Quarantine table
Lost In Honey
A sweet war…
I just wanted to cook. Like every chef. But what life offered me was more than just a plate of memories. So, I began to write. About our lives, turned into tiny honeycombs… Didn’t I tell you?
A quiet, windy morning in the quarantine house during the pandemic days… I was standing at the entrance of the room where the honeycombs were kept. Honey and ants were dripping from my palms. As I peeled off the cling film wrapped around the honeycomb, they were already dead. They didn’t make much noise, but the moment had a tragic melody. Writhing in my hands… Their bellies fuller than the people of this city, yet now they were dead.
I placed the small honeycomb I managed to save in the pantry and walked from the courtyard to the kitchen. Even the wind was ashamed to touch my face, in the city of winds, Bakı.
The news spread through the house’s courtyard faster than the ants finding the honeycomb. The lady of the house rushed in, speaking loudly. Loud and trembling… It wasn’t about the green paper scraps stuck to the honeycomb. It was something greater than that, and I felt ashamed.
"You take a bucket."
She paused. "You fill it with water. You place a small platform inside. Then you put the honeycomb on top of it. By morning, they would all be floating in the water."
So, we would ambush them in the water while they tried to find their way home. How could it be that I didn’t know what to do when the ants attacked the honey? How could I fail to save a handful of honey and lose the battle against the ants?
What a sweet war! While trapped in a cage, nature had slammed us onto the concrete and spat on us, and yet— at least I should have won this war!
As her tone softened, she spoke of how the people in the city didn’t even have money to buy a loaf of bread. While we were fighting ants behind these walls… Without seeing those beyond the walls…
There was people. No different from the ants. No different from the ants drowning in honey!
This time of year, a battlefield. This is how life was…
You were either the ant, taking your last breath in honey… Or the owner of the honeycomb, with corpses floating in your honey.
Based on a true story in Azerbaijan when I was a private chef and bee undertaker.
