The time was now one thirty. People were becoming a little impatient. Some discretely fished their pocket watches out of their vests and glanced at them quickly. They had helped themselves to the food and drink that Thilda and the girls had brought around and were presumably quite full. It was hot; several people lifted their hats, took out handkerchiefs and wiped them over damp necks. My own hat was a scorching black ceiling that pressed down upon my head, and made it difficult to think. I regretted my outfit. More and more people looked towards the hives, and subsequently, at me, inquisitively. The conversation, and my own in particular, dried up. I was unable to stay focused on the person listening to me, as my gaze was again and again drawn towards the gate. Still no Rahm. Why didn’t he come?
I’d have to begin nonetheless. I had to begin.
“Get the children,” I said to Thilda.
She nodded. In a low voice she began gathering the girls around her, while Charlotte was sent inside to get Edmund.
I started walking calmly down towards the hives. My audience became aware that something was finally happening. The scattered conversations dissipated and everyone followed me.
“Gentlemen, kindly take your places,” I said and gestured with my arm towards the chairs we had placed down there.
They didn’t need convincing. The benches were in the shade, they had no doubt already been longing to move down there.
When all those present had taken their seats, I saw that we had exaggerated. There were not nearly as many people as expected. But then the girls came, and Edmund also. They did a good job of filling up, spread out haphazardly, as only children can, and closed up the largest gaps.
“So. It looks as if everyone has found a seat,” I said. But I wanted more than anything to scream out the opposite. Because he wasn’t here, without him the day was meaningless. Then I caught Edmund’s eye down there. No, not meaningless. It was, after all, for Edmund I was doing this.
“Then you must just excuse me for one moment while I put on my protective suit.” I attempted a smile. “One is not, after all, a Wildman.” Everyone, even the farmers, laughed, both loud and long. And here I thought that I had served up a witticism for the initiated few, something that would set us apart from them. But it didn’t matter. What mattered now was the hive, and I knew that they had never seen anything like it.
I hurried inside and changed, squirmed out of the heavy wool garments and into the white suit. The thin fabric was cool against my body and it was a relief to take off the black top hat and instead put on the white, lightweight beekeeper’s hat with the gauzy veil in front of my face.
I looked out the window. They were sitting quietly on the chairs and benches. Now. I had to do it now. With or without him. To the devil with Rahm, of course I would manage without the droning of his superior knowledge!
I went outside and down the path to the hives. It had become wider, with wheel ruts from Conolly’s battered-up old wagon, in some places deep holes. I had driven all the way down with the hives, as Conolly did not dare to approach them and I barely managed to get the vehicle up the hill again.
Faces smiled at me, everyone in friendly expectation. It made me feel confident.
And then I stood before them and spoke to them. Finally, for the first time, I could share my invention with the world, finally I could tell them about Savage’s Standard Hive.
Afterwards they all came over, shook my hand, one after the next; fascinating, astonishing, impressive, words of praise were showered on me, I could not distinguish who said what, it was all a blur. But I did pick up on the most important thing: Edmund was there and he saw everything. His gaze was alert and clear, for once his body was neither restless nor lethargic, simply present. His attention was on me, at all times.
He saw everything, all the hands, even the very last hand that was extended towards me.
I had taken off my glove and the cool fingers met mine. A shock went through my entire body.
“Congratulations, William Savage.”
He smiled, not a flash of a smile, but a smile that lingered, that rested on his face, yes, that actually belonged there.
“Rahm.”
He held my hand and nodded towards the hives.
“This was something else altogether.”
I barely managed to speak.
“But when did you come?”
“In time to hear the most important part.”
“I… I didn’t see you.”
“But I saw you, William. And besides…” He stroked the sleeve of my suit with his left hand; I could feel the hairs on my arm underneath stand on end in a marvelous shudder.
“You know I don’t dare to come close to the bees without being properly dressed. That’s why I stayed here, in the back.”
“I didn’t think…”
“No. But here I am.”
He took my hand between both of his own. The warmth from them flowed through me, pumped by my blood out into every single component of me. And out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed Edmund. He was still there, still had his eyes on us, on me, was still just as attentive and alert. He saw.
Chapter 50
TAO
I stayed at the library all day. Read books, old research articles, watched films on a clattering old projector on the ground floor. I had to be completely sure.
A lot of it was primary school curriculum. I felt myself transported back to sluggish classes in natural science history, where the teacher lectured on our history with the voice of doom, an intoning drone that led to our renaming the classes the History of Sleep. We were too young to understand the scope of what she was trying to communicate. When the teacher bored her wrinkle-framed eyes into us, we turned towards the sunlight from the window and conjured up shapes in suitable fine-weather clouds or checked the clock on the wall to see how long it was until the next recess.
Now I discovered anew all the facts the teacher had tried to drill into us back then. Some dates still remained in my memory.
2007. That was the year The Collapse was given a name. CCD—Colony Collapse Disorder.
But it had started long before that. I found a video about the development of beekeeping throughout the past century. After the Second World War, apiculture was a worldwide, flourishing economy. In the US alone there were 5.9 million colonies. But the figures dropped, both there and in the rest of the world. In 1988 the number of hives had been halved. Bee death had afflicted many places, in Sichuan as early as in the 1980s. But only when it struck in the US—and as dramatically as it did precisely in 2006 and 2007, farmers with several thousand hives suffered mass disappearances in the course of a few weeks—only then did The Collapse receive a name. Perhaps because it happened in the US, nothing was really important at that time until it happened in the US: mass death in China didn’t merit a worldwide diagnosis. That’s how it was back then. Later everything was turned around.
A good number of books were written about CCD. I leafed through them, but found no straightforward answer. Nobody agreed about the cause of The Collapse, because there was no one specific cause. There were many. Poisonous insecticides were the first thing considered. In Europe certain forms of pesticides were temporarily banned in 2013 and with time, also in the rest of the world. Only the US held back. Some scientists maintained that the poisons had an impact on the bees’ internal navigation system and prevented them from finding their way back to the hive. The toxins affected the nervous systems of small insects and many people were adamant in their belief that several of the causes of bee death stemmed from these toxins. The ban stemmed from a better-safe-than-sorry principle, it was said. But the research findings weren’t conclusive enough. The consequences of banning the toxins were too great. Entire crops were destroyed by vermin, with subsequent food shortages. It was impossible to carry out modern agriculture without the pesticides. And the overall impact of the ban was too negligible; the bees disappeared all the same. In 2014 it was established that Europe had lost 7 billion bees. Because the poison was in the soil, some claimed, the bees died because it still affected them. But there were few who listened. After a trial period the ban was lifted.