Love and Obstacles (14 page)

To my father’s creative biography I should add his carpentry, which frequently reached poetic heights: more than once we witnessed him caressing or kissing a piece of wood he was about to transform into a shelf, a stool, or a beehive frame; not infrequently, he forced me to touch and then smell a “perfect” piece of wood; he demanded that I appreciate the smooth knotlessness, its natural scent. For Father, a perfect world consisted of objects you could hold in your hand.

He built all kinds of things: structures to hold my mother’s plants, toolboxes, beds and chairs, beehives, et cetera, but his carpenterial masterpiece was a nailless kitchen table he spent a month building. He paid a price: one afternoon he emerged from his workshop, his palm sliced open with a chisel, the blood gushing and bubbling from its center, as from a well—a detail worthy of a biblical miracle. He drove himself to the hospital, and afterward the car looked like a crime scene.

He also liked to sing anything that allowed his unsophisticated baritone to convey elaborate emotional upheavals. I remember the evening I found him sitting in front of the TV, with a notebook and an impeccably sharpened pencil, waiting for the musical show that was sure to feature his favorite song at the time: “Kani Suzo, Izdajice”—“Drop, You Traitor Tear.” He wrote down the words, and in the days that followed he sang “Kani Suzo, Izdajice” from the depths of his throat, humming through the lyrics he couldn’t recall, getting ready for future performances. He sang at parties and family gatherings, sometimes grabbing a mistuned guitar from someone’s hand, providing accompaniment that comprised the same three chords (Am, C, D7) regardless of the song. He seemed to believe that even a severely mistuned guitar provided “atmosphere,” while the harmonic simplification enhanced the emotional impact of any given song. There was something to be said for that: it was hard to deny the power of his baritone against the background of the discordant noise worthy of Sonic Youth, a tear glimmering in the corner of his eye, on the verge of committing betrayal.

His photography merits a mention, even if its main function was to record the merciless passing of time. Most of his photos are structurally identical despite the change of clothes and background: my mother, my sister, and I facing the camera, the flow of time measured by the increasing amounts of my mother’s wrinkles and gray hair, the width of my sister’s beaming smile, and the thickness of the smirking and squinting on my face.

One more thing: He once bought a notebook, and on the first page wrote:
This notebook is for expressing the deepest thoughts and feelings of the members of our family.
It seemed he intended to use those feelings and thoughts as material for a future book, but few were expressed. I, for one, certainly wasn’t going to let my parents or my sister (ever eager to tease me to tears) in on the tumultuous events in my adolescent soul. Thus there were only two entries: a cryptic note from my mother, who probably just grabbed the notebook while on the phone and wrote:
and a line from my sister, in her careful and precise prepubescent handwriting:

 

Whatever conveyed reality earned my father’s unqualified appreciation. He was suspicious of broadcast news, relentlessly listing the daily triumphs of socialism, but was addicted to the weather forecast. He read the papers, but found only the obituaries trustworthy. He loved nature shows, because the existence and the meaning of nature were self-evident—there was no denying a python swallowing a rat, or a cheetah leaping on the back of an exhausted, terrified monkey.

My father, I say, was deeply and personally offended by anything he deemed unreal. And nothing insulted him more than literature; the whole concept was a scam. Not only that words—whose reality is precarious at best—were what it was all made from, but those words were used to render
what never happened.
This dislike of literature and its spurious nature may have been worsened by my intense interest in books (for which he blamed my mother) and my consequent attempts to get him interested. For his forty-fifth birthday I unwisely gave him a book called
The Liar
—he read nothing of it but the title. Once I read him a passage from a García Márquez story in which an angel falls from the skies and ends up in a chicken coop. After this my father was seriously concerned about my mental capacities. There were other, similar incidents, all of them appalling enough for him to start casually mentioning his plan to write a
real
book.

He didn’t seem to think that writing such a book was a particularly trying task—all one needed to do was not get carried away by indulgent fantasies, stick to what really happened, hold on to its unquestionable firmness. He could do that, no problem; the only thing he needed was a few weeks off. But he could never find a time: there was his job, and bees, and things to be built, and the necessary replenishing naps. Only once did he approach writing anything—one afternoon I found him snoring on the couch with his notebook on his chest and a pencil with a broken tip on the floor, the only words written:
Many years ago.

My father began writing in Canada, in the winter of 1994. They had just landed, after a couple of years of exile and refugee roaming, the years I spent working low-wage jobs and pursuing a green card in Chicago. They had left Sarajevo the day the siege began and went to my deceased grandparents’ house in the countryside, ostensibly to escape the trouble. The real reason was that it was time for the spring works in my father’s apiary, which he kept at the family estate. They spent a year there, on a hill called Vuijak, living off the food they grew in the garden, watching trucks of Serbian soldiers going to the front. My father occasionally sold them honey, and toward the end of that summer started selling mead, although the soldiers much preferred getting drunk on slivovitz. My parents secretly listened to the radio broadcast from the besieged Sarajevo and feared a knock at the door in the middle of the night. Then my mother had a gallbladder infection and nearly died, so they went to Novi Sad, where my sister was attempting to complete her university degree. They applied for a Canadian immigration visa, got it, and arrived in Hamilton, Ontario, in December 1993.

From the window of the fifteenth-floor unfurnished apartment they moved into they could see piles of snow, the smokestacks of the Hamilton steel mills, and a vacant parking lot. It was all black and white and bleak and gray, like an existentialist European movie (which my father found unreal without exception, and morbidly boring on top of it). He started despairing as soon as he set foot on Canadian soil: he didn’t know where they had landed, how they were going to live and pay for food and furniture; he didn’t know what would happen to them if one of them got terribly sick. And it was perfectly clear to him that he would never learn the English language.

My mother, on the other hand, let her stoic self take over—partly to counterbalance my father’s darkest fears, partly because she felt so defeated that it didn’t matter anymore. It was okay now to give herself to the tragic flow of things and let happen whatever was going to happen. My mind stores an image of her patiently and unfalteringly turning a Rubik’s Cube in her hands, while a report on a Sarajevo massacre is on TV, completely unfazed by the fact that she is not, and never would be, anywhere close to the solution.

Soon enough, my mother set up the apartment with the used furniture her English teacher had given them. The place still looked hollow, devoid of all those crumbles of a lived life that lead you back home: the heavy green malachite ashtray Father brought back from Zaire; a picture of me and my sister as kids, sitting in a cherry tree, smiling, my sister’s cheek pressing against my arm, me holding on to a branch with both of my hands like a chimpanzee (I fell off the tree and broke my arm the instant after the picture was taken); a spider brooch my mother kept in a heavy crystal ashtray; a moisture stain on a bathroom pipe that looked like an unshaven, long-haired Lenin; honey jars with labels that had little bees flying out of the corners toward the center, where the words “Real Honey” stood out in boldface—none of those things was there, now slowly fading into mere memories.

My father dropped out of his English class, furious at the language that randomly distributed meaningless articles and insisted on having a subject in every stupid sentence. He made cold calls to Canadian companies and in unintelligible English described his life, which included being a diplomat in the world’s greatest cities, to perplexed receptionists who would simply put him on indefinite hold. He nearly got sucked into a venture set up by a shady Ukrainian who convinced him there was money in smuggling Ukrainian goose down and selling it to the Canadian bedding industry.

Sometimes I’d call from Chicago and my father would pick up the phone.

“So what are you doing?” I’d ask.

“Waiting,” he’d say.

“For what?”

“Waiting to die.”

“Let me talk to Mom.”

And then, one day, when his woe became so overwhelming that his soul physically hurt, like a stubbed toe or a swollen testicle, he decided to write. He wouldn’t show his writing to my mother or sister, but they knew he was writing about bees. Indeed, one day in the early spring of 1994, I received a manila envelope with another envelope inside, on which was written, in a dramatic cursive,
The Bees, Part 1.
I have to confess that my hands trembled as I flipped through it, as if I were unrolling a sacred scroll, uncovered after a thousand years of sleep. The sense of sanctity, however, was diminished by a huge, sticky honey stain on page six.

There is something faithfully connecting our family and bees,
my father starts his narrative.
Like a member of the family, the bees have always come back.

He then proudly informs the reader that it was his grandfather Teodor (the reader’s great-grandfather) who brought civilized beekeeping to Bosnia, where the natives still kept bees in straw-and-mud hives and killed them with sulfur,
all of them,
to get the honey. He remembers seeing straw-and-mud hives in the neighbors’ backyards, and they looked strange to him, a relic from the dark ages of beekeeping. He recounts the story of the few hives that arrived with the family from the hinterlands of Ukraine to the promised land of Bosnia—the only thing promised was plenty of wood, which enabled them to survive the winters. The few hives multiplied quickly, the development of beekeeping in northwestern Bosnia unimpeded by World War One. My grandfather Ivan, who was twelve when he arrived in Bosnia (in 1912), became the first president of the Beekeeping Society in Prnjavor. My father describes a photograph of the Society’s founding picnic: Grandfather Ivan stands in the center of a large group of nicely dressed peasants with a then fashionable long mustache and dandily cocked hat. Some of the peasants proudly exhibit faces swollen with bee stings.

Sometimes there were interesting mischiefs with bees,
my father writes, failing to mention any
mischiefs.
The sudden sentence is one of his many stylistic idiosyncrasies: his voice wavers from establishment of the historical context with a weighty, ominous phrase like
War was looming across that dirt road
or
Gods of destruction pointed their irate fingers at our honey jars
to the highly technical explanations of the revolutionary architecture of his father’s hives; from the discussion of the fact that bees die a horrible death when they sting (and the philosophical implications thereof) to the poetical descriptions of hawthorn in bloom and the piping of the queen bee the night before the swarm is to leave the hive.

Father devotes nearly a page to the moment he first recognized a queen bee.
A hive contains about 50,000 bees,
he writes,
and only one queen.
She’s noticeably bigger than other bees, who dance around her, swirl and move in
peculiar, perhaps even worshipful ways.
His father pointed at the queen bee on a frame heavy with bees and honey, and, my father writes,
it was like reaching the center of the universe
—the vastness and the beauty of the world were revealed to him,
the logic behind it all.

In an abrupt transition, he asserts that
the most successful period of our beekeeping ended in 1942, during World War Two, when we for the first time lost our bees.
It is clear that was a major catastrophe for the family, but my father keeps everything in perspective, probably because of what was going on in the besieged Sarajevo at the time of his writing.
There are worse things that can happen to you. A whole family, for example, can perish without a trace,
he writes
. We didn’t perish, which is excellent.

He then draws a little map at the center of which is the hill of Vuijak, near the town of Prnjavor, whose name appears at the fringe of the page. He draws a straight line from Prnjavor to Vuijak (
6 kilometers,
he writes along the line), ignoring the creeks, the forests, and the hills in between (including the hill I tumbled down). He places little stars around the page, which seem to represent different villages and people in that area.
It was a truly multinational place,
he says, wistfully.
Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Italians, Serbs, Muslims, Croats, and all the mixed ones.
He calculates that there were seventeen different nationalities—there was even a tailor in Prnjavor who was Japanese. Nobody knew how he got there, but when he died, there were only sixteen nationalities left. (Now, I have to say that I’ve inquired about the Japanese tailor, and no one else remembers him or has heard about him.) In 1942, lawlessness was rampant, and there were roaming gangs of Serbs and Croatian fascists and Tito’s partisans too. All those
others,
who had no units of their own, save the Germans, were suspect and vulnerable. One day, two
semi-soldiers
showed up at the door of the family’s house. They were their neighbors, ordinary peasants, except for their rickety rifles and caps with the partisan red star in the front and the Chetnik insignia (an ugly eagle spreading its mighty wings) in the back—they switched according to need. There was going to be a great battle, the peasants said, the mother of all battles.
They said we should be well advised to leave.
The peasants said they would padlock everything, and
they showed us a huge key, for which obviously no padlock existed.
They suggested, touching the knives at their belts as if inadvertently, that
we take only what we could carry. Father begged them to let us take a cow; my mother, five sisters, and two brothers wept. Winter was around the corner.
Perhaps it was the weeping that made these neighbors take pity and let my father’s family bring a cow, although it was the sick one—her shrunken udder would not provide any milk or solace.
And we left thirty beehives behind.