In fact, I was so insatiable that I decided to learn every instrument there was. Even percussion. There wasn’t much in the way of percussion instruments. A drum, one snare, a cymbal, a triangle. But when I played them I would sometimes feel something twitching inside me, as if a clock were starting to tick that till now had been stopped. In time I came to understand. In my view it’s not just music but life itself that’s governed by rhythm. When someone loses their sense of rhythm, they lose hope. What are tears, what is despair, if not an absence of rhythm. What is memory if not rhythm.
Though most of all I practiced on the saxophone. And let me tell you, there was something in the saxophone, even though those were only the very beginnings, that when I slung it around my neck, and put the mouthpiece between my lips, and placed my hands around the tube, just by doing that I could feel hope entering into me. Or that’s not quite it, it was something deeper, like I was trying to be born all over again. Who knows, maybe there’s something of that sort in all instruments. But I could only feel it with the sax. And right then, in school, I made up my mind that one day I’d buy a saxophone. I had to, come what may.
So when I graduated from the school and got a job working on the electrification of the villages, from the very first pay day I began setting money aside for that saxophone. Not a lot to begin with, because I didn’t earn a lot. I wasn’t a fully-fledged electrician right from the beginning. More of a gopher, as they say. I mostly worked putting up telegraph poles. One team strung the wires up on the poles, the other installed electricity in the houses. It was only later that they let me do other jobs. For example, when a house was built of stone and you had to make grooves in the stone for the wires, I would make the grooves. In the houses it was much better. You could earn a little extra for this or that odd job. Though in those days there weren’t that many stone-built houses. Sometimes they’d give you something, a cup of milk and a slice of bread and cheese. Or they’d let you pick an apple or a plum or pear if they had an orchard. Because sometimes our stomachs rumbled from hunger, especially toward the end of the month.
But however hungry a month it was, I had to set something aside for the saxophone. I knew the moment I collected my wages that I’d run out before the end of the month, but I had to put something away for the saxophone. Often I was tempted to borrow a few zloties from the saxophone. Not for food. For food I wouldn’t have dared. But for instance when my shirt was in tatters, or my socks couldn’t be darned anymore. Winter would be coming and I could have used some warmer clothes, long johns, a sweater, new shoes. It goes without saying that we worked in the winter too. Just not in severe frosts, we’d only work inside the houses then. But when it was only a bit below freezing we’d go on digging holes for the telegraph poles, breaking the frozen earth with pickaxes.
I kept my money in my mattress, in the straw, wrapped in newspaper. Believe me, a mattress is the best place to hide money. Especially when you changed villages and lodgings the way we did, your mattress was the best place. You slept on your mattress, squashed it with your body, who would have suspected there was money in there. When I added to it from the new month’s wages, I’d often have to search the entire mattress to find it.
I really was tempted to borrow some back. I’d take it out, unwrap it, and wrestle with myself that maybe after all I could. I mean, of course I’d return it. Maybe I’d even give it back with interest for however long it was till the next pay day. One time. I swear I’ll give it back. Just this once. Nothing’ll happen. When all’s said and done it’s my money, I’m borrowing from myself. It’d be a whole other story if I was borrowing from someone else. I’d be borrowing from myself, so I wouldn’t even have to explain if I just took something for a week or a month, because it certainly wouldn’t be any longer. Did I really not trust myself to that extent? My own money and I didn’t trust myself? Let me at least count how much I’ve saved. Though I already knew how much. I’d count it every month when I added more. But what was the harm in it, I’d count it, since I wasn’t going to borrow anything anyway. True, counting it doesn’t make it more, but it cheers you up that at least it hasn’t gotten any less.
I’d count it, smooth out any wrinkled notes, sort it into piles of hundreds, five hundreds, thousands, wrap each pile with a single note. Then I’d divide it all up again, but this time not according to denominations but in equal amounts. If I thought there weren’t enough piles I’d reduce the size of each amount so there’d be more. You know, there’s something in money that when it sucks you in it becomes hard to spend it on anything at all. I even started to worry that later I’d be reluctant to spend the money on a saxophone.
One of the electricians fell from a pole and broke an arm and a leg, and they put me in his place. I became a full electrician even though I hadn’t finished my whole training period. So I was earning more, which meant the saxophone was getting closer and closer. They began letting me do overtime and take on private jobs. I wasn’t putting up poles anymore, but installing wires on the poles. And you put in the most overtime on those poles. Everything was way behind schedule and a directive came down that things should be hurried along. So there was a lot more overtime to be had. Before the pole was put up you had to fix glass or porcelain insulators on the top. Then you’d go up and string the wires, attaching them to the insulators.
Despite the overtime, there weren’t that many volunteers for working on the poles. Most of the guys preferred installing electricity in people’s homes. So the lines were behind, they had to catch up with the houses. We’d sometimes be working on the poles right up until dusk. It was another matter that if you weren’t used to it, you couldn’t stay up on one of those poles for long. Oh no, you’d have spikes on your feet, you could put your weight on them. Have you never seen electricians working up on a pole? The whole planet is covered in those poles. Here, on the lake, the electricity comes from poles. Concrete ones, but back then they were wooden. How can I explain what the spikes looked like. They’re like sickles, semicircular, they fasten onto the soles of your boots. You don’t know what a sickle is? Never seen one? Way back when, they’d cut the crops with sickles. What does a sickle look like? You know, like a new moon. Plus, you’d have a big belt around your lower back that went around you and the pole. Despite that, you had to have strength in your back and in your legs to go up one pole after another, day after day.
Most of the electricians were older guys, from before the war, some of them were sickly after their wartime experiences, so when they’d climbed one pole, climbed a second, on the third one their legs wouldn’t obey them and their lower back would be killing them. When the weather turned colder their hands would be numb. They had gauntlets, but it wasn’t the kind of work you could do in gauntlets. And though overtime paid double, they left the pole work to the younger men. They’d make up for it and more when they were installing electricity in the houses. Otherwise they wouldn’t have given us the overtime so easily.
Another thing was, most all of them drank. Boy did they ever! In the lodgings, after work, not a day went by. But also at work. Sometimes they’d drink from the early morning. And if they didn’t drink it was because they hadn’t yet sobered up from the previous day. How could you climb a pole in that state? Whereas for me climbing a pole was nothing, like I said. I could clamber up poles the whole livelong day. I even enjoyed it. And back then I still didn’t drink. I was protected from it by the saxophone, I was trying to earn as much as I could and save as much as I could.
Actually, the other guys might not have drunk so much themselves, but in almost every home people made their own moonshine. You could get hold of booze any time of the day or night. You’d just knock on someone’s window and they’d hand you the bottle through the window. Not to mention that moonshine was the preferred form of payment. In general you could do anything with moonshine. No one believed in money anymore. The true currency was moonshine. And what else could you do with moonshine but drink it? So they drank.
I
have to hand it to them though, despite the fact they drank, they were first-rate electricians. They could do any job, drunk or sober. All the things I learned in school were nothing compared to what I learned from them. You just had to watch closely when they were doing something. And listen real carefully, not miss a single word. Each one of them had his secrets, and sometimes one or another of them would give them away despite themselves. What secrets? You’re not an electrician, what would be the point of telling you?
Well, it’s not hard to guess. You didn’t know what spikes are, what a sickle is. I will tell you one thing, a pro can recognize another pro from two or three words, especially one from the same line of work. I’m not denying that ignorance is also a kind of knowledge. But ignorance won’t help you learn the secrets of electricians. When someone doesn’t have any trade at all it’s hard to understand him even as a person. In any case, when I’d sometimes watch them at work I had the impression that electricity flowed through them the way it does through wiring. There was no problem they couldn’t fix. Often there was a shortage of materials, so they’d switch one part from here to there, wrap it in something, solder something or other. For them, nothing was impossible. So later on, when I started working on building sites, I could handle the most difficult installations. For instance I worked on the building of a cold storage plant where all the machinery ran on electricity. I set it all up without a hitch.
The one thing I didn’t learn from them was drinking vodka. That wasn’t till the building sites. Back then though I never touched a drop, the saxophone meant that much to me. At one of the lodgings I was living with a group of men and every evening they kept trying to persuade me, invite me, and they were heavy drinkers. They even started to accuse me of being a snitch. Because in their eyes, anyone who didn’t drink had to be a snitch. Especially a young guy like me. They didn’t trust young people. That’s understandable. Young people will do anything to get ahead of their elders. Young people are in a hurry. They don’t have the patience that comes with experience. They don’t realize that either way we’re all headed toward the same thing. Young people always think they’re going to build a new and better world. All of them. New young people, old young people. And they end up leaving behind the kind of world no one wants to live in. If you ask me, the quicker you outgrow your youth the better it is for the world, really. I was young once and I know. I believed in a new and better world too. Especially since after a war like that it wasn’t hard to believe in, because there wasn’t anything else to believe in. And few things are easier to believe in than a new and better world.
So it’s hardly surprising they’d accuse me of one thing or another, even of informing, since I didn’t drink. They didn’t know I was saving up for a saxophone. I kept that a total secret. I might have often had a drink with them, but I knew the expectations for when you drank. If I drank a glass I’d have to provide at least one bottle. Plus bread, pickled cucumbers, sausage. And I would regret every least penny. I excused myself by saying I had duodenal ulcers. I didn’t actually know what ulcers were, I didn’t know what a duodenum was. But one time I went into a compartment in a train calling out, pears, plums, apples, and someone offered some to someone else but the other person refused saying he had duodenal ulcers and he had to stick to a strict diet. As it happened, I looked like I had ulcers. Years later, when I was abroad, it turned out I in fact did.
According to those electricians of mine, however, and not just those ones but other ones I lived with in different lodgings, when I was on the building sites already, vodka was the best medicine for ulcers too. Because why did they not have ulcers? Well, why?
I may surprise you by saying this, but perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing that they drank. Because when they didn’t drink they had trouble sleeping. You’d think that when they were exhausted after a long day’s work, they ought to have been out like a light. But one of them couldn’t get to sleep, another one would wake up all the time, a third one slept such a shallow sleep he couldn’t say if he’d been asleep or not. And here it was morning already, time for work. The worst of it is that when you have problems sleeping, all kinds of different thoughts come to you and make it even harder to sleep.
In one village five of us were sharing a place together, all of them older guys, I was the only youngster, and one of the master electricians was also living with us. We called him master even when he wasn’t there. Go see the master, ask the master, the master’ll know what to do. I don’t know if you know how people usually talk about masters behind their back. In any case, they don’t call them master.
He didn’t talk much, he never let himself get drawn into conversation even over vodka. He liked vodka, why wouldn’t he? But getting him to talk was like drawing water from the deepest well. And they were never words that meant anything to you. Maybe to him, but not to others. Yes, no, who knows, maybe, we’ll have to think about it. Nothing was definite.
One evening it so happened that they didn’t drink. We’d come home late from work. One of them asked, Has anyone got anything? No one did, and no one felt like going to get some. All right then, let’s just go to bed. We got into our beds and turned out the light, it went quiet, I began to fall asleep. All at once one of them let out a deep sigh, another one turned on his other side with the whole weight of his body. And then everyone started switching from side to side, straightening the bedding, twisting and turning. The beds were old ones, they creaked with the slightest movement.
The master’s bed was by the window. After the light was turned out he would always smoke a last cigarette. He’d also smoke when he woke up in the middle of the night. At those times he’d have to smoke two or three before he could get back to sleep. It was only vodka that put him to sleep right away. Though that also depended on how much he’d had to drink. If it was quite a bit, then right away. If it wasn’t much, it was a lot harder for him. At those times he’d smoke and smoke. There was a geranium on the windowsill by his bed and he’d tap the ash into the flowerpot and put his cigarette out in it. He’d always fish the butts out in the morning, and from the number of butts you could tell how he’d slept. And not only that.
It wasn’t only a measure of his insomnia. But what did we know, we were just electricians. For us cigarette butts were just cigarette butts. On top of that, you could always smell the smoke in the morning, so we’d sniff and say, boy, the master sure smoked up a storm. So that night he lit up just the same, and one of the guys asked:
“Are you not asleep, master? For some reason I can’t get to sleep myself.”
Right away, from all the other beds people said they couldn’t either.
“That’s how it is when you don’t have a drink before you go to bed,” someone said, and someone else cursed. One of them recollected that somewhere or other the moonshine was stronger than some other place.
And a conversation started up. The master lit up again. He ashed the cigarette in the geranium and the geranium glowed for a second. When he took a drag, his face glowed too. You could see he was lying there with eyes open. But he didn’t seem to be listening to what the other men were talking about, because he didn’t say a word. Me, I was the youngest so I had no right to speak, I just listened. Besides, what could I have said when for instance they were discussing what each of them would do if he found out his wife was cheating on him. They were all married, whereas I wasn’t even thinking about that. Though we didn’t know if the master was married. He never spoke about it. But obviously, start thinking about your wife cheating on you and you won’t sleep a wink all night. Then the next morning you’ll be all fingers and thumbs. But each one of them knew what he’d do. One of them would kill her, another would kick her out of the house, a third one would do some other thing.
Then they started wondering if old guys can still do it, and when a man starts being old as far as that’s concerned. You know what I mean. And if he can’t, then what keeps him alive? And is it even worth living then? One of them said that God direc
ts life, that people have no right to ask whether it’s worth it. So they got on to God. Whether after a war like the last one people should keep believing in God or not. One of them said they should, because it wasn’t God that started the war, it was people. Someone else said, fair enough, though if He’d wanted to He could have held people back. Someone else again put in: They say that people pull the trigger, God brings the bullets, so He could have arranged the war so there’d be less misery, less suffering, less death. And they started telling stories of different things they’d seen or heard about. One of them whose brother had been executed by firing squad got so upset that he asked right out whether God even exists. He asked each bed in turn what we thought. Does He? I pretended to be asleep. Eventually he got to the master.
“What do you think, master, does God exist?”
The master had just put out a cigarette in the geranium pot, and he lit another. It was about the fourth since we’d put the light out. The whole time he’d not opened his mouth, it was like he wasn’t even listening. We waited intently to see what he’d say, as if it depended on him whether God existed. The one who’d asked him repeated his question.
“What do you say, master? Does He exist or not?”
“Who?” he finally said.
“God.”
He didn’t answer right away, first he crushed his cigarette out.
“Why are you asking me? Why are you asking them? You don’t need to take a vote. You should ask yourself. Me, all I can tell you is that where I was, He wasn’t there.”
He lit up yet again. Everyone went quiet, no one dared ask any more questions. No one said anything at all to anyone else. A moment later they started falling asleep. Here you could hear a whistling sound, over there someone breathing more loudly. I was wondering if the master was asleep, because no sound came from his bed. But he also hadn’t lit another cigarette.
A Treatise on Shelling Beans Page 11