Book Around the Corner

Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov (2018) translated by Boris Dralyuk. French title: Les abeilles grises.

Pashka’s garden looked out towards Horlivka, so he was one street closer to Donetsk than Sergeyich. Sergeyich’s garden faced in the other direction, towards Sloviansk; it sloped down to a field, which first dipped then rose up towards Zhdanivka.

I picked this quote in Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov because it struck me that I knew about Donetsk and Sloviansk and that many city names mentioned in the book are now familiar.

And only because these cities are theatres of war. I remember reading in one of Gary’s novels, I don’t remember which one, that in the West, we only learn geography through the news and when we know too much about a country’s geography, it’s not a good sign.

Grey Bees was published in 2018 and it refers to the war in the Donbas between Russian-backed separatists and government forces in eastern Ukraine. Russia had already annexed the Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

Sergey Sergeyich and his nemesis Pashka Khmelenko are the two inhabitants left in Little Starhorodivka, a village in the grey zone in Donbass. The grey zone means that they live between the separatists’ positions and the Ukrainian ones. Shells fly over their heads regularly.

First, fathers bundled their wives and children off to safety, wherever they had relatives: Russia, Odessa, Mykolayiv. Then the fathers themselves left, some becoming “separatists”, others refugees. The last to be taken away were the old men and women. They were dragged off weeping and cursing. The noise was awful.

This is how they became the last men living in their village and this short paragraph says all about the drama of war for folks like you and me. One day you live your life and the next, you’re packing what you can and leaving.

Sergey is a retired mine safety inspector and beekeeper extraordinaire. He’s 49, his wife left him a few years ago, taking their only daughter with her to Vinnytsia, in the west of the country.

When the book opens, it’s winter and we follow Sergey’s daily life, a quotidian of survival. They have been without power for three years now, which means heating one or two rooms of the house with the wood stove, using it to cook as well and rely on candlelight. Sergey checks on his bees every day, they are hibernating during the winter, so nothing much happens on that side.

This first part shows a gentle man who likes his village, a pacific soul who cares about his bees, someone who wants to stay out of the conflict. However, contrary to Pashka, he leans towards the Ukrainian forces.

Spring arrives and he realizes there is not enough flowers for his bees to gather nectar and pollen. If he wants them to produce honey and survive, he has to take his hives somewhere else. Therefore he loads them in his Lada, packs his camping gear and his icon of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker and goes on the road to find a suitable place to put his hives and gather honey.

His travels will take him to a village on the east of the Donetsk district and next to occupied Crimea. He will show us how his compatriots see him as a refugee from Donbass and that for them, war doesn’t mean hearing shells over your head but seeing your husband or son join the army and maybe get killed.

When he enters the Crimea region, the Russians have set up a border between the annexed Crimea and Ukraine. Crossing this border is a risky endeavor. Sergey intends to find a fellow beekeeper, a Tatar he met in a beekeeper convention. His stay in occupied Crimea shows the Russian repression towards Tatars and the brainwashing they are doing to the Orthodox population. See here the discussion between Sergey and a Russian inhabitant of Crimea:

“Well, this is their land,” the beekeeper offered timidly. “The hell it is!” the woman said indignantly, but without malice. “This land’s been Russian Orthodox since time immemorial! Russians brought Orthodoxy from Turkey, brought it to Chersonesus, back before there were any Muslims. It was later that the Turks sent in the Tatars, along with their Islam. When Putin was here, he told the whole story – this is sacred Russian land.” “Well, I haven’t looked into the history,” Sergeyich shrugged. “Who knows what happened?” “What happened is what Putin says happened,” she insisted. “Putin doesn’t lie.”

Hmm.

Sergey travels around in these troubled areas, carrying his innocence on his sleeve. Grey Bees reminded me of Candide. His travels don’t seem totally realistic and yet, they are rooted in their time. Sergey navigates in these desolate times with a one-track mind, his bees. His moto is not “We must cultivate our garden” but “We must take care of our bees.” Why grey bees? They come from the grey zone, that’s for sure and there’s an explanation by the end of the book but won’t spoil anyone’s reading.

I liked Sergey and his obstinacy to make honey and keep his bees alive. Kurkov takes a candid character and asks all the difficult questions. He shows the intricacies of the local politics, the mixed Ukrainian-Russian culture of the area, the importance of religion and the power of religious leaders, Orthodox and Muslim. It is all here, in this exchange between a Ukrainian soldier and Sergey:

Petro shook his head. “And what’s your name?” “Me? Sergey Sergeyich – you can call me Sergeyich. So it’s probably Peter, not Petro.” “No, it’s Petro. Says so in my passport.” “Well, my passport says I’m Serhiy Serhiyovych – but I say I’m Sergey Sergeyich. That’s the difference.”

His name is in Ukrainian on his passport and he uses the Russian form. The languages are intertwined in him, probably as they are in the author’s psyche.

I read Grey Bees in February, the anniversary of the war in Ukraine. I don’t want to write the “first anniversary” because that means others are to come but I’m afraid we’re headed that way. The first part was the hardest to read because it delved into the consequences of war for Sergey. Living with a different kind of silence and having fear settling their ugly quarters in his soul.

Fear is an invisible thing, subtle and variable, like a virus or bacterium. It can be inhaled with a breath of air, or accidentally imbibed with a sip of water or vodka, or come in through your ears – and you can certainly catch it with your eyes, so badly that its image will remain in your pupils even after the fear itself has disappeared.

It was very poignant and hard to read sometimes but my discomfort is nothing compared to what the real Sergeys are living.

Grey Bees left me with a question: how could we be so blind and not see this war coming?

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PS: Boris Dralyuk won Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize for his translation of Grey Bees. Congratulations to him for a well-deserved award, his translation is outstanding.

I also read Death and the Penguin and my billet is here. I have The Good Angel of Death on the shelf.