The Blood of Angels Read online

  So now that we’ve learned the practicality and ‘instinctiveness’ of the bees’ dances, we’re not the least bit interested in what the bees are saying to each other in the gaps between the exchange of information. Are they telling jokes? Swapping gossip? Hatching plots?

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  Whatever. You really have to dig for human characteristics in animals. A dog gives you his paw and suddenly he’s intelligent, practically knows how to talk. And once we’ve ‘found’ these traits by forcing and twisting the facts we’ll be able to start demanding that pigs and cows have a right to vote.

  DAY NINE

  I only have about a dozen hives. It’s just a hobby. About four hundred kilograms of honey a year. Not enough to pay a minimum wage.

  The hives are on a little rise in deciduous woods to the north-west of the cottage. The birches and aspen offer welcome shade in the summer, but when the bees start to wake up in the early spring the naked trees let the weak sunlight through and the bees are ready to venture out as soon as the temperature gets above zero in the warmth of the sunlight. There are also a lot of willows in the area, which are a vital early source of nectar.

  I finally went today to pick up my new bee suit from the service point. I was intent on finishing my errand quickly, not stopping to chat, but no one wanted to anyway. I did notice some looks – wary, pitying, eyes delicately turned to the floor or the wall, people avoiding me, keeping their distance as if I had some nasty infectious disease. In my profession I’ve learned to understand such behaviour, but not directed at me.

  The overalls feel a little loose when I put them on (I may have lost weight – don’t even remember whether I’ve eaten anything) and are oddly stiff. I’m sure all new clothes feel that way before your body shapes them.

  I know that my parading up and down, supposedly to test them out, my careful loading of bits of rotten wood into the smoker, are delay tactics, a way to put off finding out the answer to whether the end of the world has arrived.

  At the first hive the smoker flushes out a sizeable swarm of lively bees. I pull off the roof of the hive, still holding my breath. Then I let my breath out as I look at the frames in one slow exhale, a sigh of relief. This colony is healthy and alert. The hive is almost ready to harvest; I could even extract the honey from a couple of frames and put some empties in their place, they’ve been so busy.

  It was just one colony. I’m sure there are lots of things that could have thrown the bees’ life out of kilter. Mice and other small mammals try to infiltrate the hives, usually in winter – how do I know it wasn’t some little predator, maybe a shrew, braving the stings to get in and, even though it had fled, causing such a panic that the colony decided to abandon the hive. Maybe the queen just suffered some accident in the fracas.

  If I cry wolf, and there’s no wolf there, will I be believed when something bad really does happen?

  After I’ve checked the bulk of the hives I’m reassured. The colonies are busy and full of life, the brood cells are buzzing with lively offspring, the combs so full of honey that I decide to swap some frames with empties to be filled. Although the season’s almost over there’s still plenty of willowherb and heather blooming. It’s particularly lush in the woods east of Hopevale.

  To be on the safe side I decide to empty the abandoned hive completely and disinfect it. Or burn it, just to be sure. It might be asking for trouble to try to install a new queen and colony in the abandoned box, even if the problem was simply some new mould or parasite. (Although in that case I ought to have seen sick and dead bees. Ought to have.)

  I put the roof back on the last hive and extinguish the smoker. I’m heading back to the extractor room, counting in my mind how many empty frames I’ll need, when something stops me like it’s got my leg in its jaws. I jump, almost fall down, and I hear an ominous tearing sound. I grab the nearest hive instinctively to steady myself, and it rocks. I lose my balance.

  Oh, no.

  My brand-new bee suit has caught on a strip of wood nailed to one of the hives and used as a handle. I had walked too close to the nest in my absentmindedness. When I look closely I see that the strip has warped as it has aged and is sticking out a millimetre from the edge of the box. The nail should have been hammered in closer to the end. Pupa had his careless days. And my overall pocket has caught on this unnoticed, cleverly placed trap. The seam is torn at the pocket and two centimetres down the leg.

  It’s not a large tear, but it’s big enough for an angry bee to get in, so I leave quickly, covering the hole with my glove just in case.

  Nine days ago I feared the world was ending, but it didn’t end – or not in the way I expected. Then the new bee suit came, like a fateful irony, a meaningless object. Now I’m taking the rip in the suit too much to heart. It’s the very first time I’ve worn it. Equipment shouldn’t damage so easily – the suit is obviously a dud. At least the tear is right at the seam. I can patch it up myself. But if I want to put new frames in the hives I’ll need a bee suit, so old faithful will have to be called into service again.

  Luckily I haven’t thrown it away. It’s hanging in the hayloft.

  *

  I climb the ladder up to the trapdoor that leads to the loft. When Pupa’s parents were young the door had been used to pitch hay straight down into the cow stalls, back when the old cottage I live in was the main building of Hopevale Farm. The two-cow barn is now used as a woodshed and storehouse. It was built a bit oddly, as an addition to the sauna, under the same roof – or maybe the sauna was an addition to the barn; I’ve never thought to ask. Maybe they thought that heating up the sauna a couple of times each week would make the cows on the other side of the wall a little more comfortable in winter. Pupa’s father built a much larger barn at the time the new Hopevale farmhouse was built, but the cosy, steamy sauna was still used.

  The hayloft is divided into two sections by a wall. The front is almost empty, just a few brown cardboard boxes with MARJA-TERTTU written on them. They’re things she forgot that I’ve put together in one place, thinking I would send them on to her at some point. I never have, but I can’t bring myself to throw them stuff out. And anyway, the loft is the final resting place for lots of things that have fallen out of use but are still in good condition and might come in handy some day. ‘In case there’s a war or a famine,’ Marja-Terttu once said, oozing sarcasm.

  She had no idea of her powers of prophecy.

  *

  There’s a gap in the wall that leads to the back space, and there, under the sloped roof, is a collection of all kinds of things that might be needed some day. The ‘junk room’ Pupa called it. Stacks of old terracotta pots and a pitchfork with no handle and an old kitchen stool and a bent fish-trap and discarded but still perfectly serviceable clothes hanging from nails in the walls collecting dust, like my paint-stained overalls. And the honey-stiffened bee suit.

  It’s hanging on the junk room wall like a limp, white human form. I give it a shake with a flick of my wrist. Dust flies, even though it’s only been hanging there for nine days.

  *

  I put it on in the centrifuge room. It immediately feels like a favourite pair of jeans. It’s used to me. I don’t really need to put new frames in the hives today, but it helps to do something, anything. And what else do I have to do when I’m on sick leave?

  I go back out, light the smoker and notice from a distance that one of the stacks of hive boxes, the ones that are painted green, is oddly slumped. It’s the same hive that tore a hole in my new suit. The catch and stumble has knocked it out of balance.

  When I touch the top box the whole thing sways. Not much, but noticeably. I crouch down and examine the bottom of the hive. One of the bricks at the base, the one at the corner, of course, is crumbling a little. There’s a thin, meandering crack that goes all the way through the brick. There must have been a hairline crack in it back when Pupa first put the bricks there as a base, and the wint
er freezes and summer changes in moisture have widened it until I stumbled against that one hive and the brick cracked and that half of the hive pressed into the ground a little. That was enough: the whole hive is out of balance.

  I don’t even consider trying to lift the hive and fix the base where it stands; now that the honey’s starting to accumulate each box weighs quite a few kilograms. Nor do I want to start taking every frame out since I’ll be collecting the honey soon in any case. But I’m reluctant to leave it out of alignment from now until autumn. I might bump into it again in passing, or a badger might come at night poking around for something sweet and knock the whole thing over.

  If I try to move the broken brick out of the way and shove a new one in its place it should keep it stable at least until harvest time, maybe even until I get it ready for winter.

  So all I need is a brick. Where did I put the ones from when the old main building was torn down? I took a dozen or so to keep – you can always use a brick here and there for small fixes.

  In the junk room, where else? I remember it clearly; Ari tossing the bricks up to me from the barn, showing that he still had a strong arm when he needed it, chucking the bricks into the air with a laugh to cover his grunts while I bent over the edge of the trapdoor and caught them in my gloved hands. It was an exhilarating game for adults, both of us showing off our manhood. He had to let the brick fly high enough, at just the right angle for me to reach it, and I had to catch it effortlessly, as if it were as small and light as a ping-pong ball.

  I take a deep breath because a vast hatred of Ari is starting to well up from somewhere deep within me again, vomiting up uncontrollably. I try to direct my thoughts to the bricks – bricks, bricks bricks, damn it – and it helps a little. I remember the exact place now; they’re in a pile against the north wall of the junk room. I would have seen them when I went to get my bee suit if I’d known to look for them. If I’d known that I was about to need one.

  I put them there carefully, maybe so I could preserve at least a small piece of the old Hopevale house, which was a home to me, unlike the stone mansion Ari has now. He ordered a majestic, prefab house and tore the old one down as soon as Pupa was under the dirt. Maybe he had his reasons – the old place was an unsightly 1960s house with a flat roof and grey cladding that was supposed to be weatherproof. Nobody worried about asbestos back then. Pupa left me the sauna and the cottage in his will, separating it off from the property so that I would also get the beehives. Ari was probably a little hurt by the way the inheritance skipped a generation, must have seen it as a rebuke …

  No. Not now. I’m not going to think about Ari right now.

  I’m thinking about bricks. Bricks, bricks, bricks.

  Back to the hayloft. Move!

  *

  But I am thinking about Ari.

  The time he came to visit Finland, in the summer of 1976 (before he came back for good two years later), I was fourteen. I was gangly, narrow-shouldered, morose, the mere beginnings of a man, peering out under a thin, shaggy fringe at this strange man who was as big and broad as a double bed. He was broad in his speech and in his deeds, too, laughed as broadly as anyone with at least a hundred teeth in his mouth.

  He tried to get to know me again by shaking me by the neck, mussing my hair, elbowing me in the ribs, laughing his open-mouthed, American laugh that sounded almost idiotic to me at first. He invaded my personal space in a very un-Finnish way and bruised me inadvertently. Even the Levis he brought me from New York, the only real pair in the village, which should have made me incredibly proud, offended me. They were several centimetres too short and too big around the waist. In his mind’s eye Ari had seen the chubby little boy of three years earlier, not me.

  And when he gave Pupa the nickname Old Dog I was embarrassed. Pupa’s name wasn’t his fault, and neither was mine. From what I’ve heard it was Ari who wanted my name to be Orvo, after my mother, whose name was Orvokki. I didn’t know and had never heard of another boy with that name. The only thing that assured me that it was even a real name and not some damned girl’s nickname was a television show from my early childhood with a circus ringmaster named Orvo – a man, luckily. The Parrot Circus they called it. (Parrots again. Eero, I think, and shut my eyes from the sheer pain.)

  I wouldn’t even have been christened Orvo if my mother, Orvokki, hadn’t died almost immediately after I was born of complications the nature of which remained vague to me and about which I never asked. But you can always find a kernel of levity in the sadness, if you want it badly enough. Ari managed to find it even in his wife’s death – he called me Orvo the Orphan.

  My moroseness wasn’t long-lived, though. I started to see that Ari’s ease, his spontaneity, were genuine; they were just so unusual in Finland at that time that you automatically assumed he was play-acting – the American clown. Even the fact that, contrary to custom, he would just touch me in way I was entirely unused to, seizing me by my skinny shoulders even in public places, putting his arm tightly around me and squeezing – started to change in my opinion into brave, manly behaviour. Ari dared to be different from other people, to march to his own drum, and the estrangement I felt faded, first in moments of acceptance, later in a budding admiration and, I might as well say it, love. At a certain point even his tired old joke about ‘our old dog’ started to have a funny, anarchic ring to it: here was a man brave enough to makes jokes even at his own venerable father’s expense. And wasn’t an observation like that – word play with another person’s name – just a sign of his affection, and not really teasing? It was the kind of rough tenderness that ice-hockey players had when they ribbed each other in the locker room with those nicknames that seemed insulting on the outside but came from an affection on the inside. I decided that I would think up a clever nickname for Ari or a sarcastic joke about some characteristic of his and use it constantly. It would be our way of teasing one another, which he’d given me indirect permission to do.

  To be completely honest, my shyness and prejudice about Ari were lifted a lot by the envious looks of the other boys in the village, their gazes lingering on my father’s cowboy boots and leather jacket, not to mention the used Chevrolet he’d bought just to use while he was in Finland (and which he, perfectly Ari-like, washed, waxed and sold just before he left at a profit). And Ari gave me money. Whenever he came back from buying groceries he would pour all his change into my hand. ‘It’s just wearing out the bottom of my pocket,’ he would say with a laugh.

  The too-short Levis slid over my bony hips nicely. I cut the legs off above the knee and wore them as shorts. I refused to let my grandmother hem them, letting them unravel into fringe like a hippie. The waistband hung loose, almost below my budding naval hair, and Ari laughed and my grandma was aghast and Pupa smiled wickedly, but no one told me I couldn’t wear them. That and letting my hair grow way past my ears was my way of rebelling, I guess.

  Although I did have one other rebellion, now that I think about it: my choice of profession.

  Ari wanted me to go to business school.

  I tried to talk to him about bees. Pupa had taught me everything he knew about them, and I’d learned a lot more on my own. The hives would be Ari’s after Pupa died because the land would be his – or that’s what we thought before Pupa’s will – and I needed his approval. I was thinking that the operation could be expanded. Broadened, modernized.

  ‘But that’s just a hobby, for heaven’s sake,’ Ari said. ‘Some people grow a couple of potatoes for midsummer, some tinker with their cars. I have a few beehives. You can take care of them, but that’s no profession for you. What’s a bee compared to a bull calf?’

  What indeed?

  Once I was a little older and was chasing a teenage girl, the budding relationship wilted when she refused to come over to Hopevale. Because of the bees. Buzzing, bug-eyed, stinging monsters, who made up for their small size through the terrifying power of their sheer numbers. I have no doubt it would have been easier to get her to come
over if my family had raised rattlesnakes. There was no point trying to explain the basic beauty and lovableness of bees to a young girl repulsed by anything with six legs and an exoskeleton.

  A calf, after all, is a moist-eyed, warm-blooded creature that doesn’t really frighten anyone, even though it’s considerably larger and heavier than a person and could run you down if it wanted to. Besides, girls my own age ought to have been more horrified by the fact that in addition to innocent colonies of insects Hopevale also contained a death camp so efficient it made you shudder. Flayed and dismembered bodies were carted out of it constantly, ending up as bloody, lifeless lumps at the meat counter. Killing was what they did for a living at Hopevale. Murders and mutilation day after day! Cash registers ringing up death.

  Death …

  Bricks, my mind shouts. Bricks, damn it. I’m here to get a brick!

  I march to the barn and start clambering up the rough-wood ladder. I raise my shoulders through the hatch into the dark loft.

  My legs freeze, forget to move.

  I see something that doesn’t belong there.

  Are the tears on my eyelashes bending the light in some odd way, creating a reflection, an illusion? I wipe my eyes on my sleeve with an almost angry motion, smell the intoxicating scent of the honey-soaked cloth.

  But it’s still there, as if it has always been there, as plain as day and as clear as the worn timber wall it opens out of.

  I climb up the last few steps, and I can’t believe what I’m seeing, even though it’s just a metre in front of me.

  EERO THE ANIMAL’S BLOG

  PONDERINGS ON OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH ANIMALS

  HUMANIZATION

  This is in response to the only comment on my previous post, an insightful and elegantly constructed argument contributed by commenter Blablabla.