Rivka Galchen Reads Aleksandar Hemon

Amelia Island, Florida invites you to breathe a little deeper and enjoy the luxury of letting go. Discover the tranquil seaside getaway embraced by salt, air, sunshine, and authentic southern charm. Find your unwind at Amelia Island dot com. This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine. I'm Deborah Treesman, Fiction Editor at the New Yorker. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month, on our 200th episode, we're going to hear the B's Part One by Alexander Himon, which appeared in the New Yorker in October of 2002. Father announced that he was going to make a film that would not lie. My mother asked what the movie would be about. The truth, he said, obviously. The story was chosen by Rivka Gouchin, whose books include the story collection, American Innovations, and the novel Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch. Hi, Rivka. Welcome back. Hi. Thanks for having me. So on the other episodes of the podcast that you've done, you chose stories by Isaac Bush Heva Singer and Leonard Michaels and now Alexander Himon. And I'm wondering if there's a common denominator. No, I think one thing is that all of them have a language that feels translated. I mean, Bush Heva Singer is translated, but when I say translated, I mean it not in the sense of awkwardness, but in the sense of being very, very precise. Like it feels foreign because it feels so accurate. Each word choice feels accurate. And that's something I'm drawn to. I don't know why. Yeah. It feels inflected. I suppose you can hear it spoken with a certain accent, but inflection. Yeah. And you would Leonard Michaels, you can kind of tell you grew up in a household that was using different words. And definitely, that's also true of Sasha Himon and Isaac Singer. Yeah. When you are reading a piece of short fiction like this, what is it that makes you most excited? You know, I always feel hesitant to say this because it's hard to know what it means, but I guess emotion certain. And I think that's pretty common. I think that's common to connect to the sincerity and intensity of the emotion. But of course, what feels emotional or what conveys emotion is so different for different people. And I think for me, a kind of comic worldview feels credible to me. It feels real and feels like it comes out of, it's like generated by emotion needing to find some way out. And is that true in the Bees part one? Absolutely. I mean, it's a story. It starts by putting tragedy in the parentheticals, but there's a lot of tragedy that surfaces into the main paragraphs. And yet, I mean, I don't think there's a paragraph that isn't funny in some way. Yeah. It's a story that's told from the point of view of a Bosnian who has moved to the US and whose parents have moved to Canada, immigrated to Canada and whose father in particular is that figure who's both generating the emotion, generating the comedy, and has suffered the tragedies. Yeah. He kind of embodies everything you look for and his English is odd. Is there anything else that you think people should know about the story before they hear it? No, I think it's nice to enter it. Just open like this. Yeah. Okay. Let's go to the story then. And now here's Rivka Gouchin, reading the Bees part one by Alexander Hammond. The Bees part one. This is not real. Many years ago, back in Sarajevo, my sister and I went to see a movie with our parents. The film was about a handsome young man who goes on a treasure hunt where he meets a beautiful young woman. Our mother fell asleep instantly. Motion pictures often had that effect on her. Our father had a different response. By the end of the first scene, he was snorting derisively. This is stupid. He whispered in my ear. Then he turned to the people around us, imploring them conspiratorially. Comrades, don't believe this. This is not real. The hero, by this point, was dangling upside down over a pit of ravenous crocodiles. And the audience did not respond warmly to my father's interruptions. My sister and I pretended to focus on the screen. And usher appeared and tried to silence him. Our mother, woken up by the ruckus, found herself in the middle of an embarrassing scene, which ended with our father storming out, dragging my sister and me with him, as she apologized to the audience behind us. I took one last look back at the screen, where the hero and the dish shuffled, yet fair, damsel, or riding a comical pair of mules through a jungle teaming with villains. My life. In the spring of 1979, father came home with a super eight camera that he had borrowed from one of his co-workers, but to A, who had a black belt in karate and a budding brain tumor, he died before my father returned the camera. The camera was small, but it possessed a kind of technological seriousness, as if only important things could be recorded with it. He had spent a week writing the script before he revealed that the movie would tell the story of his life. The filming was scheduled for the middle of June when we would be in the country visiting his parents. We would shoot as they say on location. I was cast to play the young him, and my sister to play his sister. He didn't say which one he had six. My mother was surprised to be his assistant director, but she resigned from her position almost instantly. She wanted to spend her vacation reading, she said. Father refused to show us the script and was entirely unmoved when we pointed out that actors normally get to rehearse. He wanted life itself to be our inspiration, because, as he frequently reminded us, this film was to be real. Nevertheless, during our regular inspection of his desk, my sister and I found a copy, which we read to each other several times with the mixture of awe and hilarity. Here it is. My life. One, I am born. Two, I walk. Three, I watch over cows. Four, I leave home to go to school. Five, I come back home, everybody's happy. Six, I leave home to go to university. Seven, I'm in class, I study at night. Eight, I go out for a stroll, I see a pretty girl. Nine, I go back home to see my parents with the pretty girl. Ten, I marry the pretty girl. Eleven, I work. Twelve, I have a son. 13, I'm happy. Fourteen, I keep bees. Fifteen, I have a daughter. Sixteen, I'm happy. Seventeen, I work. Eighteen, we are at the seaside. Nineteen, we are happy. Twenty, my children kiss me. Twenty-one, I kiss them. Twenty-two, my wife kisses me. Twenty-three, I kiss her. Twenty-four, I work. Twenty-five, the end. Farewell. The first and only scene we shot was scene four. The location was the slope of the hill below my grandparents' house. I, in the role of my father at age fourteen, was supposed to walk downhill away from the camera, with a bundle hanging from a stick on my shoulder, whistling a plaintive melody, then turn and stare back past the camera to the home I was leaving and wave, bidding it farewell. The first take failed because I didn't wave with enough emotion. My hand, my father said, looked like a limp plucked chicken. The second take was interrupted when my father decided to zoom in on a bee that happened to land on a flower nearby. Two of my aunts suddenly appeared in the third take, just as my father was panning from my touching goodbye to the house. They stood, grinning, paralyzed by the lens for a moment, then they casually waved at the camera. Each time, a walk back up hilt to my starting position. My legs hurt, I was hungry and thirsty, and I could not help questioning my father's directorial wisdom. Why wasn't he slash I taking a bus? Didn't he slash I need more stuff than could fit in a bundle? Didn't he slash I need some food for the road? During the fourth take, the camera ran out of film. The fifth take was almost perfect. I walked away from home, my shoulder slouching with sorrow, my pace appropriately has it in the bundle dangling poignant. From the convincingly crooked stick. I turned and looked back at the house I was about to leave forever. It was white with a red roof. The sun was setting behind it. Tears wiled up in my eyes as I waved at the loving past. My hand like a metronome counting out the beats of the saddest edagio. Then I heard a bee. I was buzzing around the back of my neck. My metronome hand switched to a leg row as I flicked it around my head trying to defend myself. The bee would not go away. I dropped the stick and started running frantically. First up had a look. toward the camera, then downhill my heels kicking at my butt. The bee pursued me relentlessly, and I was more terrified by its determination than I was by the thought of the inevitable sting. I hollered, threw my arms in the air, lunged ahead at breakneck speed, but the bee would not quit. And the more I ran, the further I was from any help. Then, just as I realized that the bee was actually caught in my hair, that my attempt to escape was futile, I tripped and tumbled. I felt the sting as I fell, rolling toward the foot of the hill where I was stopped by a thorn bush. Need I say that my father didn't stop filming? There I am on screen, flapping my arms as if trying to take off a clueless Icarus, leaping ever farther from the sky while a cow watches with sublime indifference, as if to suggest that God and his innocent creatures will never give a flying fuck about the fall of man. When I tumble and hit the bush of thorns and my father, with his cold, directorial presence of mind, fades me out. Other works. To my father's artistic biography, as he'd add, his woodworking proclivities. More than once I witnessed him caressing, or kissing the wood he was about to transform into a shelf, a stool, or a beehive frame. He often forced me to touch and smell a perfect piece of wood to appreciate its smooth notlessness, its natural scent. For my father, the world consisted of objects that you could hold in your hand. He built all kinds of things. Toolboxes, beds, chairs, and structures to hold my mother's plans. But his masterpiece was a nailless kitchen table which he had spent a month putting together. He paid a price. One afternoon, he emerged from his workshop with his hand sliced open by a chisel. The blood gushing from the center of his palm is if from a well, a detail worthy of a biblical miracle. He drove himself to the hospital and the car, afterward, looked like a crime scene. He also liked to sing. One evening I found him in front of the TV, with a notebook in a sharpened pencil waiting to transcribe the lyrics of his favorite song at the time, "Drop, you traitor tear." Which was about to be featured on a musical show. For days afterward, he sang "Drop, you traitor tear" over and over again, humming through the parts where he couldn't remember the lyrics, preparing for future performances. He sang at parties and family gatherings and sometimes accompanied himself on a badly tuned guitar, playing the same three chords, A minor C, D7, regardless of the song. He seemed to believe that even a severely mistuned guitar provided "atmosphere" while the harmonic simplification would enhance the emotional impact of any song. And truly, it was hard to deny the power of his baritone against a background of discontent noise worthy of sonic youth, a tear glimmering in the corner of his eye as he contemplated its possible betrayal. His photography merits I mentioned too, even if its main intent was to record the merciless flow of time. The composition of almost all his photographs is identical. My mother, my sister, and I face the camera. The passing years measured by the emergence of my mother's wrinkles and grey hair, the width of my sister's beaming smile and the thickness of my smirk. One more thing. He once bought a notebook and on the first page wrote, "This notebook is for expressing the deepest thoughts and feelings of the members of our family." Perhaps he intended to use those thoughts and feelings as material for a future book, but in the end there were only two entries. A cryptic note from my mother, who would probably just grab the notebook while on the phone and wrote, "Fried a/healthy children/time." And a line from my sister in her careful and precise, pre-pubescent handwriting. I am really sad because the summer is almost over. The real book. My father believed in whatever conveyed reality. He was suspicious of the television news, which relentlessly listed the triumphs of socialism, but he was addicted to the weather forecast. He read newspapers, but trusted only the obituaries. He loved nature shows, because the existence and the meaning of nature were self-evident. There was no denying a python's wallowing a rat or a cheetah leaping on the back of an exhausted terrified gnu. But nothing insulted him more than literature. The whole concept was a scam. Not only was it all made from words, whose reality was precarious at best. But those words were used to render things that had never really happened. His dislike of literature may have been strengthened by my intense interest in it, for which he blame my mother, and my consequent attempts to interest him. For his 45th birthday, I unwisely gave him a book called The Liars. He never got past the title. Once, I read my father a passage from a Garcia Marquist story in which an angel falls from the sky and gets locked up in a chicken coop, and he became seriously concerned about my mental capacities. In time, he began casually mentioning his plan to write a real book. Having such a book would not be a particularly trying task, he suggested. Provided one didn't get carried away with self-indulgent fantasies and stuck to what had really happened. All he needed was a few weeks off. But he could never find the time. There was his job, and the bees, and things to be built, and the necessary replenishing naps. One afternoon I found him snoring on the couch with his notebook on his chest and a pencil on the floor beside him. The only words written. Three years ago. The writers retreat. My father truly began writing in Canada in the winter of 1994. He and my mother and sister had settled there after a couple of years of refugee roaming, years that I'd spent working low-wage jobs in Chicago and pursuing a green card. They had left Sarajevo on May 1st, 1992, the day before the siege began. There had been some shooting and trouble was clearly brewing, but the main reason for their departure was my father's devotion to beekeeping. If he hadn't had to do the spring work in his A.B.A.R.E. clean up the hives, merge the weak hives with the strong, and so on, they might not have left Sarajevo at all. In any case, they spent a year at his deceased parents' house in the country, on a hill called Vichak, living off of the food they grew in the garden, watching as truckloads of Serbian soldiers pass by on their way to the front. My father occasionally sold honey to the troops, and toward the end of the summer he started selling meat, too, although the soldiers preferred to get drunk on slip of its. My parents secretly listened to radio broadcasts from the Beseech Sarajevo, and they feared a knock on the door in the middle of the night. Then my mother got a gallbladder infection and nearly died, so they went to Novi Sad, where my sister was trying to complete her college degree. They applied for a Canadian immigration visa, got it, and arrived in Hamilton, Ontario, in December 1993. My father began to despair, as soon as he set foot on Canadian soil. From the window of their 15th floor, unferenced apartment, he could see piles of snow, the smoke stacks of the Hamilton steel mills and a vacant parking lot. It was all black and white and gray, like the kind of bleak existentialist Eastern European movie. My father, without exception, found both unreal and morbidly boring. He didn't know where he was, how they were going to pay for food and furniture. He didn't know what would happen if one of them got sick, and it was perfectly clear to him that he would never learn the English language. My mother on the other hand maintained her stoicism. I believe a counterbalance my father's fears unpartly because she felt so defeated that nothing really mattered. She yielded herself to the tragic flow of things. I can still see her, patiently and unfalteringly twisting a rubik's cube while watching a television report about a Sarajevo massacre, completely unfazed by the fact that she wasn't and would never be anywhere close to solving the puzzle. She filled the apartment with used furniture her English teacher had given her, but the place still looked hollow, devoid of all those crumbs of a lived life that once led my parents home. The earth-shaped clock was sputting at cans that my father had brought back from the USSR. The picture of me as a boy sitting in a cherry tree, smiling, and in simple before I fell and broke my arm. The bathroom pipe with a moisture stain that looked like an unshaved, long-haired linen. The badly framed reproduction that was his unstill life. The honey jars marked real honey on whose labels little bees flew. My father dropped out of his English class, furious at a language that randomly distributed, meaningless articles and insisted on having a subject in every stupid sentence. He made cold calls to Canadian companies and an unintelligible English described his life, which had included being an engineer who brought light to big cities. To perplexed receptionists who put him on indefinite hold. He nearly got sucked into a venture set up by a shady Ukrainian who convinced him that there was good money to be made by smuggling Ukrainian goose down into the country and selling it to the Canadian betting industry. I'd call from Chicago and my father would pick up the phone. phone. So what are you doing, I'd ask? Waiting, he'd say, for what? Waiting to die. Let me talk to mom. And then one day when his well became so overwhelming that his soul literally hurt, like a stubbed toe or a swollen testicle, he began to write. He wouldn't show his writing to my mother or my sister, but they knew that he was writing about bees. In the early spring of 1994, I received a manila envelope on which was written in a dramatic cursive, the bees part one. My hands trembled while I flipped through those 21 pages as if I were enrolling a sacred scroll, rediscovered after a thousand years. My sense of sanctity was somewhat diminished by a sticky honey stain on page six. The bees part one. There is something faithfully connecting our family and bees is how my father's narrative begins. Like a member of the family, the bees have always come back. Until his grandfather, my great-grandfather, Teodor, first brought civilized beekeeping to Bosnia in 1912, my father writes, "The natives have kept their bees and straw and mud hives and killed them with sulfur, killed all of them to get the honey." He recounts the story of the few hives that traveled with his family from the hinterlands of Ukraine to the promised land of Bosnia. The only thing promised them was plenty of wood which enabled them to survive the winters. Those hives multiplied quickly, unimpeded by the first world war. Teodor's son, my grandfather Ivan, who was 12 when he arrived in Bosnia, later became the first president of the beekeeping society in Prinjevoir. In a photograph of the society's founding picnic, Ivan stands at the center of a group of peasants, with a fashionably long mustache and a dandish cocktat. Several of the other members proudly exhibit faces swollen with bee stings. Sometimes there were interesting mischieves with bees, my father notes, without confaying the actual mischieves. Throughout the text, he wavers between ominous wavy phrases, establishing the historical context. War was coming down that dirt road. War, the gods of destruction pointed their irate fingers at our honey jars. And highly technical descriptions of the revolutionary architecture of the hives his father built. He goes from a discussion of the horrible death that bee suffers when it stings, and the philosophical implications thereof, to a lyrical description of Hawthorne in Bloom and the piping of the queen bee, audible the night before the swarm leaves the hive. He devotes almost a page to the first time he recognized a queen bee. A hive contains about 50,000 bees and only one queen. She's noticeably bigger than the other bees, who dance around her, swirl and move in peculiar, even worshipful ways. Seeing that first queen bee on a frame heavy with honey, he says, was like reaching the center of the universe. The vastness and the beauty of the world were revealed to him. The logic behind it all. The most successful period of our beekeeping, which began in the 20s with the founding of the beekeeping society, ended in 1942, during the Second World War, when we, for the first time, lost our bees, he writes. The loss was a major catastrophe for the family, but my father tries to maintain perspective. There were many tragedies in besieged, sorry, Avo, then. There are worse things that can happen to you, a whole family, for example, can perish without a trace. We didn't perish, which is good. On the next page, he drew a map of the tiny village of Vajak and the town of Prinjevore, six kilometers away. He placed little stars around the page to represent other villages and people in the area. It was at truly multinational place, he notes, wistfully. Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Slovak, Italians, Serbs, Muslims, Croats, and all the mixed ones. There were 17 different nationalities in all, even a Japanese man who was a tailor in Prinjevore. In 1942, my father explains, "Lalessness was rampant." There were roaming gangs of Serbs and of Croatian fascists and of Tito's partisans, too. One day, two semi-soldiers showed up at the door of my father's house. They were his neighbors, ordinary peasants, except for their rickety rifles and their caps with the Chetnik insignia, in ugly eagles spreading its wings, on the front and the partisan red star on the back. They reversed the caps as they deemed necessary. "There was going to be a great battle," the peasant said. They said we would be well advised to leave. They offered to padlock everything and they showed us a huge key for which it was clear no padlock existed. They suggested touching the knives at their belts as if inadvertently, that we take only what we could carry. "Father begged them to let us take a cow. My mother, my six sisters, and my two brothers wept. Winter was around the corner. Perhaps it was the weeping that made them take pitonous and let us take a cow. Although it was the sick one, her shrunken utter would not provide any milk or solace. And we left thirty beehives behind." In the next paragraph, my father's writing becomes unstable. A couple of sentences are crossed out, beneath the shroud of fierce scratching, I can make out a few words and phrases. Raven, urine, belonging to, and skin, sseid. "I was six years old," he continues, and I was carrying a meat grinder. His mother was carrying his youngest brother. He clung to her chest like a little monkey. Only after a few months did, all the details of the pillaging and pilfering done by the neighbors come to light. After the peasants had emptied the house and the attic and the barn, they finally got to the bees. They wanted the honey, though there was little of it, just enough to help the bees survive the winter. They opened the hives and shook the helpless bees off the frames. It was late October, it was cold, and the bees couldn't fly or sting. They dropped to the ground in absolute silence. No buzz, no life, they all died that night. When the family finally returned home, my father found a mushy pile of rotting bees. Before they died, they had crawled closer together to keep warm. Two of the hives had been stolen by another neighbor, Tito, who was also a beekeeper. My grandfather Ivan knew that Tito had them, but he never asked for them. Tito came by one day and unable to look Ivan in the eye, claimed that he had just been taking care of the bees while the family was away. He offered to give them back. I remember going with my father to retrieve our bees. We went on a sleigh, and we had to be careful not to shake the two hives, lest the bees unfurl their winter clusters which kept them warm. My father sat between the hives holding them steady. It was a cold night with stars glittering like ice shards. If they were careful in patient Ivan told him, these two hives would breed many more. The following year they had six, and then twice as many, and in a few years they had 25. The conditions of production Out of respect for my father's desire, his need to produce a true book, I must append a few paragraphs on the conditions of his truth production. I wasn't there while he was writing it, so I have to use the accounts of a reliable witness, my mother. Thus, he wrote mainly in the afternoon with a pencil on filler paper and long slanted engineers cursive. He sat on his bed with the bedside table between his legs. He sharpened his pencil with a Swiss army pocket knife, a duty-free present for me years before, littering the bedroom floor with shavings. The pencils came from a 99 cent store and their tips frequently broke. He snapped several of them, infuriated. Over the phone I listened to elaborate laments and his retroactive appreciation of "our pencils." Pencils you could trust. Sometimes he just sat there hissing at the pigeons on the balcony as they pecked at the breadcrumbs my mother left for them. He'd often interrupt his reflections to get himself a slice of bread with butter and honey. Eventually he'd start writing, and he sometimes kept at it for as long as 45 minutes. In eternity for someone as impatient and miserable as my father. I'm holding his manuscript in my hand right now, and I can see the ebbs and flows of his concentration. I can decode the increase and decrease of his back pain, in the smooth, steady handwriting say at the top of page 10, which then meanders on page 11, in the random words written in the margins. Bronco, Horseman, Watermelon, Slotter. The adjectives accompanying lonely arid nouns. Stinky, walked in. around feet, classic alongside theft, golden, melting over honey. There are mid-sentence breaks with syntactical discrepancies that suggest his thoughts splintering. Sometimes a sentence simply ceases, "We know." Then nothing. It must be said, but nobody knows what. On page 17, my father is in the middle of conveying a humorous story about another neighbor, a man named Bronco. By this time Ivan's hives had been confiscated by a socialist collective and he had been put in charge of the co-op APAry, overseeing about 200 hives, far too many to keep productively in one place, but an order is an order. My father, 13 at the time, is helping him. The day is gorgeous, the birds are a Twitter. There is an apple tree in the center of the APAry, its branches breaking with fruit. They work in complete silence interrupted only by the occasional thud of a ripe apple falling to the ground. A swarm of bees is hanging from one of the branches and they need to get it into a hive. Ivan suggests that he shakes the branch while my father holds the hive under it. When the swarm hits the hive, he says it will just settle in following the queen. But, my father anticipates, "I might be too weak to hold the hive and if the swarm misses it, the bees might fall on me. I know they don't sting when they're swarming, but if they fall with their stings down, they might hurt me. What's more, we'd have to wait for them to gather again." Here comes Bronco, clearly up to no good. He hates bees because he's been stung many times, but he still offers to help, probably hoping to steal something. So Bronco stands under the swarm instead of my father, looking fretfully up at the bees, trotting around in a small circle trying to center the hive. As he is still moving, Ivan shakes the branch with a lone crooked stick and the swarm falls directly onto Bronco. Before a single sting breaks his skin, Bronco is already screaming and shaking his head as if possessed by a host of demons. He bursts out of the apiary, crashes through a hedge and throws himself into a mud puddle, whose proprietress, an enormous sal, studies him, lethargicly. My father is rolling on the ground with laughter, a twitch that could be a smile, surfaces on Ivan's face, then quickly vanishes. The paragraph breaks off. In the next paragraph, an occurs of so tense and weak it seems evanescent, my father writes about an epidemic that attacked the co-ops hives, spreading quickly because they were so close together, and decimating the bee population. He describes the harrowing side of a thick layer of dead bees glimmering in the grass. Ivan squats despondently, leaning on a tree, surrounded by rotting apples that beckon hysterical flies. This is life, my father concludes, struggle after struggle, loss after loss and list or immense. Fathers and daughters. It took me some time to find out what had happened between the paragraphs. A month past at the beginning of which my father received a call from Nadah, the daughter of his cousin Slavko, who had emigrated alone and ended up in Lincoln, Nebraska, where she went to college, majoring in library science and minoring in theology. Slavko and my father had grown up together, they were the same age, but Slavko had died recently and accomplished alcoholic. Nadah had called my father, she said, because her father had told her stories about their childhood together. My father was delighted to hear from her, said she could call any time, because "family is family." But fun calls were too expensive for both Nadah and my father, so they started exchanging frequent letters. Instead of writing the bees, my father reminisced at length to Nadah, fondly recalling his and Slavko's childhood mischievous. His letters were rife with bees and apples and family get together, where everybody sang and hugged and lick-tunny from their fingertips. My mother told me that if Nadah hadn't been a relative, she would have thought my father was in love. He had someone now for whom he could paint the picture of his life, to whom he could tell the true story. Nadah's letters, however, were often rants, bemoning the fact that her father had ended up a weak, bitter man, and her mother was overly receptive to the attentions of other men. She hated America and Americans, their provincialism, their stupid, rootless culture. She was clearly wretched, my mother said, but my father was by and large oblivious to that. Then Nadah didn't write for a while, but one night my parents were woken up by an avalanche of paper slithering out of their fax machine. In a 65-page fax, Nadah's father was upgraded to a child molester, her mother to a cheap prostitute. America had become a filthy inferno of idiocy and nothingness run by the Jews and the CIA. Her roommate, Alatina Horr, was trying to kill her, her professors discussed her with her classmates, showing secretly taken pictures of her naked body while Frat Boy's masturbated. Her doctor had tried to rape her. In the INS office where she went to apply for her green card, the woman who interviewed her had hooves instead of feet. And somebody was changing the words in the book she was studying. Every day they were full of new, lies, lies, lies. At first she had believed that she was being persecuted by jealous people, who hated her for her purity. But now she knew that God had become evil and begun purging the innocent. "The only hope I have is you," she wrote. "Could you come and take me from this pit of hell?" In the last few pages she warned my father about me. Reminded him of the Etappist myth and of the fact that I lived in the United States, which meant that I was corrupt and untrustworthy. Keep in mind she wrote that God preferred sons to fathers and daughters. A different story. My father kept calling Nada, receiving no answer, until her murderous roommate, Madrigal, picked up the phone and told my father that Nada had been "institutionalized." He did not understand the word and could not pronounce it for me to translate, so I called Madrigal. She just went nuts, Madrigal said, in the library. She heard voices coming from the book spreading rumors about her. My father was devastated. He called someone at the University of Nebraska and asked them in his Tarzan English to visit Nada at the institution and tell her that he had called. We don't do that, the anonymous Nebraska said. Father sat at his desk, frantically sharpening his pencil, but not writing, until it was reduced to a stump he could barely hold between his fingers. He called every member of the family, as if they could all pool their mental waves and send Nada a telepathic remedy. He called me almost every day and then demanded that I call him back as he could not afford the calls. He gave me reports of his futile attempts to reach Nada, and finally he asked me to go to Lincoln and track her down. I couldn't do it. "You've become American," he said. But that's a different story. The message. After the break, his story trickles away. He flies through an incident in which Ivan was stunned by hundreds of bees and spent a few days in what must have been a coma. He devotes a paragraph to be keeping in the 60s and 70s, which could be considered the second golden age of family be keeping even if father was going completely blind. When Ivan lost his sight, the bees slowly died off, and by the time he was dead there were only three hives left. My father couldn't help. Traveling around the world, mainly in the Middle East and Africa, I could barely manage to see my parents three times a year. And there was no way I could devote any of my time to the bees. Shortly before his death, father summoned me and my brothers for a meeting of the family be keeping tradition. His message. And there the bees, part one, ends. No message delivered. It isn't hard to imagine what it might have been. My grandfather died. My grandmother too. And my father and his brothers kept the bees. They, the bees, survived an epidemic of varoamites, a drought in the beginning of the war in Bosnia. When my family emigrated to Canada, they left behind 25 hives. Shortly after their departure, a horde of their neighbors, all drunken volunteers in the Serbian army, came at night, kicked the hives off their stands, and when the bees feedily tried to escape. Once again, it was a cold night and they crept on the ground. Through a couple of hand grenades and laugh to see the dead bees flying around as if alive. They stole the heavy frames and left a trail of dripping honey in their wake. The well. My father found a job in a factory doing equipment maintenance. The facts. Stry was hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and when he worked night shifts, he would sometimes fall asleep waiting for a green light at the wheel of a decrepit Lincoln town car. He hated the job, but he had no choice. One day surveying the classified's in search of a perfect garage sale he found an ad for homemade honey. He called the number and told the man outright that he had no money to buy the honey, but that he would love to see his bees. Because there is such a thing as beekeeper solidarity, the man invited him over. He was a Hungarian, a retired carpenter. He let my father help him with the bees and gave him old copies of Canadian beekeeping, which my father tried to read with the insufficient help of my mother's dictionary. After a while the Hungarian gave him a swarm and an old hive to start his own a beery. He had managed my father for refusing to wear overalls and a hat, or even gloves, but my father contended that things were good for all kinds of pain. I still can't figure out what language they spoke to each other, but it almost certainly wasn't English. My father has 23 bee hives now and collects a few hundred pounds of honey a year, which he cannot sell. Canadians don't appreciate honey, he says. They don't understand it. He wants me to help him expand into the American market, but I assure him that Americans understand honey even less than Canadians. He recently decided to write another true book. It already has a title, The Well. There was a well near his home when he was a boy. Everybody went there to get water. Because there were "interesting incidents". Once he remembers a mule escaped and came to the well sensing water there. But his head was tied to its leg, which was how people forced mules to graze them, and it was unable to drink. It lingered around the well, banging a tad against the water trough, dying of thirst with water inches away. It braided in horrible pain. It braided all day, my father says. All day and all of the nights. That was Riftka Gouchin, reading the Bees Part One by Alexander Hemman. The story appeared in the New Yorker in October of 2002 and was included in Hemman's collection, Love and Obstacles, which was published by Riverhead in 2009. I'm Shilpa Oskar Kovic. I'm Jesse Sepcek. And we're the host of the Bon Appetite Bake Club podcast. Bake Club is Bon Appetite's community of confident, curious bakers. Jesse and I love to bake. Some might even call us obsessive, and we love to talk about all the house and wise and what didn't work that come with it. Every month we publish a recipe on Bon Appetite.com that introduces a baking concept we think you should know. Then you'll bake, send us any questions you have, and we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe. So consider this your official invitation. Come join the Bees Bake Club. New episodes on the first Tuesday of every month, wherever you get your podcasts. Happy baking. So Riftka, the father in the story, he has this sort of relentless search for reality as he sees it, and it can be emotional reality, like his family's deepest thoughts and emotions. It could be kind of factual reality of family history and his own life story. And at the same time, he deeply distrust movies, which aren't real and literature, because it's all made up. And those are exactly the genres he uses to express himself. So how do you parse that contradiction? I mean, it's just like almost everything in the story has that strange paradox and it gives like a lot of pleasure. I love that he is devoted to the weather forecast, which of course is famously wrong, but doesn't believe the news. And I also love that from the beginning you can tell that his representations of the truth are wishes, are dreams. The first kind of outline of the film that he wants to make is one kind of boundless happiness and wonderful things, one after another. And over the course of the story, it seems like that would be an odd summary of his life. Right, it's very different from how he later recounts his life in the Bees Part One in writing. I haven't thought about that. That's interesting. Why do you think it shifts so much? I think that there's something so heartbreaking when the family moves to Canada and the description of what the view from the window in Hamilton, Canada looks like to the father is a movie he doesn't believe in, a sort of bleak existential Eastern European film that he not only distrusts but is bored by. And that's the scene he's in. And the story opens up with the mother waking up and being quote-unquote in a scene in the movie theater. You just get the sense that now that he's kind of separated from his stabilizing familiar world, however charged and difficult and not straightforward that world was, I don't know, there's not like anything to confirm the real for him. Yeah. I mean, when we look at what he considered real at the start of the story, you know, this life story that he wanted to film, the only scene of which was, you know, the sun walking down the hill with one of those completely like bogus pillowcases, sacks wrapped around a stick. You know, there was absolutely nothing real in that scene that he shot besides the beasting, which, you know, was unexpected and not in the script. So what he actually was representing is reality, like like the weather report is very far from the reality. Now he's in a reality. It's not a real, and it's a sort of leak. And it's not as easy somehow to rewrite it or get on top of the narrative partially because of language. He can't sort of interact with the world and kind of mold it through just control of the language because he doesn't speak English and he learns some English obviously, but it's not his language, you know. There's so much loss and displacement in the story. You know, he's lost his home, he's lost his bees, he's lost, like you say, the ability to live in his language. And he's in this apartment that, you know, is devoid of all those crumbs of a lived life that constituted home for him. And so he has these empty spaces and what is he filled them with. Yeah, you know, the narrator also, like the father, is sort of not in the right home and it's so moving that the opening scene, which is so funny and what to say, try and film again and again, basically the son can't leave home. He's trying to leave home, but they have to keep filming it again and again. And he's never quite going to be able to leave home. He has a fidelity and attention to his father that he'll meaningfully never, never leave. And the father too, you start to see, you know, has actually a very difficult childhood and is displaced from the very beginning of his life when he's quite young. And he too has a sort of fidelity to his own family story that is both meaningful and difficult. And it's interesting to watch it, like kind of evolve across the story and that it takes a lot of time before he can feel like this new displacement can somehow be folded into family connection. I mean, if you do feel that there's some movement that way in the story. Family connection between the son and the father or most of it between the son and the father because it feels like it throws a little bit tighter because the son is basically spending a lot of time thinking about his father's life just as the father is spending a lot of time thinking about his family history. Yeah. What do you think the father becomes so obsessed with his cousin's crazy daughter with Nada? Well, you know, you kind of know as you're reading the story that someone's going to go mad and it's more than one person. We'll go mad and not as a real connection for him to the past of his life. And it's too painful for him to pick up on the clues that her intensity of engagement is partially a derangement. And it's so moving the way he calls every member of the family with a sense that something could be done, right? And it's also a very striking moment when he basically tells the narrator, "Well, why don't you go and check on her?" And it simply says, "I was not able to do that." The father accuses him. It feels like an accusation of having become American. And there's something in that moment like, I mean, of course, one always could go to Lincoln Nebraska. And that's a different kind of way of thinking about family, especially about family you've never met. And the story has shifted into a world where the narrator isn't going to think about family that way. It's another example of the father reaching out because he reaches out a lot, actually. He's calling up random receptionists and reciting his work history and unintelligible language. And he calls the University of Nebraska and asks someone to go and check on her. You know, he's calling people. He's trying to be effective. And it's also ineffective. I mean, maybe that's what makes him turn to writing. You know, I hadn't really thought about that. It's true. It's placed it exactly the moment when he's reached out to everyone he can think to reach out to every distant member of the family. Random administrators at the University of Nebraska, I guess it's and his son. And I guess it's an endpoint which makes the writing feel even lower than I had thought of the writing before then. Yeah, I suppose he's stymied because he can't write to Nada anymore. He was writing her letters. And so now that those words have to go somewhere else. I mean, it seems to me that he is filling these empty spaces with words, with whatever words he can. It's interesting. I don't think the story ever tells us if he's writing in English. I was thinking about that. I'd never thought about that when I'd read the story before. But when I was reading it verbally out loud because of the attention to funny formulations like semi-soldiers, misgeves. Yeah, he must be writing it in English. So his English has had time to get to that point at least. You know, I think there's the line that's just so heartbreaking. You know, one day his when his woe became so overwhelming that his soul literally hurt like a stubbed toe or a swollen testicle he began to write. And so at this moment, I suppose he's writing what he believes are facts and reality. But at that moment, he turns to something which really is literature, which really is the impetus for literature, this despised art. [LAUGHTER] You know, it's funny, the kind of literature he writes, which I think is a lot of literature. Almost feels like a case is being pled before a jury or God who's not there but ought to be there. It just really feels like making an argument for, especially these first person voices and arguing for how they ought to be perceived or how their life ought to be understood or how it should be observed and how it should be reacted to. So there's something there with the father. Yeah, it's a testimony or testimonial. Yeah. And in the middle of it are these bees. So let's talk about bees. These are obviously real bees. They're real bees that get killed in bad ways and are lost or stolen. And bees are essentially put on earth to create sweetness. And also to sting people painfully. Those are the things they're known for. Do you see them as also having a kind of metaphorical weight in the story? I was reading separately about bees. And there was this bee scientist, Carl von Fischin, who, despite being one fourth Jewish sort of state and Munich throughout the rise of the Nazis and throughout the war, because he was so obsessed with studying the bees. And the Nazis said that will be useful for us, because we need our crops to be fertilized, we're having problems, et cetera. But the reason I bring it up is because it was this beautiful observation he makes. He says, you can have one cow, one donkey, one dog. They'll be OK. But you can't have one bee. One bee will die right away. It's a social creature, overwhelmingly social creature. But that's the part that this time reading the story really stayed with me. This idea of, you know, you can't just have one bee. Yeah. And so you see the father as one bee. Well, it seems like he's-- there's also that moment where they're trying to get the bees to get back into the hive and it goes kind of stuff. But there's just-- he is someone who connects to other people, even in the movie theater. He wants to have a conversation with the other strangers there and sort of tell them what's going on. He's really a communal person. Yeah. He wants a community. It's true. And that's part of his reaching out and feeling that people should do things he asks them to do, right? Like they're part of a hive. They are supposed to be working together and there's failure of others to work with him in that way. So it's disappointing. And then the way that the bees can't do what they do in the winter, if it's cold, they can either sting nor really survive outside the hive. But you know, in the summer, they do have these other powers. And you feel that in the story too, a sort of an ebb and flow of certain-- I don't know-- potential. Yeah. When you go back in the father's family history, and you go to those scenes when he's six, you know, the neighbors come around and say, get out of here. We'll take care of your home, you know, and send them off. And they come back years later and everything's ransacked. And even someone they sort of trusted has stolen two hives and shame-facedly returns them. And then obviously a bigger exodus, but there's no return from. The people around him in his life have betrayed him fairly often and have failed to live up to this model of bee community. Yeah. Yeah. That scene is particularly devastating where the neighbor-- you know, if he's just a completely horrible guy in a weird way, it's not very painful. And you can let it go. But then he comes back and sort of has a cover-up story but tries to, you know, return these bees. And it's particularly moving. And oddly enough, that section is one of the only sections that kind of ends on and up. No. It goes from two hives to five hives. I think it ends on 25 hives. It's sort of the only section that kind of sings. Yeah. That's true. I mean, if we want to talk about not ending on an up note, let's talk about the ending of the story. That mule. Oh, my goodness. The father's projected next book with this mule, this head tied to its leg that is dying of thirst and can't drink. Yeah, that's a pretty grim ending. One of the tiny sort of light points in it for me was, I guess, the beauty of the story, because that word, the well, it comes up with in the father's hand is gashed while he's woodworking and making the sort of table he values the most and the blood is coming out like a well. And it's just-- I mean, maybe that's a right early pleasure. But you just see how he's controlled your mind so that even if you don't remember that detail about the well, the ending is the father. And you can't miss it emotionally. So that's the only cheerful thing I saw there at the end with how masterful this story was. Yeah. I know. There isn't really any humor in that mule that's just brain all day and night and pain. It's one of the moments in the story that isn't threaded with that sort of slapstick humor that's almost everywhere else, right? And if you think about it, it's a setup for slapstick because it's very awkward to walk with your head tied down to your leg. And so it's even more deliberate that it doesn't do anything with that. Yeah. So I was looking at some reviews of the collection. This story ended up in love and obstacles. And there seemed to be a real inclination on the part of the reviewers to see this as a real book, a true book, and to assume that a handman was writing quite directly about his family. Yeah. There's one review that just called that a master work of family history. [LAUGHTER] And I was like, really? Did you notice it was called a story collection? So what's interesting is there are large number of details that are true. The handman family are beekeepers. And have been, and some of that family history is true. Sasha's father did make him play him in a super-aid movie. [LAUGHTER] And he did write something when he was really down. He wrote something on the bee's part one. But there was also a part two. And so there are things that are quite true and emotionally true. And then there are things that are fictional in this story. Do you think that should change the way we read it? You know, I feel like that's a deep question, because I find it almost impossible not to like the father kind of give more credence because it feels that it springs from somewhere very real, as they say. And also, at the same time, it makes me think, well, of course, it should be a story. Of course, it should be a fiction. Because every time you try and sort of give a straight account of something, it always-- - It always feels more false, it always fails. Like I think there's nothing I just believe more than a memoir. But it's always meaningful to me to think about when someone hasn't truly overwhelmingly interesting life. However painful it is to have an interesting life. Their family history is very interesting. The decision not to just tell it straight, it's revealing, it's revealing about an idea of like how to tell it straight. This is somehow the way to tell it straight. I wish I sort of understood it better. It's actually something I think about often. But I do think it's deeper than just protecting your parents or protecting the real people who are sources for the story. I just think that's not the full explanation. There's something more than just that that makes it become a fiction instead of a memoir. - Yeah. And obviously this story is so carefully structured and it's structured as a set of chapters with their own titles. It's crafted and it leads us somewhere in the way that life is not always so purposeful or intentional. - And also we miss it. We always miss life. It's happening in front of us. But if you had a live cam on whoever it was in your life that you were interested in, you'd probably just miss everything. You kind of need it to be processed in some way that makes it perceptible. - Even if everything were true, Hamon would still be picking his details. You can take any series of true details from a life and put them together to form a story which is not what that person would think is their life story. (laughs) So there's an element of control as a writer. It's interesting. I saw an interview with Hamon where he explained that there are no words to distinguish fiction and nonfiction in Bosnian. And that when he had to try to translate nonfiction to Bosnian, he could only do it by saying true stories. (laughs) So in a sense, and this is something I come across often in my job, this distinction between fiction and nonfiction is maybe a little artificial anyway because as you said, like in memoirs, you don't believe it. When people call something nonfiction, you assume half of it's made up. - And especially in those cultures where there's a real habit of ever so slightly exaggerated tale told to the children or told in the bar or wherever it might be, just the given that the tale is trying to emphasize one thing or another and it's also trying to entertain and that it's letting the true story kind of travel on the energy of charm and of shape, of the pleasures of form. - Yeah. There was another thing I was thinking about when thinking about talking to you about this story, which is it made me think of your most recent story in the magazine, how I became a vet in which the main character is having a kind of constant mental internal conversation with her father even though at some point he's maybe not alive anymore. And that made me think of Grace Paley's stories about talking to her father or the father in her stories. Her father was also in the story obsessed with saying what's true and what's real. - Just tell the story. - Yes. And it made me think about just that I'm sure there are many, many, many more stories that involve conversations with a father present or not present. And I wondered about, maybe there's something in the sort of father child relationship which requires this kind of imaginary entanglement, much more than the mother child relationship. No one's really imagining long complicated conversations with their mother because they've already said it all. - They didn't see the thing right there. Right, so fathers, you have to explore somehow more in writing it. Literally like the book I was reading on the subway on the way over which was a nonfiction book, the history of the cell by Cittar Sommukaji. And there's a section that sort of pops up and not really a book about fathers and sons but that just pops up about, you know my mother, I was immediately close to you but my father, it wasn't until we were writing letters sort of across the ocean that this other kind of intimacy was allowed. Obviously not in every case, not with every father but there is something there. - Yeah, something that furnishes great father for fiction in any case. - I mean it's interesting that the father and the story is also thinking a lot about his father. - Yeah, and he failed his father and in the way that he tells the story, he's traveling, he can't take care of the bees. He fails to come home just like his son fails to go to Nebraska and he includes that detail. As you said, it's a long life with many different parts and that's what he includes. - Yeah. - Yeah. And the bees are just, they are kind of buzzing through all of it and suffering along with him, right? These bees suffer. - And then the wonderful fathers and daughters thing where you read that section and starts fathers and daughters and you think it's kind of sort of focused on the intimacy between fathers and daughters but it's basically got this God who's apparently evil prefers sons and of course the first thing you think of is like, well you know Abraham's asked to sacrifice Isaac. That's what it means to be a son and sort of serve this world order. - It's interesting also to me that we don't, you know the narrator of the bees part one. We don't learn a whole lot about him. - No, just Chicago, Chicago. - Chicago, it's jobs. - He'd left before. - Yeah, of course we learn a lot about as they would say the contours of his heart and his imagination, but we don't learn much about him. - Yeah, he has no bees. - And no, no honey. - Yeah. - I mean, you know, you kind of see the father eating honey and you see the other family members looking their fingers but you don't really get to see the narrator eating honey. - Yeah, well, Canadians and Americans don't understand it. - You don't get it. (laughing) - Well, thank you so much, Roofka. - Okay, thank you Debra. - Alexander Hemman, a winner of the MacArthur Fellowship and a Penn W.G. Sable Award among others is the author of six books of fiction, including the novel The Lazarus Project and The World and All It Holds, and the story collections, The Question of Bruno and Love and Obstacles. He's been publishing fiction and nonfiction in The New Yorker since 1999. Roofka Gouchens books include The Story Collection, American Innovations and two novels, atmospheric disturbances, and everyone knows your mother is a witch, which came out in 2021 and was a finalist for the Atwood Gives in Writers Trust Fiction Prize. She's been publishing fiction and nonfiction in The New Yorker since 2008. You can download 199 previous episodes of The New Yorker Fiction Podcast or subscribe to the podcast for free and Apple Podcasts. On The Writer's Voice Podcast, you can hear short stories from the magazine read by their authors. You can find The Writer's Voice and other New Yorker podcasts on your podcast app. Tell us what you thought of this program on our Facebook page or rate and review us in Apple Podcasts. The New Yorker Fiction Podcast is produced by Michelle Moses. I'm Debra Treesman, thanks for listening. (upbeat music) (soft music) From PRX.