Angel of Oblivion Read Free Page B

queen.
    He rushes to the suspiciously buzzing trees armed with a wooden box and a ladder. This time he has pulled a white hat with a veil over his head and his pleas for help bringing the swarm back home are roundly ignored.
    One time, Mother, trying to help fasten the wooden frame under the swarm of bees, faints after being stung several times. My younger brother and I stand there petrified next to Mother lying on the ground. Father has put a damp cloth on her forehead and raises her gently until she regainsconsciousness and vomits. From that day on Mother is terrified of bees and I, too, can barely master my distrust of them.
    You have to bear what you’ve provoked, Mother says after I cavalierly cross the bee’s flight paths.
    This time I’m helping Father pull the honey. He brought all the honeycombs with caps into the extraction room and started to remove the top layer of wax from the combs with a broad capping fork. He scrapes the gathered wax off onto the edge of an earthenware bowl painted with flowers that is only used for harvesting honey. I put a few pieces of honeycomb in my mouth and chew them until I’ve sucked out all the honey. If a small piece of honeycomb breaks off the frame during the uncapping, Father hands it to me, and I put the dripping comb in my mouth. The honey streams over my gums like a sticky pap and fills me with delight.
    Father puts the unsealed cells, in which the honey, now visible, sticks like liquid resin, into the extractor and starts to turn the crank. As soon as the honey begins to flow and Father starts praising its color, Grandmother comes back into the apiary. She pulls out her little notebook and starts estimating and writing down the number of liters per hive.
    After the extraction, I return to the front section of the bee-house where a few worker bees are flying about wildly. My fingers are sticky and damp. The bees suddenly attack me and as I’m trying to brush them out of my hair, I feel the stings on my scalp, which tightens from the pain as from a hard blow. I start screaming and hope I won’t faint. Father andGrandmother rush over to me and talk to me, but the pain that is now flooding over my entire body is stronger than any imploring words.
    My eyelids are swollen from tears and beestings when I finally stop crying. My scalp is covered with painful bulges that are visible under my hair. Grandmother puts a bottle of chocolate milk on the table to comfort me and lays cold poultices on my forehead and temples. As I lift the bottle to my mouth, my father’s cousin Michi walks in the kitchen. Such a big girl drinking out of a bottle, it can’t be true, he says reproachfully. Since there is as much astonishment as reproach in his comment, I understand, despite my predicament, that at my age, I really should start using a cup. Leave her alone, Grandmother says, she got stung by the bees. She shows Michi the stings, separating my hair in one section after another as if she were filing index cards. Michi sits with us on the kitchen bench and consolingly strokes my burning cheeks.

M OTHER helps me practice the Slovenian poetry I’m supposed to learn by heart for school. She says, we’ll do it together, I’ll memorize them with you! While she irons the clothes, I read from my poetry books and schoolbooks. Together we let the flowers grow. We crow with the roosters and peal with the church bells. We croak with the frogs and sing
tra-la-la
and
hop-sa-sa
for their weddings. We laugh with the ravens at the scarecrows, let soap bubbles rise like the sun, earth, and moon that turn without wheels and fly without wings. We load springtime with its garlands of flowers onto a boat and sail into the distance. We sit for hours in meadows of language and speak in the rhythm of rhymes. We realize that nature must be adorned with verse and the flowers woven into wreaths. With rhymes we can leap from stanza to stanza like butterflies from one blossom to another without fear of falling.