Tonight, I hang a black scarf in front of the transom window in my new home. It looks just like the ribbons women in my mother’s village used to tie to the metal courtyard gates of their homes when someone in the family died. The cheerful shape, painted black and hung below the sad announcement with a photo of the dead, confused me as a child. Even so, I was willing to get used to everything. The strange way these people talked, their angular faces, the cold gazes behind drooping eyelids, the lines of time carved into their weathered, sunburnt skin. They were so different from the city people I left behind. Their primitive rudeness scared me, their simple desires fascinated me. My rosy cheeks and polished manners never belonged there, but that rigid world pulled me in.

My grandmother had the coldest eyes of them all. Sometimes, when I opened my heart to her, I felt she remembered she had one too. For a moment, its warmth would melt the ice of her blue eyes. The same blue as mine. But she would never care about the bees.

The first time a bee flew into my new home, I panicked. I have a mild allergy, and their sting brings sharp, lingering pain. But I soon found out they didn’t notice me, nor the flowers in the vase. In fact, nothing could distract them from their one obsession: the ceiling light in my kitchen.

There they buzzed around it in a desperate dance, bashing their heads against the plastic, spinning like they were possessed. Their buzzing echoed everywhere, I turned off all lights, closed all doors to escape it, and I sat in the darkness praying for the bees to find another entertainment in the night. Then I’d find them on the floor, writhing. I tried to scoop them up, set them on their feet, carry them outside. I was hoping they’d recover, let go of the cursed glow, and return to nature, whose moods shift from winter’s final chill to summer’s early warmth, confusing her faithful children.

In the mornings, I’d find them dead. Lying on the floor, the ceiling, drowned in the sugared water I read I should offer. Their bodies beside the electric candle I lit in the hope of luring them away resembled human corpses in an actual funeral. 

So many deaths brought a strange sense of doom to my solitary life. Bees matter. If they die, we die. I knew that. And their quiet determination to die in my home turned my bleak life into a private apocalypse.

I’m not attached to my life. But I don’t want a front-row seat to the end of the world.

I’m alone. Everyone who cared for me is gone. If I had a husband or a lover, I could ask him to mount a net on the window. I could even do it myself. Someday…

But tonight, I’ve put up the black scarf and I remember the ribbons of mourning.

I never put one up for my grandmother. I was too eager to leave the house where death reigned. I never looked back. Never returned. So death came to find me in this new place, where no memory of her kingdom had been invited.

My grandmother wouldn’t care about the bees. She killed moles with a shovel when they tore up the garden, then burned their bodies by the river. She poisoned the ground to rid it of unwanted growth and wished the death of her dogs when they became useless as guardians. She killed chickens to feed us. She belonged to a generation that didn’t worry about nature’s survival. It fought for its own life. Merciless, like nature itself. 

“Like nature herself,” I would say in my Slavic language. My grandmother’s language in which nature is also a woman. A cruel mother who sends her children to die in service of her order, then, with the same grit, nurtures life once more. 

Who am I to judge her?

I can’t even save a bee.