“Putin’s calculation is simple: a Ukraine with a permanent war in its eastern region will never be fully welcomed by Europe or the rest of the world.” So concludes Sergey Sergeich, the bee keeper living in the Donbas grey zone between the Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian military.
I’m nearing the end of this remarkable novel, Grey Bees, set in 2014 and published in 2018, by Andrey Kurkov, who coincidentally I have just heard on Radio 4 commenting on the first anniversary of the Russian invasion. Kurkov, born in Russia but raised in Kyiv, writes fiction in Russian and non-fiction in Ukrainian. The border between the two cultures and languages also runs through him.
We follow the beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich, a divorced man living alone in the abandoned village of Starhorodivka, alone except for one neighbour. Despite the widespread destruction all around his home and the occasional dead soldier, he has resolved to stay, cold and fearful, for the sake of his beloved bees.
The bees, of course, know nothing of borders and live collectively. And they could teach us a thing or two about how to live together, he muses. “After all bees alone had managed to establish communism in their hives, thanks to their orderliness and labour.”
In many ways the very existence of borders bear witness to our human condition, how they separate us from each other. Later in the novel Sergeich trundles across the border into the Crimea, in his ancient Lada with USSR number plates.
Nothing changes but everything changes as a result of the then recent Russian takeover of territory and the consequent installation of this new border. He is now a foreigner in his own land, limited to a 90 day stay.
For Kurkov frequently denotes his characters not by their proper names but in terms of the border, as visitor or the host. So given the fluidity of borders Sergeyich could become a foreigner despite never having moved from his land and having little interest in the conflict.
In fact, his very identity is to be defined by the border as demonstrated by official documentation. Towards the end of the novel: “His passport and license had been taken away. Who was he now? No-one. No documents, no rights.”
As the novel progresses so Sergeich loses his apparent indifference towards the conflict over the border. He notices his bees refusing to make room for a newcomer from another hive. Suddenly their communalism looks like little more than cruel tribalism. Sergeich reprimands them: “Why are you acting like people?”
For where there are people, there are borders. And where there are borders, there is conflict. We fight and so we build walls to protect and define ourselves. Borders in one way or another are always in the news. And worse, we would aim to extend them, as we are now seeing in the Ukraine. It’s what human beings do.
Borders were just as important in the time of Jesus, even more so. You see this in the everyday life of the country folk of Nazareth. Witness the 70 mile detour they would make each year in their pilgrimage to Jerusalem, anything to avoid crossing the border into Samaria.
And in their determination to kill Jesus.
We read how Jesus at the beginning of his ministry returns to his hometown. “He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom.” (Luke 4:16)
To begin with he is warmly welcomed as one of their own. “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips.”
But then their mood suddenly changes as Jesus demonstrates from the Hebrew scriptures how God would bless the outsider, even the widow from Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian. Gentiles, goyim.
For Nazareth saw itself as a settler community, a Jewish outpost against the steady encroachment of Greek culture as demonstrated by the nearby Gentile settlement of Sepphoris, just a 5k walk away, which frighteningly had recently become the capital of Galilee and Perea.
Jesus, as we saw in a recent blog, was threatening the very raison d'etre of Nazareth, hence their fierce response.
“That set everyone in the meeting place seething with anger. They threw him out, banishing him from the village, then took him to a mountain cliff at the edge of the village to throw him to his doom, but he gave them the slip and was on his way.” (Luke 4:28f)
For Jesus’ very mission was to abolish all frontiers , to destroy every border wall which would divide humankind into them and us. As the apostle Paul writes: “For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups (Jew and Gentile) one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.” (Ephesians 2:14)
So the purpose of his cross? “Instead of continuing with two groups of people separated by centuries of animosity and suspicion, (Jesus) created a new kind of human being, a fresh start for everybody.” (Ephesians 2:15, the Message)
We are to be defined not by our borders but by our bonds. And that’s where we are going, thank God. And so meanwhile the Holy Spirit would make this future evident today in the church where there are no frontiers which would separate, “no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free.” (Colossians 3:11).
Our witness to a fractured world.