The History of Bees

Chapter 56 GEORGE

Once again, I was unable to fall asleep. Everything was in place to ensure a good night’s rest. The room was suitably cool, it was quiet. And dark. Why was it so dark lately? Much darker than before. Then I remembered the light. That was why. I’d never gotten around to repairing it. The cables were still crawling up there on the wall, like worms with heads of electrical tape. I passed by them every day, saw them every time, and they always put me in a bad mood. One of the many things I never got around to. It wasn’t important, I knew that. I didn’t need that light, none of us did. Emma didn’t nag me about it, either. I don’t even think she thought about it. But the crawling cables were a part of everything that wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, everything that didn’t work.

I needed seven hours of sleep. At least. I’ve always envied those who don’t need much sleep. Those who wake up after five hours and are ready to perform at their best. They’re the ones who really go far in life, I’ve heard.

I turned towards the alarm clock—12:32 a.m. I’d been lying here since 11:08 p.m. Emma had fallen asleep right away and I dozed off, too, pretty quickly. But then I woke up again, my head clear, alert. And my body was running, unable to lie still, unable to make contact with the mattress. No matter what position I was in, it was wrong, lumpy, poking.

I had to get some sleep. I wouldn’t be able to function tomorrow if I couldn’t sleep now. Maybe a drink would help.

We didn’t have any hard liquor, rarely drank it. But I found a beer in the refrigerator. And a glass in the cupboard. Then there was the opener. It wasn’t hanging on the wall, in its place, a hook over the sink, the fourth hook from the right, between the scissors and a spatula. Where was it? I opened the silverware drawer. Found the corkscrew along with some rotten rubber bands in a separate part of the drawer furthest in. But the opener wasn’t there. I opened another drawer. Nothing. Had she rearranged the system? Put things in new places? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time.

I kept looking in drawer after drawer. Had to put down the beer, use both hands, couldn’t be bothered to be quiet now. Since she’d gone and started rearranging everything, she’d have to put up with that much. Dammit, there were so many drawers in this kitchen and so much junk. So-called useful utensils gathering dust. An egg cooker, an electric pepper grinder, a gadget that divided an apple into six pieces. Things that had accumulated over the course of half a lifetime. Emma was the culprit behind the majority of the things. I got the urge to find a bag, start throwing things out, at long last. Clean up.

But then it appeared. It was lying in the big drawer with the ladles, scoops and whisks. In the very back. At the very bottom. Yup, had clearly been given a new place. I opened the beer quickly. Mostly I had the urge to go and wake her up, tell her she could give a damn about changing things. But instead I took a large swig of beer. The cool liquid ran down my throat.

My stomach rumbled, but I didn’t feel like finding anything to eat. Nothing appealed to me. Beer was nutritious, too. I wasn’t tired at all, just restless. I paced back and forth, went into the living room, grabbed the remote. But I froze midmovement, because suddenly I noticed something on the wall in the dining room.

I walked in and stood in front of them. The drawings. William Savage’s Standard Hive. Which, strictly speaking, had not been a standard for anybody except the Savage family. On a wall never touched by sunlight. In thick gold frames, shiny, without a speck of dust, Emma made sure of that. Black ink on yellowed paper. Figures. Measurements. Simple descriptions. Nothing more. But behind it was a heritage that my family had taken care of ever since the drawings were made in 1852. The Standard Hive was supposed to be William Savage’s great breakthrough; he was supposed to write himself into the history books. But he hadn’t taken the clever American Lorenzo Langstroth into account. Langstroth won, he developed the hive measurements that later became the standard. And nobody paid any attention to Savage. He was, quite simply, too late. That was maybe how it had to be when they sat there in distant parts of the world, each of them working on the same thing, but without a telephone, fax or email.

Behind every great inventor are always a dozen crestfallen guys who were just a bit too late. And Savage was one of them. So there were neither riches nor honor for him or his family.

His wife apparently managed to marry off most of the daughters. But it was worse for the son, Edmund. He was a good-for-nothing, a restless guy, a dandy, had acquired a taste for liquor at an early age and eventually disappeared into the gutters of London.

Only one of the daughters had never married. Charlotte, the brightest. The first lady of our family. She purchased a one-way ticket across the pond. Her trunk was up in the attic. It was the one she traveled with, she and a baby. Who the father was, nobody knew. The two of them and the trunk came to America all alone. In it she had everything she owned. It smelled stuffy, old. We didn’t use it for anything, but I didn’t have the heart to throw it out. Charlotte had put her entire life into the trunk, including her father’s drawings of the Standard Hive.

And that was where it started. Charlotte started beekeeping. Not full-time, on the side of her job as a teacher and headmistress. She only had three hives, but the three hives were all it took for the child, a little boy, to eventually take a shine to it, and he expanded with a few more hives. As did his son. And his son. And finally, my grandfather, who invested in full-scale operations and made a proper living out of it.

The damn drawings!

Suddenly I slammed my fist into the glass. It cracked; the pain radiated from my hand and through my entire body. The picture shook a bit, but hung there as before.

They had to come down. All three frames had to come down.

I lifted them off the hooks and took them with me out into the hallway. There I found my biggest shoes, heavy winter shoes with thick soles.

Shoes on, out into the yard.

I was about to put an end to them, land my boot on them, trample them hard, but at that moment I suddenly thought of Emma, of the noise it would make. I turned towards the bedroom window. The light wasn’t on up there. She was still asleep.

I carried the frames outside, opened the door to the barn and put them down on the floor.

Of course I could have just opened the frames from the back and teased out the pictures, but it was the sound of glass I wanted to hear. The crunching under my boot.

I stomped away, again and again, jumped on them. The glass broke, the frames shattered. Exactly as I had imagined.

Then I plucked out the drawings. I had hoped the broken glass would destroy them, but they were as good as new. The paper was surprisingly stiff and resilient. I laid them one on top of the other, six in all, in a pile. Stood there with them. I could burn them, put a match to them and let the lifework of my ancestors go up in flames. No.

I put the pile down on the worktable, studied it for a while. Terrible drawings. They hadn’t contributed to anything. Deserved a miserable fate. Not a fire, that was too dramatic, too dignified. Something else.

And then I knew.

I summoned my strength, took hold of the pile, my hands resisted, but I forced them. Then I started tearing. Long strips, I tried to make them as even as possible. But it was too thick trying to tear six all at once. I’d have to divide the pile in two. Three pages at a time. But that didn’t take long enough. I wanted to carry on for a long while. So I did one page at a time.

I liked the sound. It was as if the paper were screaming. Mercy. Mercy!

It felt better than good. It felt sensational, doing something—accomplishing something substantial. I could keep this up all night.

But finally I had to stop. There was no point tearing them up into too-small pieces, then they wouldn’t serve the purpose I had in mind.

I gathered up the strips and took them with me. Couldn’t be bothered to clean up the frames and the glass, I’d take care of it tomorrow. I just walked out into the night, across the yard and opened the back door.

Onto the porch and from there into the back hallway. There I opened the first door on the right and took two steps into the darkness. A gurgling sound informed me that as usual the flush valve was stuck. Probably needed to be replaced. I didn’t bother to turn on the light and check now. I just put the drawings, the paper, down on the floor. Ready to be used. Where they belonged. In the john.