Queens Of The May

 

New Albanian vocabulary: dyllë (wax)

 

 

Our beekeeping fraternity was growing. We had got to know Rob’s colleague, Dardan, through whom Rob had found and bought me my hive. Mr Velija, who had accompanied us when I had first visited Adem and Xhezide, was Dardan’s father, and when Dardan heard about the clean air and the sweet and abundant flowers where my bees pastured he said he was going to buy a hive of his own and keep it next to mine on the smallholding. Unlike me, Dardan didn’t need Adem’s expertise as well as his land – he knew something about beekeeping already, learned from his experience living with a beekeeper while he was hiding out during the days of NATO’s bombing campaign in March 1999.

Sometimes we drove out from Pristina together with Dardan – always in our Landrover, because Dardan said his BMW would get damaged on the rough tracks at the end of the journey to Adem’s house. Sometimes on our visits Dardan – American-university-cocky – and Adem, quietly unmovable, would debate approaches to beekeeping. I never heard them contradict one another – Albanian debate doesn’t work like that – even when they were in complete disagreement. It was a careful flight alighting gently on the flowers of proposition and counter-proposition. For me it was also a master class in beekeeping.

When Dardan heard what Adem had said about the chance that my colony was going to separate, and the need for a new hive he was excited for me.

‘I’ve got some old hives at my house. If you’re willing to clean them up with me you can take one and hope to get them to Adem in time to be used for when your bees swarm.’

So on a quiet afternoon on the last day of April, I put on my oldest clothes and went to Dardan’s house in the suburbs of Pristina.When I arrived, the family – Dardan, his parents and paternal grandfather – was sitting outside on a balcony enjoying the sunshine and a lively discussion about religion. I gathered that Dardan and his father didn’t agree with the old man’s take on things.

‘You knew what my grandfather’s views were, I guess,’ shrugged Dardan.

‘No?’

‘You can work it out – it was he who named my father “Islam”.’ Well, that figured. I was interested to think about the name that Dardan’s father had given his own son. Dardania is the ancient Albanian name for the area covered by modern-day Kosovo – Islam seemed to have been replaced by nationalism as the generations passed.

‘What would you call a son of yours then?’ I asked Dardan.

‘Something short – something that wouldn’t be mispronounced by a non-Albanian. A son of mine will grow up in the international community and I’d want him to fit in.’ The three generations of the Velija men were a history of Kosovo in miniature.

Dardan’s own attitude to Kosovo’s history had been a point of controversy between us before now. During the autumn he had called up to suggest that Rob and I could go for a walk with him in the huge park of Gërmia just outside the capital. We all walked companionably together through my favourite season, chasing falling leaves and breathing in wood smoke. As we turned a corner on the path that led upwards, we passed a half-destroyed building – concrete powdered to rubble and reinforcing rods twisted to graffiti across the sky.

‘What’s this?’ I asked.

‘It was used by Serb forces as a hide-out during the bombing,’ Dardan explained.

‘Were there people inside it when it was blown up?’ I asked.

‘I hope so,’ Dardan replied.

Naively, I was shocked. I’d never had a glimpse of these attitudes lying below Dardan’s urbane surface. His face, his conversation, had always been set forward, to the future promised him by his Western education, his imported car. But the officers in this police station had, of course, been the police who executed his uncle in front of his family, the regime who made him live for a large portion of his life under something like apartheid. I didn’t know what to say – so I said nothing.

Some weeks later Dardan had come to lunch at our house. The date was 5 November and I was feeling more homesick than at any time since we’d moved to Kosovo. In every year of my life so far 5 November had meant fireworks. Childhood memories of my gloved hand being held reassuringly by a parent, hot soup and baked potatoes, gasping in unison at magical shapes shimmering in the sky... not only did I have none of these this year, but there wasn’t even anyone to understand what I was missing. It was my first taste of cultural dislocation. So I had been feeling vulnerable anyway, when the subject of the bombed Serbian police station came up again.

‘You didn’t like what I said to you that day,’ Dardan had said when we talked about it during that lunch.

Again I didn’t know how to answer.

‘I told a friend about it and he said I should never have said some- thing like that to an international.’

Ouch. I didn’t know what upset me more – Dardan’s attitudes, or his sense that he shouldn’t share them with me; that I was an ‘international’ – and presumably nothing more.

Still I said nothing. But when our lunch guests had gone, Rob gave me a long long hug.

On this early summer day, November seemed a long way away. This was one of those days that even the atheist wants to say are blessed with sunshine – as I squatted with Dardan on the driveway alongside buckets of water to clean up the hives and the frames, sun glinted on the water, and dried the frames that we stacked around the garden. It was a rarity still at that time of year – something that we might have strolled through without thinking a few months later, but we were still savouring it on that day.

But our November conversation still rankled. And so did the fact that I’d said nothing – nothing to challenge or explore the attitudes, not just to the Serbs but to me as an ‘international’. Taking a deep breath, I said, ‘Do you know how much it upset me that time you called me an ‘international’, and suggested you should have censored what you said to me?’ Dardan knew exactly what I was referring to. He’s a thoughtful person and he paused before he said carefully.

‘Yes, I can see why it might. I’m sorry. You’re not like the ‘internationals’ who make decisions about this country without taking the time to try to understand it.’

The incident that had been niggling at me as I tried to get close to this country with its unexpected prickles, had been transformed into something positive. We smiled at each other, and got on with the frames.

I do manual work rarely enough that the work was a treat for me – the gentle rhythms of sloshing water, wood emerging fresh from its dust, and my muscles awakening from their slump, as I carried and lifted and stooped. The frames are each fitted with two wires that should be strung taut. It’s onto these wires that wax sheets are melted – the sheets serve as a foundation for the bees’ honeycomb building. But the old frames in Dardan’s yard had strings as slack as the old musical instruments at the Ethnological Museum.

Conversation was freed up now. We discussed sex, politics, war. Dardan told me about his time during the NATO bombardment – attempts to join the KLA, and how ‘they stayed put while Rob’s army did the work’ as he said without apparent bitterness. I tried to get a sense of what those days must have been like, and was surprised to hear them described as days of hope as well as fear – at last Kosovars were really doing something to seize their destiny. Talking about the frames he had had the task of making for the beekeeper he was staying with, you got the sense of a younger Dardan poised for bigger action, a Dardania feeling itself on the brink of historic independence.

I was experiencing my own small liberation as we worked too. I realised that this was the first time my beekeeping identity had extended beyond Adem’s land. Still under apprenticeship (Dardan directed me and pointed out the wax moth cocoons stuck to some of the hives which would make them impossible to use again – ‘the bees will never store honey in a place that’s been infested before’) but this was how a real beekeeper might spend an afternoon.

It felt a significant day, one for new identities, the turning of the seasons.

‘Well, tomorrow is 1 May,’ said Dardan, ‘look.’ He gestured beyond his house where billows of foul thick smoke were tumbling from the tops of the hills. I thought about the NATO bombing and shivered. ‘Kids burning stuff. They used to burn wood on the eve of 1 May, but now it’s tyres.’

Whatever your mode of expression – the slow process of working together to magic streams of honey from the frail blooms just butting up through the soil, or the summoning of toxic fumes from molten rubber- this was a day when everyone marked new cycles beginning, ushering in the reign of a new queen.