The Beekeeper's Son

1895, Leonding, Austria.

The first time a bee stung me I screamed and my father looked at me the way you look at a dog pissing on the carpet.

The summer of his retirement, he brought home hives. Set them at the back of the garden, against the hedge. Nobody said a thing. In our house, nobody said anything. You made room and you shut your mouth.

The garden had never been any good. In summer the earth cracked. In winter it was mud. Tall grass. Rusted tools. After the hives, it became his place.

He made me put on the veil.

The cloth stuck to my face. The gloves were too big. My sweat tasted bitter. The bees started right away. A thick, continuous hum. It vibrated in your teeth. It filled everything.

— Adolf, shut your mouth and stand up straight.

My name in his mouth sounded like something he regretted signing.

— You cry when you're alone. Not in front of me. Not in front of them. Not in front of anyone.

My hands were soaked. My heart was pounding hard. I was trying to breathe without making a sound. I was shaking.

— They can smell you. Stop.

He saw it before I did. The more I tried to stop, the more it climbed up along my forearms. A fine tremor. The bees circled around the veil. They bumped against it. They came back. They were looking for an opening.

My father lifted a frame. His hand trembled too. Just a hesitation at the wrist. The frame vibrated and the cluster shuddered. The bees knew. So did I. He kept going. Slowly.

Under the veil, he had the face of a man whose stomach had given out in the night and whose body had been eating itself ever since, organ by organ, starting with the face.

Thirty-five years a customs officer. Thirty-five years standing behind a counter, in the smell of damp paper and cold coffee, deciding with one stamp whether you existed or you didn't. He could read a man in his sweat. In the way he holds out his hand. He'd learned you don't need to hit. You just need to delay. To look for a long time. A polite no that closes a life.

In retirement, he didn't leave the border. He brought it home. The hives were his post. The landing board, his counter. Us, we always arrived too late. Smiled too much. Answered wrong. Never had the right papers.

He'd traced a path for me. School. The uniform. A desk. The right side of the glass. Nothing that trembles.

And then he understood that I was drawing. I hid my drawings the way you hide evidence. Under the bed. Behind a plank. I drew what didn't exist: lit windows, straight hedges, open hands. I was drawing acquittal. I didn't know how to say it. I didn't have the words. Words were my father's territory. I had charcoal. Charcoal didn't ask anything of anyone.

He didn't tear up my sheets. He didn't shout. He did something more precise. He increased the hours in the garden. Slowly. An extra quarter hour per week. Like someone turning the hot water tap so slowly you don't feel the burn.

At first I told myself I'll draw tonight. Then I told myself tomorrow. Then when I'm done. And each time the word changed but the meaning stayed the same and the meaning was not yet and not yet is the polite way of saying never.

One morning I realized I wasn't drawing anymore. Not that I'd decided to stop. The time had been removed from my day with a surgeon's precision. I couldn't name the day it had tipped.

A bee slipped between the cloth and my cheek.

The sting was clean. Hot. I wanted to step back, rip off the veil, run. The gesture stayed stuck in my shoulders. I thought of his gaze.

I didn't move.

The skin swelled. The red rose. My eyes stung. The sweat thickened. The sun beat on the cloth and the cloth sent the heat back onto my mouth, my eyelids. Light too white. Hum too loud. Ground too far. Or too close.

My father kept going. He was putting the frame back in place.

My father had the garden. The bees. My body. The bees would do their work. They had no intention. They were applying a law. My father, he had intention. He called it training.

Maybe he believed that at the end there'd be something. A conforming son. A stamped son. Able to stand behind a pane of glass without trembling. Maybe he just wanted to check that his power still held.

The ground swayed. The black won the edges. Nothing left but the sound of bees and the burn.

I wondered if stings count when you're unconscious.

The worst part is that I wanted him to look at me. That I was standing in his garden with his bees on my face and I wanted him to raise his eyes and see that I was holding. After everything he'd taken there was still a place in me that wanted something from him.

1905, Linz, Austria.

I had no friends in that class. I had a seat. It's not the same. A seat is wood and emptiness around it. The desk knew my elbows. The boys knew my silence. Nobody attacked me. They went around me. I was a piece of furniture.

Pötsch came in on time.

He set his satchel on the desk. The leather struck the wood. Clean. Dry. The silence didn't fall. It rose. It came from the floor, from chair legs, from the dust, from the corners where the air keeps what hasn't been said. My father did the same at home. But he needed a belt and time. Pötsch needed two seconds and a look.

He turned off the light.

The lantern cast shapes on the wall. They trembled with the flame. The desks, the boys, the walls, all of it stopped counting. What remained was an inhabited dark. Something was about to be said. My body knew it before my head. I straightened up.

It was the same stillness as in my father's garden. Except in the garden I stayed still to survive. Here, I stayed still because I felt something beginning.

A boy in the back coughed. Another shifted his foot. The creak seemed obscene. Nobody laughed.

Pötsch said nothing. He placed his hands flat on the desk. He waited for the last sound to die on its own. Those who had still been talking looked like people who had soiled something.

He brought the match to the glass. The flame caught the wick. The light grew against the wall.

— There is, beneath the mountains of Thuringia, an emperor seated at a stone table. He has been there for centuries. His beard has grown. It has passed through the table the way roots pass through rock. The stone couldn't stop it.

He changed the glass plate. The mountain became an empire.

— They took his empire the day he died. They carved it up. They distributed it. Each prince took his share. Each share became a country. And each country forgot it had been an empire.

He forced nothing and that's what was terrible because a man who forces you can measure him you can calculate his limit but a man who doesn't force you don't know where he stops and you don't know if he stops.

— But the beard grows. The beard doesn't know the empire was carved up. The beard knows only one direction.

In the middle of a sentence his body let out a sound. Short. Muffled. An old man's intestines. Everyone heard it. Nobody moved. Pötsch paused. One second. Maybe less. Then he picked up exactly where he'd stopped. As if the sentence had simply needed air.

He turned the knob. The flame lowered. The shadows stretched across the faces. In the dark, some boys looked older. Others were waiting to be told what to do. One, near the window, was watching the image without entering it. It irritated me. I didn't know why. My neck stiffened as if before an insolence. A fault. The same kind of fault my father saw everywhere. I felt it and it scared me.

— The people didn't accept his death. The people said: he sleeps. To accept death is to accept that greatness ends. And the people refuse the end.

My nails dug into the wood. I didn't know if I wanted to cry or break something. I was sitting in that dark like a man hearing for the first time words he'd already been carrying without knowing them.

Pötsch placed his hand on the lantern. The heat of the glass against his palm.

— One day, he will rise. He will walk out of the mountain. He will look at the world. And he will ask what has become of what he built.

He let a beat pass. You could hear the others breathing. And behind it, the city.

— And those who are there will have to answer.

He turned off the lantern.

Black.

A boy stirred in the darkness. Pötsch spoke without relighting.

— The beard grows. The empire waits. And somewhere in this room there is perhaps someone who hears what the mountain says. Or perhaps not. The mountain has time.

He switched the lights back on. The fluorescents killed the mountain. The walls came back. The desks. The boys. Everything became small again.

I stayed seated one second longer. The others were already packing up. They had places to go. I had the mountain. And a new anger in my throat.

In the yard, I saw the boy from the window again. He was kicking a pebble. One kick. Then another. That was all he'd made of Pötsch. A pebble.

I went straight at him. He didn't see me coming. I grabbed him by the front of his shirt. I shook him. Not hard. Just enough so the fabric said yes to me. Just enough to taste it. And it tasted like my father.

— Did you like the class?

He looked at me. Dark eyes. Thick eyebrows. The kind of eyes my father would have stared at for a long time behind a glass before deciding.

— Where were you during class. I saw you. You were looking at the window. It's not your mountain. It's not your emperor. You don't have a mountain. You have the window.

I was talking too fast. I could feel it. I couldn't slow down.

— What's your name.

He said it. A name that didn't fit with the others. Too many consonants, or not in the right place.

— Hey. Let him go.

A girl. Third row. I didn't know her name. I knew the back of her neck and the wet sound of the pencil she chewed.

I let the boy go. He didn't leave right away. He stayed one second too long and in that second he looked at me for real. His gaze didn't tremble. It shamed me. Not because I'd been wrong. Because I'd seen myself. He took off.

She stayed.

— Proud of yourself?

— I didn't do anything.

— Your hands were on him.

— Not anymore.

— Look at your hands.

I looked at them. Closed. I opened them slowly, as if peeling something off.

— Do you still draw?

— How do you know.

— I saw you at the library. You were sitting alone in the back. You were drawing. You weren't moving. Nobody was looking at you. And I thought: that's the first time I've seen him without his teeth clenched, that one.

Without his teeth clenched. The words hurt.

— Yes. I'm preparing for Vienna.

— Show me.

I took out the notebook. The portrait of Pötsch, in charcoal. Three evenings on it. The hands mostly. Flat on the desk. The hands that bring the silence. That was the part nobody would look at and that I'd started over the most times. I was proud of that drawing. I was proud of few things.

She looked.

— It's good.

Two words. Two words for three evenings. It tasted like the stamp. Filed. Shelved. Next.

The heat rose to my face. Not just shame. A need to fill the space.

— Tonight there's Rienzi at the Landestheater. Wagner. A man nobody knows. He rises, he speaks, and the crowd follows him. His voice enters a place where people are cold and it makes them warm. The orchestra lasts for hours. You feel the music in the floorboards. In the armrests. In the chest.

My back straightened. I was filling the space of a man larger than me. And somewhere a small part of me watched this with disgust, the way you catch a lie that's working.

— Are you sure it's music you're talking to me about.

— Are you coming?

— Maybe.

She took a few steps. She stopped. She didn't turn around right away. When she did, her voice had changed. Lower. Simpler.

— Don't stop drawing.

She'd hesitated, as if she already regretted speaking.

— Why.

— Because when you draw you don't feel like biting. And when you don't feel like biting you're someone people can look at without being afraid. The rest of the time…

She left.

The rest of the time, no. The most honest sentence anyone ever said to me.

I stayed there. I knew she wouldn't come. I knew I'd spend the evening watching the theater door hoping it would open one last time and it would be her. I saw myself sitting in the dark, the music all around me, and I imagined she'd turn her head toward me and she'd see me. Not just when I'm drawing.

Me.

That night in the theater there would be an empty seat next to me. And that emptiness would have her exact shape.

1907, Linz, Austria.

My mother was melting. That's the only word. She was melting into her bed like a thing left in the sun too long. The iodoform stank. The yellow compresses stank. The whole room stank of chemicals and death. The chemicals were losing.

I stayed seated. I'd stopped going to class. I'd stopped drawing. I did nothing. Nothing was all I had.

My father had put me in a garden with bees to make a man of me. Take it. Shut up. Don't tremble. He thought that's what life was. Something stings you, you don't move, you win. He'd prepared me to endure. Not to lose. Because loss doesn't sting. It takes. Slowly. Without a sound. You can clench your teeth all you want. There's nothing to endure. There's someone leaving and you watching.

He wasn't watching. He went out. He found a task. He kept his counter even inside the house.

One day, my mother's voice had slipped from the threshold.

— Vienna?

— I sent it.

— Everything?

— The file. The drawings. Everything.

— Good.

Silence. Her breathing. The sound of the house around us. The sound of a house when walls and furniture remain and only one person still matters.

— You'll be accepted.

— You haven't even looked at my drawings.

She'd moved her head. Slowly. As if it cost her.

— I don't need to look at your drawings. I looked at you.

That was the sentence. The only one.

My father had spent his life looking at papers to decide if a man was worth a passage. My mother looked at people. Two counters. My father's closed. Hers opened.

She'd placed her hand on mine. Light. So light I nearly didn't feel it. It wasn't a hand that holds. Not a hand that grips. Not a hand that commands. It was a hand that says goodbye and I believe in you in the same gesture.

She died on a Saturday morning. I knew before Bloch opened the door.

Bloch came out. He closed the door behind him. The iodoform clung to his fingers, under his nails, in the creases of his palms. He carried my mother on his hands.

— It's over.

Two words. Like the girl's "it's good" in the yard. Same format.

Outside it was beautiful. The sun didn't apologize. The birds didn't slow down. The street went on. The baker was opening. The world turned with a precise indifference.

I cried. Like a kid. My father had told me: you cry when you're alone. Not in front of me. Not in front of them. Not in front of anyone. And I was crying in front of a man. And nobody asked me to stop.

Bloch was Jewish. A name that sounded different. A name you read twice behind a glass. That you weigh. That you suspect. That you delay. Two years before, I'd grabbed a boy like him by the shirt in a yard because his name didn't fit with the others, because I needed someone to correct so I could breathe.

And he was the only man on earth in front of whom I could cry.

Because his hands had touched my dead mother.

1908, Linz, Austria.

The letter was white. The seal clean. I opened it.

Admitted.

I read the word. I read it again. The paper trembled between my fingers. Or it was me.

By the third reading something rose in my chest.

The first yes of my life on official paper. The first stamp that said yes. My father had given thousands. Never to me. The school had done in one line what he'd never been willing to do in eighteen years. Recognize me without stinging me. Let me pass.

My mother had said: you'll be accepted. Without seeing the drawings. She'd been right. She wasn't there to be right.

I would draw.

I would draw my mother's world.