A Treatise on Shelling Beans

by Wieslaw Mysliwski

  “Too bad, boys,” he said in farewell. “I’d finally have been done with it all. Find me my bottle tomorrow. Right now I want to sleep.”

  And that was the end of the revolt. No, they didn’t show the film again. Besides, who would have wanted to watch it now? The power came on the next day, as usual. There were no musters, reports, speeches. All they did was make us clean up. They had us bring in the instruments that had been thrown out of the windows. Lessons and shop and work were all put on hold. We got breakfast and lunch and dinner as before, not reduced portions. Right away glaziers came in and started putting in new windows, starting with the rec room. Then the insurance people came to assess the damage. So it seemed like our revolt had been insured. Nor could you tell from the teachers that there’d been any kind of rebellion. They even got more lenient. In any case none of them raised his voice or frowned. The commandant responded to our bows, which came as a shock, because up till then he’d hardly ever nodded back when you bowed to him. Mostly he didn’t notice you. Unless something he didn’t like caught his eye, in which case he could even slap you in the face. In front of everyone else, to make it worse.

  Our biggest surprise, though, was the music teacher. Not the fact that he was going around sober. It was that when he was sober he was a completely different person, quite unlike himself you might say. Lost in thought, older, and he rarely showed himself. No, we never did find his bottle, though we did what he asked and scoured the entire parade ground the following morning. That was the strangest thing of all, it was like the bottle had vanished into thin air. I’d understand if there’d been grass or bushes, but the whole square was covered with gravel. There was nothing on it but gravel and huts. We even wanted to buy him a new one, because it wasn’t just an ordinary bottle, these days flat bottles like that are everywhere, but back then there were only round ones. Where he got it from I couldn’t say. I think he went looking for it himself as well, because he’d sometimes come out in the morning and walk around the parade ground.

  Otherwise, nothing happened. One time only, once the windows had been fixed in the rec room they had us all assemble there. There was the commandant, the teachers, and us. They told us to think about our revolt, about whether it had been worth it. Whether we’d have it easier without the school. No one said anything about the film. The whole affair was pretty short. The only other thing they said was that until order was restored, until the damage had been repaired, they were giving us some free days to think about everything. We were being punished by being made to think, as one of the boys put it.

  So, whereas to begin with we’d reckoned that things wouldn’t end there and it was only the calm before the storm, eventually we stopped suspecting anything, since they’d told us to reflect on it all. Some of the boys even began to regret we’d not at least burned down the teachers’ hut.

  Maybe a week passed, maybe less, in any case we still had free days, and here there was a muster at the crack of dawn. Not a normal one, but like something unusual had happened. We ran out onto the parade ground and there were three military jeeps. You know, cross-country vehicles. They had us fall into line two deep, and told us we’d be questioned after breakfast.

  They sent us off to eat. They must have been eating also, because they waited a long time. The sun was already well up in the sky when they began calling us in to the rec room for questioning. Not in alphabetical order, not according to age, not team by team or room by room. At random. There had to be some principle at work, but we couldn’t figure out what it was. It wasn’t even who had shouted the most during the revolt, who had been the loudest or the most involved. Nor was it who had been the first to suggest we should make a noose and hang someone. Though everyone knew who that had been. They started with one of the boys who happened to have fallen sick after the revolt and had had a fever.

  They were seated at a table, a handful of civilians, a few military, and our commandant at the end. The table stood by the far wall of the room. It was a long one, made of several tables pushed together and covered with a red cloth. There were two vases with flowers, and everyone had glasses of tea in front of them. It even looked nice, they smiled at us in a friendly way, not just the civilians but the army guys as well. They asked us their questions politely, no one raised his voice, it was like they’d just come by to chat with us.

  What did they ask us? Most of all about the teachers, as if the main thing was whether they treated us well. For example, do we often ask the teachers questions, and how they answer. What do they say when the power goes out. Or what do they say when the food is worse than usual. Do we ask them about that. That question none of us could understand, since the food was always worse than usual. They must have known that. But they didn’t ask anyone what we actually ate. If they had, they might have learned that a great deal depends on food. It’s not always about a film. The film, it was the first time they’d shown it. Whereas we ate every day. Things depend on food, and on what you eat it from and with what, on the plates, spoons, knives, forks. Us, we always ate from beat-up old mess kits. We’d been told the army had donated them to the school. But no one believed it. There were rumors they’d been gathered from dead soldiers at the front. So you could imagine that you’re sitting there eating from a mess plate, and next to you is the dead guy whose plate it was. Even if you had a nice pork chop on the plate, do you think you’re going to enjoy it? Heck no, we never got pork chops. If there was any meat, at most it’d be a piece of liver or spleen, or very rarely heart or kidneys. All the time it was kasha, potatoes, potatoes, kasha. Pearl barley it was. To this day I can’t stand it. The soup was usually watery. Often the boys would just dip their spoons in it, then flick it over each other, they were so mad. They’d start at one table, and pretty soon the whole cafeteria would be splashing soup over one another. Little thing like soup, but it could have led to a revolt. The spoons and forks were made of cheap aluminum, they’d get bent and you’d keep having to straighten them. Not to mention that most of the forks were missing a prong, sometimes two. And there weren’t enough knives to go around, when there was something to cut up, of course. Luckily they weren’t needed that often. And they really didn’t know about all that?

  With the teachers, it was like they were trying to analyze them in detail. But there wasn’t much we could tell them, because in our eyes all the teachers were alike. Besides, what was the point of dwelling on the teachers when it was all about the film breaking off when the power went out? Some of the boys did their best to tell them about the man in the film, and about Mary. That he kept trying on hat after hat. But they interrupted as if that was of no interest to them. At one moment apparently one of the military guys even smiled, though it wasn’t me being questioned at the time. In my opinion, first they should have watched the film, and only then questioned us. And it should have been stopped in the same place it was for us. Maybe then they would have understood how a revolt can break out. You don’t think they’d get it? You reckon they’d think it had to be more than the film? Or that they wouldn’t understand how it could all be about the hat? I have to disagree with you there.

  In any case, they wouldn’t listen to anything about the film. And as far as the revolt itself was concerned, they asked us for instance what we shouted, they told us to tell them if not the exact words, because we might not remember, then at least the gist of what was said. They also asked each of us what each boy did during the revolt. As if each person could be doing something different in the middle of a revolt. A revolt means everyone does everything together, and no one’s aware of what they’re doing individually. One person shouts, and everyone thinks they’re the one who shouted. Or like one person’s at the front of the crowd, but everyone will think they were at the front. It’s like in a war, one man dies and all the others think they’ve died as well. If someone is alive it’s only because there has to be someone who remembers that the others died. Running away is the only thing you do on your own.

  Maybe they got some
thing out of us after all. You know how things are in that kind of questioning. You don’t want to say something, yet you don’t even realize you’ve already said it. You have nothing to confess to, but between the lines you confess all the same. In general, in questioning what they ask is more important than what you answer. The questions contain the answers they’re looking for. Your guilt is already in the questions, even if you don’t feel guilty. Whether you say you don’t remember, or whether you say nothing, you confess. Especially with silence, because that way all you’re doing is confirming your guilt. Inside you is enough guilt for every possible question. Even those that no one has ever asked, and maybe no one ever will. Because what is a person if not a question about guilt? The only good thing is that at least he rarely demands an answer of himself. It’s just as well, because he wouldn’t be able to give it.

  On top of everything we were afraid they’d arrest us all, so we could have accidentally given various things away. They asked us for example about the ringleaders, as one of the army guys called them. He explained right away that that meant the ones who had led us, who had been the most eager, who had shouted the loudest and the most, that we should give their names. Each of us gave a different name, so maybe it turned out we were all ringleaders, because they didn’t arrest any of us.

  But the matter couldn’t end there. And it didn’t. You know who they arrested? That’s right, the music teacher, who’d done nothing wrong whatsoever. Maybe someone had let slip that we were going to hang him. That was enough for them. That was enough of a clue. Because no other clue led to anyone else. True, later on word went around that he’d been under an obligation to inform them about anything that happened in the school. And he’d failed in that obligation. But you know what it means to say “word went around,” so none of us believed it. How could it have been him, the music teacher. A guy who was almost always drunk, aside from anything. What could he have seen or heard when he was drunk. His eyes were permanently misted over, his ears must have been filled with other sounds. The sounds might have been in his eyes too, because often he didn’t know which way he was going. There were times he couldn’t find his own room. He needed to be led there. You had to take the key from his pocket, open the door for him. Help him off with his hat and coat and shoes. Lie him down on the bed. Who knows, we might have been no more to him than sounds he kept trying to put together in a way that made sense, and when he couldn’t it wasn’t his fault but ours.

  Would you have believed it? There you go. But that’s what people said. And the worst of it was that no one knew anything, no one said anything, but the rumor went around as if the information had come into being of its own accord. Where does such a thing come from, can you tell me that? Maybe there’s something like the spontaneous generation of words, what do you reckon?

  When we heard they were taking him away we ran to the rec room, grabbed whatever instruments we could, whether or not they were working, and we stood on the parade ground the way he’d arranged us that time as an orchestra, in any case more or less like that, it didn’t really matter. The ones who didn’t have instruments also gathered around us, because the whole school turned out. When they led him out, we all took up our instruments as if we were about to start playing. But we didn’t play, we just stood there.

  He was walking with his head down, he didn’t even look at us. They put him in the back seat of the car, one guy on one side of him, another guy on the other. They were just about to set off when he jerked forward and shouted:

  “Long live music, boys!”

  7

  You didn’t know him? That’s too bad. Did you know the Priest maybe? I don’t mean an actual priest. That was just what we called him, the Priest. He even let me call him that, though I was a lot younger than him. A welder, he was. We worked on a building site together. Because I was thinking that if we found some people we knew in common, maybe we’d find ourselves too, the two of us, at some time or other, some place or other. I sometimes think of somebody I used to know, and he leads me right away to some other person I knew, then that person leads to someone else, and so on. And I’ll be honest, there are times I find it hard to believe I used to know one guy or another. But I must have, since they remember meeting me someplace, at such-and-such a time. One guy, it even turned out we’d played in the same band years ago, him on the trombone, me on the sax. Though he’s dead now. But people we know can lead us all kinds of ways, even to places we’d never want to go.

  One guy abroad told me about these two brothers he used to know who’d fought on opposite sides in a civil war. Brothers on opposite sides, you can imagine what ruthless enemies they must have made. But the war was ruthless too. People killed each other like they wanted to drown each other in blood. Civil wars are much worse than ordinary wars, as you know. Because there’s no greater hatred than the kind that comes from closeness. So when the war ended they continued to be enemies. They lived in the same village, but they wouldn’t allow their wives to talk to one another, or their children to play together. And it goes without saying that they themselves never spoke a word to each other. But they both used to go to the same bar. It was another matter that there was only one bar in the village. They’d sit at separate tables, drink their beer, read the paper. If there was only one newspaper, when one of them finished reading it he’d put it back where he got it, even if his brother’s table was nearer. The other one did the same thing if he was the first one to read it.

  But the one who finished reading first didn’t leave. He went on drinking his beer, as if he was waiting for his brother to finish reading. Almost every day they’d show up at more or less the same time, as if they knew when they were supposed to come. They drank their beer, read the paper, the second one after the first one or the first one after the second one, then when their glasses were empty they’d leave. The second one after the first one or the first one after the second one, just the same. It never happened that one of them finished his beer sooner and left. They didn’t have to sneak glances, you could easily see the beer in their glasses. Or maybe because they were brothers they had the same rhythm? In any case they drank at the same pace. And that seemed to show they hadn’t stopped being brothers. Because as for words, the war had killed the words in both of them for good.

  The years passed, and they got older. One of them went gray, the other one lost his hair, and they kept coming to the bar, one of them at one table, the other one at the other, they drank their beer and read the newspaper. And each time they’d put it back where they got it. They needed eyeglasses to read now, and they weren’t that steady on their feet. But neither of them would give the paper to the other one when he was done with it. Then they’d finish their beer, one of them would leave and the other one would leave right after. All those years, neither of them said so much as:

  “Here, here’s your paper.”

  That one sentence might have been enough. Because who knows if with that single sentence they wouldn’t have said everything they hadn’t said to each other all those years. You can fit an awful lot into one sentence. Maybe everything. Maybe a whole lifetime. A sentence is the measure of the world, a philosopher once said. That’s right, the same one. I sometimes wonder if the reason we have to say so many words throughout our life might be in order for that one sentence to emerge from among them. What sentence? Everyone has their own. One that you could utter in a fit of despair and not be lying. At least to yourself.

  If only you’d known the Priest. You know, the welder. I couldn’t tell you. I don’t even know what his first name was. Everyone always just said, the Priest. His first name and last name got lost somewhere along the way. You know what, you even resemble him a bit, now that I look at you. Hand to God. There’s something of him in your features, in your eyes. Of course, I mean when you were younger, as I imagine you. He was still young then too. A lot older than me, but I was no more than a kid back then. It was only my second building site, and I worked on the first one less than a year.
When you lift your head a bit that way it’s like I was looking at him. Stop shelling a moment. When your hands stop moving your face is clearer. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe a little.

  Why Priest? He’d trained to be a priest, spent three years in seminary, but he gave it up. That he never told me. But he kept his surplice and stole, and his Bible, he had them in a separate little suitcase that he kept locked. Though on a building site like that, who wouldn’t open another person’s suitcase and take a look inside? Especially one that was locked. Before he went to sleep he’d always kneel by his bed and pray for a long time. He never missed Sunday Mass. So it was all the more of a temptation to open the suitcase. Work on the building site often continued on a Sunday, especially if it was running behind, but he always had to go to Mass.

  Of course he got into trouble, he was written up, they docked his bonuses. At the worksite meetings they claimed it was because of people like him that the building was behind schedule. That there were too many believers on the site, and he was an example to them. Though he was no exception. All kinds of people worked on building sites in those days. Building sites were like hiding places. So if they’d wanted to get rid of all those of one kind or another, there wouldn’t have been anyone left to do the job. Not to mention the fact that there’d have been no tradesmen whatsoever. And he was one of the best welders. Maybe even the best of all. All the other welders would go to him for advice. Plus, he was hard-working. If there was some urgent job that needed doing he wouldn’t leave the site till it was done, even if he had to work through the night. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t go to dances. He kept away from girls. In his spare time he read. In that respect he was an exception, because everyone else drank in their spare time. Even before he went to sleep, however exhausted he was, he’d always say he had to take up his book and read at least a couple of pages. One time when I’d climbed the scaffolding to where he was, he said to me that books are the only way for a human not to forget that he’s a human. Him, in any case, he couldn’t live without books. Books are a world too, a world that you choose for yourself, not the one you’ve come into.