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It is mainly for the memory of my father. He was the one who took care of the garden. The beautiful garden of the new house he had bought and renovated with a lifetime of savings. He enjoyed it for far too few years. If it were up to my brother, there would now be a thick gray mass of concrete instead of greenery, and damn it. For me, it would be like spitting in his face. My father, I mean. Maybe it was a burden at first, but now tending to the flowers, mowing the lawn, pruning, fertilizing, and managing the perpetual and imperceptible growth of the plants relaxes me. It makes me feel good.
They fly from flower to flower, light. They brush against my face while I take a break lying on the grass and watch them up close without disturbing them. The buzzing of bees hypnotizes me, and so I've decided for a few years now to mow the lawn higher, letting some small white flowers grow on the grass. I watch them work with their little legs to gather pollen, tirelessly marathoning up and down. There are beehives at the edge of the nearby farmer's vineyard, and yes, I think that's where they come from.
Andrei Kurkov's latest book is precisely about bees. With my fake account, I had sponsored "Hendrix a Leopoli" without much success. Now I'm trying again. However, the setting is not my idyllic lawn but a Donbass village in 2015, almost two years after the hostilities broke out. Sergey survives in the gray area, the so-called no man's land. To the right, the artillery of the pro-Russian separatists; to the left, the defense of the Ukrainian army. The front is practically immobile, and bombs fly over his head, often far enough away, sometimes too close. Sergey refuses to abandon his home and faces the harsh winter, where only an old childhood enemy keeps him company. A cunning profiteer with whom he is forced to bond to avoid going mad from loneliness. Kurkov narrates a minimal and bleak life with a dry prose laced with sharp jokes and amusing descriptions. In Sergey's restless sleep, memories quickly run to dwell on the simple beauty of daily life when there was no war.
"Bees are better than humans. At most, some people can be like bees, but most cannot."
They live simply by their work, are autonomous, and do not bother anyone. They have their strict rules which they adhere to, and only sting when they are afraid or attacked. Sergey adores his six beehives and their buzzing inhabitants. He takes care of them as if they were his children and lives on their perpetual work. But the bombs make life impossible even for his bees, which need light, and die in the grayness.
And so Sergey embarks on a journey first within Ukraine and then to Crimea. His convictions about the superiority of bees find confirmation in the meanness and distrust of the people who stop at appearances, hearsay, the mere place of origin, the TV news. He comes from the gray area, neither fish nor fowl, and, like a drone before autumn, is rejected by most because he is different. But even away from the bombs, Sergey realizes that his country is gravely ill. It's true, people don't die of hunger, there are no bombs to be heard, but even there the sun is different. Those rays warming him in the sunny Crimea are now contaminated. There's distrust, fear, and an absence of the future in the air. A beehive is requisitioned by a central office, and the bees, like humans, begin to gray.
It is a non-trivial book that highlights, with a delicate prose almost poetic in its absolute simplicity, the senseless logic of war. Sergey will return to his former enemy Paska to keep the village alive and to cast a gaze towards the future. Beyond this endless and boundless grayness.
P.S. The book was written in 2019. The grayness is still there, ever darker.
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