The Honey That Parted Ways

- My honey, - says Ovsii. - Nay, mine, - says Radko. And the two of them pull that same barrel each his own way, honey slopping onto their shoulders and down their collars. They stand in the middle of my yard, sticky as two flat cakes, and around them half the village with their pots - tomorrow is Spas, time to bless the honey. But hold on, because that barrel is already the end of a song that began a week ago.

Ovsii and Radko are kums, yards across the fence from each other, and their honey "yields" exactly the same. But pride - each has enough of that for two more apiaries. Ovsii walks about grandly, as if he carried a royal charter under his shirt, though he's belted with a rope off a sack. Radko holds his pipe like a mace, though there's been no tobacco in it since Trinity. Ovsii says: the kum's honey isn't honey, it's impudent sugar.

Radko says: the kum's bees are dying of boredom. They struck a deal in front of Dmytro: they swap hives for a week, and whosever bees work better in the other man's yard - his is the truth. They swapped fair and square, before people, and shook hands on it. But at night Ovsii grew sorry for his bees: they'll perish, poor things, at that slob's place.

He got up, carried his own hive home under the pear tree, set the other one in its place, and slept sweetly - the sleep of a man who has outwitted them all. One thing he didn't know: an hour earlier, under that same pear tree, Radko had already gone by with a hive on his belly. And so it went for three nights. The hives crossed the fence more often than the hens did, and by morning even the bees, it seems, no longer knew whose they were.

Before Spas they rolled the hives out to the inn - to show the village whose honey was the real thing. Ovsii looked at "Radko's" hive and went cold: the handle was crooked, familiar, he'd whittled it himself after the third shot, left shoulder higher than the right. To say so would be to confess where he'd been crawling at night. So he drew in a breath and, for the whole yard to hear: - Now that's the kum's honey! That's a bee for you!

And across the yard Radko went just as white over "Ovsii's" hive and shouted just the same. The village gasped: they've made peace! The women were already waving their kerchiefs. Dmytro drew off a pot from each hive for the tasting, and forgot to put a mark on one of them. And that's when it started: mine - nay, mine. Here I stepped in myself: stood between them like a fence - and got honey round the ear from both sides.

And Dmytro looked at the kums the way you look at rain at harvest time: - You'd have done better to part ways. Off home, each with his own. - And whose is whose now?! - both shouted at once, and for the first time in a week they agreed. Then Dmytro invented fairness: - Pour both into one barrel. The honey is shared, it'll be blessed, and there's no quarrel. Fool that I am, I even brought out my own oak barrel. They poured.

For two minutes such a hush stood over the yard that you could hear a bee licking a spoon. And then Ovsii peered inside: - There's more of mine in here. - Nay, mine. - I'm telling you, mine. - Nay, mine, for it's thicker. They grabbed the barrel by the handles: Ovsii pulling his way, Radko his. - Let go. - Nay, you let go.

The staves cracked, the hoops went hopping across the yard, and the honey spread in a lake over the whole yard - under the benches, under the fence, into the entry hall. And from above the bees of both apiaries came down in a cloud and settled on the puddle side by side, wing to wing, never once asking whose master was the better man. Dmytro stood over that lake of honey: - You'd have done better to part ways. And I'll swear on it, he was smiling.

The whole village gathered the honey - with spoons, with flat cakes, with fingers, and the hens, downright happy, simply stuck themselves to the ground. Dmytro says to this day that the honey that year was the sweetest, because it parted its ways over the whole village. And every year at Spas, Ovsii and Radko swear it wasn't them who spilled it.