The Castle in the Forest (21 page)

13

T
he good hive was another matter. It was thriving. The weight of the colony increased each week, and the honeycombs began to fill up. From his books, Alois had learned that each of these minuscule cells was capped with wax by the worker bees only when the water content in the honey had been reduced to less than 20 percent. To blow off such surface water, the bees had to fan their wings for hours every day. Alois felt intoxicated all over again by the dedication of his newborn creatures to such never-ceasing chores. To sweeten his mood even further, the first honey was ready, and so his bees were capping the cells—just as they were supposed to!

Out in his white garments with the big boxlike white veil over his head, protected by his gloves, Alois began to feel as if he was acquiring a bit of real technique. It was, after all, not so simple to pull combs out for examination, then slide them back again. He certainly didn't want to be such a lummox as to squash his Queen. Indeed, the confidence he gained from these results took him over to Der Alte's hut long enough to purchase a new Queen to replace the one who had been gassed in the other Langstroth box.

Der Alte even gave him a lesson on how to spot an active Queen. It was not too difficult when she was laying her eggs into empty cells, for she would be followed then by a retinue who hovered over each deposited egg long enough to discharge their own enzymes onto the larva. “Magical fortifiers,” Der Alte said.

Alois had to submit to the lecture but was able to return with not one but two Queens (both impregnated in the past year). One would establish a colony for the box that had been fumigated, and the other could be installed in the box Alois had built last fall. Some of his combs of new brood together with combs of new honey would now be transferred to the two empty boxes. Thereby, all three would be partially filled, so there would be space for each colony to build wax cells for their new brood as well as storage cells for their new honey. If he had lost one colony to gassing, he would soon be able to consider himself the master of three, all flourishing—could that be? Of course, he had had to lay out good money in the hope that he could yet speak of such success.

All the same, he did feel a cautious optimism. April had come. Flowers were sprouting, the walnut trees, the oaks, the plum trees, the beeches and cherry trees, the maples and apple trees were in bloom. There would be a host of flowers in the meadow.

He liked to sit by his hive boxes with Adi beside him, the boy carefully covered and veiled in an outfit Klara had put together. Father and son now delighted in keeping watch at the entrance to each hive, where guard bees stayed on post. Every last bee that came back with pollen and honey was carefully sniffed by one of the guards before she could enter. On occasion, Adi would begin to hoot because the guard would drive a visitor away. “Look, Father,” he would say, “she doesn't smell right.”

Yet, with all these incoming riches, Alois still kept feeding honey to the colonies. “That,” Alois told the boy, “is so that they will make even more honey.” Five trays filled with combs sat in each of the three hives. And three Queens were working in three separate hive boxes to deposit their eggs in cells, while foragers were flying missions from morning to dark. Each forager would return with its load every few minutes, and then be off again. Alois had read that it took forty thousand such voyages to accumulate two pounds of honey.

Sometimes he would look at the old bees who had lived through the winter in the healthy box. They were now battered relics with frayed wings. Worn out from overuse, the hair was gone from their bodies. They were expiring. Each morning a team of newborn worker bees would collect whichever bodies had fallen to the floor of the box and sweep them out of the guards' entrance, then off the ramp. Alois could hardly mourn their passing. Young stock was taking their place. He felt as if he had finally begun an ongoing venture into apiculture. The new bees would be his, not Der Alte's. He did not dwell on the fact that all three of his Queens had been fertilized a year ago and so, in that sense, were Der Alte's children.

14

G
iven a splendid morning in May, with a host from each of the three colonies in the air, Alois began to notice a pattern in the movement of one bee. This scout—or whoever she was—kept making figure eights in the air.

“She is signaling to the others,” Alois said to himself. “She is trying to show them something.”

He was right in this observation, he knew it, because a good number of other bees had joined the first, and off they flew toward the head of the meadow. On the other side of that rise, as Alois soon discovered on his walk, wildflowers had sprouted overnight. The bee he had observed was indeed a scout.

An old lust came back then. If there was one thing Alois had always wanted from life (even more than a new woman), it was to be the discoverer of a new concept. He dreamed of discovering something so startling and so valuable that his name might even be honored across time.

The desire still resided in him. It gave him considerable happiness to think that he had just discovered a new concept. And by the use of his eyes alone! He had seen what he would call a bee's signal. Up above, he could swear that one bee was trying to excite the others to fly to a place where flowers were full of nectar. In none of the books he had read so far had he seen any mention of this little dance, this wig-wag in the sky. He was twice afraid to mention it to Der Alte—once, because for all he knew it might be already an established concept among apicultural cognoscenti; and if, to the contrary, it turned out to be brand new, might not Der Alte know better than himself just where to publish the observation?

Nonetheless, he still had to learn how to locate the Queen, so he decided to visit Der Alte after all. The man was skillful. That had to be said. Der Alte opened one of his hives, scanned the racks, located the Queen, reached in with a bare hand, and grasped her wings carefully and most delicately between thumb and forefinger. “In a few years,” he said, “you, too, will be employing this approach to capture, but for now, I will show you a safer method.” Of course, he proceeded then to discourse on all the methods and modes of discerning just where the creature might be, whether depositing eggs, or fertilizing them one after another in their new cells, or, sometimes, resting in her court.

“Once located, it is simple,” said Der Alte, “to capture our Lady.”

“This, as I understand,” said Alois, “will be most necessary when I look to collect my honey.”

“Exactly,” said Der Alte. “That is a time when you are moving many frames, and scraping the wax covering away from the honey cells. A careless move can crush her.” To Alois' annoyance, Der Alte wagged a finger at him. “So,” he said, “we do not go first for the honey, no, we locate the Queen like the good fellows we are, and then we use a queen catcher.” He took up a glass tube with a concave dome at one end. “This is what you lay over the Queen,” he said, “and then you slip a little queen cage”—he held up just such a small flat container, two inches long—“underneath and blow the Queen right into the cage,
punkt!
Now she is safe. She can stay in the cage until the honey has been removed.”

We can be certain that Alois practiced catching the Queen. Indeed, he spent an afternoon apprehending and releasing each of his three beauties, finding them, putting the domelike end of the tube most carefully over one or another, and then blowing her right into the little queen cage.

Performing this task over and over, he came to recognize that what he had perceived that morning in the dance of a bee would hardly seem a secret to someone so knowing as Der Alte—once again he would have to give up a fine dream—he would not be remembered as a discoverer.

15

A
lois' fine spirits also waned with the loss of warm weather. A cold spell arrived, cruel to the expectation aroused by early spring. Alois now girded himself for all his gains to be lost by this out-of-season chill.

An old axiom returned to him. Johann Nepomuk used to say, “Spring is the season that will betray you most.”

So there were days when he came close to exhausting himself through the to-and-fro of removing tarpaper from the top of each hive, only to put it back again if the light at high noon might go dim in the sky. Soon after, he had to run back to strip the tarpaper away, for the sun was out again and the day had returned to warmth.

During one near-freezing cold spell, he caught a cold. That offered a collateral worry. Was it impossible that one of his Queens might also catch a cold? In sympathy with the overlord? He scolded himself. Such nonsense!

Then it occurred to Alois that this return of his fears might not be so silly. What if it were a reflection of how he felt about the condition of his true health? Was he coming nearer to his end? It was the worst thought to have. His imagination now entered a matter he had never allowed himself to approach. All through the years, so far as he could remember, death had not seemed threatening to him. A dull end to a good life, maybe, but nothing to do with hell.

Now, however, one damn question was following another. What if death was not as he had assumed? He had been certain that religion was there for a very good practical reason. It couldn't be simpler—you had to keep the weak and unruly in order. But a man of pride (such as himself) could do as he chose.

Now he was feeling panic of a new sort. His heart took a leap at the thought, one fearful leap, as if his chest had been pummeled. Could guilt be real?

Poor Alois. He was now there for the taking. No Cudgel would bother to protect him. I could have the tried-and-true pleasure of appearing to him in a dream. I could offer an impersonation of a guardian angel. I did not even have to be present. It would be easy enough for the best of my three agents to bring it off.

But to what end? Would Alois be worth the maintenance?

The sober fact, which we do well not to ignore, is that people of Alois' age are rarely a prize. Their utility is limited. They are too fixed in their nature to warrant much molding, whereas flexibility is what we look for in exciting new clients. Ideally, we can redirect their aims with ours.

On those rarer occasions when we choose a man or woman over fifty, we look for a serviceable warp in their psychic framework that can be employed for a specific purpose. Repetitive irritations are one example. A mean old lady who keeps asking everyone whether they want something to eat when she knows that they don't can unhinge a good family. They grow uneasy at their increasing desire to smother her with the nearest pillow.

Alois, however, was too average a human product. There was little need to pick him up now. Milk runs would be enough. Let my agents hover just above his dreams.

16

E
arly in May, the weather turned warm again, and many of Alois' woes eased. In part he had already recovered some of his good spirits by cleaning and oiling the tools he had bought in the fall from Der Alte, and this chore he performed in much the manner of a good soldier who takes his rifle apart in order to oil it and put it back together again.

My Hafeld agents, having little to report, filled their latest communications with lists of his tools and did this so assiduously that I grew irked at their enumerations of pollen feeders, hatching cages, bee smokers, a water sprayer, a mating box (whatever that was!), a hive tool, even a honey stirrer made by Alois himself out of beech-wood. And then there was a spur-wheel embedder for preparing the foundation of the insertable frames, as well as a capping fork—a slew of particulars which provided no interest for me.

Klara, in contrast, knew how to make better use of spring in Hafeld. She was not always counting how many of the brood nests were filled with new pupae, nor was she worrying about the temperature within the hives. Now that it had turned warm on a second wave of sun and undulant air, she was ready to loosen some of the knots that had coagulated in her limbs that winter. “God, too, is taking His rest,” she said to herself even as she drew in a breath of air through the open window of her kitchen, and then, on impulse, with much left to do in the house, she picked up Paula, four months old, and went out into the meadow. The loveliest of silences prevailed, wholly without sound, a silence that took in the lightest caress of air. It was as if she could even hear the swaying of tall grass in the field and all but hear the curtsies of the flowers. It was as if the sum of these tender sensations supported the silence of the hills. “Listen to how quiet it is,” she said to Paula. “Listen, little angel, and you will hear the flowers whisper.” It seemed to her as if the nearest petals had heard what she said, for indeed their stems began to incline toward her, the most cheerful little daisies she had ever seen.

She knelt in the grass, the infant in her arms, and spoke to them. “You are beautiful, all of you,” she said, and, yes, there was no mistaking, these flowers were stirring for her. “Yes, Paula,” she said, “these flowers like you and like me because we love them. Is it not so, you little dears?” She was ready to vouch that they had heard her, and once again, they did bow delicately. “Yes, they are little ladies,” she said to Paula, and had to laugh at herself for feeling—was this pure madness itself?—that the daisies were not only dear to her, but that she was dear to the daisies. “Oh, I am one big silly,” she said aloud. But she could not help herself. She still believed that these white petals were listening. The balm of the air was like love, yes, exactly like the love she felt for the four-month-old in her arms. Klara's body was returning to her, or so it felt. The old poked-out, wounded, bruised, and stupid body of all those winter months after Paula had been born now felt sweet with the beginnings of true repair. She told herself that it was spring, and nature herself was enjoying a party. How could it be otherwise? Each breath was full of balm. God was near and He was in the air, her Good God, full of radiance. Yet the air was at peace. Could it be that God was resting on His laurels? He deserved as much. He deserved so much. She wanted to pray to Him then, but did not know how, since she did not wish to ask for anything at this moment, merely to praise Him for being so good, and that was better to do in church. There, everyone else would be doing the same, so it could be understood as humble, not vain, whereas here she was all alone with Paula and the flowers, and full of such happiness. For she was thinking of all the young boys and girls of her childhood and of those rare occasions when they would romp and play just like these sweet crazy bees flying around the house now and so happy to be out in the sun after living in a dungeon all through winter, crazy now with the joy that they could turn somersaults in the air, free of all duties, free of their tasks for a little while. Indeed, like Paula they were new to sunshine.

And Klara thought of the years to come when Paula would be ready to play, and that left her full of love for little Edmund, who was so kind to the baby, the only one of the children who was. Angela couldn't really care (although she was dutiful enough), and Adi was a worry—once she had seen him pinch Paula's cheek hard enough to make her cry. Klara had spanked him for that, one sharp slap across his little seat, but she wouldn't do it again in any kind of hurry. For who would think? He had glared back at her—the prince of princes, so strong a look that she had to use all the strength of her eyes to stare him down.

It was too beautiful a day to think of that moment of misery—so intense it had been—no, she would rather thank God for having given her so sweet a baby, a daughter who would yet grow up, so she knew, to be her own good sweet best friend. And she even said as much aloud to Paula. “May the angels hear me,” she whispered to her child before she turned back to the house and her duties.