Holiday Souvenirs: My Own Bee-Suit

 

New Albanian vocabulary: duvak (veil – the word used as in English for both beekeepers and brides)

 

 

When I travelled to live in Kosovo I hadn’t realised that I was travelling to a place that would be a Launchpad for so many other journeys. From Pristina Rob and I had explored in our lumbering Landrover all the other countries of the former Yugoslavia – the vast grey structures of Tito-era Belgrade and the whimsical art deco of Subotica in Vojvodina; the enchanting lakes of Macedonia by sunset; war-scarred Bosnia, where I realised what Kosovo had been spared; Slovenia, startlingly efficient with a quiet Habsburg, EU-member pride and a deep love of bee- keeping; the islands and old cities of Croatia where we ate supper in piazzas around which swallows dived and saxophonists busked and it seemed impossible that this place could have ever been part of the same country as Kosovo.

We had also had a number of trips back to the UK for work, friends and family. These visits were significant as chances to see people we cared about, and to stock up on cheddar (on one occasion we ended up paying the £60 excess baggage charge because of our cheese, and considered it money well spent). I had always found air travel exhilarating, and even with the increase in frequency of my trips, I never lost the adrenaline rush of take-off and landing. On one trip, as we circled low over my homeland, I was caught unawares by a new emotion – flickering’s of recognition, but also something like regret. For the first time, I had an instinctive sense that being here was preventing being there – and that that was something I missed. It most closely resembled a feeling I had only had previously for people rather than places. After Rob and I had known each other a while I realised quite suddenly that this person I knew I was fond of, whose habits I liked and company I enjoyed, was actually someone with whom I had fallen in love. As the wheels bumped over tarmac at Gatwick, I understood with the same sudden clarity that Kosovo was not to be a one-year stand for me. This was something that would, in some form or another, be a permanent relationship.

So travel really does broaden the mind. But throughout August as our friends in Kosovo were jumping on overheated coaches or into the chilling air-conditioning of 4x4s, to get to crowded coastlines abroad (Croatia, Albania, Montenegro), we stayed lolling in our sunlit Pristina garden among the rose bushes and the honey-bee pollinated apple trees. We had plenty to read – I was immersed in The Balkan Trilogy about a British woman who had followed her husband to unknown parts of the Balkans seventy years before me. I found it comforting to read this elegant narrative of petty gossip around the British Council and struggles to find an identity in an expat circuit where you didn’t quite belong, in a country where you were so obviously a foreigner. It made me feel like I was a character in a book. With reading, the bees to visit at the weekends and interesting projects at the Ethnological Museum where I was now working as a volunteer, I felt the journeys I was on were taking me far further than the Landrover could.

But one weekend we decided that perhaps we should push our- selves just a little bit beyond Pristina. We couldn’t decide exactly where to go in Kosovo, or even whether to make it a day trip or an overnight stay, so Rob suggested a magical mystery tour.

’Meaning?’

’Well, let’s just make the decision on what direction to take when we reach any given crossroads, until we get an idea of a final destination.’

It sounded crazy. The idea of setting off with only a spare set of underwear and a full tank of petrol on a sunny day that we could spend happily in our own garden was rather a risk. It felt like we were making a habit of the spontaneity which had landed us in Kosovo to start with.

And yet we set off, knowing nothing of where we would end up, and certainly not that it would be a stop on my route to competent beekeeper. At the bottom of our road, Rob asked whether we should go left or right. Left would take you into an underpass where there is normally at least one dead dog lying halfway into the road, and always the sense that you might find more cadavers if you looked hard. There are rubbish skips in the roadway and usually some poor soul rummaging them for recyclable metal that could be sold. There is always the fear of our car running into them in the ill-lit narrow space. Added to all this, the gratings in the roof of the underpass through which a little sunshine filters are gratings in the paving of the pedestrian shopping area which has been created above. Unidentified liquids drip down.

As if it was a decision of Manichean significance, I chose right.

This leads you on the road south. About twenty minutes out of Pristina, this road takes you past one of the new out-of-town super- markets. This particular supermarket sometimes has real French cheese in stock, as well as a bakery that was the only place in Kosovo where you could order fresh-baked French bread and ciabatta rolls. I suggested we stopped there to buy a picnic.

With a good lunch in front of us, we set off from the supermarket car park.

’Right,’ I said.

We found ourselves approaching a sign to Gjilan.

’Gjilan?’ we said. ‘Gjilan!’ we said. It is one of Kosovo’s five largest towns, and a place neither of us had ever been. I had a vivid picture of it from Shadow behind the Sun, a book written by a woman from the town about her life there until 1999 and her frightening flight to Glasgow where she now works with asylum seekers from around the world. Yes, this was a place I should see for myself, so we drove on towards it.

It’s a pleasant town, with wide boulevards that give it a different feel from Pristina.

Not that different though – as we drove down the main street I saw someone I recognised. Fatmir is a writer and academic to whom I had taught English in Pristina for a few months. Unlike my other Albanian friends who had been refugees in Germany, the UK, the States, he was a refugee within Kosovo. His family home was in the Preshevo valley, in the ethnically Albanian part of Serbia. The drawing of new borderlines had left this population isolated from its ethnic and linguistic brothers, just as it had left the ethnic Serbs of northern Kosovo isolated from theirs. There was on-going debate about what the fate of Preshevo should be – united with Kosovo (and, some would suggest, later with Albania too, to create a Greater Albania which stretched across these current borders, and into some of Macedonia, Montenegro and Greece), or exchanged as part of a deal whereby northern Kosovo’s Serbs were reunited with Serbia? Neither seemed likely any time soon, and as ever, it was the small pockets of minority ethnicity who would suffer in any broad realignment. Fatmir’s political activities and the oppression of the Serb regime had not been a good mixture, so he was sheltering in Pristina where he wrote and campaigned for the com- munity he had left behind, and told me stories which haunted me about how his library of books and collection of Albanian ethnological arte- facts had all been burned. I was almost ashamed at how it had upset me, in a lesson I’d come to straight from the Ethnological Museum’s similar collection of precious salvage, to hear about this destruction. ‘They’re only things,’ I’d said, ‘it shouldn’t matter like people’s lives matter.’

’People live their lives knowing that they will come to an end one day. But with the right care, objects can live almost forever.’ We under- stood each other.

I had wanted Rob to meet Fatmir, to hear him talk passionately about history, politics, nationalism – why these things matter. And to hear his enormous and unpredictable laugh, as if he caught himself out sometimes with the realisation that they don’t. This chance meeting in Gjilan was the perfect and typically Kosovo-given opportunity. We stopped the car and I rushed across the road to him.

He seemed as delighted as I was. He was on his way to a meeting but of course had time for a coffee – would we join him? He would show us the nicest place to drink it: a café on a hill on the outskirts of town. He would buy us the coffee (Albanian rules are really very strict on this point. The person who suggests having coffee is from that moment the host for the occasion, and it is unthinkable that the other party would pay for their own, or anyone else’s share – as unthinkable as if you were to try to pay for a meal you had eaten at a friend’s home).

As we drove through the streets to the café he recommended, while Fatmir and Rob animatedly discussed the Cold War (I was right to have wanted them to get together previously), I saw a poster advertising a bee supplies shop. So once we had drunk our coffees (the men sorting out Russia all the while) and given Fatmir a ride back into town, we walked to the shop.

At this moment, more than any other, I felt I had become a bee- keeper. Up till then, because of the unusual circumstances through which I had been given my bees, and because Adem was the only bee-keeper I knew, my understanding of beekeeping had been entirely contextualised around his small house and plot of land. Walking into the shop and seeing the beekeepers’ suits (Adem’s beekeeper suits) hung up for sale, and multiple smokers (Adem’s smokers) stacked along the shelf, alongside piles of new frames (just like Adem’s frames) was rather like walking into a theatre green room. There was the same sense of a spell broken, and the same sense of a new spell woven. So it wasn’t just Adem who could do this magic – conjuring honey from wooden boxes. But if it wasn’t just Adem who could do so, then maybe that meant that I could do it myself too.

It was in the beekeeping shop in Gjilan that I bought my own magician’s suit, an elasticated top with integral hood and black mesh visor.

The next day, Rob and I left Gjilan and wandered again around Kosovo, taking arbitrary lefts and rights. We chanced on the spring where our favourite Kosovan mineral water was bottled, and went in the allegedly healing pool there; we picnicked on our French cheeses and played word games in the sun.

I was keen to go back to my bees at my first opportunity – to show them my new suit, and to use it. As with new jeans or trainers, you want to get over the stiff, shiny stage as soon as possible. At the moment my new suit was a glaring white, where Adem’s was always blotched with little stains of honey, wax and propolis, blooming like lichens over the soft fabric. My suit smelt new – like a hospital – while his had always smelt like a hive; wearing it, I had felt like a great bee myself.

And I guess I wanted Adem to see how I was growing into my role. We hadn’t heard from him for a few weeks, which meant that he hadn’t contacted me about my offer of accompanying Mirlinda to her potential new school. With a little nervousness, I phoned him to see if we could come and harvest some more honey.

Of course we could.

’And Mirlinda? Is there any news on her school?’ I asked hesitantly.

’Oh yes, she has a place,’ he said proudly.

So the system worked without us. I was relieved for a whole range of reasons.

When I put on my new suit Adem looked at it approvingly. We went down to see the bees and found a few more frames in my hives which had enough honey to harvest – enough to load the slots in the centrifuge entirely with my bees’ frames, without mixing them with Adem’s. We went through the processes again, and I managed to be more careful in my scraping of the topping wax this time. I wiped things onto my new suit deliberately. I could tell that Adem was watching me.

I was proud of doing this by myself. I think Adem was proud too; when the first kilogram jar was filled from the centrifuge, he picked it up and presented it to me like a certificate.

Practical Xhezide took it away from me and wiped it down with a damp cloth before giving it back, like a midwife at a birth. As other jars were filled, they all needed wiping down, so while Rob, Adem and Lavdim all took their turns at the centrifuge, I stood with Xhezide at the sink helping to tidy things up. It was new, this patterning within our visit of the two of us alone. We talked to each other awkwardly at first. Only once the wiping and sorting settled into a rhythm, did our conversation do so too. I asked a bit about her life before Adem, before this farm.

’I was born in Pristina. It was an arranged marriage. I came here to nurse Adem’s mother until she died.’

 

 

I had never thought of Xhezide in Pristina – she had always seemed a part of this farm. I realised that I had always spoken to Adem and Xhezide of Pristina in the same way that I spoke about London – a concept I politely suggested they might have heard of. But then to what extent would Xhezide’s Pristina be the same city as my Pristina? It had been twenty years ago, and in so many ways, longer even than that.

We went on to harvest more than a kilogram jar of honey per frame this time – my care in scraping off the wax toppings paid off. It takes bees visiting ten million flowers to generate a kilogram of honey, and as the stuff spilled out of the centrifuge I tried to imagine these extravagant wild bouquets we were squeezing into the jars.

There was the same problem we had had on our previous visit, of the two inches of honey lying in the bottom of the centrifuge, below the spout, and only accessible by leaning over the top, and half-diving down into the honey trap. It was a time-consuming business and as we had a deadline for getting back to Pristina, I suggested that since the family had given us more than our share of the harvest on the previous occasion, the excess from my hives which was lying in the bottom of the hopper could be left for them this time if they didn’t mind doing the scooping.

We said our goodbyes and got into the car. As the engine started up, Xhezide ran down the steps of the house, still sticky from the gleaning she had been doing of the excess at the bottom of the centrifuge. In her arms was an enormous jar – perhaps four or five litres capacity– of the remaining honey. She would brook no argument: this was for us to take with us. I felt that I had not yet found a single way to repay my mounting debts to this kind, careful family. The jeroboam of generosity sat on the back seat where the afternoon sun glinted through it, casting pleasing honey-coloured stains of shadow onto my white bee- keeper suit.