Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk

It was on a visit to Kiev in July 2018 that I first became aware of the war in the Donbass region of Ukraine. Right behind our hotel, on the walls of St. Michael’s monastery, was a display of photos and names of soldiers who’d been killed in that conflict, month by month. The transformation of statistics into faces and lives made a great impression on me, especially as we passed it each time we left and returned to the hotel. When I got back from that trip, I read Anna Reid’s hugely informative book about Ukraine, Borderland, and learned more about Ukraine’s relationship with Russia and the origins of that conflict. I was then intrigued when I heard about Andrey Kurkov’s new novel, Grey Bees, set in the conflict zone and translated by Boris Dralyuk, known to me for his brilliant translation of Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel.

The novel centres on Sergey Sergeyich, a retired mines inspector now turned beekeeper, living in the tiny village of Little Starhorodivka in the no-man’s-land between the breakaway forces in Donetsk, supported by the Russians, on the one hand, and the Ukrainian army on the other. There’s only one other person still living in the village, Sergeyich’s frenemy, Pashka, with whom he has a pragmatic relationship of comradeship in adversity. The other residents have all left, driven out by the constant noise of shelling from the front line, and the very real threat to life. Much of the village has been destroyed, including the church, and the proximity of noise and danger is constantly in the background in this section of the book. But still, the two men have to eat and keep themselves warm, and I loved the detail of Sergeyich’s everyday struggle to feed his potbelly stove, to find food, described in the rather naively matter-of-fact voice of this character.

This first section is quite slow—those readers who love plot may feel a little impatient—but the monotony of Sergeyich’s everyday routines is broken up a number of incidents: his sighting of a frozen body out on the hillside in the snow, his meeting with Ukrainian soldier Petro who’s been tasked with watching the village for snipers, his hike to the village of Svitle to visit old Nastasya. Parallel to this slow pace is a wonderful awareness of the gradual shift in the seasons from winter to the first signs of spring, beautifully rendered in translation. After snow creaking…the rustling of snow… the jostling of snowflakes we have this: On the third day of March, the sun began to flex its rays like muscles, and black patches began to spread across the fields beyond the garden, emerging from under the melting snow, straightening their earthy shoulders. I love the imagery here, the translator’s word choice, the syntactic elegance.

Now, in this first section of the book those eponymous bees remain in the background, overwintering in the safety and relative warmth of a shed. But we do learn of their power and significance through Sergeyich’s recollection of a visit paid to him by the regional governor. The governor had heard of the therapeutic properties of Sergeyich’s bees when part of a bee bed: the six hives were put together, a plank of wood topped by a thin mattress laid on top and a person who then lay down on this bed would be calmed and renewed throughout their body by the gentle buzzing and moving of the bees beneath. But the bees really come into their own in the second part of the novel, when Sergeyich decides he has to get out of his village to keep his bees safe. He remembers a fellow beekeeper, Akhtem, he met many years ago at a beekeepers’ conference, who lives in Crimea. He packs up his six hives into his ancient car and sets off to pay him a visit.

The novel then becomes something of a road movie as Sergeyich travels towards Crimea, stopping off for some weeks in Vesele where he lingers to enjoy the ministrations, culinary and otherwise of local woman Galya. As he heads off again for Crimea, the Russian presence, with all its bureaucracy and stony faced border guards, looms larger in the narrative and the reality of the Russian takeover and domination in Crimea becomes clear through the story of Akhtem and his family. They are Tatars, a Muslim community living in Crimea, who suffered racial discrimination, if not genocide, in the 1940s under Stalin when they were deported to Uzbekistan. The fact that Akhtem has disappeared, and later, that his son, Bekir, is arrested on the flimsiest of grounds, tells us that their subjugation at the hands of the Russians is ongoing. Despite finding his friend has been missing for two years, Sergeyich decides to stay in town, camps on a hillside above town where Akhtem keeps his beehives, and takes on the care of Akhtem’s beehives as well as his own. The result of him befriending the family is that he’s asked to intercede with the Russian authorities by Akhtem’s wife, Aisylu, to mitigate her son’s situation. Sergeyich feels increasingly out of his depth and never more so when the Russians turn up at his camp and remove one of his hives to carry out tests on the bees. The hive is duly returned, but the bees have changed- they’ve turned grey. And the focus then turns to Sergeyich’s return to Ukraine: whether he’ll manage to leave, not only with those bees, but also with Akhtem’s daughter, Aisha, on board.

So there are parallels at different points in the book between the lives, social organisation and behaviour of the bees and that of humankind, always to the detriment of the latter, though what I found more intriguing in relation to the bees was that wonderfully therapeutic bed. I found Sergeyich an incredibly sympathetic and plausible character—a loner, reticent with women, a simple soul, only half getting the power relations playing out around him, yet responsive to the small incremental changes in the seasons and the natural world. I loved the carefully observed details of the characters’ everyday lives, both in the grey zone of no-man’s-land but also the customs of the Tatar community in Crimea. Yet this is a writer who can stand back from the detail and give us the larger picture of power relations between the different communities in Crimea since the recent invasion by Russian forces in 2014. I really recommend this novel for anyone interested in this part of the world, and who, like me, finds fiction an illuminating way to approach and understand political events and their effects on individual lives. And in this specific case, to maintain awareness of the conflict and tension in Eastern Ukraine, which may have disappeared from the front page, but which has most definitely not gone away: the wall I saw in Kiev in 2018 has been unveiled this August 2021 as The Wall of Remembrance, and commemorates the many soldiers who have lost their lives in the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war.