fed the bees on a light blue square, on a checkered tableau, whose remaining squares they’d painted in various shades of gray. In the next phase, when they let them “choose” between blue and some other color, the bees flew to the blue squares expecting to find food there. They had replicated the experiment with other colors but the insects couldn’t tell the difference. Bees see light blue, indigo, yellow, blue-green, and ultraviolet—included too in this gamut, more than likely, was lilac. Everything else they see as gray or black, as through the lens of a black-and-white film.
Even fewer people came to the memorial service forty days later. It was normal. She felt fine but she would have felt better if she weren’t preoccupied with the fact that she still wasn’t feeling much at all. Neither sadness nor relief. Only that time had passed and things had changed.
Outside it was sleeting and inside the church the space heater was barely making any difference. Her freezing feet made her think of his, how they must have been at the funeral. There’s no point in anyone dwelling on such thoughts. Maybe that’s why the bees’ language filters it out on its own; maybe that’s why a scout bee can’t express distress about a pollen source being far away. She can’t, therefore, feel distress either.
The friend with the full lips (she didn’t remember his name anymore) was there; she saw him sitting in one of the back rows.
“When will the service begin?” sounded a voice, distinguishing itself momentarily from among the psalms.
Neither did she know. If it weren’t for the tray of kollyva—boiled wheat with a simple powdered-sugar dusting—you’d say it was just another Sunday liturgy, of the kind she hadn’t attended since childhood.
Three little girls approached the tray and whisperingly admired it. The middle-aged woman accompanying them batted their hands away from the kollyva as discreetly as she could.
“It’s starting now,” she heard the friend with the full lips say to the other man, and almost immediately they read out her father’s name in its byzantine form.
The rest did not last long. The friend with the full lips didn’t stay for the coffee.
On the way back, it was still sleeting. She remembered the smell of firewood burning in the fireplace. The white of the wood that had turned to ash, orange glowing in the lit charcoal. It had been years since her father had made a fire.
That is the question. Unsure why, Hamlet’s words came back to her cynically at the most unexpected moments. Perhaps, because she still didn’t feel much at all. Only that time had passed and things had changed.
She went back to the hives a few days after the memorial service. The sun had teeth. It was bright out but bitterly cold. She had to get really close to see them. Dead bees all along the front of the hives. There were so many. Down on the ground and on the landing boards. Countless of them. The bees had died.
The verb to be, no matter the language, was hard for him.
Because you have to go say it to them. You tell the bees. You go knocking with the heavy key from hive to hive to get their attention and you yell it out, “Father died. Don’t come out! Don’t fly!”
Some choose to drape the hives in black crapes. They raise the hives symbolically and lower them back down again the moment the coffin is lifted onto the bearer’s shoulders. They turn the bees in the direction of the funeral procession. They save them some of what was being offered at the funeral—kollyva with powdered sugar.
If you do not tell the bees, tragedy strikes.
She returned to the house and, this time, she looked through his papers. Everything gave off the same humid smell. Bills, checks, tearaway calendar days with proverbs on them. Useless stuff. And one of her old university textbooks that stunk like mildew. Introduction to linguistic theory. Ah, Chomsky! How much they’d disagreed about Chomsky. About the language of bees and of people. Not even then had she managed to convince him.
She reopened the spiral address book and observed the penmanship throughout. A faint cursive that was completely illegible to her. As if it had been written by bees. Like the sort of cipher bees inscribed onto the honeycomb during waggle dances.
Under the letter “B” she found an entry for a beekeeper. His name seemed vaguely familiar. When she spoke to him on the phone, his willingness to come by at a moment’s notice struck her.
Upon seeing the friend with the full lips standing at the kitchen door, she almost asked what had brought him this way. He was the beekeeper, Vasiliadis, but entered under “B.”
“What do bees do in the winter? Do they die?” The question came out naturally.
“A winter cluster,” the friend offered with a hint of a smile. “Do you know what that is?”
She didn’t. Maybe he would take it as yet another lack of affection on her part. Least of all dead she could love him.
They walked toward the beehives in silence. The friend started to examine the losses along the front of the hives. “They’re not that many . . .” he mumbled. Then he bent forward to examine some marks on one of the landings. He stood up again, approached the beehive from the back, knelt down, and took a few deep breaths. He placed his ear over the lid and started to clap the sides with his hands. Only then did she realize he wasn’t wearing a white suit, not even a mesh-veil covering. She couldn’t picture him in that costume, looking like an astronaut or a fencer. In the end, the friend stood up and said that there would have to be an inspection.
“To see if they have enough honey.”
Seeing that she was puzzled, he continued, “Why do bees make honey? To save it for the winter when they can’t fly because of the cold. However, some bees might get fooled and go outside during halcyon days, what we call Alkyonides. They get tricked by the clear blue skies and warm temperatures; they freeze and don’t make it back to the hive.”
Suddenly he smiled at her.
“Your father told me about you. He talked about your studies, your achievements. He was proud of you . . .”
That did something to her, even if it wasn’t true. She imagined the beekeeper thinking that she too had been fooled. That due to the cold she had not made it back inside the hive.
“What is a winter cluster?” she asked him quickly, to block out not only her thoughts.
“They huddle together for warmth. Gathered at the center of the hive they form a cluster and produce warmth by pulsating. They change places every now and then. The ones around the outside move in and so forth. But they need strength in numbers and food. Did your father store any honey? Did he have time to leave them any dough? The supplement must be of good quality, so that it doesn’t petrify before the end of winter.”
She watched the friend’s full lips nurse every word.
The truth was, she didn’t know. If her father had had time to leave the bees with supplies. She had no idea how active he might have been at the end, before he fell, and they took him to the hospital.
“His illness didn’t last long,” she limited herself to saying.
The friend promised to arrange an inspection at the very next show of sunshine. She thanked him.
Before they parted, she gave him her cell number. He gave her a second number of his too.
She had it on the tip of her tongue—but didn’t say it.
To bee or not to bee. That is the question. Because that is what had happened: her father now was the bees.