The Sound of Language (5 page)

“Sorry,” he said to Raihana. “I was sleeping.”

Raihana understood that much Danish.

“How will she get here every day?” he asked Christina as he drank coffee. They were in the kitchen and both Raihana and Christina had refused Gunnar's offer of coffee.

Raihana answered instead. “Cycle. I can cycle,” she said.

“Okay,” Gunnar said.

They sat in silence for a while, and Raihana kept her head bowed and stared at her practical black shoes.

“She will start tomorrow,” Christina said finally. “What do you want her to do? Why don't you show her around?”

“How much Danish does she understand?” Gunnar asked.

“A little,” Raihana said sheepishly.

“Enough,” Christina answered at the same time. “She is here to make her Danish better; let's go see your workshop so you can show her the frames.”

What is a frame, Raihana wondered as they walked to the workshop.

The workshop was the garage, really a wooden shed that Gunnar and Anna had lovingly built. Even now when Gunnar stepped inside he felt Anna's presence envelop him. She had painted the walls a deep honey color. She had hung pictures of their bees, of them in their hoods and veils as they harvested honey over the workbenches.

He saw the two stainless-steel smokers on the workshop table, scarred with the knives and hammers used to make the frames. His throat closed. They had fought once because Anna said Gunnar kept using her smoker. He didn't plug his smoker with a cork to kill the flames, so his smoker always ran out of fuel, while Anna's didn't. Gunnar had insisted he couldn't tell which was his and which was hers and Anna had tied a ribbon on the handle of her smoker. It was still there, the red ribbon tied into a pretty bow. Gunnar suddenly wanted to get Christina and that Afghan girl out of there. And he wanted to get out himself. This was too much, he thought, his despair becoming overwhelming when he saw Anna's smiling face in one of the photographs on the wall. He had to get out.

“Ah,” Raihana cried out then and picked up a frame that was only half wired. There was relief in her voice. “I know this,” she said to Christina and then she looked at Gunnar. “See,” she said and sat down to slide the wire through the frame and pull it out.

“My
chacha
had same,” she said.

“Who is
chacha?”
Gunnar asked and Christina whispered, “An uncle.”

“He has many honeybees,” the Afghan girl said. “Many honeybees.”

“How many?” Gunnar asked.

She gave him a baffled look and then laughed softly. “I count them not,” she said. “I try but they sting me, and I run.”

Gunnar stared at her and saw an image of a little dark-haired girl looking into a bee colony trying to count each bee. He smiled.

“I have twenty-six colonies,” Gunnar said and she looked at him absently.

“I have about a hundred thousand bees,” he said and her eyes widened. Regardless of what Christina thought, Gunnar could see that this girl knew nothing about beekeeping.

“How do you count so many?” the girl asked.

“One after another,” Gunnar said somberly and then laughed at the shocked look on the girl's face.

FIVE
ENTRY FROM ANNA'S DIARY
A Year of Keeping Bees

5 MAY 1980

The sun, the sun, the sun! We have been desperately waiting for the sun because when the sun comes out, the bees come to life. Yesterday, as clouds gathered and stood morosely over my hives, there was no sign of bee activity. But today the bright yellow sun has brought the bees to life—waggle dancing, foraging for pollen, it's time to feed, to live, to buzz.

We went out in the morning right after breakfast and I had to calm myself through the last dredges of coffee in my cup. I could hardly wait. Gunnar felt the same excitement. Our bees were ready.

Hello, bees. It is always such a pleasure to pull them out of the boxes, go through the frames, touch them, hear them, and see them. We spot the queen and see how the brood is doing. All our hives have thrived. We need to make more colonies. By the next bee season, we will have ten colonies, I am sure of it.

We see capped brood in some colonies and we are excited, it means the queen is laying and the hive will be replenished by her offspring as the older ones die off. The cycle of life. The life span of a honeybee is just six weeks, six weeks of gathering pollen and nectar, six weeks of giving and giving and giving. And then winter comes and they snuggle into their cells and sleep until spring.

In one of Gunnar's colonies the queen has laid eggs. We have two colonies each and we will have to move the bees around, make six colonies out of our four. We'll have seven or eight by the time spring is here in full force.

I used to think the protective suits made you look silly, like you were a scientist working in atop-secret lab, but now they feel professional. Wearing them makes me happy because when I put one on, I know I will be seeing my bees again.

“
S
o is he any better now or is he still sitting around and drinking coffee all day?” Layla asked Raihana. Raihana had been working with Gunnar, called “the Danish man” in Raihana's Afghan circles, for a month now.

Raihana had had little to report during her first month. When Layla and Kabir asked what he was like, she told them he was quiet and minded his own business. Raihana had found a
praktik
that was easier than Layla's as she had absolutely no work to do.

“The same,” Raihana said. “Very moody … but then his wife just died.”

“And you're not scared of him?” Layla asked.

Raihana shook her head. No, she wasn't scared of him. The fear had disappeared when he had laughed. He had joked with her about counting one bee after another and somehow that had made her feel better about him and the bees. He had suddenly seemed like a normal man, a friendly man, and she wasn't nervous around him anymore.

“What is that you do every day?” Layla asked.

They were making dinner together, as they always did. Raihana did most of the cooking while Layla helped with the chopping and cleaning up. The division of labor had asserted itself as soon as Raihana arrived in Layla's house. Layla had been relieved. She had tried to learn how to cook but just like Raihana couldn't sew anything without it going completely wrong, Layla couldn't cook. She started out making
biriyani
and somehow it never tasted right and more often than not, something got burned at the bottom of the pot. Once she had tried to make
samboosas
and it had been a disaster of monumental proportions.

Raihana, on the other hand, could take potatoes and onions and make the perfect
sabzi
to go with rice or
rotis.
She made excellent desserts, even Danish ones, after she had gotten recipes from a Danish cookbook in the language school's library.

Layla, Kabir, and especially Shahrukh had been thrilled to find Danish layer cake one evening—made just as it was in the bakeries with layers of sponge, yellow custard, fresh strawberries, and whipped cream.

“I have been making frames. Next week we check on the bee colonies to see how many are alive and how many died,” she said. “We are already late. He should have started looking at the bees two or three weeks ago. It is the end of April now … many bees will have died and some colonies might be getting ready to swarm.”

“Swarm?”

Raihana nodded casually as if it were a word that she used often. The truth was that she'd had to look it up and it had taken her several days and help from Christina to understand what it meant.

“If there are too many bees in a hive then half the bees leave and go elsewhere looking for food,” she told Layla.

Layla stared at her. “How do you know this?”

Raihana feigned nonchalance. But she was proud of what she had learned about bees in just a month. Gunnar hadn't helped much. In the garage workshop she had found a black leather diary in which someone had painstakingly recorded a year of beekeeping with a blue ink pen. The writing was so neat that it seemed as if it had been printed on a laser printer like the ones at the language school, instead of being written by hand.

It was in Danish, and Raihana could decipher about a third with her Danish-to-Dari dictionary. For the rest she went to Christina with questions.

Christina had looked puzzled at the black diary.

“It is okay to use?” she asked Christina, worried that maybe she shouldn't have the diary.

“Yes, yes,” Christina said. “Gunnar gave this to you?”

Raihana nodded. Technically he had not given it to her. She had found it and asked him if she could take it with her and he had waved his hand. She wasn't sure he had understood what she had said and if what she had said in Danish was even understandable. But it was just a book; she didn't think anyone would mind. Obviously the Danish man didn't seem to care.

“Okay, let's see what your question is,” Christina said, flipping to the page Raihana had marked with a piece of paper.

For the next few Wednesdays during their one-on-one study sessions, Raihana and Christina pored through the black diary. The technical terms were the hardest for Raihana as there was no way to translate them. But Christina's husband was a beekeeper too, so she drew diagrams to explain the various tools used for beekeeping.

“Anna was a very passionate woman,” Christina said, smiling at a passage where Anna talked about how hard the bees worked.

Raihana had to consult her dictionary to find out the meaning of the word
passionate.
Reading the dictionary was like putting the pieces of a puzzle together and Raihana took pleasure in the game.

Raihana preferred going to school than to her
praktik.
It was boring to go and sit in the Danish man's garage. The Danish man didn't speak with her or teach her anything. He sat there like a lump of clay, ignoring her. However, Raihana felt she couldn't back out now, not after she had convinced Kabir and Layla that this was such a good idea.

But she was annoyed about being in this man's garage, in his house, in his presence when he would barely acknowledge her. The house was horribly untidy and filthy in many places. She wasn't supposed to go inside the house. She was supposed to stay in the garage or go to the beehives in the backyard, but she got tired of sitting in the garage and there was nothing to do in the garden but watch the bees race around.

The more she found out about bees, the more she was in awe of them. The bees left during the day, hunting for honey, and then found their way back at dusk. She had learned that from the diary. She had also learned that the longer the Danish man waited to check on his bees, the larger the chance they would swarm —because they couldn't all fit in their box—or die because they didn't have enough food.

The Danish man always opened the door on the second knock, never the first. She would smile at him and he would nod without smiling in return. Then he would point to the garage and close the door in her face. Raihana would go to the garage and sit down. She had peeked in the room used for storing honey and saw a big steel machine, stacked white buckets, and some other equipment. Most of the time Raihana sat at the workbench, staring at the road and the cars that went by.

When it was time for lunch, she would open her lunch box and eat the sandwich she had brought and drink some of the juice she had packed in a plastic bottle that once had Coca-Cola in it.

She would wire frames for part of the day and then when she got bored she'd read the black diary. And when that got boring too, she'd look at her wristwatch, waiting to get back home.

She came to Gunnar's house for fifteen hours a week. The hours were split into three days so that she had time for language classes as well.

The first few days she didn't leave the garage until the designated time. She came in at eight in the morning and left at one in the afternoon. But as the weeks passed she started leaving ten to fifteen minutes before one o'clock and then eventually almost an hour before she had to go.

One day she brought chicken curry and bread for lunch and needed to go inside the Danish man's house to heat the chicken curry.

“May I use microwave today?” she asked the Danish man when he opened the door in the morning for her.

He looked at her confused. “Okay,” he said and opened the door wide.

“No, not now, for lunch,” she said.

“Okay,” he responded and slammed the door shut in her face again.

When she knocked at lunchtime, he opened the door and let her in. He sat and watched TV while he drank his coffee; at least she thought it was coffee. The man lay in a stupor all day; she wouldn't be surprised if he was drinking something a little stronger than coffee.

She found the microwave, but it was so filthy that she couldn't bring herself to put her food in it. Raihana knew it wasn't her job but she couldn't help it. She had been raised in a clean house and when she had kept her own household everything had been spick-and-span, even though she and Aamir had lived in a one-room flat where the windows had been shattered by bullets a long time before and had been replaced with thick plastic. Raihana cleaned the plastic the best she could so that they could look out the windows without opening them. They didn't have much, but what they had, Raihana took good care of. Aamir had given the flat to their neighbor's uncle in order to get Raihana safely across the border.

Without asking for permission Raihana started to clean the Danish man's kitchen. She found cleaning supplies under the kitchen sink and rolled up her sleeves. First, she put all the dirty dishes into the dishwasher.

How much work was it to put a cup inside the dishwasher? Why hadn't the man done anything? she thought irritably as she used the Ajax spray she'd found over the counters and cleaned with a paper towel.

When she left that day, the kitchen wasn't exactly gleaming, but it was clean.

The next day she decided she'd clean the living and dining rooms as well. The Danish man had gone right ahead and left coffee cups and dirty plates all over the counters and sink. How could he have made such a mess in one evening?

She got the mop and vacuum cleaner from the garage and started cleaning. She didn't say anything to the Danish man and he didn't say anything to her. When she came into the living room armed with the vacuum cleaner, he scuttled farther inside the house. Raihana didn't want to clean any more rooms than she was already cleaning; she especially didn't want to think about the bathroom. There was a small toilet attached to the honey room, which she used. That bathroom had been neat and tidy, pretty pink curtains on the small window and a bar of pink soap in the sink. The pink towel was dirty, so Raihana had brought her own. It was also pink and Raihana took it home with her every other day to wash.

The dining room was narrow with a red-and-black carpet on the wooden floor. The dining table was huge and seated twelve. There had been dust on the table, greasy and thick, when Raihana first walked in. Now it gleamed with the furniture oil she had found under the sink.

The living room had a big sofa, two comfortable leather chairs, and a coffee table. There were knickknacks on the mantelpiece and on a shelf next to the television. Raihana dusted and wiped off everything and then vacuumed.

The Danish man didn't say thank you and he didn't say stop, so Raihana continued to clean. After a week of cleaning part of the house, she itched to clean the rest, just so that she'd have something to do. But before she could, the Danish man opened the door one morning and told her they would be melting foundation wax on the frames that day.

“Does he teach you everything about bees?” Layla asked as Raihana put the last of the diced mutton into the big pot she was making
biriyani
in.

“Not really,” Raihana said. “He just sits in his house and watches TV. I do everything myself.”

“Do you go inside the house a lot?” Layla wanted to know.

Raihana knew she couldn't tell the truth about how she spent a good part of her day inside his house, cleaning it. Both Kabir and Layla were paranoid about white men and had made her promise that she would stay out in the open and not go into the house where she would be alone with him.

It amused Raihana that Kabir didn't worry about Layla spending time in a grocery store after hours, alone with other workers, some of them Danish men, but was afraid for Raihana because she was alone with a frail old man.

Layla looked around to make sure neither Kabir nor Shahrukh was around. “Has he … you know … tried anything?”

Raihana stared at Layla for a second, unable to understand what she was asking, and then sighed in exasperation. “I told you, his wife died recently and he's still mourning.”

“Just because someone's wife died doesn't mean they don't try to you know …,” Layla said. “Be careful. If he tries anything, anything inappropriate, you should leave. Promise me, Raihana.”

Raihana couldn't imagine that sad man would ever do anything improper with her. He barely noticed her, but she knew better than most that people changed and that without reason, those you trust could become enemies.

“I promise,” she said.