Throughout his life the person who had come closest to being his friend was his mother. And she had dominated entirely. She gave, but too much and too hard. He was not big enough to contain all that she pressed in upon him; to be constantly grateful for things he never asked for, never wanted. She mistook what was expensive for what was real. She pushed the father to work harder and harder, to buy toys, equipment, education. And all for a son who would have preferred his father’s time and attention to the toil that eventually broke him. She gave savagely. All the slights she had been dealt in her life she would protect him from; all the toys, games, love she had missed out on, she would shower upon him; all the opportunities she had not been given, she would throw open to him; all the neglect, the indifference with which her parents had treated her, she would make right in her relationship with her son. She treated him as her own wound, a wound that she would heal despite everything. She forgot that he was a person unto himself, and she failed to get to know that person. She did not let him reveal himself to her, did not ask him what he wanted, what were his preferences. She gave him what she would have wanted. She gave him what she felt he would need. And all was delivered with such passion and ferocity that the boy withdrew into a corner of himself.
Now he wanted a proper friend. He wanted a friendship grounded in equality and like-mindedness. This he had never had. But he always had his loneliness. As a child, as a man, as a priest he had always carried along, in a discreet bag, his loneliness. A small boy in sky blue, sitting at the end of his bed playing with his toys in shafts of sunlight. Alone. A big boy in grey, studiously at his school-books, waiting for a friend. But alone. A young man in black, barely out of teenagehood sitting reading in a college room. Waiting alone. A priest on his knees praying, closer-than-close to his God. Still waiting for a flesh-and-blood friend. His need had trembled through the years into something hard and constant. His loneliness the scent of incense. A scent picked up by the Beekeeper.
The longing of the priest seeped out only in his dreams. He never spoke to anyone of his wish. He knew that the words, ‘I’m lonely,’ would drive people away. The Beekeeper, harvester of dreams, could not get the priest to make a request while conscious, not even in that dreamy state between wake and sleep where the majority of the soul-stealer’s transactions had been struck.
Once after a service, the priest had spoken to the Beekeeper. Their conversation had begun innocently, the nature of converse between two men of education. Deep in discussion the Beekeeper had, for the first time in six centuries, made his offer not as a bee, not as a mere sound insinuating itself, but as a man. Admittedly he had adopted the guise and the protection of theory, ‘What if …?’ he began, and proceeded to make his offer. The priest immediately recoiled at the idea.
‘My soul is not mine to give,’ he replied, believing he was entering a purely theoretical discussion.
‘Then whose soul is it, if not yours?’ said the Beekeeper.
‘It is a gift from God,’ replied Father Zeothus.
‘A personal gift to you?’
‘Yes,’ the priest replied.
‘Then why is it not personally yours, to do with as you wish?’
The priest smiled, ‘Some things are not given in order that you possess them, they are given in order that you receive them. They are absolutely yours, but fundamentally a gift. A soul is not a commodity to pass on. It always remains a gift, it never becomes a commodity to be cut up, shared around, leased out. I could no sooner lease you my soul than I could fly.’
The Beekeeper threw back his head and laughed, ‘What if I told you I could fly?’
‘I would say you have sat too long in the sun, my friend,’ the priest replied, and also laughed.
The two parted company, the priest in good humour at having had a decent conversation, the Beekeeper in a state of perplexity. Several things had taken place that had not done so for several centuries. One, he had laughed. Two, he had made his offer as a man rather than in the guise of another creature. Three, he had been refused by a man in possibly the greatest state of need he had yet encountered. Four, he had been shocked. True, he had laughed at the response of the priest, but what if the priest were right? What if the soul could not be genuinely leased, what if it were a gift that could not be separated from the individual upon whom it had been conferred? What if what was real was what you believed to be real, if reality was the particular myths you chose to believe? Could your beliefs make you invincible, incorruptible? Could your beliefs protect you, irrespective of absolute truth, absolute reality? Was there anything in existence irreducible, beyond manipulation?
The Beekeeper threw off his apprehensions. He was living proof the priest was wrong. He had lived for six centuries, he had lived through the events that had littered those centuries, he had artefacts he could only possess had he acquired them during certain epochs, and he had witnessed events recorded, independently of himself, in history books.
‘Possession,’ he murmured to himself, ‘possession. Zeothus will not lease me his soul simply because he does not believe he can, not because he does not want to. A challenge,’ he smiled appreciatively, ‘who would have thought? Belief,’ he muttered, as he contracted, ‘let's see what games we can play with this toy, belief,’ he hummed to himself as he set off upon the wind.
***
Xia is waiting. For children to grow, for husband to relent, for conditions to change. Xia is waiting. ‘Xia will grow old,’ she sighs, ‘and still be waiting’. She placed a wet dish on the draining board, and looked out through the window. She looked out to the small lake at the foot of the mountain. It was called the Black Lake because it was said to be bottomless, black to its depths. It also sat in the shadow of the mountain. Behind the mountain the weather gathered. Slowly it swallowed up the summit and fell on the mountainside as rain. A sinuous curtain of rain, it hung, then fell in folds upon the lake's surface.
No rain fell yet on the house of Xia. It would take some minutes more before the deluge, driven by the wind, would reach her house. She turned and looked at her husband. He sat at the table eating without interest or pleasure. She looked down at him, shrouded in defeat.
How you used to run to me, she thought. Now, she looked away from him as if the sight made her feel sore and empty; now you have a hundred ways of running from me. You have learned so many ways to do nothing at all. You think I no longer listen to you; but you say nothing. Days come and nights go under the crushing weight of your silences. Compassion, if nothing else, should compel you to talk with me, take the awful weight of silence from upon us. Perhaps you do not feel the weight as I do. And she turned back to the sink, back to the dishes. Her feet found the grooves in the floor where she had stood for eons, waiting for some word from him. Below her the dishes, before her the window, outside the shimmering world. Freedom. The rain flew in at the glass, smudging the view, the colours of the world seeping into each other.
Xia looked at her reflection in the suds. Goodness, she thought, I’ve lost weight around the soul. I’ve stopped taking care of myself.
She turned to her husband. ‘I want to go to Australia,’ she said, ‘I want to visit my sister. It's been years since I've seen her.’ Then she braced herself for the list of why-it-isn’t-possible.
Without looking up, her husband began, ‘We do not have the money, besides the children have school, and the ...’
You’ve lost weight around the soul, she repeated to herself and ran her hands through the suds.
***
The Beekeeper picked up the scent. Unmistakable. The smell of human need. Nothing like it. The fragrance of this one? Freedom. Release from all that reduces, all that diminishes.
It was late afternoon and the shadows hung long and languid over the fields of the Beekeeper. He walked slowly down through his fields and, on reaching the boundary, he condensed. Smaller and tighter, c
ompressed yet almost weightless he became bee and was carried off on the prevailing wind. To fly. To feel at your centre - pitch, roll, yaw - the dimensions, the axes of flight. If he were a man in flight he knew he would feel it at the centre of his chest. To fly is not intellectual; it is all will and all sensation. To feel one’s way through space, to be carried along in the heady warmth of the thermals and updrafts, to feel one’s way along the myriad, limitless planes in air. There are no boundaries except earth and the denial of feeling.
He followed the scented thread thrown out by the woman, as it weaved its way through air. A chance meeting with a crosswind - decision - he changed direction. It was uncharacteristic for him to take a detour when he was following a scent. Now was a time of changes. The wind took him southward across the floppy-roofed Byzantine church, Agios Dimitrios. Upwards it surged, and he followed it to one of the highest peaks on the island crowned by the monastery of Agias Elessis. Centuries before, he had nicknamed it the Monastery of Clouds. Here the Beekeeper reclaimed navigation. He veered off the back of the crosswind and, under his own effort, flew to the highest roof at the rear of the monastery. He alighted on the wall and assumed the shape of a man. He sat looking towards the south-west of the island, out across the arrogant blue of the Mediterranean.
The sun had not yet settled into the sea, a lambency played upon white horses. Competing colours filled the sky.
‘It’s coming,’ he whispered, and looked west, straight out to sea. A blue sea before him, clear, numinous skies above. The wind roared in from the ocean. He braced himself. He could feel the wind as it raced up the face of the mountain and swept high above his head.
‘It’s coming,’ he repeated, smelling the air. He could taste the moisture increasing with every intake of breath. The speed of the wind increased, it tore up the side of the mountain that fell away south-west of the monastery. It forced itself higher and was flung into the sky.
Slowly then faster, the clear air condensed to haze, then faster and faster, swirling broiling, taking shape and form. Mist, steam condensing to critical point - what had been invisible shuddered into another form - the birth of a cloud just above his head. He threw up his hands, threw back his head, and howled like an animal. Up there, at that peak, solitary, trapped, his fingers rigid as he dragged them through cloud matter like blades through silk - streaks of cloud streaming between his fingers as he tore at the sky.
He turned his head from the tableau of release above him, the alchemy of release. In a fury he ran the length of the wall, and jumped. Straight out into the roaring wind, he reached for release in oblivion. For a moment as a man he hung in the air, momentarily caught up by the wind then, just before the fall, just as a cloud became material and his body plunged through its cloth, he was contracted to bee and thrown earthwards.
The careless flick of an indifferent force of nature. He swirled through invisible arcs in the air, plummeted towards the long grass and tumbled into the micro-thermals of the scrub. Alive. Never to die. No release.
Subdued, he sprawled out to man, and sobbed in the grass. Utterly beaten, he picked up the scent of Xia’s need, became bee and pressed on with the ritual of expiation.
***
Honey is roughly one-fifth sugar and minerals and four fifths water, yet it has unusual qualities. It has been used for centuries to dress wounds as it is a substance in which microbes cannot live. Alexander the Great was embalmed in honey - mellifluous shroud.
In a good season a hive can produce over sixty pounds of honey; honey surplus to the needs of the colony. Honey bees must, however, consume over ten pounds of honey to produce one pound of beeswax. Pollen is collected and mixed with water to form a type of bread which is fed to the young larvae. Honey is saved and stored for use as food for the entire colony in winter. It is a colossal effort, considering worker honey bees live for only four weeks in spring or summer, and up to six weeks during winter.
Bees collect the nectar from surrounding flowers and blend it with enzymes from glands in their mouths. The resulting mix is stored in hexagonal wax honeycomb until the water content is reduced to about one-fifth. At this point, the bee caps the hexagon with a thin layer of wax. This capping signals the honey is ready for harvesting.
***
Xia carefully measured out the ingredients. Local honey and crushed almonds, sugar, butter, flour, a little desiccated coconut, cinnamon, her own blend of spices, and icing sugar to dust the finished biscuits. It was Easter and Xia always made the traditional Easter delicacies to break the Lenten fast. Just as her mother had, and her grandmother before her.
As her fingers nimbly blended the ingredients, she tried to pretend her husband was not in the room with her. He sat in silence. He did not venture conversation. He simply sat. If she tried to begin discussion he would answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Years of trying, and failing, had made her feel defeated. She mixed flour and butter and tried to keep the silence from pushing the air from her lungs. She made sure the honey was warm and would easily mix. She looked quickly at her husband. She wished he would go, and take his silence with him. If she were by herself in the house she felt no silence, not even if the house itself were noiseless. But he sat there obstinate, indifferent doing nothing, just sitting in silence.
She poured in the sugar, dusting the mixture every so often with cinnamon and spices. She gradually added the honey and crushed almonds and finally the desiccated coconut.
The silence was bearing down on her, a dead weight. She tried to keep it at bay with her movements. She concentrated intensely on what she was doing. Please leave, she thought, please go, there must be something to do in the olive groves, the garden. But he remained, sitting silently.
She roughly pulled the mixture into small balls, then deftly rolled them into elongated egg shapes, until they were the length of the first two segments of her middle finger. Now, the most important part. She gave each biscuit a roll, three times, in the warmth of her hands. This, her mother had told her, was the most special ingredient in the Easter biscuits; the love infused by the warmth of human hands.
Xia carefully positioned each biscuit on the baking tray and, when it was full, she placed it in the oven. She grew a little desperate. All she had left to keep the silence out was the cleaning up. She set about her tidying, but the silence was beginning to seep in through cracks and crevices despite her activity. For years she had tried to talk with him, tried to initiate conversation. Her husband was a man of monosyllables. It did not occur to him that companionship inhered in the most mundane of conversations. If she had pressed him to talk, he would get sullen and defensive.
After half an hour of tidying she opened the oven to release a waft of warm spicy air that gathered like a hug around her body. The biscuits looked beautiful. She fetched icing sugar to dust them while they were still warm. The silence was broken by the sound of the chair legs being scraped along the wooden floorboards. Her husband got up and shuffled to the table.
‘They’re dry,’ he said.
Xia stood within reach of him. She slapped him hard across the face. She knew her action was utterly wrong, unforgivable, and she knew she would have done the same again in the same situation. He looked at her shocked, but he said nothing. He did not react at all; he merely shuffled from the house and took the silence with him.
The emptiness pressed in around her. Then, without warning, a hum, a voice at her ear.
‘I will lead you into the rain,’ it whispered, ‘you will be cleansed. You will find relief. No more waiting. You are thirsty, I will bring water. I will wipe your tears. I will gather you up and soothe your fears,’ comforted the voice at her ear, ‘I will lead you to freedom.’
Xia was not thirsty for water, nor for conversation. She was hungry for comfort, for reassurance. She thirsted for freedom.
***
The Beekeeper alighted on the window sill. It was
a warm night and the shutters were open to allow for any passing breeze. Xia was in bed by herself. Her husband had not said a word to her since she had slapped him. Not a word. No reaction. He merely made up his bed in another room and went to sleep.
Xia lay alone. She loved to sleep, it was a world peopled by lively people and warm experiences - the world of her dreams.
The Beekeeper, soul lifter, moved in. Xia dreamt of freedom. She dreamt of travelling, and in her dreams her travels were exotic. Cruising down the Nile breathing in the sights, sounds and smells of Luxor, Edfu, Karnak, the ruins at Aswan, pink granite quarry - stone womb - begetter of monumental children. The Beekeeper, as bee, moved in close to the sleeper’s ear, alighted on her pillow, sent out a low hum, a drone that spilt into words.
‘I can give you freedom, I can set you free into this great world, I can give you wings. Away from the crushing silence, the weight, I can add lightness to your soul.’
Teasing, prising, separating the soul from the jealous body, like gossamer from grass, gently easing the spirit from the flesh.
‘You are a captive,’ the vibration at her ear, ‘I will set you free. For one small transitory fee I will open the world to you and, at the end of a mere year, return your deposit. I will have taken nothing. You will have received all.’
Xia dreamed of Australia - red sand and blue skies. Away to the land of the Dreaming. The Beekeeper leant in, sifting the soul that ached a fraction from the body with each breath. Lifting rice paper from the delicacy, fearful of rents, tears that might cause a withdrawal of the timid. Cajoling, encouraging the passage of a yes.
The Beekeeper - from the collection: 'Night Flight from Marabar' Page 2
