Angel of Oblivion Read Free Page A

building’s far wall. Next to the window stand two wardrobes in which Grandmother keeps her clothes. Beehives tower along the front like a broad buzzing wall. In spring, woolen blankets are still draped over the hives. In a separate back room is the honey extractor and fresh sheets of beeswax are piled on a small table near the door.
    Father is glad when I go into the apiary with him. He says he doesn’t like to work alone and presses the smoker into my hands. With a gentle grip, he opens the first hive and I reach the smoker inside the case. I run back outside right away. One by one, Father pulls the honeycombs out of the hive. With an eagle feather, he brushes away the bees hanging onto the frame and takes each honeycomb outside to check it. I wait at a suitable distance until Father comes out carrying a honeycomb crowded with bees and summons me with a nod of his head so that I can get a look at the seething mass. The first to find the queen bee gets to cheer. Stretching my neck, I bend over the colony and call out
matica, matica
,as soon as I’ve spotted the queen. Father sighs and looks for the queen cells with the tip of his feather. Sometimes he sweeps a colony, made weak by winter, as he says, away from the entrance of another hive and hopes that the weakened bees will be taken in by a neighboring colony. He tells me to stay calm and not make any sudden movements. He says he chose the right day, the bees have flown out and I don’t need to worry, no one will get stung on a day like this. I don’t entirely trust his confidence because I’ve often seen him swollen with beestings. Father likes to blow his cigarette smoke on the bees’ backs. They especially like that, he says, his tobacco can tame the fiercest creatures. He smiles when he sees me draw my head in, afraid an angry worker bee will attack me.
    Grandmother usually comes into the apiary to ask about the state of the bee colonies. She takes a small brown notebook with yellowed pages from a drawer in the wardrobe and notes down the size of the colonies and the number of queens. The cover of the notebook is emblazoned with the German Imperial Eagle. Under the insignia is written Employment Record Book, Name and Location, Nationality:
Deutsches Reich
. This notebook belonged to your grandfather, she says, though he never used it. He took over the farm on February 1st, 1927 and married on February 27th, 1927, that’s recorded in the notebook, Grandmother tells me. She kept a record of all the rest on the inside of the wardrobe door, where the dates of marriages and deaths are listed in pencil.
    Grandmother can’t bear to throw anything away, Father says, she even uses the old Hitler stuff until it completely falls apart. Nonsense, Grandmother retorts, the winter coat, the one she keeps in this closet, forexample, she only wore it once and won’t ever put it on again. She opens the wardrobe and points at a dark gray-green wool coat folded up on the floor. She “organized” it in Ravensbrück and from then on didn’t let it out of her sight, she says. She wore the coat on the day the camp was evacuated. It remained her best coat. Yeah, yeah, Father says and turns back to the bees. I cast a curious look at the coat before Grandmother closes the wardrobe door again and goes to get a jar of honey from the back room with the extractor. I’m surprised she used the word “organized,” which I’d never heard from her lips before. It must have something to do with the secret activity that kept her alive in the camp, I think.
    As soon as summer is palpable and you can’t go into the fields because grass has grown high, the bees call attention to themselves again after a brief rain shower. On such days you can hear the hum of a swarm flying to a branch that protrudes near the house or hanging from a tree at some distance from the farm like a seething cluster of grapes. Father is called from all corners of the farm, he must bring the escapees back to the old