Bienen

Bienen recur at the edges of domestic and working life, first in the industrial handling of chickens and later in Harry’s account of beekeeping. Their appearances are brief, but they connect animal life to human labor, practical concealment, and the narrator’s remembered landscape.

The Chicken Farm

The narrator works evenings twice a week at a large chicken farm made up of sheds between villages. The birds’ manure is spread over the surrounding fields, and the wind carries its smell from one village to another. In Hall 9, workers put on boots and handle the chickens directly: gloves make them too difficult to grip. The first bird is easy to catch, but each additional one is harder; once four hang tightly together in a worker’s hand, they stop struggling because they cannot move.

The chickens are pushed into plastic boxes that must be filled and closed before midnight. Workers divide the task into catching and packing, carrying boxes to a lorry, and stacking them on its load bed. The work is governed by speed and by the condition of the birds: too many broken wings discovered at the slaughterhouse bring trouble. When a chicken’s foot is severed as a box is stacked, the shift leader treats the injury with dark casualness, recalling a chicken leg that supposedly hopped into a field and failed to get up after stumbling over a molehill. In this setting, animal bodies are handled as units moving through a production chain, while injury is absorbed into workplace routine.

Harry’s Bees

Much later, Harry describes his father’s life after an accident and retirement. Having withdrawn from social life, his father takes up beekeeping after his wife urges him to find a hobby and get out among people. Harry pictures him in an astronaut suit, standing inside a cloud of bees, and calls this arrangement social with pointed irony. The image conveys Harry’s fear of becoming like his father: he says that avoiding that fate is the only goal he has.

Harry also reveals that he used to hide his dope in his father’s beehives at home. Drug-sniffing dogs, he explains, were afraid of the bees, and the stash acquired a distinctive taste of honey. The hives therefore served not only as the setting for his father’s chosen hobby but as cover for Harry’s concealed activity. Bees are part of a household arrangement whose meaning differs sharply for father and son.

The Landscape and Its Recurrences

The bees return as a visual feature of the narrator’s rural surroundings. Running along a freshly asphalted field road, he sees a row of beehives in a meadow and listens; what he hears is only the hum of the bypass. The moment places the hives within a landscape shaped both by cultivated land and modern traffic, without explaining who owns them or whether they are connected to Harry’s father.

Across these scenes, bees and chickens are not given extended independent perspectives. They are encountered through human routines: chickens are caught, confined, transported, and injured; bees make possible a father’s hobby and help conceal a son’s drugs, then appear as a quiet row in the countryside. The contrast links animal presence to the book’s material details of work and family without making the animals interchangeable or reducing their different roles to a single symbol.