Finely Chopped Cabbage And Fine Lines

 

New Albanian vocabulary: turshi (pickled vegetables)

 

 

Talking to all these other beekeepers was making me miss my own bees; it had been a few weeks since I’d seen them or Adem and Xhezide. Ironically, I had been too busy writing about other people’s bees to be visiting my own. So we arranged to drive over to them on the next Sunday. When we arrived, we discovered that we were sharing the visit with a senior Kosovan judge who has a house in the village nearby. He goes there only at weekends, spending his working days in the capital, in a Kosovan approximation to Virgil’s model lifestyle. My heart sank when we met because I knew that the hospitality which so often got in the way of my visits to the bees would only be increased this time when it was multiplied by one more guest.

Also visiting was Enes, Adem’s nephew from next door. The last time we had met had been the previous summer when he was five. I doubted that he would remember me, but he did, even managing to greet me with my name.

’Have you started school now?’ I asked.

’I’m registered,’ he lisped proudly. So I asked him whether he could count, and with a bit of help we made it to 19. He was inordinately proud of himself, so while the grown ups chatted across the room, I suggested that Enes and I moved on to a bit of writing. He and I huddled in one corner of Adem’s front room over some paper I tore from my notebook, and painstakingly made our way through his name, though with some reluctance over the S, possibly because I told him it was like a snake. He wanted to do more; with memories of my own efforts learning to write my overlong name, I suggested we tried Adem.

Meanwhile the judge was trying to tell us about the history of the region. I saw him look at me occasionally, with a schoolmaster’s stern stare. He didn’t seem impressed that I quite clearly enjoyed the six-year old’s learning more. There in the room were Yeats’ two models of education, perfectly elaborated – the judge’s painstaking filling of a pail, and Enes and I enthusiastically lighting a fire.

Nevertheless, eventually Enes wriggled away with ‘I’m tired,’ care- fully folding over and over his piece of paper covered in letters, and sticking it in his pocket. I started listening to the judge. He was holding forth on how outrageous it was that Adem had been sacked from his recently-acquired job working on the new road to Skopje. We hadn’t even heard that Adem had lost his job – the last we knew was when Adem had come to visit us in Pristina one day without warning, and brought with him unexpected gifts: a pot plant and two lovely earthenware vases, carefully chosen for our sitting room. He’d told us then that he was working on the road – the first job he’d had beyond the farm in years – and we had realised that he must have spent much of his first pay cheque on our presents.

And now he had apparently been let go, with no reason, and no pay. The judge was furious on his behalf. He ranted about justice and how it should be blind. ‘Any Hashim or Fatmir [the prime minister and the president] should know that they are going to get the same treatment as anyone else,’ he said, and we of course agreed.

I had hoped we might have been able to visit the bees by now. The judge also kept bees and I thought perhaps he would understand, or even help with a pally lecture as we stood observing my hive. But it seemed we were stuck inside, and as a woman, as a guest of lower social status than the judge, I didn’t feel I could do anything to get us moving. I tried to steer the conversation onto bee-related topics. Then the judge wanted to talk about the liquid for varroa treatment which is imported from Serbia. I gathered that there was a recurrence of a poisoning-the- wells story I’d had sent to me some months before in an email circular about imported foods from Serbia. Kosovo is still heavily dependent on Serbian manufacturing in a number of sectors, including food, where old Yugoslav trade patterns die hard. All the population over the age of nine were brought up as good little Yugoslavs on Serbian baked goods, and most cut their teeth on Plazma brand biscuits. However, according to the story in circulation, separate conveyor belts in the Serbian Plazma factories produce the goods destined for Kosovo. People who have eaten the biscuits in both Serbia and Kosovo claim that they taste noticeably different, and there are a series of unproven cases of poisoning which are widely considered to be a result of Serb food-tampering. I just didn’t believe it.

This time it was the Serb-produced varroa treatment exported to Kosovo that was being alleged to be poisonous.

’Do you believe that?’ I asked the judge, the educated, self-consciously educated man.

’Oh yes. There have been cases – my neighbour treated his hives with some, and all of those bees are now dead.’

The way he phrased his reply reminded me that the death of bees is a serious business in Kosovo. When bees die in Albanian, they don’t ’ngordhë’ like all other animals; instead they ‘vdes’, a word otherwise only used for the demise of human beings. As for the theory surrounding these significant little deaths, like all conspiracy theories, there was of course no sane response I could make which wouldn’t receive the answer ‘that’s just what they want you to think...’

Thankfully, Xhezide came in at this point with lunch. She had prepared a pite pie, with pickled cabbage that she had chopped using the food processor we’d bought her as a present some months ago. I was really pleased that she was using it: I had worried that with such sporadic electricity – the farm sometimes goes days together without power – it might be little more than a spare mixing bowl, with an irritating lump of machinery on top. But I had wanted so badly to give her a present that might really make life easier for her in some small way.

A previous present with aspirations to chic had been a cultural dis- aster; I had arrived one Saturday with a chichi little decorated tin with bath salts in it that I’d brought back from England for her. She had smiled and thanked me and I had thought nothing of it.

It had been months later that I had had a call from Mirlinda. ‘You know that metal thing? What is the stuff inside it?’ I didn’t even know what she was referring to until she sounded out the word written on the side, ‘l-a-v-e-n-d-e-r’. ‘Is it to eat?’

’Oh no!’ I explained. ‘It’s to put in your bath.’

’We don’t have a bath,’ she said rather sadly.

Of course they didn’t. Although I didn’t know exactly what the washing arrangements were – I had never seen the family’s bathroom. The one time I had needed to use a toilet when we were visiting, Xhezide had gently asked ‘is it for a big need or a little need?’ and then led me out to the wooden privy that stood next to the barn where the skeps hung.

So feeling that I had got something right with my food processor gift gave extra piquancy to the pickled cabbage.

Before anything else could be done after the meal, we had to have tea. I swiftly finished my cup, and Mirlinda approached with the teapot, offering more. I refused politely but she pressed me to take another cup. I refused again but she kept insisting. Finally I managed to assure her that I really didn’t want any. Next to me, I saw the judge drain his own small tea glass and place the teaspoon, convex side up, over the top of it. Mirlinda silently took his cup away. Finally grasping the elegant little system, I belatedly tried to do the same without anyone noticing, but Xhezide doesn’t miss much and started laughing.

When everyone’s tea glass had a spoon balanced on it, and with Enes now knowing how to write his own and his uncle’s name satis- factorily, I could see no other reason for us to delay. Perhaps I might check on my bees?

I suited up and went down to the hives with the smoker. Adem had found some of the special fungus that grows on trees, which he had told me made the best smoke to use with bees. These were great tough ringed bulges that smelt like the autumn of autumn as they burned.

Lifting up the hive lid I could hear the drone, and hear its tone change as the bees realised that someone was looking in on them. The smoke calmed them to the point where I was able to lift out the frames to check what was going on. Everything seemed in order, the cells filling up nicely and the bees busying back and forth with pollen visible in the little pouches on their legs. My reference book had told me that when a bee returns to the hive it will be carrying up to 75 per cent of its own weight; aeroplanes carry only 25 per cent of their weight.

Adem said that there wasn’t anything more I should do for the moment, and he was standing waiting. It was time to go. Rob and I offered the judge a lift down to his house, and set off, following his directions, taking us past a memorial. As we approached he told us of the massacre that had been committed there by the Serbs on his grand- father’s family. Fourteen of them had been killed, from children to old men. They were buried in a communal grave. I asked which year this had been, assuming it was something from the 1999 atrocities, or maybe the previous year.

’1921,’ he said. God, this history stretches back; and around.

Beyond the memorial, he directed us down the hill to the main road and as we approached I saw a police car stationed at the bottom. I had noticed before that the judge wasn’t wearing his seatbelt, in contravention of the new and now zealously-policed law, and I alerted him now. ‘Sir, put your seat belt on – the police will fine you.’

He was gung-ho about it, swatting away my insistence.

’Don’t worry. They know me.’

Sure enough, we sailed past the checkpoint, with the judge’s seat- belt flagrantly and illegally loose, and I wondered then what had become of the same law for Hashim, Fatmir and everyone. I don’t think that the judge would have understood my point even had I articulated it. I don’t think he would have seen any connection between the local police failing to impose on him the fines for contravention of the seat- belt law, and the need for an impartial judiciary. And I don’t know how that connection can be made.