Delila Bešlija reads contracts for a living. At the notary's office in Travnik, in March, while the last snow melts down along Plava Voda, she reads her grandfather's will too, twice, the way she reads everything: a house below Vlašić, a meadow above the creek, twenty beehives and "the blue notebook, which is not to be sold with the house or without it." Grandpa Vejsil died at eighty-nine, on his meadow, with a smoker in his hand. The other grandchildren are in Germany and Sweden. At the funeral she was the only family there. The only one who cried was the neighbor.
The neighbor's name is Jakub Dedić, he is forty, he has a hundred hives on the slope above her meadow and hands cracked from propolis. When she comes out of the notary's office, he is waiting for her beside his pickup. "I hear you already called that man from Sarajevo," he says. Delila does not ask how he knows. In the village everyone knows everything. The developer is offering ninety thousand marks for the meadow, where he wants to build weekend cottages for skiers from Babanovac. "Vejsil did not want that," Jakub says. "Vejsil didn't sign anything," Delila says. "Vejsil signed with a handshake." "A handshake is not a legal instrument," she says. Jakub laughs without any joy. "That's why there are so many of you in Sarajevo."
The developer wants a signature in September. Until then Delila plans to sell the hives as well, because a living bee colony is worth money and a dead one is worth nothing. So someone has to look after them until fall. Jakub refuses before she finishes her sentence. "I don't work for a woman who is selling Vejsil's meadow. If you want your bees to see September, learn to keep them." That night, in her apartment in Grbavica, Delila orders online a beekeeper's hat with a veil, gloves and a book for beginners. She was the best of her year at law school. No insect is going to beat her.
In Sarajevo no one would recognize her in that hat. There Delila is a lawyer who reads loan agreements for a bank from eight to eight, who eats lunch at her desk, and who two years ago broke off her engagement because, as her former fiancé told her on his way out, she read his promises like an annex with penalty clauses. She last saw her grandfather at Bajram the year before, for an hour. He told her the bees had come through the winter well and that number seven was the angriest again. She did not ask him what number seven was.
The first time she comes is in April, on a Friday after work, two and a half hours' drive through Kiseljak and Vitez, then the switchbacks above Travnik. Jakub is waiting for her at her grandfather's fence, without a hat. He shows her how to light the smoker, with dry pine needles and a piece of old sack, how to lift the lid and how to take out a frame slowly, upright, "as if you were taking a book out of a library where someone has fallen asleep." On the first day a bee stings her on the eyelid. Delila says she will sue him. Jakub says she is the first lawyer he has ever seen cry over one bee, and that it will be gone by Sunday. It is gone by Monday.
They argue about everything. About her parking her car in the middle of the road, and about him leaving his pickup so that she cannot turn around. About her wearing gloves, when he says bees don't like people who are afraid. About him talking to the bees, which she says is not scientific. "Your contracts aren't scientific either," he says, "and people still sign them." The next Friday she brings him a printed article on how bees recognize faces. He brings her a little jar of propolis for her eyelid. Neither of them says thank you.
In the evenings, in her grandfather's house, where the stove is lit even in June, Delila reads the blue notebook. For forty years her grandfather wrote down in it every inspection, every rain and every jar of honey. The hives did not have numbers but names. The first was called Fata, after her grandmother. The fifth was called Sweden, after her uncle who had gone there and never come back. The seventh was called Delila. "Delila strong, angry, won't let you look inside. Just like her. Her honey is the best," it said next to one May ten years earlier. Delila sits by the stove until long after midnight. In the morning, for the first time, she asks Jakub something that has nothing to do with the meadow: what her grandfather was like in his last year.
Jakub answers while they inspect Fata. In his last winter her grandfather could hardly see, so every evening Jakub read the notebook aloud to him and wrote down whatever he dictated. On Sundays her grandfather called Delila from the landline and hung up before she could answer, because he did not know what to say to her. "I had that number," Delila says. "I thought someone had dialed wrong." Jakub says nothing. That Saturday they do not argue once, which they both notice and neither of them mentions.
In June the hive called Delila swarms. Delila, the real one, is at a hearing in Sarajevo that Friday when Jakub sends her a photo: a dark cluster of bees hangs from her grandfather's pear tree, as big as a watermelon. "If you don't make it before dark, they will fly off." For the first time in her career she asks a judge for an adjournment, and she arrives at eight, in her suit and high heels. Jakub holds the box, she climbs the ladder and shakes the branch. Thousands of bees fall onto her arms and shoulders. Not one stings her. "They recognized you," Jakub says when they close the box. Delila says that is not scientific. Her hands keep trembling for another half hour. They sit on her grandfather's steps and eat bread with honey from Jakub's jar, and for the first time she asks him nothing.
In July he teaches her the plants. The linden is down in the valley around Travnik, the acacia was over in May, and in August heather blooms on her meadow, which is why her grandfather's honey is dark and bitter at the tip of the tongue. "That's why the developer wants it," Jakub says. "A nice view. But you can't eat a view." Delila tells him he talks like a bad poster. He says she talks like a good contract: everything accurate, and nothing warm. That time they argue until midnight, on the bench in front of the house, and neither of them gets up first.
At the end of July a bear comes to Jakub's slope. Delila does not see it, only hears it, at two in the morning, something heavy breaking the fence and Jakub shouting in the dark. She runs out in her pajamas, with a flashlight and her grandfather's pot, and bangs the pot with a ladle until her arms go numb. The bear goes off toward the woods with half the comb from one hive. Until dawn they repair the fence, in silence. When the sun comes up, Jakub tells her she was stupid and she was brave, and that he cannot decide which of the two she was more.
In August the contract arrives. Delila reads it in her office in Marijin Dvor, the way she reads everything, pen in hand. Article nine: the seller undertakes to remove all existing structures and beehives before the handover, and the buyer reserves the right to treat the land with chemicals for landscaping. Delila has read a thousand articles like that. Her boss says it is standard wording and that the price is good. This article Delila reads five times. Then she calls the developer and tells him the signing is moved back a week, because of the honey harvest.
They extract the honey in Jakub's shed, with an old extractor her grandfather bought back in the seventies. Jakub turns the crank, Delila holds the sieve, and the honey runs down her wrist all the way to her elbow. The honey from Delila is dark and thick and smells of something she remembers before she knows what it is: her grandfather's kitchen when she was seven, when he would stir a full spoon of honey into her wild thyme tea. Then Jakub hands her the blue notebook, open to the last page. "I didn't want to show you this before you decided."
The last entry is in her grandfather's handwriting, large and crooked, from February: "I offered Jakub the meadow and the hives. He won't take them. He says Delila needs the meadow, only she doesn't know it yet. He is as stubborn as she is. Let them argue, it's good for the honey." Delila reads it twice. Then she looks at Jakub, who is looking at the extractor as if he were seeing it for the first time. "You could have had all of this for nothing," she says. "I could have," he says. "But then you would have sold just the house, and you would never have come."
Delila walks out of the shed with sticky hands and calls the developer. She tells him she is not selling. He asks how much more she wants and says there are other meadows on Vlašić. There are, she says, but none of them is hers. The contract has an article nine, she tells him, and for her that is the end of the conversation. Then she hangs up and stands for a long time on the meadow, among the hives that have names, while bees land on her sticky fingers.
In September she arrives on a Friday with a trunk full of empty jars and a single printed sheet. An agreement on the use of the meadow: Jakub Dedić has the right to keep hives on the Bešlija meadow free of charge and for an indefinite period, with one obligation, that he teach Delila Bešlija everything he knows. Jakub reads it on the hood of his pickup. "This isn't a contract," he says. "This is a marriage proposal." "Don't interpret," she says. "Sign." He signs with the carpenter's pencil her grandfather used to count frames, and then, without asking, he writes one more article under his signature. Delila reads it twice, the way she reads everything, and does not cross it out.