The Honey Leaking Away

 

New Albanian vocabulary: shikime të shkurta (glimpses)

 

 

Rob’s contract finished at the end of May, and we were preparing our- selves for the possibility of his future work being based outside Kosovo. He applied for a range of jobs – continuing in Kosovo, going back to London, moving to Georgia...With no idea how our future was going to work out, I lived in a way that was perhaps the most Kosovan I had ever felt, unable to make any appointments or commitments more than a month ahead.

It’s a good discipline, living and judging each day on its own merits. I learned a lot in those months in Kosovo, savouring each meeting with my favourite people, each of my favourite views of landscapes, all the food that I knew I might never taste again. I noticed new things in familiar relationships, familiar sites. Lying awake one night, I realised I was listening to cicadas. I had never before been aware that we had cicadas in our garden; maybe they had just moved in, to serenade our final weeks. The next night I heard them again and paid attention to their strange sound, thinking about all those little hairy legs frotting away. As I listened longer I realised that I was hearing the sound of an unbalanced clock ticking. This was what it sounded like when time went too fast.

I wondered whether this was what the twilight years of life would be like.

But maybe we would be here for years more. I was reluctant to give up on Kosovo even as it looked increasingly likely that the job Rob would be offered would be UK-based. Stubbornly, I threw myself into new projects, as if I was playing chicken with fate, daring it to run over my plans. I worked with a friend to develop a training programme for walking tour guides in Pristina, and launched a full recruitment and marketing programme to make the project a success: radio interviews, press releases, coffees with journalist friends.

A few weeks later Rob received the email that said that he was being offered an excellent post back in London. We knew what we were going to do if he was offered that job; he called them the next day and accepted. We had a month to prepare ourselves.

How do you prepare for such a huge change to your world? I remembered my strategy when we were moving out to Kosovo – minimal practical preparation beyond checking the website of the hotel we would be staying at on our first night; and instead how I used all my energy to enjoy being with the people I cared about – saying proper goodbyes. And this time, it wasn’t just people I had to say farewell to of course; there were also the bees.

We went to visit Adem and Xhezide to tell them that we were going to have to leave Kosovo. ‘Are you going this week?’ they asked. ’No, in about three weeks.’ They were unmoved. Three weeks is not a timescale you can worry about in Kosovo. Live for the day. Conversation picked up on previous, well-worn and more enjoyable themes.

I tried again, explaining that with all the things we had to do in preparation for moving back to England, it was possible that we wouldn’t be able to come and see the bees again, though we hoped that the family would come to Pristina to a leaving party we were planning.

They weren’t sure. ‘It depends on whether we can get a lift with someone,’ they explained, rather offhand.

’We were hoping that when we are back in England you can keep looking after my bees, and enjoying their honey yourselves.’

Whatever

.I was confused. I couldn’t work out whether this implacability was a reflection of a lack of affection for us; or whether that as part of that strange, shifting international presence in Kosovo we had always been seen as only a temporary part of their lives. Where we thought we were building relationships to endure, viewed through a beekeeper’s eyes perhaps we were just part of that unpredictable community of queens who come and go; thrive and swarm, produce and die off.

We didn’t see Adem, Xhezide and Mirlinda again until the week we left. The leaving party we held was a wonderfully self-indulgent celebration of our time in Kosovo, or – as the invitations put it – our reasons to return here. I had become very proud of the photographs I had taken over the previous two years, and it had been while we were here that I had had the first external encouragement for my photography when a picture of mine was highly commended in a national com- petition. So we decided to put on an exhibition of celebratory photographs – Thirty Glimpses of Kosovo – and invited all our friends to the opening night.

It was an exciting evening which, like the cicadas, went too fast. The director of the National Gallery of Kosovo, whom I knew from the artists in residence project at the Ethnological Museum, agreed to host the exhibition at his gallery. More than eighty of our friends were able to come to the opening. Among them were Adem and his family.

In fact, they were there twice over. Among the traditional costumes, market scenes (the cheese barrels from that early shopping trip), curious sidelong looks at modern Pristina, communist architecture, a Serbian Orthodox monastery, Adem Jashari’s shelled home in Prekaz, haystacks and houses, Xhezide and Mirlinda stood making fli and serving drinks. I had taken the photograph on one of our earliest visits to them, and I wanted to include it as one of the experiences that had meant so much to us while we’d been here. I’d spoken to them on the phone to check that they would be happy for me to include the photo in the exhibition, and – bemused – they had given their consent and had promised to be there.

They were the first to arrive, along with the National Gallery’s official photographer. I stood at the drinks table we had set up, ready to serve Pimm’s, and wondered whether I was equal to this social situation.

It felt odd, standing together with glasses in our hands and wearing our best clothes. But we talked our way through it. Adem told me that this year’s honey was ready for harvesting, and I had to tell him that in the days left to us in Kosovo I didn’t think I was going to be able to come over for the centrifuging and filtering that I had just got the hang of the previous year. I asked whether Xhezide and Mirlinda liked the photograph and they said they did; I offered to give it to them when the exhibition came down.

The gallery began to fill up. It was a great mixture of many of the people who had created our Kosovo for us. Shpresa, my first Kosovan friend, was there; Coriander Sue and Mike came along, the guides from the Ethnological Museum, friends from the British Embassy, artist friends I had got to know when I worked on the charity art auction, colleagues from school, from the charity. Shqipja and Lendita, the sister beekeepers from Drenica also came, and I introduced them to Adem and Xhezide, hoping that there would be enough beekeeping in common to give them something to talk about. Before I could see whether I had been successful, I had to go and say hello to someone else.

 

 

I was standing talking to a group of American friends when I noticed Adem’s family at a polite distance waiting for my conversation to end. Excusing myself, I turned to them and they explained that they were going; they said that the person who had given them a lift into Pristina had to return to the village. Even as I thanked them – so much– for everything they had done for me, I could see another guest arriving and I knew that I really didn’t have long with them. I gave them all a brief hug, and they were gone. It was a sad, low-key leave taking, with no honey in it.

The next day, Adem called. He told me for the second time that the honey was ready for harvesting. ‘I’m sorry, Adem, but I can’t come today. Today, the movers for our furniture are coming. Then tomorrow, the packers are coming to take the rest of our belongings away before we leave this house.’ One by one, my ties with Kosovo were being dis- mantled, removed, undone. And Adem didn’t seem to understand.

’No, no. You don’t understand, Elizabeth,’ he said. ‘I am going to harvest it, and I want to bring it to you.’

It was yet another instance of his generosity. But unlike all the delicious meals, the easy hospitality, the knowledge transferred, the earthenware pottery… this time I really wasn’t able to accept his offer. The United Kingdom takes a dim view of imported honey. Along with fish and meat it is considered a ‘bio-product’ and customs will not accept any with provenance outside the EU or other countries with strict regulations in place. Flying in from a country where smuggling across borders involves guns and young women sold into prostitution, the stern posters at British airports asking you to yield up your pots of honey seem rather over-cautious. But a law is a law, and with the recent wide- spread colony collapse in the British bee population from causes unknown, I didn’t want to try dodging customs officers with my illegally sweet and sticky cargo.

So I tried to explain to Adem that I wouldn’t be able to take the honey. But he wouldn’t accept my protestations, and he asked if he could come the following morning to deliver it.

At 6.45 am the next day, the doorbell rang. I really wasn’t ready for this.

I pulled on some clothes and went down to find Adem waiting outside with the friend who had driven him into the city. After saying hello, Adem went back to the car and came back with his arms around an enormous, weighty basket, inside which were jars and jars of honey. They were all shapes and sizes – the jeroboams I had seen before, along with jars that had held commercially-produced jam, ajvar, sauces. He handed the basket to me and went back to the car. He returned with a further cardboard box weighed down with more jars. Altogether there were twenty kilograms of honey.

I was overwhelmed. Just when I thought that I was stripping my Kosovan home, and my life in Kosovo; losing chairs, tables, possessions by the boxful, here my home was filling up with sweetness. At the same time, of course, I was wondering what the hell I could do with twenty kilograms of honey before my flight back to Gatwick.

But in the meantime I tried to be the perfect early morning hostess to Adem and his friend with the car. We had no furniture left to sit them on, but they politely professed themselves comfortable with the cushions on our wooden flooring that was all that remained. I found a spare plate and the watermelon that we had been given the previous day as a thank you by the family to whom we had given our unshippable items of furniture. We still had our kettle, so we sat down to an impro- vised breakfast together. I put out small glasses filled with the excellent honey that Adem had brought – this was just the beginning of what would be a sickening honey orgy if we were to eat it all in the next 24 hours.

Rob found a saucer for Adem’s cigarette, and in the sleepiness of early morning we sat eating watermelon and talking about nothing in particular while Adem’s smoke filled up our sitting room until it smelled just like his own. Occasionally he ran his hand over his face – all the way from the chin up over the forehead and then down the back of his head– and I realised that something was bothering him. It was bothering me, too.

‘You will keep in contact, won’t you?’ he said, and we promised that we would.

’And we’ll come back to visit Kosovo,’ and we all nodded.

’And I’ll look after the bees.

’Adem called Xhezide for her to say goodbye by telephone. She said she had heard me on the radio the day before when I’d been a studio guest talking about my walking tour guide training on the morning programme. She told me that she had burst into tears, thinking that it would be the last time she would hear my voice. We were all nearly crying now.

’You will keep in contact, won’t you?’

’And we’ll come back to visit Kosovo.’

’And I’ll look after the bees.’

At each repetition of the formula, Adem rubbed his hand more furiously over his face and I felt closer to sobbing.

After he’d smoked another cigarette, Adem got up to go. I hugged him on the doorstep, and he rubbed away at his face, tears in his eyes. Rob escorted him in proper Albanian fashion to our front gate and they hugged too. We stood and waved them off, swallowing hard at the large lump in my throat that I guessed that even twenty kilograms of honey– particularly twenty kilograms of honey – wouldn’t soothe away.

The last 24 hours were a ridiculous rush around Pristina with jars of honey in my bag – a small sad bee in reverse. This was my final chance to try the tricks I’d learned from Vedat’s mother, from Xhezide as I’d left their houses – a sudden splurge of generosity in parting. I took one pot over to the small gym opposite us to thank the staff there who had helped not only with keeping me fit, but also generously lent us outdoor heaters for that first birthday party here at the Ethnological Museum, the day I’d been given the beehives. Despite it being our last evening in Kosovo, I insisted on going to my yoga class – more chicken with fate– and at the end of class I left a pot next to my teacher’s mat at the front. I walked up to the corner shop which for two years had been a constant friendly source of chocolate and newspapers, and gave a pot to the owner who had put me in my place when I’d grumbled about how long I seemed to be waiting for Kosovo’s independence. He seemed to be as much in denial as I was about us leaving. ‘How long are you going away for?’ I didn’t know how to answer.

I sent an email round to friends advertising that they could come and collect as much honey as their arms and blood sugar levels could manage, and gave pots away to my favourite people: Saskia, with whom I’d celebrated Women’s Day and visited Women for Women’s bee- keepers. Naxhije, the Ethnological Museum photographer, came round with her husband, and so did Cindy, with whom I’d run the workshops at the kulla. I went to visit the offices of Cultural Heritage without Borders, the NGO that had funded the workshops I’d led at the kulla, and were now giving money to enable the Pristina walking tour guide training project. Along with the paperwork they’d asked me to hand in before I left town, I brought a pot of honey for the director and one for his finance manager. I took a taxi to the Journalism Institute who had given us rooms for free for the training, and left a pot of honey on the desk of the Director there to thank him, and gave another to Bryony, my colleague in the project. One pot went to our mercurial, generous, slightly mad landlord when we handed over the keys.

This was an intensification of a process that had been going on for several weeks. We had found families who said that they would like our furniture, had brought women we’d found begging in the streets to take their pick of the clothes and lamps and crockery we really couldn’t justify keeping, let alone transporting across Europe. The ‘Safe House’ shelter in Gjakova had inherited the drawers of unopened cosmetics and toiletries that I had collected, and the Vetëvendosje movement had said they could use one of the beehives for which I had leapt from the car on the way to the Xhonaj music festival. One of their activists had made it into a lampshade which hung over the courtyard of their head- quarters; I liked the idea of it illuminating their political discussions.

 

 

Along with my delicious honey, I had been sure that British Customs would also turn their noses up at the former hive that I had had in our garden. It was the used ‘primitive’ made by Rexhep, and given to me along with the chicken on our visit to his farm. With cow dung plastering the outsides and bits of honeycomb still clinging to the inside, the object would scream ‘bio-product’ to any customs officer. On our final morning in Kosovo, we walked to meet the guides from the Ethnological Museum for coffee. I brought with me the hive and over a rather solemn makiato I handed it over to them. It was almost unbearably ashes-to-ashes.

When we’d finished our coffees, the guides had to get to work, and Rob and I went to see to our final suitcases, and our trip home.

And so the love story of my beekeeping adventures in Kosovo, like so many love stories, ended in the car on the way to the airport. Ramiz, Rob’s friend, was driving us, and in the glove compartment of his car sat the last pot of honey we had had to dispose of. Handing it over hadn’t marked the end of our relationship with Kosovo, of course, but surrendering the last jar of all that concentrated sunshine, flowers, hard work, was a difficult thing to do. But there was nothing for it; Rob and I sat squeezing one another’s hands as we rushed through the outskirts of Pristina, nearly at the airport, as we drove on into the suburb of Fushë Kosovë, past the signpost with the Serbian name spray painted out. For perhaps the last time we were journeying over the field of blackbirds, the field of my bees.