The Castle in the Forest (15 page)

8

T
hese days Angela had come into her first period, and Klara was doing her best to allay the girl's distress. She could see that it was connected in Angela's mind with Rosig, who hemorrhaged blood all over her hams before she died.

To bring some calm to such outraged feelings, Klara spoke for the first time of intimate matters. She adored her stepdaughter. The twelve-year-old was by now the equal of a close friend, and so Klara spoke not only of this new condition, but went on at good length about odor in general, and its peculiar subtleties in nature. Odor was part of nature. Casting about for happy examples, she presented a piece of information Alois had provided her in passing. Once, Klara had asked how he could be sure his own bees (once he started his hives) would know how to find their home. As she understood it, he planned to acquire a couple of hive boxes, each a full colony in itself. There they would be, sitting side by side in the shade of the big oak near the house. “How will these thousands of bees know to which box they belong?” she asked.

He was sufficiently pleased by her curiosity to explain that he would paint each of his boxes a different color, green for one, sky blue for another, even pink, possibly, for a third. Bees, he explained, liked to return to dwellings that could be close to the color of the flowers whose nectar they brought back.

“But you tell me that each day these little creatures go to a different kind of flower. They are faithful only for this one day at a time to each variety of flower. Is that not so?”

“Yes.” He wasn't certain he liked the conversation. Would he be able to answer all her questions without slipping and sliding into other matters?

“So it could be a flower of one color on one day, and another color is what they like tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“How do these bees not get mixed up?”

Yes, he was reluctant to tell her. It was not something to talk about. Not necessarily. Still, he chose to proceed. For Klara to be interested in apiculture might, on balance, be better for him than if she showed indifference. “Each Queen has her own odor,” he informed Klara. “Since she will fertilize every cell in every comb and so puts tens of thousands of eggs into separate wax cells for their beginning in life, so she is certain to pass her own odor into each of her thousands of larvae, yes, her eggs, her future children.”

“That is remarkable,” said Klara. “How do you know this, Alois? So much you know.”

“I have read about these discoveries in books,” he said grudgingly.

“You have never smelled it yourself?”

“Do I look so stupid as to put my head into a hive in order to give a dozen bees the opportunity to fly up my nose?”

She began to laugh. In certain ways, she knew him well. He might read his books on the subject, but, at bottom, he did not like to admit that he had not learned the subject by way of his hands, his feet, his strength, his five good peasant senses.

Indeed, Alois had told her a little too much. Now she had to know more.

Before the conversation was over for the night, she actually prodded him into explaining how the Queen was fertilized. She was, after all, curious about any Queen who could give birth to so many thousands of children and still remain a Queen. There was such admiration in Alois' eye when he spoke of this. Everything depended on
the Queen
—the success of the hive, you could say.

So Alois did choose to lead Klara through a few descriptive steps. Given her evident excitement, he could sense it would be to his advantage on this night. She was clearly full of ardor at the thought of so female a creature, so tiny, so extraordinary.

He explained then that this young Queen, very much a virgin, not twenty days out of her own wax cell (which was no larger in width and depth than the eraser tip on the end of a new pencil), would, so soon as she emerged from that cell, be fed by Queen-bee nurses and Queen-bee attendants. Yet just three weeks from that first day, she would be ready to take her virgin flight out of the hive. Usually this would happen on the first warm day in May. Up she would lift into the heavens, flying higher than all but a few male bees who would attempt to follow.

“The ones who are called drones?” asked Klara.

“Yes, fat spoiled fellows. They jam their corner of the hive. They live to eat, and on a good day they fly around like fools. For the fun of it. They do not even bother to bring back pollen. It is only when this virgin Queen—who you might say is still a Princess—comes out for her first flight that they are able to justify their existence. On this day, they have been flying around waiting for her. They know she is coming. This Queen who flies so high, who is so beautiful compared to all her sisters, those thousands of worker bees, yes, workhorse females always looking for more nectar to bring back—those poor girls do not have full ovaries, so they go out and forage, except when they are attached to other duties for the hive. Clean-up duties. Chores. But this Queen, she is different, still a virgin, she is not yet really a Queen, more, as I say, a Princess. Then, she chooses to fly so high that only a few of these drones can follow. It comes down to two drones, to one, but, oh, this last strong one, he reaches her, he puts what he has, yes, you know what I mean, his very own organ which he has kept inside himself until now but suddenly it comes out, springs up, you could say, into, yes, yes, springs into—call it her vagina—why not? It is so, and she takes it all in even as they are up in the air so high, just the two of them.”

“It is a wonder,” said Klara. Her eyes had begun to shine. She actually said, “A miracle of love.”

“No, not exactly,” said Alois. At this moment, he did not know how to continue. If he said too much, he could spoil what he was looking for on this night. Still, his shrewd side was ready to speak, and he knew, yes, the best was most likely to come from telling it all.

“This drone,” he said, “this one good brave drone, sticks it in so far, which is exactly what nature demands, we must suppose, that then he cannot get it back.”

“What?”

“No!
Donnerwetter,
he can't pull out! The Queen has hooks, or something of the kind, very sharp hooks, and that keeps him there. She likes him there. He is stuck. When he does insist, when he has to pull away, you won't believe it, his good organ is ripped right out of him. He is obliged to leave it behind. His manhood! Gone. All gone.”

“And him? What happens then? To him?”

“Oh, he dies. He is gone. He falls to earth.”

“The poor creature,” she said. But she could not help it. Against her will, Klara's mouth pulled into a smirk, then slipped over to a smile. Once begun, she had to laugh. Then she could not stop. Never before had Alois heard her laugh so long.

“What a life,” she finally said, and Alois had been right to tell her. She was over six months into her pregnancy, but they made love that night. Alois had known more than one woman who could even give you a good piece of the real business in that very last week before she would pop out someone else's baby. But that had hardly been the case with Klara. On this night, however, she was different. It was equal to her best.

Of course, he certainly did not go on to tell her of two other things. The first was that the Queen was perfectly capable of having other lovers after that first fabulous flight. Over the next few weeks and into June, she could have five or six more lovers. That would store more semen in her ovaries, enough to lay thousands, then tens of thousands of eggs, one each for every cell among those thousands of cells, and she would continue to do so until cold weather came. Then this cycle could be repeated each spring for the next three years to come. All that wealth of impregnation derived from no more than five or six copulations! This meant that for the rest of her life, the Queen would have no more to do with drones but would be feeding honey and pollen to the pupae she had created while her court, her worker females, followed her with devotion, capping the cells of larvae with a mysterious wax substance they were able to make from the pollen of the May flowers, a wax that no chemist could duplicate in the laboratory. No, he did not describe how devotedly the Queen would have to work for the rest of her life, and he certainly did not tell Klara that when mating season was done, these female worker bees would evict the drones from the hive. When it came to dealing with the laziest bums who would not stir, the worker bees would sting the drones to death. (Nor did the worker bees lose their stinger on such occasions. The belly of a drone was softer than human skin.) After the slaughter, these same worker bees would sweep the carcasses out of the hive. Nor did he speak of other complications. There was always a tendency, once real warm weather began, for as much as half of the colony to be ready to swarm, that is, to fly away, desert the hive, go back to the way they used to live in the hole of a tree. You could lose your profit in a hurry. Nor did he tell her of Princesses who were often extinguished by the court of bees who surrounded the Queen. He left such details alone. It was better that Klara should remain sympathetic to what would be his oncoming enterprise.

Klara had not only been engrossed by what he told her that night, but now thought it might divert Angela from her woes, and so decided to tell her about the wrenching end of the brave drone who did succeed in reaching the Queen. This time, Klara had company in her laughter. They carried on as if they were both of the same age, and as Klara divulged more and more of what she had learned from Alois, the topic turned not only to odor, but to the exceptional power of the Queen. There she was, this creature, hardly larger than her own nursing bees and certainly smaller than any drone. Nonetheless, she had the power to impregnate the air of the hive and the thousands who dwelt within it. All of them would know their own hive, since they all smelled the same. “It is,” said Klara, full of a new set of giggles, “as if all Russian men and women have one kind of awful aroma, and those Polish oafs another. Maybe there is a good decent smell of tea for the English, and we Austrians, we have to be something special, we are warm like strudel.” Again, she had Angela full of giggles. “And the French, yes, a shameless ugly scent. So harsh! Worse than rotten onions and old gravy. Italians—nothing but garlic.” They were hugging each other by now. “Maybe the very worst, the Bohemians. I shouldn't describe them. Stinking old cabbage.”

They wiped their eyes. Adi, hearing their laughter, came to join them. He was annoyed when they explained nothing, merely kept laughing at the sound of each country.

All this talk of good and bad smells gave a special tingle to Angela's nose. In school, she was now most aware of Fräulein Werner, with all her talcum powder, and then there was her own little Adi. He was absolutely smelly at times, especially when he ran up and down too many hills. She was always coaxing him to use more soap, or on those nights once a week when Klara boiled enough water for each of them to bathe in the big washtub, Angela would insist on lathering his back and his armpits before returning the bar of soap to him. Then, with a wholly mischievous grin—“You have the soap now, so put it where it can do some work, you careless boy.”

Adi would scream with anger at such incivility, and made certain to be loud enough for Klara to come running in. Yet he would not repeat a word to his mother. He was in turmoil. Did he smell as bad as Angela kept saying, or was his sister crazy? Who could know? He could barely sniff a thing on himself.

Angela, however, would begin to brood once again on the death of Rosig. The prize sow had indeed been full of a strong odor, not unlike Adi at his worst, or was it Rosig at her worst?—enough! Angela began to cry for both, the boy and the pig together. Full of remorse for teasing him, she tried to make amends by telling him a few of the wonderful secrets Klara had told her, all of this new knowledge about bees, and on many a morning as the two walked to school, she would take up the topic again—her head was so full of what she had been told that Adi's imagination was soon inflamed by the mysteries of the Queen.

Ever since they had come to the farm in April, he had been most aware of the nearness of bees. In May and June, there had been hours in full daylight when the sky was full of tiny lights, glints of light whipping about, flying in so many directions. His mother was always warning him that he must not try to touch any such tiny creature should he see one on a flower. Worse, he must never dare to kill one. That same bee could give him something to remember! Then one fine morning in July, Edmund got stung and couldn't stop screaming for the longest time. So Adolf, in his turn, had been most respectful of the perils of their presence.

Now, however, to hear that the Queen shared her odor with every bee in the hive, yes, that did excite his thoughts.

The night after he heard that his father might be going to talk to a neighbor about purchasing what Alois called “the first materials”—an announcement he made on a Saturday evening at dinner—Adi had a vivid dream. He saw an army of bees flying in circles above the farm. Standing near their house was an old man who was dressed differently from anyone Adi had ever seen. His shirt remained outside his pants and came to his knees, and he wore an old knit wool hat over his white hair, a hat as long as a stocking. It hung half down his back. He was not short, but he still looked like a dwarf because he was bent over. In this dream, Adi knew his name. The man was called
Der Alte,
and the boy woke up on Sunday morning to learn that his father was actually going to visit a beekeeper named Der Alte.

How could he not ask his father if he could go along? Alois was surprised, then pleased. Every Sunday until now, Klara was picked up by another farm couple in their wagon to go to Sunday Mass in Fischlham's small chapel. She would travel with the three children, even as Alois stayed at the farm. “In truth, in good conscience, I cannot go,” he would tell her, and he would be left alone to walk his fields. This morning, therefore, he was all the more pleased that Adi asked to join him.