December: ‘the colony is checked only by looking at the hive from outside’

 

The Beekeeping Calendar by Z S Muçolli

 

 

New Albanian vocabulary: koshere (hive), çeiz (trousseau: in fact, this word is not Albanian but Turkish – just as the ‘English’ equivalent is borrowed from our own former occupiers and bringers of fancy ways and ideas, and words)

 

 

I couldn’t wait to meet my bees. We were in our sitting room talking about practicalities. Rob waved a hand at the view out of the window – at the concrete and glass aspirations of the Ministry of Education next door, the post office building towering over rooftops, the dusty road outside where nothing bloomed in the verges except occasional road- kill; my bees wouldn’t thank me if I brought their hive to the city. Rob explained to me he had come to an arrangement that they could be left on the land belonging to Adem, the man he had bought the hive from. I could go up and work on it whenever I had spare time, and be apprenticed to Adem as I learned my new craft.

So we set my first meeting with the bees and with Adem at his home on the first possible weekend after my birthday.

It had been through the father of one of Rob’s colleagues that he had been put in contact with Adem to buy the hives. In numerous sub- sequent phone calls Mr Velija had asked Rob whether I was happy with my present, whether Rob was happy with the arrangement, whether we were sure that we didn’t want to move the hives to be with someone who was less of a... villager? Mr Velija owns land near Adem so Rob finally suggested that he could come with us on our visit, and he could see for himself that everything was tamam, just so.

We started off through the northern suburbs of Pristina. I’d been told that this part of the city has the highest crime rate, so I eyed the streets with suspicion. But it was the usual Kosovan Sunday scene – pixie-faced boys in faded sweatshirts playing ball by the road, shop- keepers twitching at the display of their goods outside, over-filled cars with wedding songs wailing from the stereo, weaving along in good- natured chaos, young women in tight jeans sweeping their front steps or banging rugs out of upstairs balconies, while their mothers-in-law in baggy Turkish-style trousers stood watching them.

The houses thinned out and soon each one we passed was set in its own field. By this point in the year the haystacks were dwindling, the single stick which supports each one in the middle was showing – they seemed munched through to the bone. Lean cows tethered in front yards gazed at them sympathetically.

And then there was hardly a house to be seen. We were into the wild hills, uncultivated and impenetrable. There were still landmines in Kosovo off major roads, and I thought of them glinting in the under- growth. I thought of the pixie-faced boys scrambling after their ball.

I had never met Mr Velija before, but on the road we made conversation – stilted through lack of familiarity and lack of vocabulary.

‘My family have always lived in this region,’ he told me, and he offered us vignettes of its history, which was also his history. He gestured at a hill to our right. ‘Below that are the remains of an ancient city’. He is a founding member of an organisation for the promotion of the economy and culture of this part of Kosovo, and he was working on fundraising for an archaeological dig to uncover the city.

My British mobile phone bleeped in my bag. A text message said ‘Welcome to Serbia.’ It was ironic – the Belgrade government would claim that I had been in Serbian territory from the very start of my journey in Pristina; here we were only a few miles from the 1999 border. Mr Velija acknowledged what I said with another bit of history. It was on this road that his family fled in 1999. He talked about the roadblocks, the sadism of the paramilitaries who had set them up. We drove on in silence, and I thought about the pixie-faced boys again.

It was only half an hour’s journey to the farm. The road had deteriorated into potholes, and for the last mile was nothing more than mud. Pulling up the hill we could hear the tyres spinning, and we slithered and sprawled to a halt on Adem’s land.

I got out of the Land rover and looked around. To the left was the view I was familiar with from that photograph that Rob had given me for my birthday. Set on the slope, to catch the low slanting winter sun, was the small wooden box of my hive. It stood in a row of perhaps a dozen others.

To my right was a low cluster of buildings: a barn draped in a UNHCR-marked tarpaulin of the kind that were issued to refugees, another outbuilding with a wolf skin nailed to it round which hens picked daintily, a smaller hut with heavy tools hanging off it and a dog tied up below, whimpering when I got closer, and a low stone house, down the steps of which a man was coming forward to greet us.

Adem’s face was the colour and texture of a man who is out in all weathers. He looked about my father’s age, but of great physical strength. Perhaps, as I’d found with Shpresa’s parents, I wasn’t good at judging ages in Kosovo. His hand was rough when I shook it, and his smile was enormous, and slightly lopsided because so many of his teeth were missing.

I was shifting and fussing, introducing myself, thanking him, asking after his health, his wife, thanking him again, catching myself in grammatical mistakes, uncertain how this relationship was supposed to work. My shoes had sunk into the mud of his yard and I wished I’d worn something more practical. I wondered what he thought of me.

In the midst of this motion and vacillation, Adem stood still and comfortable. Rob greeted him, and so did Mr Velija, and then when I had finally twittered myself into silence, Adem turned to me ‘O Elizabeta,’ he said, in welcome. ‘Hajde!’ He was ushering me into his house. He had addressed himself to me, not to either of the men, not to Mr Velija who was a generation older than both Rob and I, not to Rob who had paid for this treat. It was a gentle and nicely-judged form of respect and I liked him for it immediately.

The men stood back as Adem steered me up the steps into his home. We took our shoes off at the entrance and stepped into the front room. It was fuggy from a wood stove burning to one side, and it smelt of fried peppers. Standing to greet me was Adem’s wife. He nodded at her with one word, ‘wife’. I had read Edith Durham, the Edwardian traveller to the Balkans, saying that there was a superstition that couples shouldn’t use one another’s name; I hadn’t known that the tradition persisted.

The woman I subsequently discovered to be called Xhezide welcomed us formally in a bird-like voice. She was shorter than me and had to tilt her head to talk to me or the men. She, I could see, was as unsure about how to handle this situation as I was.

‘Sit, sit,’ Adem invited us, and we sat down on the long upholstered bench that ran along the edge of the room. The children, Mirlinda and Lavdim, were called in – two teenagers who shook hands respectfully before going and helping their mother. Xhezide busied off to the stove and started making Turkish coffee in its special enamel pot. I saw her looking at us as she waited for it to boil. I smiled at her and she looked confused and turned back to her coffee. Adem pulled up a low wooden stool opposite us and offered us cigarettes.

‘How are you?’ he asked. ‘And your family? Your health?’ A Kosovar told me of a superstition that bees won’t stay on the land of an unhappy family. So maybe these conversations were of agricultural as well as social importance. I could tell that Adem had slowed down his questions for our benefit and I was grateful. This region of Kosovo is known for its quaint vowel sounds and it was hard for me to make sense of them. More than that, I had the sense that Adem was slowing down this ritual – the greetings, the welcome, the cigarettes, coffee, routine questions – to teach us how it was done, to reassure us that we were in safe hands. I felt that I would enjoy learning beekeeping from a man like this.

I tried a few British hospitality rituals of my own. Looking around the room I found things to admire. Xhezide had just put an embroidered table cloth on the table in front of us. ‘What beautiful work,’ I congratulated her, adding the Albanian formula, ‘may your hands be praised.’ With everyone pitching in to help with providing a translation she told me that she had made it herself as part of her trousseau. Looking around the single kitchen, dining, entertaining area I realised that all was hand-stitched, hand-carved, hand-cobbled-together.

As we drank our coffee together we all relaxed a little. The family were friendly but seemed confused and maybe even suspicious about us. It takes some explanation – we were obviously not ‘villagers’ and were people who could buy as much ‘Industrialised, Homogenised’ honey as we wanted from the well-stocked shelves of Pristina’s shops. Instead we were going to be travelling regularly out of the city to bring back the odd jar of honey with a few stray insect wings still stuck to it.

 

Adem

 

Nevertheless, Adem led me out to the hives. He explained that we couldn’t open them because it was too cold. But the bees were in there, he assured me, and suggested that we tap the box to rouse them so I could hear the sound of them fanning their wings.

I duly knelt on the wet grass with my ear to the wooden box, and knocked against the side. I couldn’t hear anything.

I looked up, and Adem was smiling encouragingly at me. ‘Do you hear them?’ he asked. I didn’t know what to say. I thought of new mothers who have told me about the confusion of staring at the ultra- sound scans and trying to see the baby the doctors are showing them there. These bees were my first real commitment to Kosovo and I couldn’t even be sure they existed. Adem saw my uncertainty, and rapped at the box again. There was a sound. But I thought it might be the noise of my hair rustling against my ear.

I tried one final time. It was becoming embarrassing to be squat- ting in the mud trying to listen to the bees I’d been given as a present. I thought I could hear something. Perhaps it was the hum of my own blood circulating – this was very like listening for the sound of the sea in a shell. ‘It’s very faint,’ I said sheepishly, and got to my feet.

Maybe there were no bees in my hive, but I didn’t dare ask any- thing more.

Back inside, Xhezide served us tea with honey stirred into it. I cupped my hands around the little glass. It had been bitterly cold outside, but the small room was warmed deliciously by the wood stove where our tea was boiled up. I was reluctant to leave.

That evening I did my first piece of writing about Kosovo. Up till now I had felt that the repeated patterning of Albanian verb tables, the acquiring and playing with new vocabulary, had filled every space for words in my head. But the knocking on the side of my hive had got something stirring.