Varroa

By Uma H. Demir

/ Fiction /      

She can’t summon the energy to do it herself, so Haris has to lift her arm for her. His fingers shake as he wraps the cuff around her bicep. Ajša rests against the kitchen table, her eyes half-closed, watching as he adjusts the stethoscope underneath the cuff. Pump in his hand, eyes on the gauge.

“I’m fine,” she says. Her voice is raspy, blood-thick. Cochineal covers her cheeks, spread apart like butterfly wings. They burn as she speaks.

“I need to listen,” Haris says, not looking up from the gauge. He’s kneeling in front of her, his head bowed in careful focus. Behind him, light comes in through the high window, fragments of fig trees peeking through the glass and dappling his thinning crown with July sunset. Behind the trees, the mountain looms above her house, above her village, cracking the clouds into eggshell shards that meander through the sky.

Ajša lets her eyes wander. On the table, next to her arm, lie the remnants of ten minutes ago: torn-apart cardboard boxes and open tabs of pills, handwritten doctor’s notes with shaky instructions. The empty glass, still wet. The slab of dark chocolate, from when he forced a piece between her jaws. Leftovers from that day’s lunch, vine leaves stuffed with rice, seeping in their juices. Her gloves, propolis-stained, hanging over the edge of another chair. The stains grow and deepen before her eyes, the smell of it rising.

She doesn’t let him give her the result, speaking as soon as he takes the stethoscope out of his ears. “I’ll work on the hives later in the evenings.”

His fingers falter on the cuff.

“It was just the heat,” she says. “And the sunlight. I didn’t take my medication on time. I was stupid.” His bowed head, the way he still refuses her gaze, it stings her. “Anybody would have fainted, God fuck you, anyone. You got heatstroke last year. You were fine. Nothing has to change yet.” A final plea. “The doctors said years, it’s too early for me to—it doesn’t have to mean anything.”

His hug is tilted, nauseating. Haris lets out a breath that sounds like it dragged itself out of his lungs, wet without a hint of tears on his face. She has a flash of vertigo as she buries her face in the crook of his throat. This close, she can feel his pulse buzzing underneath his skin.

* * *

Spring honey harvested from her mountain always has a bitter aftertaste—something vaguely sour, herbal. The peak is covered in plants that grow thick and fat, first to bloom in the year, filling the air with crisp scent. White heads of cow parsley spread over delicate strands of mint, anise rising when she crushes them both underfoot. Cranesbill and nettle later in the year. Pungent sage growing with the heat. Charcoal. Scorched, petrified earth, swathed in shale shrapnel and thick thorn bushes. Ajša marinates meat in the earliest honey she can harvest, grills chicken into charred strips and chews through the tang. The rest of the village tends to wait until the honey becomes sweet and clear again, once spring shifts into summer, once her bees have flown far from the mountain.

* * *

“I want us to leave them at the peak.”

Haris is at the far end of the table, wrapping up their blood pressure kit. She hasn’t moved. Sitting on the same chair, holding a yellow mug in her lap. The rash on her face has settled into a schoolgirl blush and she scratches at one cheek, aimlessly, dirt-lined nails digging into rough skin.

“We don’t have to talk about this yet,” he says.

“We aren’t talking about it.” She wraps her hands around the mug, needs them both to lift her tea. Liquid sloshes over her fingertips. Droplets stick to a faint scar on her right index finger, clean and angular, the line light on her skin. “We knew it would happen. Eventually.”

“And when we talked about you stopping, eventually, we agreed on selling them.” He yanks on the zipper. “Not just leaving them somewhere. Ahmed could take them.”

“He retired for a reason.” Even the spoonfuls of honey she added to the tea can’t hide the bitterness in her voice. “He’s twice my age now. He has a reason to retire. And he’s the only beekeeper in or around Vrelačići. Who else would be interested?”

“Not Ahmed, then,” Haris says. “But somebody else, in the other villages. Across the border.”

She sets her drink down, harder than she needs to. “How do you think they’d treat something ours? This way, the bees have a chance.”

“You once told me,” he said, still not looking at her, “that you apologized to the bees every time you opened their hives, because you knew at least one of them would die that day, and you couldn’t bear the thought of having blood on your hands without mourning them first.”

Ajša massages the skin on her chest, focusing on how her lungs gasp in the summer heat. The red on her cheeks is a betrayal—split capillaries, her bleeding heart. “They die mine,” she finally says. “If I can’t die theirs.” In the silence, she adds another teaspoon of honey to her tea.

* * *

The first time her hives swarmed had been an accident.

The heat had clawed itself into autumn. Bugs twitched aimlessly in the thick air. Tree trunks bled threads of sap. The autumn wave of figs broke before they could finish growing, taut skin exposing unripe pinkness, flesh burning before it could ripen. The two of them ate tomatoes fresh, cutting slices off in their palms with a dull knife and sprinkling them with sea salt. Canned fish. Garlicky yoghurt and cold meat pie. They licked their fingers clean.

Ahmed told her that the bees were already preparing for winter. That had been Ajša’s first year with her hives, when she had been churlish and ungainly, still dreaming of naming the thing that sank beneath her skin and gnawed at her chest and stole her breath, tools as foreign as the endless boxes of medication in her hands. Her hive boxes were a brilliant yellow that hadn’t had time to chip and stain. Ahmed would sit in the shade and shout instructions at her. The shrapnel scars on the back of his hands and his wrists stayed a pale white, even as his skin tanned from the sun. They had a solemn camaraderie this way; her body fighting to disintegrate, his body fighting not to.

The hives had already abandoned the drones to the repugnant heat. Ahmed pointed them out with a swollen finger; pitted nails, blue veins. An attempt to make space was the first sign of autumn. The queen needed to lay the eggs for the winter brood. These bees would live six months instead of six weeks, would be born fatter than their summer siblings, but the hives were overheating. Thousands of workers hovered outside the hive entrances in shifting beards, dripping off the edges and pooling down to the dirt. Thousands more flew at the entrance, desperately beating their wings to force new air inside. If they didn’t cool the hives down, they might all die. If they swarmed, it would be certain death to those who left.

Six hives in the garden, each with smoke clouds. Dark, roiling bodies. Ajša had only gone to the garden to pick the last of the dill for lunch. Instead, she watched them from the garden’s edge, the forgotten blade she had brought with her pressing into her frozen fingers. Drops of red curved down the blade, dripping onto the parched soil. Some of the bees had already crept up to the splitting fruit trees, crawling through the figs and getting stuck on the tendrils of sap. Others filled the air with full-bodied sound. The heat shimmered in the air around each swarm. Tiny blackened bodies dropped to the dirt, stuck on their backs, rocking back and forth with frenzied energy.  The patterns each swarm formed had something beautiful at their centre: the old queens of the hive, royalty protected by bodies upon bodies of the dying.

Ajša knew exactly where her swarm boxes were—along with the rest of her gear, her toolboxes with their hive tools for scraping beeswax and cracking hive lids, her pristine gloves, her brand-new veils, her second-hand smoker with a dent in the handle and twigs of rosemary hidden inside—and she knew that to leave now was to miss watching them go. As she thought it, the swarm on the furthest fig tree rose into the thick air. It was a slow, lumbering thing. Bees flew too far apart and then rushed back to the group. She imagined the marked queen flying at the front, little dot leading them away from her. Slowly, surely, the swarm flew towards the mountain.

Haris had been helping a neighbour. He would find her later, sitting in the dirt, blood sluggishly oozing from the gash on her finger, her eyes dazed and unfocused. But long before that would happen, Ajša sank to the ground. She made herself watch as the second swarm, already in the air, decided to follow.

* * *

That evening, she hides in the workroom. Here, the smell is all wax: warm, intoxicating, overpowering. Blocks upon blocks on the metal countertop. Buckets of scraped comb on the ground, lumps of half-crushed hexagons and lingering traces of nectar inside. Ajša reaches out to touch one of the frames hanging on the wall next to her—a whole frame of drone brood, laid too late. She had stolen the frame to mount it here. Some of the cells had been a day or two away from hatching, and she runs her hands over these, feeling the lumps inside. Her fingers twitch: uselessly. Unwillingly.

Behind her, old honey waits to be filtered. Sticky residue lingers on the handle of her extraction machine, clunky and old and all the more beloved for it. Empty glass jars have been lined up against the wall, gold lids stacked in a box by her feet. As she looks up from her seat, she catches a glimpse of the strips of wallpaper left behind, bits she had always planned to tear down somehow but had never gotten to. The glass warps bodies, an extended eye and half a wing floating in one. Elongated, deranged smile in another.

The garage had been a better option for her work. But she remembers when she was still half-toothless, looking up at her mother in giant glory and plotting to yank on her trailing apron strings. Her mother had turned around with a clear liquid on the tip of her finger and had rubbed it against her aching gums. She had cut off a wail to stuff her sticky fists inside her mouth, and her mother had smiled down at her and said, this is a birthday present.

Every birthday, like clockwork, almost evolutionary. Ajša had spent her teenage years looking for that jar. Accidentally breaking cupboard doors, rifling through drawers. She discovered loose floorboards and documents with burn marks on them and bullet casings. In the end, the jar had been here the whole time, in her old nursery. On the shelf where she now stores empty honey jars, where there had once been photos of a man, his smile too sacrosanct for her to disturb in her search, and where it had been hidden in plain sight. Untouched until ten years ago, when she had finally found it.

All she had wanted was a place to lie down. Even before she bought her first bees. She hadn’t wanted to worry Haris with the racing of her heart, the trembling of her limbs. In the end, it had been the gold lid that had caught her eye. Such a small thing. Her name had been written on the lid in unfamiliar, spider-webbed handwriting—to my Ajša, happy birthday. 

* * *

She wakes before the sun. Her hips grind against each other as she walks down the stairs, the pain curling against the tail of her spine. In the kitchen, she lifts her arm to reach for a coffee cup and the limb spasms, the cup falling to the rug with a dull thud. She drinks water instead. She holds the glass with both hands.

It will take Ajša strength that she does not have to pack her bees away, to lift the hives into the cargo of their clay-red truck. It is strength she would give twice over to say goodbye.

She hasn’t worn her full gear to work amongst the bees in years. Inside the thick white suit, her body moves in alien ways. Wisps of hair stick to her cheeks and forehead. The bees only know their keeper by the sureness of her step, the color and smell of her hair. When she breaks the first hive open, they divebomb her in erratic, sleepy waves. She fumbles with the metal grips, accidentally knocks her smoker to the ground. The hum grows to unbearable levels. Two bees linger on the mesh of her veil, directly in front of her eyes. They undulate their abdomens at her.

When she finds the queen, only the grace of habit allows her to find the bee box in the cacophony of her toolkit, even blinded and aching. The bee box fits in the palm of her glove, this tiny thing of thin wood and a cork stopper. Ajša grasps the queen carefully, lifts it into the box, closes it. One side of the box is made of a fine wire mesh; through this, she can see the queen testing each corner. She places the box on one of the frames and watches the workers surge towards it. They leave everything behind: the black-capped brood, the thin nectar. Balls of propolis lie abandoned on the hive floor, surrounding a red dot—a varroa mite, leaving the body of a still-twitching bee, wings freshly crushed. She looks at it and feels an ugly kinship.

She can feel Haris watching, doesn’t know when he’s come. Ajša turns back to the hive and places the frames back inside with her gloved hands instead of using a tool. The nectar smears over her bumbling fingers. She prays for him to fuck off.

“I can pack them directly into the truck,” Haris says, voice soft behind her. “You checked on the queens just the other day. They’re fine.”

“They’re not ready.” She straightens, rubbing the small of her back. “They need time to adjust to being moved. I wanted to leave them in the truck for today.”

“I know.”

“You said you’d let me do it.”

“This is different.” Haris steps forward to catch her by the arm. He doesn’t pull her to face him. It’s the opposite, him keeping her still while he walks to face her.

“It’s different,” he repeats. “Let me pack them up. We can drive there tomorrow morning.”

“Today. Tonight.”

“Tonight. I’ll pack them now, they’ll be settled by nightfall. Go inside. Have breakfast, at least. I’ve put the water on for your knock-me-awake coffee. I’ve even toasted the coffee grains.”

Ajša doesn’t move.

His fingers tighten, slightly, like wings fluttering. He meets her gaze. “I can take them.”

Ajša rips her arm away. “You have no right,” she bites out. Behind her veil, her teeth are bared. “To do this to me, to take them away without me, you have no right,” and it’s a thousand stings to the chest. She lets her breath linger. Lets it choke him. He is a blur of motion with wild eyes and she can feel her spine cracking. He tries to say something. “They’re mine,” Ajša says, and walks past him.

The kitchen window is propped open. Inside, the water screams like a newborn.

* * *

Her father didn’t even make it halfway down.

That’s how she heard it, the first time she was told the story. He and a hundred other men had been left on the peak of the mountain, only a short walk away from the building that had kept them prisoners. The soldiers had fed them with expired cans of dog food. Pork, sometimes, when they wanted to be cruel. Water was once a day, even during the summer heat, given through a hose that had once been part of a fire truck. Three minutes, the guard on duty would say, three minutes per person. Drink as much as you can. And the men, they would drink and drink, dying for it, and in a few minutes the sweat would spring up all over their body and a few minutes after that they would be dry again, thirstier than ever and with nothing to show for it.

The guards never had to hold the number up with their fingers or write it down. A neat uniform or a ragged one, the men spoke the same language.

More were on the way. Her father and the other hundred had been let loose on the peak as a last-minute attempt to make more space. The guards chose those who didn’t need to be stuck inside a cell to disintegrate. These men had ribs jutting out of parchment-like skin, angles so harsh that it looked like a knife carving its way out of their bodies. Their lips bore a million tiny cracks, with no blood left to drip from them. Their teeth had started to rot inside their skulls. Their eyes sunk into dark wells.

The guards hounded them up like expired dogs. They did it at noon. The men removed their shirts and shoes, and then the guards set the pile of cloth scraps on fire. The intense heat threatened to peel the last bit of skin from the men’s bodies. Run, the guards said. Most of the guards still had baby fat sticking to their cheeks. Their beards had grown into scraggly goatees, like a bush with only half the leaves. They gave the prisoners a few seconds to start running. Some shot with their eyes closed.

Aiming or not, the first shots drove home quickly. Most of the men were still blinking against the light. Some of them hadn’t even started moving. But her father had saved some of his energy—somehow, supposedly—and forced himself to start running, head down, focusing on one foot after the other. He didn’t look behind him as he ran. He didn’t know that the guards had started to aim.

Ajša had been three months old. Her wrists still had red thread wrapped around them. For luck, her grandmother had proclaimed, mere weeks before she had died as well. Protection against the evil eye. Her nursery walls had been covered with round, cartoonish bees. Fat with fatter eyes.

* * *

And now—despite herself, standing alone in the mourning light of her kitchen, coffee grains dark and smoking like a true Bosnian—she thinks back to the gluttonous heat of the previous day. The cacophony of the workers, a hundred thousand strong, vibration and fever. Strong enough to kill. The ache that had settled in her spine like a birthright, like an inheritance of rot, the small of her back flaring each time she shifted. Her face had started burning behind her veil.

Delicate skin in blushing-bride fancies. One of the bees had lingered on the mesh of the veil, and she had watched it twitch and had felt the world twitch with it; something in her spine shifting, her jaw locking. Ajša had tried to swallow around the lump in her throat. She had tried not to hurt herself as she fell. The acrid soil had scraped against her back as she shuddered. When she had woken up, it was to Haris, pale-faced and soundless, trying to lift her in his arms and carry her back inside, her gear abandoned on the ground, the pain lancing through her body in electric waves, veil tossed back in a mockery of love.

* * *

Ajša never made it to the peak before. A few times, random times, burdened with the buzz of alcohol, she had tried. Always alone. Always turning back before she’d even made it halfway up. This time, Haris came with her—he had driven the truck while she sulked in the back seat like a child—and she made it to the end of the road, where it dwindled into nothing.

Clumps of herbs grow wild between the cracked rocks. The few trees she can see are stunted and twisted, flattening themselves against the slopes in a desperate attempt to avoid the wind and the sun that now clings onto the horizon. Some patches of grass are greener than others, dotted with wildflowers. Somewhere nearby, only a short walk away, there’s an abandoned building.

The village looks different from the top of the mountain. The houses are tiny, doll-like. She can pinpoint her fig trees, their house with the red roof and the painted yellow window panes and the ripped wallpaper behind glass jars. Behind them, the hives rattle at each other.

She steps around Haris to approach the truck. The hives have been well packed, ropes securing each to the cargo bed floor and blankets as padding between them. He watches how her trembling fingers slip against his knots. She can feel how his hand twitches, as if to pull her back and then thinking better of it.

“Let me,” he says.

She doesn’t step away from the truck, but she does let him come closer, allowing him to unlatch the bands around the first hive and lower it to the ground. He does it perfectly, even as his shoulders strain from the weight. When he opens the lid of the first hive, letting her peer inside and check for damage, they spot the queen box at the same time. Still on top of the frames, somehow unblemished from the ride up. The workers have huddled around the box, some still fluttering weakly after the last day of desperately trying to feed their queen. The pain in her chest quickens.

Haris carefully reaches out, plucking the box away from the workers and offering it to her. She’s so numb, hands so stiff, that she cannot feel its weight. Just the corners, the way it digs into her skin. She had bought this queen’s grandmother ten years ago. This line of royalty had produced the best workers, the fattest drones, the most mild-tempered bees. She had to spin the frames so often on this hive that she would give up counting the jars of honey collected each year. That’s why she had made an exception to the elegant numbering system she was supposed to use, to count the queens and keep track — instead of tagging the queen with a whiteyellowredgreenorblue dot, the way beekeepers were supposed to, she had used a gold one. That dot now lies still inside the box, reflecting red against the sunset. She swallows against the dryness of her mouth, relishing the sting. Such a small thing. As she watches, the queen twitches.

Before Ajša can catch the thought, or catch her body, she is moving. She is unlatching the bee box, she is opening the box wide, she is tilting the box to the side and pouring the queen out as if it were a spoonful of honey. She is closing her fists around the queen to stop it from flying away. She tightens her grip so that the queen is almost flattened, vibrating against flesh instead of wire.

Haris is in front of her now. Grieving, she thinks, watching his blown-black eyes. The queen, trapped within her palms, gives a half-hearted push at the darkness. A stray bee wanders out of the hive, pushing past the crushed bodies of its sisters. It crawls vaguely in her direction.

His hands are on hers. No, Ajša tries to say, but he is still there, still moving. His face is suddenly terrible—carved stone, trembling mouth chewing on something like a prayer. His hands shake around hers. No, she tries again, pulling away. Not yet, please. She won’t hurt me. When he curls back one of her clawed hands, the gold dot sears itself into her eyes. When his fingers close around the crushed queen, she screams at him, wordless, unhinged. As he drops the little body back in the hive, Ajša bursts into tears.

Next to their feet, the newly-dead twitch.

* * *

Some patches of the mountain grow greener than others. Mushrooms love to creep up on these patches. But first—the wildflowers take over, purple starburst and yellow centres. Creeping red vines that wrap themselves around the rocks. Dark green leaves with jagged edges, hiding white thorns. Bees migrate towards these patches, collecting blood-red pollen, barely flying from the burden of their treasure. These bees come only in spring; not during the heat of the summer, not during the rain of the autumn. When they do come at the wrong time, they have the sense to die gracefully. In some ways, they were made for it, for dying. For moving on.

The first honey of the year, in this place, always comes from peak flowers. It has a bitter aftertaste—something people notice, the second after they swallow. It’s the taste of something raw and rotting, blood recognizing familiar blood, that lonely part that makes it down the mountain.