The History of Bees

Chapter 52 WILLIAM

The letter arrived with the afternoon coach. I was still flying after yesterday, when everything had gone as I’d wished, yes, perhaps even better, when my new life had begun. I could still feel the moment inside me, the moment between Edmund, Rahm and I, that period of time when everything was completely as it was meant to be, where the Idea about the moment and the Moment itself ascended to become a higher entity.

I started trembling when I saw the postmark. Karlowice. It was from him—an acknowledgment—it couldn’t be anything else. It had been weeks since I’d sent my letter, his answer could have come on any other day, but imagine, it arrived just now, exactly today. I was shaking. It was too much. Was I Icarus? Would my wings catch fire? No, this wasn’t hubris, this was the result of hard work. I had earned this.

I brought the letter into my room, where I settled into my chair, and with just as much reverence as in meeting with St. Peter himself, I broke the seal.

I gripped the letter with both hands, but still it trembled, the letters shook, they were scarcely legible. Laughter reverberated in my ears.

Mutual correspondence. Peers within the field. I repeated the words to myself, but they had no meaning.

It was too late. I was nobody’s peer.

I was the one who should be placed in a box with a lid where I could be observed and controlled from above. I was tamed now, by life itself.

I dropped the letter and stood up. I had to knock something down, destroy something, tear something apart. Whatever it took to stop the hurricane inside me. Suddenly my hands flew out from my body and pulled down books, the inkwell and drawings from the desk. Everything fell to the floor, the ink gushed out, becoming a bottomless lake against the wooden floorboards, which could never be removed, and would remain there like a staring reminder of my defeat. As if that were necessary. All of me, my entire indistinct, inert body, was a reminder.

The bookshelves suffered the same fate as the inkwell, the desk chair followed. The wall charts were next, I tore them to pieces. Swammerdam’s sea monsters were shredded, never again would I fix my gaze on them, see God in the tiniest of components of Creation.

Then the wallpaper, the blasted, yellow wallpaper. I tore it off the walls, strip by strip, till it hung in shreds and left behind large wounds upon the raw brick wall behind.

And then, finally I stood with them in my hands, the drawings of the hive. Worthless. They had to be destroyed forever.

I flexed the muscles in my hands. I wanted to crumple them, tear them apart, but wasn’t equal to it.

I wasn’t equal to it.

Because I wasn’t the one who should do it. They weren’t mine to destroy, but rather his. Everything was his fault and therefore also his responsibility. I leapt out into the hallway.

“Edmund!”

I didn’t knock, just stormed in; he hadn’t gone to the trouble of locking the door.

He popped out of bed. His hair bristled, his eyes bloodshot. He stank of spirits. I turned away from the stench almost without thinking, as I had no doubt done before, deluding myself, pretending it didn’t exist.

No. Not today and not ever again. He should receive a thrashing. A thrashing over his back with the belt buckle, until his skin was full of gashes and bleeding.

But first this. “Look here!” I threw the drawings onto his bed. “Here they are!”

“What?”

“You’re the one who got me started. Here they are! What am I supposed to do with them?”

“Father, I was sleeping.”

“They’re worthless. Do you understand?”

His gaze became clear, he pulled himself together. Picked up one of them.

“What is this?”

“Not worth the paper they are drawn on! Worthless!”

He looked over the meaningless blotches of ink.

“Oh. The hive. It’s the hive,” he said softly.

I breathed heavily, tried to compose myself. “They’re yours now. The drawings. You were the one who wanted me to begin this. You can do what you want with them.”

“Wanted you to begin… what do you mean?”

“You started it all. Now you can destroy it. Burn them. Tear them to pieces, do what you want.”

He stood up slowly and took a sip of water from a cup, with an astoundingly steady hand.

“I don’t understand what you mean, Father.”

“It is your work. I created them for you.”

“But why?” He stared at me. I couldn’t remember the last time I had met his gaze. Now his eyes were narrow. He looked older than his sixteen years.

“The book!” I cried.

“What book? What are you talking about?”

“Huber’s book. François Huber! New Observations on the Natural History of Bees!”

“Father. I don’t understand.” He stared at me as if I were insane, as if I belonged in an asylum.

My body slumped. He didn’t even remember. This moment that had meant so infinitely much to me. “The book you left with me after that Sunday, when the others were in church.”

All of a sudden it was as if something dawned on him.

“That day, yes. In spring.”

I nodded. “It is something I will never forget. That you, of your own free will, came to see me that day.”

His eyes slipped away, his hands moved, as if he wanted to grasp something, but found nothing but dust particles in the air.

“It was Mother who asked me to go see you,” he said finally. “She thought it would help.”

Thilda. He was still hers, now and forever.