Everything Happens as It Does (2 page)

4.
Be
es and Their Friends

 

Boris cohabited with bees; bees cohabited with him. The very first time his father took him to the beehive not too far from the house, the bees and Boris immediately took to each other. He was interested in the way his father pulled the honeycomb frames and pushed them back like drawers. They made the same sound. It all seemed like a game to his childish eyes.

Later his father would say that the bees did not gather around him, but swarmed around Boris. His father's head was covered with a net, propped from below by a wide-brimmed hat. The shape of a planet. But Boris would learn this only later, in school. That there were celestial bodies, spheres, some of them with rings. Saturn. His father's head at the beehive was like Saturn. Boris liked Saturn very much.

Later, when Maria read ancient Greek myths to him, he learned that Saturn was the father of Jupiter. Or rather, that Chronos was the father of Zeus. Saturn and Jupiter were their Latin names.

Maria had become his wife by then. But at the beehive he had no idea she even existed.

After that first time, Boris regularly went with his father to see the bees. He did not like the taste of honey. Perhaps that was why the bees liked him. He ate honey sometimes, because he had to comply with his mother's wishes, but he never enjoyed it. He knew from the very beginning that honey belonged to the bees, and his father rattling the drawers now seemed silly.

When he found a wild beehive for the first time, he saw how imperfect the man-made beehives were, with their little toy roofs. Doll houses in which the bees were forced to do what they naturally did anyway. Such things, and others, would cross his mind.

At some point he learned that there were queen bees, drones, and brood chambers, and this filled him with admiration. The worker-bees worked; they did their tasks without thinking. Boris decided that human beings were imperfect in comparison, because they would always think while doing things. And they would tire—whereas bees never grew tired. They simply reacted to changes in temperature. They stopped being bees below such-and-such degrees.

He gathered honey, filling jars with amber. Other people in the village also had beehives, but Boris seemed to have a special gift; he was so good at it that everyone relished his honey.

He never put on a beekeeper's veil. Not a single bee ever bothered or stung him. Boris found bees to be perfect and tried to learn everything there was to learn about them. Then he became the bees' man. And they became Boris's bees.

Year in, year out, the same thing would happen. Boris would lie down in the tall, soft grass between the beehives. At first he would hear them moving along their flight paths, then a wave of information signals that he could clearly sense would traverse the air. The bees would start hovering above him, and he knew that they were trying to decide which ones should descend on him. They would begin to land on him, covering first the bare skin, his hands and face, and afterward his entire body. They would stay there until he stirred to get up. Then they would lift off at once like a cloud of sound and he would walk away. He would eventually leave them behind and they would again busy themselves about their bee work.

No one knew that Boris and the bees had a special relationship. Or perhaps no one wished to know. The bees, just as the glasses did later, provided enough explanation for the boy's absentminded wandering, his reticence and his lack of interest in the food on his plate.

 

5.
Sisters and Brothers

 

His reticence did not diminish with the years. Since he learned faster than others, he had the small privilege of taking his exams in writing. They had suggested to his parents that he should pass some tests and go to a school for gifted children. But his parents had rejected the idea. What difference did it make if the child could learn faster—sending Boris to a different school meant acknowledging he was different. And that would have been too much.

But when he ranked first in the entry exams for the English Language School, there was no choice. Boris was to live with his sister in Plovdiv, where his room had already been prepared.

He didn't feel like leaving the village. Here he had conquered his own territory and he knew he could be left alone. In the city, he would have to start from scratch.

In any case, he had no choice. He had to continue his studies. He was glad he was older, because with age, the opportunities to raise barriers between himself and others grew larger.

His life in Plovdiv began with observing his sister's family. A husband and two children; he was the children's uncle. They all behaved as if being a family was the most natural thing in the world. The family seemed to engender and maintain itself. Maybe that was the case.

He quickly managed to discourage his sister from accompanying him anywhere. He drew his own itineraries and came to like the city, where he could be even less visible.

He liked the open-air amphitheater the best. There were people there at all times, like everywhere else in the city, but the space was designed for it. It was created with many people in mind. Even when it was empty, a distant din seemed to ripple through the air, inhabiting the area. He was moved by this ghostly presence. To him the human race appeared remarkable, as long as it remained at a distance.

The idea of apartment space, for example, seemed ridiculous to him. In the kitchen you cook. In the sitting room you sit. The bedroom is for sleep, and the children's room is for play. And in order to legitimize this division of space, people fitted each room with the respective pieces of furniture and appliances. And as if that was not enough, the damn shapes of these spaces simply drove him to despair.

They were all the same. He could see it from the outside. A mere glimpse at the façade and he could picture the hive inside. A hive that was not a real hive, and was much worse than the little man-made toy houses for the so-called domestic bees. What human beings considered rational was miles away from the living economy of bees. Between the act of pressing the washing machine button and the mood of the person pressing it there was an entire universe of folly that people called their lives.

Houses were a different story—when they were not ruined by the desire to transform them into modern apartments. They revealed unexpected spaces, which welcomed human beings the way a wooded glade did. But that was rare. He had looked carefully at all the houses in the old part of the city, but they all resembled taxidermied animals. Even if they had been alive before, today they were lifeless. Their colors were almost painful to look at.

His sister made it her habit to come into his room to wake him early in the morning. Even when she realized that Boris was always awake by the time she came in, she persisted. He decided not to deprive her of this privilege, allowing her to keep this tiny harmless territory so he could gain much larger terrain. For example, the right to be absent from the evening gatherings of the family. Or the right not to watch television.

His sister began to feel a peculiar awe toward him. Once Boris had openly acknowledged that he was different, she was no longer surprised by anything he did. He functioned like clockwork, always doing the same things at the same time of day, without showing impatience or boredom. He never talked about school or about his friends. How was he?—He was fine. Was everything alright?—It was.

The profound difference between them was compensated for by the absence of any serious problems. His behavior suggested that everything was under control, and people around him, at a loss about what else to think, reassured themselves that indeed “everything was under control,” believing they had reached that conclusion alone. Meanwhile, Boris spent his time reading, the overlap between his inner and outer age thinned, and he seemed to be always deep in thought, always thinking, but about what—that was beyond anyone's guess.

 

6.
Ghosts

 

Something did happen once, however. Or, to put it differently, something went out of control once.

Because of his calmness, Boris could often join a small group of classmates walking together part of the way back from school. Since he could accommodate both their conversation and his own thoughts, his classmates, tame enough, accepted his silent presence. He nodded, replied in monosyllables, and smiled if necessary so they would not consider him a complete stranger. Besides, for some inexplicable reason, he looked like an athlete; he was as fit as other boys would be only with much exercise. One day he took part in a group fight and that, once and for all, confirmed his right to be there, doing nothing.

There was a girl in the group who, despite his resistance, drew his attention. He could not explain the phenomenon in any rational way. The girl wore a pleated skirt, spread out like an umbrella over legs as thin as walking sticks, and that was that. Boris never looked at her, but was somehow constantly aware of her position or movement, which he felt like a spatial relation he could not overcome. He rebelled against this awareness which was forcing itself upon him, mobilized all his strength to destroy it, but it remained intact, as if some part of his mind, insusceptible to reason, kept registering the girl's presence. Perpetual motion. She was there, she was not there, she was approaching, she was moving away, tick-tick-tick—the skirt with the little legs.

His record of warmth-waves expanded like a file. The information, most of it monotonous and unvaried, kept accumulating, and Boris felt he now lived with it, as if it was his second heart.

A year passed, and then another. The girl stopped wearing the umbrella skirt, but he never even noticed. He was collecting the data of her movements, her appearances and disappearances. An oscillogram. Until one day she vanished from his life.

Late one evening, having wandered through the streets for a while, he saw her walking up the front of a white house. With her skirt and her thin little legs. Like a fly, like a bee. He saw her and that was that. He blinked in the moonlight, but he still saw her. She climbed to the eaves and continued over the roof, reached its top and disappeared on the other side.

Boris stood motionless in the silence. It never crossed his mind to run to the other side and watch her descent. He knew she was climbing down the other side. And so he left, carrying with him the image of the girl walking down the back wall of a white house.

 

7.
Digital Worlds

 

He kept reading until the moment he discovered computers. Then he finally entered a world that corresponded to his own expectations—he found a new way of creating order. A new way of possessing what he called his own. Entrances were designated by icons.

There was nothing friendlier in his life than these icons, behind which sparkled his treasures. The icons multiplied, and the electronic beeps with which his computer responded felt closer to home than anything else.

Then he began to create virtual civilizations. Primitive, medieval, improbable, all kinds of civilizations. Their populations grew according to the variables he would input, and people slaughtered each other, they always destroyed themselves completely, whether their lives were short, or long. The civilizations that quickly declined were not his favorites. He learned how to keep an archive of their histories and return to it for reference. Gradually he began to see the mistakes he had made, if these could indeed be called mistakes. He was not using all available options.

His first virtual worlds were short-lived, like explosions. Later they began to resemble pyramids, then spirals. The graphs of their development showed their respective level of stability. His goal was to create a kaleidoscopic civilization. He tried setting aleatory parameters. But his creations did not submit to such operations.

Then he started to feel some kind of responsibility for the people in his virtual worlds. And fear. Their longevity and their death depended on him. At first he liked the idea, but then he began to feel uncomfortable. Events were taking place on his computer even in his absence. Whenever he peeked inside, he was astounded to see how much his creations had progressed. He began to realize that his task was to slow down their development. And slowing it down meant adding more parameters. This, in turn, meant more variables. He searched for an optimal relationship between input parameters and the predictability of outcomes.

And, at some point, toward the end of high school, he knew what he wanted to do later in life.

 

8.
Fathers and Their Professions

 

Philip met Maria at a friend's house. Although he never liked to admit it, he failed to notice her at first. She had been sitting in some part of the room, watching him. He had felt her gaze, though without being able to identify where it came from.

For a long time afterward, he wondered why this creature stood there draped in black cloth, as if she were an extra in a bustling film scene.

Philip was a pathologist, and that caused him both annoyance and relief. He was the only one among his friends who could say in a word what he did for a living. For a twenty-seven-year-old man it made things easier. But when people, curious about the nature of his work, started asking questions, he was not good at explaining.

The voice on the phone had moved him so unexpectedly and profoundly that he had nearly hung up. He couldn't remember what they said to each other, just as later he couldn't recall anything specific from conversations with Maria. But he could remember situations in which her presence or her voice obliterated everything else.

It was impossible to say “no” to this voice, which was now calling to him from the receiver. Why him, and not someone else, he never understood. Here I am, Lord.

He proposed to her almost immediately, not knowing what he was doing. He knew only that he could not have done otherwise. She nodded, as if she had foreseen long ago that this was bound to happen.

Time seemed to be out of joint. The days were shamelessly short, the nights blended into one. Something was ripening in Philip; he could feel it in nervous spasms, but ignored it. He was spinning with Maria in a whirlwind. He had turned into a boomerang, always meekly landing at her feet, no matter what he thought, no matter what he did, and no matter who he saw.

Before meeting Maria, he had been simply Philip, a doctor, a pathologist. He had been able to describe himself in a word.

After meeting Maria, his center of gravity was transposed out of his body, and in the beginning this gave him strength. Strength that Maria absorbed.