Killing Juggernaut

I collapsed upon reaching the starlit summit of Mount Rysy, feeling as if I’d been punched hard in the gut—not from the six-hour trek, which was only on the edge of my attention, but from the horrendous murder of my father, Martin Dimitrov. Everyone said the trouble originated with him, but I instead traced it back to, well, obviously my mother, but also the government, who innocuously appointed the title of Administrator of Tatras National Park (TANAP) to someone to whom nature actually mattered. Even soon after he took on the strenuous role, he began to look at me with that face, the one that was an odd mixture of exhaustion and hope—like a weathered warrior.

‘Papa, where do bumblebees live?’ I asked him at the age of five, the year he was assigned to TANAP. These fuzzy fliers in the wildflower meadows had spellbound me. My mother Zdenka dismissed my curiosity and so I resiliently embarked upon a several-hundred-metre expedition to the eternally busy TANAP Headquarters down the road. My father looked at me with that face.

‘Mister President,’ he said to a portly man hovering in the glass wall.

‘Martin, I’ve more pertinent matters right now,’ the man said.

‘I understand you’re a busy man, but I must meet with you regarding the plans to establish additional—’

‘Martin, the National Council is in emergency sessions over the funding of social services and I’m up to my eyeballs in this banking crisis. You should be talking to Milan.’ A photo of the environment minister appeared in the corner of the glass, a man with matted gray hair and a grumpy face.

‘I’m sorry, sir, but the ultimate legislative power on federal land lies with—’

‘Martin, look, my office will send you a schedule of when we can meet later, perhaps sometime early next month.’ A calendar sprung up on the glass next to the man and I was transfixed by the translucent white squares, holdovers from the time when arbitrary technological advances were affordable and coltan wasn’t as scarce as zinc.

‘Yes, sir, I’ll see you then.’ The man disappeared and with a pensive expression my father waved his hand, causing the vacated panel to be replaced by his own calendar. ‘Six,’ he called and the glowing square from the side of the glass jumped across the pane. ‘Seventeen-thirty to eighteen o’clock.’ The numbers blazed. ‘What’re you doing way over here, Poecile?’

‘Where do bumblebees live?’ I reiterated. He squatted next to me so that his brown eyes were looking straight into my own, and leaned extra close.

‘You tell me,’ he whispered with a wink that sent a wild shiver shooting up my spine. I had a mission! That same bright morning saw me following a red bumblebee I had deemed ‘Mister Bumble,’ who seemed oblivious of his stalker as he devotedly visited each flower and mysteriously accumulated yellow saddlebags on his hind legs. Finally, in the purple twilight, Mister Bumble crawled into a hole under a bush. I anxiously dove under the bilberry, plunged my fingers deep into the Earth, and unleashed a swarming attack that sent me wailing away.

‘You opened their home, Poecile,’ my father reprimanded that evening as he rubbed Hydrocortison Léčiva into my back.

My mother cradled me and kissed my forehead when I winced. ‘Oh, my poor baby,’ she cooed. She had longer blonde hair back then and it was soft and gently perfumed against my cheek.

‘How would you feel if someone tore open your home?’ my father said. The blue eyes of my mother shifted to my father. His words concocted imagery of a giant creature thoughtlessly ripping away the roof of our home, the wooden support beams violently cracking, sienna shingles shattering, and the white stucco walls exploding into chaotic debris.

As they left my room, a fragment of half-whispers came to me: ‘You told her to follow bees? She’s a little girl. It doesn’t take a genius, Martin…’ The hallway light cast an orange triangle into my dark room and, as the dried tears crystallised to my cheeks, the bumblebees retired in their refuge as well. I learned that other biologists before me had already uncovered the mysteries of the bumblebee. ‘Mister Bumble’ had really been ‘Miss Bumble,’ a worker in the last half of her life. I had learned the hard way that bumblebee stingers do not rupture to remain in the enemy like honeybee stingers, giving bumblebees the power to defend their homes repeatedly.

All nature enchanted me after that point. By the time I was eight, much of the light-dappled forests of spruce, maple, beech, and dwarf pine had been explored in search of frogs, lizards, and snakes while hoping for glimpses of a bear or a lynx and imagining that small dinosaurs like Saltopus lay hidden in the undergrowth.

This was the year of László Chlebo, the boy to whom I gave a bloody nose after he emphatically crushed a mantis at school. László was my nemesis. I had prematurely sprouted little Mount Kilimanjaros and László sadistically delighted in creeping up behind me and snapping the straps through my shirt. Smashing the mantis during recess was the last straw. There was this inquisitive brown alien-looking creature looking up at me on the sidewalk behind the school. The tiny dark spots within his giant greenish yellow eyes seemed like pupils to my mind. I’d watched him land there after I’d startled him by approaching too quickly when he was on the wall above a window. I had crept up close and now saw that he had bright green along the edges of his sleek, streamlined wings. Then the rubber sole of a trainer came down from nowhere, obliterating his abdomen. There was László’s grin. He dragged his foot backward to reveal a terrible brown smear and the poor insect waved his raptorial claws feverishly, trying to get away from his smashed brown entrails. My cheeks went rigid and burned hot and suddenly László was down. For my defiant reciprocation, surely my father would be proud, so I didn’t flinch when Miss Benovsky called him. Instead I was grounded.

‘You can’t resolve things like this, you know that,’ my father said.

‘Do you want people to look at you and say that I raised a brute? Huh?’ my mother demanded. ‘Look at me when I speak to you! Well?’ Her question had seemed rhetorical to me, but now her face was locked in rage because I wasn’t answering.

I shook my head and ruefully averted my gaze.

‘How am I supposed to work in this province if people come to me and say, “I won’t do business with you because you have a thug for a daughter”? Huh?’ That seemed very unlikely to me. My gaze was fixed to the floor not to fend off my mother, but to avoid seeing the disappointment that permeated my father’s face, cutting deeper than words.

‘If you act like a fool, Zara, you will become a fool,’ she continued. My father lifted an imploring hand as though to protect me: ‘Miláčik —’

‘No, she needs to understand! For two months you must do all the dishes and the laundry, keep the house and my office totally spick and span…’ How exactly was this different from normal? ‘…And no skautka for you.’

‘What!’ I shrieked. My heart crumbled. No skautka! The upcoming camping trip was to be my sanctuary from László. With precise cunning, she had identified and executed the only punishment that could do me harm. I had only just started being a skautka and even though I didn’t identify with the other girls, I relished the idea of being led into the wilderness and taught to survive.

‘It is for your own good,’ my mother asserted, as if she knew what was good for me. ‘One day you will appreciate this.’

I looked from her to my father, looking for an ally.

‘People will never learn through violence,’ my father advised me. ‘They will only learn to hate you for your violence.’

I was baffled and close to tears. ‘Then what am I supposed do? How do you deal with mean jerks like that?’

‘Through education and friendship, Poecile,’ he said and smiled.

Reflecting on those words, I painfully sighed atop Mount Rysy with thousands of distant apathetic stars surrounding me.

Throughout my life, making friends has always required effort for me. I’m talking about physical pain. The others in Junior School…and Middle School…may as well have paid to gawk at me as a sideshow curiosity. Come see the sensational Mantis Girl who’s had close encounters with chamois, red deer, buzzards, brown bears, and grey wolves! To make it even more difficult, Tatranská Lomnica is a tiny village of six hundred people and there were only fifteen kids in my grade, so everybody knew everybody else. There was nowhere to hide—keeping to myself actually attracted attention.

‘What are you doing?’ I recall Erika Lukáč asking when I was thirteen. I was trying to identify the weeds growing on the school grounds using the ProBot app....