Of Bees and Mist

by Erick Setiawan

  After the doctor permitted him to walk, he devised a secret game to drive the loneliness out of his heart. Once in the morning and once in the afternoon, he would grope his way around the room in search of an object he had not identified before. After he found one, he would tax his memory to recall the times his wife had come into contact with that particular object. In this way, he remembered that many years ago, she had a habit of putting dried citrus peels in the blue ceramic dish he was now holding, but one day she stopped when four-year-old Noah ingested them by mistake. Another afternoon found him sniffing her boxwood comb. Her handkerchief. The squat ivory brush she used to powder her nose. Day by day, more objects occupied his universe of longing. He did not think much about it, only felt that if he could resurrect his world on top of the one she had crumbled, he might find the word to break her silence.

  One thing he noticed was that he could not find her wedding ring anywhere, even when he ordered the maid to search the house up and down. The shovel and the chair were also gone, as were the shirt and trousers that had divulged his shame. He attributed this work of elimination to his mother, and soon confirmed that her effort did not stop there. Over the course of days, things that belonged to his wife began to disappear from the room. The ceramic dish vanished one morning, then her books and hats, followed by her slippers and stockings. One night, he woke up covered in sweat because the room no longer smelled of her. He snatched her pillows and buried his face in them, but the only scent he breathed was that of sun and freshly laundered linen.

  On his tenth day of blindness, conquered by an uncontrollable yearning, Daniel dictated a letter to his mother and asked her to deliver it to his boy. Three days passed and no answer came. He was about to compose another letter when his mother broke down in tears.

  “It’s no use, son. She told Noah to his face that you’re not his father. I was standing at the door when she tore up your letter.”

  His mother was working herself into a fit, exclaiming, “We’ll get her! We’ll get her!” and insisting he hire an attorney before that hound from hell stripped the very socks off his feet. He listened to her as if from the remote depth of a cave—every word reached him clearly yet dully, and despite her rage, her voice sounded tired and ancient. The only things he was aware of were the pillows that no longer smelled of his wife, and the words he kept muttering again and again like a curse.

  “She doesn’t want to see me, wants nothing to do with me.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  From Magnolia Avenue, the fireflies led them to the Cemetery of Ashes. Noah walked in silence, stern in his Sunday vest and trousers, while behind him Meridia followed with the suitcases. As the sun rose higher, the fireflies’ flame grew brighter, forming a swirling golden shield around them. The few people out at that hour stopped when they saw the spectacle, thought it was a spirit departing and raised their hats. Every time the town bell chimed, Meridia paused and muttered a prayer. The town was otherwise quiet.

  When they arrived at the cemetery, Noah was the first to notice the oddity. Adjacent to Gabriel’s grave, in the lot reserved for Ravenna before the time of the mists, was a mound of freshly turned earth topped by an arrangement of stones. “Look, Mama,” he said, and pointed. Meridia at once recognized the mark of a primordial burial. Noah removed the lily and the candied apple from his pocket and placed them among the stones. Except for the chirping of lone birds and the bitter cemetery smoke, nothing disturbed them until the fireflies spun and settled over the mound. Startled by the motion, Meridia looked up and saw a woman in black looking at her from a distance. It was Malin, standing before her baby’s grave with butterfly weed in her hand. When their eyes met, they each looked away and did not interfere with the other’s grief. The next time Meridia looked, only the blossoms remained, decorating the most handsome and polished headstone in the cemetery.

  MERIDIA DID NOT ALLOW herself an opportunity to sit. The instant they arrived at 24 Monarch Street, she rolled up her sleeves and subjected the house to a cleaning more thorough than Ravenna’s. First she attacked the kitchen from top to bottom, wiping cabinets, scrubbing walls, soaping the stove until all smell of ash and charred meat was eradicated. Moving to the living room, she beat the dust off the curtains, yanked the funereal white cloths off the furniture, swept the floor, restored the indigo rug to its original position. She assigned Noah the task of beating the mattresses, and then told him to hold the wooden stool steady while she climbed up and harvested spider-webs with a broom. Pulling sheets and pillows out of the closet, she urged him to explore the house and make himself comfortable, because from that day on, “this place will be our home.” The boy nodded without comment and left to wander on his own.

  At noon, shuffling about the house with a mop and pail, she caught Noah staring out the window into the street.

  “What are you looking at?”

  He turned and for a moment seemed to be sneering savagely.

  “A crazy man was clawing his own eyes. You should have seen him jumping like a monkey and punching the air for nothing.”

  Meridia looked out the window. A few people were still scratching their heads, but it was evident that the main attraction had ended.

  “Poor man,” she said. “I hope someone is taking care of him.”

  An hour later they went out for lunch at a café near Independence Plaza. They each had a plate of beef and mushrooms, a chicken roll and cheese croquettes, and two scoops of cherry ice cream topped with chocolate sauce. They ate urgently as if they had been starved for days, and did not speak until they finished. Sipping coffee, Meridia told the boy that they would fix the house and make it their own; he could have her old room and his grandfather’s study and decorate them in any way he wished. Noah listened with his clairvoyant look and saved his question until the end: “Will we be happy again, Mama?” “Of course,” Meridia answered at once. “As long as we have each other.”

  After lunch, she took him to the Sunday bazaar and bought him the latest marvels. A levitating spin top. Color-changing marbles. A rectangular stone that drove away nightmares if kissed before bedtime. At a bookstall, Meridia bought a dozen novels, knowing they would be her solitary companions in the long nights ahead. After this, they went to Cinema Garden and saw a colored projection of people who lived in flying castles and airborne chariots. Noah liked it so much that he contemplated the idea of stringing his beloved rabbit doll to the levitating spin top when he got home. On their way back, they stopped by the market to purchase fish, vegetables, eggs, and oil. Deep dusk had fallen when they reached the house, blanketing Monarch Street with a formal solemnity. This alone allowed Meridia to conceal her disappointment when she found no one at the door.

  That night, they ate a simple meal of fried fish and egg soup. While Noah bathed, Meridia unpacked their few belongings and hid the money and jewelry in various places around the house. At bedtime, Noah refused to sleep by himself in her old room, so they huddled under a great blanket in Ravenna’s bed. He asked her to tell him a story, and for an hour she resurrected the fanciful tales she had invented with Permony many years ago. After the boy dozed off, Meridia remained awake. She forced herself to read, but her brain rejected the pages. At dawn she gave it up. Despite herself, she kept waiting for a hand to reach out from the dark and reverse her sorrow.

  EVA WAS SHOUTING AND pounding before breakfast. No sooner did the door swing open than she tried to shoulder her way in.

  “Give me my grandson!” she said angrily. “You have no right to take him from his father.”

  Meridia planted her feet and kept her out.

  “I have every right to take what’s mine,” she said. “If he cares so much about Noah, why didn’t he come to get him himself?”

  Her unassailable tone had the desired effect. Eva, growing more furious, snorted contemptuously.

  “What makes you think he wants to see you? My son sent me here because he wants nothing to do with you.”

  Meridia took her time examining h
er mother-in-law. In place of anger, it was pity that surged to her heart. She saw the thin white hair and the bowed spine, the graying eyes and furrowed skin, and wondered how that old, withering body was still able to contain five decades of bile.

  “Daniel’s certainly old enough to make his own decision,” Meridia answered.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” taunted Eva. “If you think he’ll come here on his knees and beg to have you back, then you’re far more deluded than I give you credit for. Your marriage is doomed and no power on earth can rescue it. Your husband—my son—has been unhappy for a long time, and it’s all because of you. You forced him to find his comfort elsewhere, failed him so utterly in so many ways that I think you’ve done him a tremendous favor by leaving.”

  Meridia was upon her at once. “I knew you were in on it from the start. Tell me, how did you pick her from the crowd? Did you promise her she would be mistress of Magnolia Avenue? And what lies did you tell Daniel to sway him? For the love of heaven, did you let them make love in your bed while you turned the other way?”

  “For shame!” cried Eva. “How dare you stand there and accuse me of baseness! If your husband sought the company of another woman, then you’ve got no one but yourself to blame. You spat on his love, mocked it, murdered it, and for what reason? Did you learn nothing from the mistakes of your ax-wielding mother? Daniel’s done no wrong. It’s you who chased him from your bed with your pride and your stubbornness, after he was kind enough to stay when he knew you could give him no more children!”

  The arrow did more than hit. Detecting a quiver in Meridia’s eyes, Eva sharpened her voice and added, “Hand me the boy. It’s the least you can do.”

  Silence, yet all at once Eva knew she had miscalculated. What she took as a weakening was but a lull in the shifting of forces. The quiver swiftly sealed itself with steel. The eyes tore at her with passionate honesty. Eva had no choice but to look away.

  “There is nothing here that belongs to him,” said Meridia. “Not a strand of hair or a drop of sweat. If you’re having trouble understanding me, I’ll gladly repeat myself.”

  The response—delivered calmly and almost inhumanly—struck louder than a slap. Before she could stop herself, Eva backed away from the door. For a second she saw tiny bright objects swarming her vision, and her cheeks suddenly burned with the old sting of Ravenna’s hand. It was the same unforgivable pain, the same crushing humiliation. Quickly she rallied herself. “I’ll get Noah somehow. Just you watch!”

  Meridia did not even blink. “If you ever come near him, I swear on the names of my father and mother, I’ll rip your heart out and feed it to you piecemeal.”

  She slammed the door shut. For several minutes Eva stood staring at it, absolutely livid, but finding no courage to strike.

  MERIDIA DID NOT LET Noah go to school that day. She told him that she needed his ideas on what to do with the house, but to herself, she admitted that she would not take chances with a woman like Eva. Sensing her restlessness, Noah raised no objection. She was in the midst of urging him to choose a color for his room when a note arrived from Permony. The girl, burdened with a troublesome pregnancy, excused herself for not coming to see them in person, and then continued:

  “You have every reason to be angry. Mama tried to hide things, but I can read well enough between the lines. Daniel has no excuse. I’m appalled by his conduct and I never imagined he would hurt you this way. However, if it makes the slightest difference, I have reasons to believe that he is suffering deeply from his action. Mama was just here, more upset than I have ever seen her, and she let slip that he’s taken to bed ill. She wouldn’t say from what, but I think he’s heartbroken. Even if it was impossible for you to forgive him, I thought you should at least know of his condition…”

  Meridia did not finish the rest. Her first instinct was to laugh and shred the note to pieces. Let him suffer! Let him wallow in the hell of his own making! But then gradually, as the thrill of vindication cooled in her blood, a part of her she had sentenced to die with the fall of the shovel began to revive. The note explained why Daniel had sent Eva for Noah, why he had not come to confront her himself yesterday. He was ill, aggrieved, heartbroken. What if Permony was right and he was truly sorry? Inconsolable and wishing he could take it all back? Her rational mind felt foolish to believe this, and yet the damage was done. For the rest of the morning, Permony’s words jangled in her brain, breeding hope, inciting anger, striking down resolutions already settled. In the end, she found herself in no greater clarity than when she started.

  At two o’clock, she left the house with Noah and headed to Magnolia Avenue. The boy asked point-blank, “What for, Mama?” She told him she had some business to do in the neighborhood, “things to pick up and bills to settle,” but of course she would not be mad enough to venture anywhere near their house. Noah lowered his head and said nothing. From this she knew he had stopped listening halfway through her excuses.

  They were almost at the shop door when it hit her that she had made a mistake. A festive tune was drifting from inside, followed by a laughter of tinkling silver bells that brought her to a standstill. Meridia did not have to search her memory far to remember where she had heard it before. A second later Eva’s warm voice confirmed her suspicion. “Pour us more tea, Sylva. The lady of the house should never permit her guests to die of thirst. Daniel, come down and join us!”

  Meridia stood petrified. In wave after wave, fury and humiliation swept the world from under her feet. Her vision tunneled to a single point, and all over her body her heart was trembling with a violent and unfamiliar sensation. She blinked quickly. The desire to storm and unleash, to flare up in rage and inflict severe and irreparable damage cried out with each beat of her wounds. She blinked again. In the second before she took the irreversible strides that would have vaulted her into the shop, a small hand grabbed her wrist and pulled her away. Meridia gasped as if emerging from a dream.

  “Let’s go, Mama,” said Noah.

  He led her away without another word. The pressure of his hand was enough to tell her that if she should look back with regret at the house with the flowing music and the easy laughter, or if for any reason she should remind herself of the way the sun slanted in the parlor while his father read the paper and drank coffee, then nothing on earth would save them from the heaviness of the days ahead.

  OVER THE NEXT TWO weeks, Meridia did everything she could to rid the house of its grudges. She had the walls painted a sunny yellow, fitted the rooms according to Noah’s approval, replaced the ghostly mirrors and moth-eaten curtains, and resuscitated the garden with tulips and hydrangeas. She hired a crew of experts to analyze the airflow of the house, and at her friend Rebecca’s suggestion, she rented a machine for ridding the air of perpetual chill. The device not only worked well but also cured the staircase of mischief—there were now exactly twenty-five steps to go up or down. In order to exterminate Ravenna’s rancor from the kitchen, Meridia commissioned workmen to strip the floor and ceiling, layer the walls with checkered paper, and install brand-new cabinets and appliances. She inaugurated the finished space by baking one hundred cream cakes from Patina’s recipe, and ended up stuffing herself and Noah to the point of sickness. For hours they could not move from the sofa, sugar in their hair and custard on their lips, and still they forced themselves to eat until they sank into a sleep without dreams.

  Unable to dismiss Eva’s threat from her head, Meridia walked Noah to school every morning and waited for him at the gate when the last bell rang. This precaution earned the boy no small ridicule from his friends, but he appeared impervious and did not object to his mother’s company. Around this time, the other students began to notice his deepening air of isolation. Noah was always amicable, ready to offer help when needed, but a barrier clearly separated him from the rest of them. At recess, he displayed no awkwardness in sitting and eating by himself, and when asked to play, he would participate with polite interest but never zeal. Many years
later, it was this trait of solitude that kept him alive in their memories. An intense and inscrutable boy, they would say to one another. Always peering ahead as if he had a crystal ball to look through.

  In reality, it took Noah a long while to adjust to his new life. Even after his mother’s feverish bout of redecoration was completed, the archaic house with its autumnal rooms and innumerable shadows continued to terrify him. After the first night, he chose to sleep in his own room, and although his fear kept him up till dawn, he breathed not a single word to his mother. Noah would never admit that what he feared most was to spot his grandfather Gabriel among the shadows. Whenever he imagined the grim paraffin face with its sharp nose and relentless brows lurking underneath his bed, he would break into a sweat and cover his face with a pillow.

  For a long time, despite Meridia’s urging, he did not dare enter his grandfather’s study. Here, year after year on his birthday, he had stood sweating before the massive desk in a necktie and a stiff-collared shirt, trying his best to keep still while his grandfather passed a terrifying glance over him. For this reason, he resolved to avoid the room at all costs. But one afternoon, it was his grandmother Ravenna who told him to go in. He was doing his homework in the front hall when he heard her approach from the kitchen, laughing more joyously than she had ever laughed in her lifetime. “Go on,” she said, clear as a whistle. “The bastard’s got no more use for his toys now that he’s stuck with me.” The moment he felt her hand on his shoulder, he was no longer afraid. He opened the door to the study and walked in. At once she encouraged him to play with the compass and the globe, the writing instruments, the crystal flasks, the alabaster jars that housed a million tiny seeds. He studied the archaic maps on the wall, intrigued by the names of continents that no longer existed, and then boldly added his own archipelagos with a red pen. He took down book after book from the towering shelves, and while he labored to decipher the arcane texts and convoluted diagrams, his grandmother Ravenna bustled happily around him. At dinnertime, Meridia found him asleep in Gabriel’s chair, his mouth open and his feet flung exhaustedly on the baronial desk.