The Final Solution

by Michael Chabon

  “Morning, ladies,” he said; or perhaps he merely thought it.

  He put his lips to the entrance hole and blew in a rank rich exhalation of mundungus. He had bred a commendable docility into his stock but when you came to steal their honey it was best not to take any chances. The shag he favored possessed remarkable powers of tranquilization; The British Bee Journal had published his notes on the subject.

  He ratcheted himself to his feet and prepared to remove the super, with its fat, waxy combs. This was not a task he relished; the supers got heavier every year. It took no effort to imagine losing his footing on the way to the covered porch around the back of the cottage where he ran the extractor: the snap of a critical bone, the splintered frames of honey spilt on the ground. He did not fear death exactly, but he had evaded it for so many years that it had come to seem formidable simply by virtue of that long act of evasion. In particular he feared dying in some undignified way, on the jakes or with his face in the porridge.

  Carefully he let his pipe go out and then tucked it into the wide pocket of his bee suit alongside his matches and pouch of tobacco. Benzoic aldehyde was only moderately flammable, but the prospect of setting himself on fire with his own pipe conformed to his worst ideas of the indignity that death would one day visit upon him. With the pipe out of the way, he unstoppered the brown glass bottle, and his organ of smell was overwhelmed, all but undone, by a strident blast of marzipan. He sprinkled the stuff liberally on the felt batting of the fuming board. Then he reached for the peaked roof of the hive and lifted it off. Quickly, nearly dropping it, he laid it on the ground and turned back to the comb, the beautiful comb, each cell of it sealed with a wax cap of sturdy bee manufacture. It had the strange pallor of heather honeycomb, an intense whiteness, white as death or a gardenia. He admired it. Here and there a bee surprised at its business contemplated the meaning of the disturbance, the sudden burst of daylight. One, a heroine of her people, rose at once into the air to attack him. If she stung him, he didn’t remark it; he had long since grown habituated to the stings. He settled the fuming board down over the pale expanse of comb and hoisted the roof back into place over it. In a few minutes the hated stench of the aldehyde would have driven any bees still hanging about the comb down to the next level in the hive.

  When the veil of his bee hat was lowered he generally could hear nothing apart from the breathing and the mumble of bees. But he had not troubled with the veil, with the bees so slow and fat, and so he chanced to hear the stifled cry behind him. It was more of a gasp than a cry, really, brief and disappointed. At first he thought it must be the Satterlee girl but when he turned he saw the boy standing by the garden shed, sucking on the back of his hand. He was wearing the same short pants and clean, pressed shirt as on the day of their first encounter, but standing there without the parrot he struck the old man as looking glaringly bereft.

  The old man grinned. “Hurts, don’t it?”

  The boy nodded slowly, too surprised or in too much pain to feign lack of understanding. The old man ambled over to him, shaking his head.

  “What a singularly unlucky boy you are,” he said. “Let’s have a look.”

  He took hold of the boy’s hand. On the back, just below the wrist, a puffy nipple of flesh, tipped with the black filament of the barb. The old man took a matchbox from the zip pocket of his bee suit, poked out the tray of matches. Cupping the tray in his left hand, with his right he flattened the outer sleeve of the matchbox. Then, using an edge of the flattened bit of cardboard, he scraped the sting out of the boy’s hand. The boy wept freely during this procedure.

  “Mustn’t yank them out,” he told the boy with a sharpness he did not entirely intend. He was aware of the existence of a vocabulary for the consolation of sorrowing children, but it was one he had never troubled to learn. Boys had served him well over the years—but that was in another century!—extending the reach of his eyes and ears, passing invisibly into dark lanes and courtyards where his own presence would have drawn undue attention, slipping over transoms, through the back doors of hostile alehouses, in and out of the stable yards of crooked horse trainers. And in his own lofty jocular way he had spoken to and even, carelessly, cared for those boys. But they were a different species of boy entirely, ragged, rude, pinched and avid, holes in their shoes, holes for eyes, boys disciplined by hunger and poverty to display the narrowest possible spectrum of human emotion. They would have sooner drunk lye than allowed themselves to be seen to shed a tear. “Only spreads the venom.”

  The barb tumbled free; the boy took back his hand and studied the pink histamine swell. Then he returned his hand to the solace of his mouth. There was something about the sight of the mute boy sucking on the back of his hand that enraged the old man. He allowed a desire to slap the boy’s cheek thrill him for a moment.

  “Wait a moment,” he said. “Not like that.”

  Fumbling, rage and arthritis crippling his fingers, he tried to reassemble the components of the matchbox. The little drawer tipped and scattered matches on the ground. The old man swore. Then, at once with deliberateness and out of some wild impulse he swore a second time, vilely, in German. The agreeably rancid syllables escaped his lips with an audible smack of pleasure.

  The boy unkissed the fiery back of his hand. A wicked look animated the wide somber gaze, a parrot gleam of hard amusement that had from time to time, in that vanished nineteenth century, flared in the hard hollow eyes of those ragged urchin irregulars. The boy unburdened the old man of the sundered halves of matchbox, knelt down, quickly gathered up the strewn matchsticks, and tucked them neatly into their berth. He passed the box back to the old man, who restored it to the zip pocket of his bee suit and took out the pouch of shag. He removed a pinch, showering rank confetti on the ground. Out came his ogre tongue, pointed and fissured. A dab of his dragon saliva. Then he held out his hand to the boy.

  “Here,” the old man said as gently as he could manage. He had a feeling that it was none too gently. The boy understood. He passed his wounded hand to the old man, his face at once grave and expectant, as if they were about to seal some boyish pact in pinpricks of blood or palms anointed with sacrosanct saliva. The old man laid the moist gob of tobacco against the welt. He took the boy’s other hand and pressed the palm against the bee sting and the knot of tobacco. “Like this. Hold it there.”

  The boy obeyed while the old man labored to remove the fuming board from the uppermost super. He hoped he had not left it to sit too long; prolonged exposure to the fumes could queer the flavor of the honey. Setting the board to one side he grasped the ends of the honey-laden super and staggered a few steps toward the extracting porch, working feverishly, and with a desperation that saddened him, not to appear to be staggering. His effort failed to fool the boy. There was a squeak of rubber soles in the grass and then the boy was there, beside him, taking hold of one end of the rectangular frame of the super with the injured hand—the welt appeared already to have begun to subside.

  Together they made their way to the porch. The boy’s eyes were not on the old man but on the air around him, darting, wary, fearing a further attack. As the old man struggled to get the screened door open the weight of the frame shifted inexorably onto the boy. He bore it. They lumbered into the porch, where the centrifuge, with its great, toothed hand crank, waited, bearing the patient reproachful air of all idle farm machinery. Even open as it was, a deep, vinegar gloom hung about the porch from bygone years of harvest. They laid the tray with its weirdly radiant cargo of wax on a clean bedsheet and started back toward the hives.

  Laboring alone—his way, preferred and inevitable, for the past thirty years—it might have taken him until well past dark to finish the job of removing the supers one by one from the six hives, two supers per hive; cutting out the frames of comb; slicing off the wax caps with the heated blade of a bread knife; loading dripping sections of cut comb into the extractor and working the crank until all the honey that could be persuaded to abandon the combs had
been drained off, by various operations of centrifugal force and gravity, into the settling jars; ensuring that the porch was screened and sealed against counterraids; and returning the ravaged supers to the hives. With the help of Linus Steinman, increasingly competent as the day wore on, intelligent and handy and blessedly, staunchly, wonderfully free of conversation, he completed the work just after four in the afternoon. They stood together in the screened porch, in the dense, foul reek—like the atmosphere of a planet of fermentation and decay, like the planet Venus in all its purported rank inhospitable riot—of honey. At the stilling of the centrifuge the porch, the farmstead, this vale in the lee of a hillside, the immense bowl of tedious green country around them seemed to fill with a thick and gummy mass of silence.

  All at once the comfort of their mutual labor abandoned them. They regarded each other.

  The boy had something he wanted to say. He felt his pockets, fingers sticking with a whispery rasp to the fabric of short trousers, and shirt. His bit of pencil turned up in the seat pocket of his short trousers, but as the search for the pad continued without issue a crease appeared in the boy’s domed brow. He patted himself up and down until filaments of honey floss formed between his fingertips and pockets, coating him in a gossamer down. The old man watched helpless as the boy, with mounting agitation, spun threads of loss from his palms and fingertips. Doubtless the pad, in the continued absence of Bruno, was all that remained to him in the way of a companion to his thoughts.

  “Perhaps you dropped it by the hives,” the old man suggested, and as he said the words he heard both the note of genuine comfort that he had, at last, managed to work into them; and the utter adult hollowness of the hope that they extended.

  Duly they tramped out across the hiveyard where the old man, his joints ablaze, his muscles quivering, managed to get his clattering remains down onto the ground. With his accustomed canine aplomb he combed the yard for the cheap pasteboard-and-pulp remnant of the lost boy’s voice. From the low angle of his search the six hives loomed white and solemn in the late sunlight as a street of temples in Lucknow or Hong Kong. While he crawled on hands and knees the possibility of his dying thus recurred to him, and he found to his pleasure that no shadow of indignity darkened the prospect. Long life wore away everything that was not essential. Some old men finished their lives as little more than the sum total of their memories, others as nothing but a pair of grasping pincers, or a set of bitter axioms proven. It would please him well enough to amount to no more in the end than a single great organ of detection, reaching into blankness for a clue.

  At last, however, he was forced to concede that there was nothing to be found. When he rose unsteadily to his feet, the throbbing of his joints was like a universal sentiment of loss, the action on his bones of certain things’ implacable resistance, once lost, to ever being found. Heavily, as if fetching it from far across the North Sea, the boy produced a sigh. The old man stood, shrugging. With the consciousness of failure, a gray shadow seemed to steal over his senses as if, steady as a cloud, a great obstructing satellite were scudding across the face of the sun. Meaning drained from the world like light fleeing the operation of an eclipse. The vast body of experience and lore, of corollaries and observed results, of which he felt himself the master, was at a stroke rendered useless. The world around him was a page of alien text. A row of white cubes from which there escaped a mysterious drone of lamentation. A boy in a glowing miasma of threads, his staring face flat and edged with shadow as if cut from paper and pasted against the sky. A breeze drawing rippling portraits of emptiness in the pale green tips of the grass.

  The old man brought a fist to his lips and pressed it there, fighting down a hot spike of nausea. His attempt to reassure himself with the dim recollection that such eclipses had happened before was arrested by the counter-recollection that they were coming more frequently now.

  Linus Steinman smiled. From some unplumbed pocket, or lining the boy had produced a scrap of card. The occluding moon rolled on; the world was dazzled once more with sense and light and the marvelous vanity of meaning. The old man’s eyes filmed with shameful tears as, relieved, he watched the boy scribble a brief query on the bit of paper he had found. He came across the grass and, a question in his eyes, handed the old man the torn scrap of ecru laid.

  “Leg ov red,” the old man read. He felt strongly that he ought to understand this communication but the sense of it lay just beyond his grasp. Perhaps his breaking-down brain had failed, this time, to make a full recovery from its recent lapse. An invocation, perhaps, illiterate and broken, of the pink-tinged talons of the vanished African gray? Or—

  The scrap slipped from the old man’s fingers and spun fluttering to the ground. The old man stooped, grunting, to retrieve it, and when he picked it up again found on the reverse of the scrap two words and a numeral, written not in the boy’s crooked graphite scratch but in the bold hand of an adult, in black ink with a narrow nib. It was the address, in Club Row, of Mr. Jos. Black, Dealer in Rare and Exotic Birds.

  “Where did you get this paper?” the old man said.

  The boy took back the card and, under the address, scrawled the single word: BLAK.

  “He was here? You spoke to him?”

  The boy nodded.

  “I see,” the old man said. “I see that I must go up to London.”

  9

  Mr. Panicker nearly ran him down.

  In fine weather, and driven by a man as sober as the tenor of his profession demanded, the Panicker vehicle, small, Belgian, ancient, ill-used by the son of its current owner and retaining few of its original constituent parts, was difficult to govern. Its tiny windscreen and broken left headlamp lent it a squinting, groping aspect, like that of a drowning sinner seeking an allegorical lifeline. Its steering mechanism, as was perhaps fitting, relied to a large degree on the steady application of prayer. Its brakes, though it was blasphemy to say, may have lain beyond the help even of divine intercession. On the whole in its unfitness, shabbiness, and supreme air of steady and irremediable poverty it neatly symbolized, in his own personal view, all that was germane to the life of the man who—far from professionally sober and caught up in a gust of inward turbulence nearly as profound as that which on this cold, wet, blustery, thoroughly English summer morning buffeted the sad tan Imperia from one side to the other of the London road—found himself, his foot pumping madly at the hopeless brake pedal, the single wiper smearing and revising its translucent arc of murk across the windscreen, on the brink of committing vehicular manslaughter.

  At first, seeing nothing but a flapping shadow, a tumbling sheet of oilcloth blown from on top of some farmer’s woodpile, empty and uninhabited, he prepared to plunge straight through it and trust in the ironic fortune that had ever been his to fathom. Then, just as the furling blanket of his destiny was about to swallow him, the sheet resolved itself into a cloak and claws, a great bat of brown tweed flapping toward him. It was a man, the old man, the mad old beekeeper, lurching into the road with his long pale face, arms awhirl. A huge frantic hawk moth fluttering into his path. Mr. Panicker wrenched the wheel to the left. The open bottle, purloined from his wretched son, that until now had been the sole companion of his turmoil flew from its perch on the seat beside him and smacked against the glove compartment, scattering brandy as it swung through the air like an aspergillum. With a palpable sense of freedom, as if at last it had attained the state to which, throughout its meager career of puttering, shivering, creeping, and stalling, it had long aspired, the Imperia described a series of broad, balletic loops across the London road, each linked, in a circular pattern, to the last, leaving a child’s drawing of a daisy half drawn in streaks on the slick black macadam. It was at this point that Mr. Panicker’s relations with his deity once again demonstrated their long-standing sardonic trend. The car abandoned or perhaps lost interest in its escapade and came to a juddering stop some twenty feet farther along the road than it had begun, its bonnet directed faithfully toward Lon
don, engine rumbling, lone headlamp peering through the falling rain, as if it had received a scolding for its antics and was now prepared to continue on its humble way. His process of thought, hitherto a chaotic combustion fueled by twin reservoirs of unaccustomed bibulousness and a kind of jolly rage, also appeared to have come juddering to a halt. Where was he going, what was he doing? Had he truly, at long last, escaped? Could one simply roll one’s trousers in a grip and walk out?

  The passenger door flew open. With a howl of wind and trailing a retinue of raindrops the old man billowed into the car. He pulled the door shut behind him and shook himself in his Inverness like a lean dank dog.

  “Thanks,” he said curtly. He turned his horrible bright gaze on his rescuer, on the upended bottle of brandy, on the torn seat-leather and exposed wires and peeling dashboard, on the very state, or so it seemed to Mr. Panicker, of his sodden and astonished soul. His long flared nostrils felt out each scattered fleck of brandy in the air. “Good morning to you.”

  Mr. Panicker understood that he was expected now to engage the forward gear and proceed to London, conveying thither, as if they had prearranged it, his new passenger and his smell of wet wool and tobacco. Yet he could not seem to bring himself to do so. So profound had his unconscious identification with the 1927 Imperia become that he felt now as if this large, damp old man had intruded directly into the glum sanctity of his own rattletrap skull.

  The engine as if with a sigh settled into a patient idle. His passenger seemed to interpret Mr. Panicker’s immobility and silence as a request for explanation, which, in a manner of speaking, Mr. Panicker supposed, it was.