A Treatise on Shelling Beans

by Wieslaw Mysliwski

  In any case, after the wedding bad things started happening between them. Him, he didn’t even look up when she served him his soup or his main course in the cafeteria. And as for her, it no longer made a difference whether she was putting the food in front of him or someone else. Her eyes seemed to be losing their shine from one day to the next. You couldn’t say, You look nice today, Miss Basia, or Basieńka, because she looked like she might burst into tears. She unbraided her hair and just tied it behind with a ribbon. It still looked nice, but it wasn’t the same as when she’d worn the braid. But no one had the courage to ask her why she’d done it.

  The Priest stopped coming to the cafeteria, and that made you wonder as well. Apparently he went to some tavern to eat. Then one day she happened to be bringing the main course to the table where I was sitting when someone ran in to say that the Priest had fallen from the scaffolding. Either he’d fallen or it was something else, in any case the guy shouted to the whole cafeteria that he’d fallen. She had one more plate to put on the table and, as chance would have it it was mine. The plate fell from her hands to the floor. She burst out crying, covered her face with her hands and ran into the kitchen. What went on in there I couldn’t tell you. But people in the cafeteria could have thought it was because of the dropped plate.

  We all rushed to the door, people came hurrying from the offices and from management, everyone was running, a crowd gathered and it was hard to push through to the place where he’d fallen. Someone checked his pulse and his heart, but he was dead. Soon an ambulance came, the police, they started questioning people and asking about witnesses. But it wasn’t by accident that it had happened at lunchtime, if you ask me.

  I didn’t see her again that day. And him, he left that same evening. For the next few days she didn’t work in the cafeteria. One of the cooks took her place. They said she’d taken some sick days, but she’d be back soon. And she did come back. Only, you wouldn’t have recognized her. She took soup to the men from the foreign contract and right away she asked them when he was coming back. They didn’t say anything. She brought them their main course and asked again when he would be coming back. When they still said nothing, she made such a scene that they got up and left. She was crying and shouting that they’d come to get their meal and they’d left him to do all the work. He’d get exhausted working so much. As it was he didn’t look well. He was pale, he’d lost weight. The next day she was fired.

  After that, from time to time she’d come to the cafeteria, stand by the hatch and say to the cooks that she just wanted to serve him his meal when he came. And the cooks, like you’d expect with cooks, they’d say to her, Come in to the kitchen, sit yourself down, we’ll tell you when he comes and you can serve him, we can see the door from here, when he comes in we’ll let you know.

  You’d also meet her outside the gate waiting for him to get off work. Everyone had already left, but she’d sometimes wait till dusk, till night. It would be raining, pouring even, but she’d wait. She didn’t have her umbrella anymore, who knew what had happened to it. Out of pity the watchmen would sometimes bring her in to the watch house so she wouldn’t get so wet. Or they’d tell her to go away, that there was no point in waiting.

  “My husband works here,” she would reply.

  “He used to, but he doesn’t anymore. And what do you mean, your husband?”

  “He’s my husband, he took an oath. I wore a wedding gown, a priest married us.”

  “What do you mean, a priest. He was a welder. Besides, he’s dead now.”

  Sometimes she’d beg them to let her onto the site.

  “Let me in.”

  “Come to your senses, girl.”

  “I’ll just tell him I’m waiting for him.”

  Occasionally they’d let her in. If not, she’d squeeze through a hole in the fence. She knew all the holes, after all. Even when they saw her wandering around the site they didn’t drive her off. They turned a blind eye. If someone from management had seen her they had a good excuse, that they’d not let her in through the main gate. Besides, she was quiet, all she did was walk around the main yard. She never stopped anyone, never asked any questions. If someone came along she wouldn’t hide anymore. No one asked her any questions either, everyone knew. Sometimes she’d sit down somewhere and lose herself in thought, like she didn’t even know where she was.

  From time to time I’d cross paths with her when I happened to work late on the site. One time it was almost evening, she was sitting on a crate.

  “Oh, Miss Basia,” I said.

  “It’s not ‘miss’ anymore,” she said. “I’m married. Who are you?”

  “An electrician, Miss Basia.”

  “Oh, right. I remember you from the cafeteria. I used to think you were cute. You were a shy one, I remember. You used to want me to be your wife. A lot of them did.”

  She surprised me, I’d never told her that. I wanted to say to her it wasn’t that I used to want her to be my wife, I still did now. You might not believe it, but I suddenly felt like I wanted to be in her unhappiness with her. True love is a wound. You can only find it inside yourself when someone else’s pain hurts you like your own.

  But before I could explain this to her she said:

  “Except that you guys working on building sites, wherever your site is, that’s where your wife is. What do you know about love.”

  My courage failed me.

  “Help me find my way out of here.”

  “The gate’s over there,” I said. “I’ll walk you out.”

  “I don’t want to use the gate.” She looked at me as if with those old eyes from the cafeteria. “You know, I still think you’re cute. But I already have a husband.”

  8

  Let me tell you, he changed my life. You know, the warehouse guy. I told you about him. The warehouse worker that turned out to be a saxophonist. I don’t know why you find it surprising. I mean, back then hardly anyone was who he was. A welder would turn out to be a priest. There were all kinds of guys working on building sites, hidden behind different occupations. But often it was only over vodka that you’d find out stuff like that. And not the first time you drank with them. Anyone who didn’t drink, or only occasionally, they weren’t trusted. It was because of that that I turned to drink. They’d ask a few questions but in only a general way. It wasn’t till later they’d start to probe into your life. Or your conscience. Especially since our consciences had turned out to be something different than before. You think a conscience is something permanent? Too bad you never worked on a building site back then. It was probably the same in other places. But I worked on building sites and that’s all I can speak about. You know, any change in the world is an assault on people’s consciences. Especially when it’s an attempt to make a new and better world.

  In any case, you’d never have met such a mixture of people anywhere else. Bricklayers, concrete workers, plasterers, welders, electricians, crane operators, drivers, delivery men, all kinds, same in the offices, and it would turn out that one of them had been one thing, another had been something else, one was from here, another from there, they’d been in camps, prisons, one army or another, they’d fought in the uprising, in the woods, they had kidney problems from being beaten, they were missing teeth or fingernails, they were ageless, or still really young but already gray-haired. Every building site in those days was a true Tower of Babel, not of languages, but of what could happen to people. Though there were also folks, a good few of them, who had changed profession of their own accord so they could take part in building a better world, because they’d stopped believing in the old one.

  I don’t remember now which site it was, but on one of them there was this guy that worked in the planning department. People would say, the planning guy, and everyone knew who you meant. So one time, over vodka he let on he’d been a history teacher. He couldn’t hold his liquor, he got drunk and started talking about how history had deceived him. Imagine that, history had deceived him. Like hist
ory could deceive anyone. It’s us who keep deceiving history, depending on what we want from it.

  Besides, if you ask me everyone lives his own life, and every life is a separate history. The fact that we try and pour it all into a single container, into one big immensity, doesn’t lead to any truth about humanity. You can imagine a history of all the individual people that ever lived. You say that’s impossible? I know it is. But you can imagine it. Yet nothing exists in the abstract, especially people. I don’t know how you see the world. Me, like I said, I see it from one or another building site. They were always individual people, each one different from the next. They’d be called a team, the way you talk about history, but that was only at meetings.

  For instance, on one site there was a philosophy student. Actually he’d completed his studies, he only had one exam to go when the war broke out. Then after the war he learned to lay parquet floors. He was even a foreman, I was friends with him a bit. He drank like the blazes. He had a strong head, and not just for philosophy. One time, when we were drinking he began talking about the studies he’d broken off, and someone asked him:

  “Why didn’t you finish? You could have done it after the war. What’s one exam?”

  His eyes became bloodshot, and we hadn’t drunk so much at that point.

  “What the hell for? What use is philosophy to me after all that? No mind could comprehend it. Plato, Socrates, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant – none of them could have. Screw the lot of them!” He slammed his glass down on the table.

  We all exchanged glances, because none of us knew who all those people were that had gotten under his skin like that. No one dared ask either, because maybe we were supposed to know. Someone just said:

  “You find the same sons of bitches wherever you go, sounds like. Not just on building sites.” He poured the other guy a brimming glass. “Here you go.”

  Believe me, if I hadn’t worked on building sites, and also, well, if I hadn’t been a drinker … Anyway, it was on building sites that I learned how to live. And it was thanks to all the different people I met, that I wouldn’t have run across anywhere else. I really owe them a lot. I might even say that each one of them might not have actually felt like living. They all had their reasons. But they were living. Above all I’m grateful to them because even though it often seemed a particular price was too much to pay, and there was nowhere to borrow from, still you had to keep on living. And most important of all, I realized that I myself wasn’t an exception. Or if I was then the world was filled with exceptions. But those things only came out over vodka. So how could you not drink?

  For instance, one person worked in the benefits department handing out bars of soap, towels, rubber boots, work gloves, they could have been just anyone, but over vodka they turned out to be one thing or another. Someone else operated a backhoe, it seemed like other than the backhoe all he knew how to do was drink vodka, but after a bottle or two he’d recite poems from memory. With another guy, it was Cicero in Latin. And thanks to the vodka you could even enjoy listening to it.

  On another site there was someone who’d been a policeman before the war. I don’t know if you’ll agree with me, but I reckon any change in the world starts with the police. He’d had to hide his past, because during the war he’d also been a policeman, the organization had ordered him to be. It goes without saying he had no certificate after the war to prove it. Who could it have been from? With an official stamp to boot? The people who could have corroborated his story were apparently dead. And how many of them could there have been anyway? Two or three at the most. So after the war he moved from place to place to cover his tracks. He’d learned a couple of trades in the meantime. On our site he was a plasterer. But he drank too much, if you ask me. And when he did, he’d tear open his shirt and pound his own chest till it rang, shouting that the organization had ordered him to. Even over vodka there were always limits as to how open you could be. Me, I never said too much at such times, at most I’d talk about how things had been on other sites. Whereas him, once he’d gotten all emotional about how the organization had ordered him to do it, he’d always swear by Our Lady of Ostra Brama, which made it all the more suspicious, because Our Lady of Ostra Brama wasn’t in Poland anymore. A policeman, yet he couldn’t keep a cool head when he was drinking.

  There were other guys that even when they were dead drunk, they could have been drowning in misery and their hearts bursting with revelations, but still they wouldn’t say a word more than they wanted to. Someone who has a calling to drink, who doesn’t just drink from one opportunity to the next, they know ways to say a lot while saying nothing, how to laugh when inside the last thing you feel like doing is laughing, how to believe in something when you don’t believe in anything, even in a new and better world.

  I don’t know what happened to the policeman, because soon after that I moved to another site. Not for any particular reason. Maybe I thought that on a different site I’d drink less, or stop altogether. In general, whenever I’d worked on one site for too long I got the feeling it was winding itself around me, sucking me in. I couldn’t stand it, and I’d move to another site. You probably think I was impatient, like any young person. It wasn’t that. I just couldn’t get attached to any one place. Actually, the thought of getting attached scared me.

  No, I didn’t have any problems with that. I was a good electrician. They always assigned me to the toughest jobs. When it came to hooking up new machinery or equipment, it was always me. There wasn’t a problem I couldn’t fix. I got complimented the whole time, they gave me all kinds of certificates. I never missed a bonus. Or even when something needed mending in the apartment of one of the directors, they’d always bring me in, at the request of the director or his wife. Anyone could have done it, it was only the iron or the hot plate, or just a light bulb that had burned out, but I was the one they asked for.

  Did you change jobs often? Never? How is that possible? You liked it so much in one place? What job did you have, if you don’t mind my asking? Did you not want to get ahead? That I don’t understand. Everyone wants to move forward, if only to the next level. For most people that’s the goal in life. So it was all the same to you? I don’t get it. What kind of institution or firm was it? You’re not at liberty to say? I understand. I’m sorry for having asked.

  For me, it was never better somewhere else. Not in that sense, because the pay got better and better. Maybe I was driven a bit by the thought that where I was going things would at least be different. But everywhere it was the same. There was drinking just like at the previous site. In the end I turned to drink completely. It was only on the site where I played in the band, and I met that warehouse guy, that I worked till the construction was finished. Though it dragged on forever.

  On one site, which one was it again? Actually, it makes no difference. Anyway, there was this one guy that worked there, well, you couldn’t really call it work, he kept the overtime records. We didn’t know the first thing about him. He didn’t even make you curious about who he was. Because what kind of job is that, keeping overtime records. He rarely drank vodka, except when we invited him when it turned out he’d done a good job of recording our overtime.

  Then one day two civilians and one military guy showed up in a car and asked him if he was him. He was. They twisted his arms behind his back and handcuffed him. Then they manhandled him into the car and sped off. He never came back. And we never found out who he was. He kept the overtime records, that was all.

  True, we might have wondered, he always went around nicely dressed, coat and tie, pants with a crease in them, always freshly shaven and smelling of cologne. When he greeted women, whether it was the cleaning lady or the head accountant, he’d always kiss their hand. And he always referred to women as the fair sex. The fair sex, gentlemen. With the fair sex. He never got on first name terms with anyone. Maybe if he’d drunk more often with us. But we only invited him because we wanted to thank him for the overtime. Though he knew how to behave. He was our
guest, but still he’d always bring a bottle at least.

  Oh, I just remembered one other detail. He’d never take a piece of sausage or pickled cucumber from the tray with his fingers, like all of us would do. He’d always use a fork. He’d bring one whenever we invited him over, it would be wrapped in a napkin. If you don’t mind, gentlemen, I’ll use a fork, that’s just my way. And he never ate the sausage with the skin on, he’d always peel it. I sometimes think to myself, maybe if it hadn’t been for that fork. Maybe if he would’ve just used his fingers, like the rest of us, and not peeled the sausage. Sometimes there’ll be a little thing, but it leaves marks like a trail in the snow.

  And then there was the warehouse man. I think I mentioned that we were building a glassworks. In the middle of the countryside. The grain was almost ripe, but they weren’t letting people mow it. We even volunteered to help with the mowing, it was a pity to see so much grain go to waste, how much bread would be lost, when there were often shortages of bread. But it was no, because the plan was behind schedule. Construction was supposed to have started the previous year, then it was supposed to have begun in the spring. They were always urging us to get a move on, faster and faster, high days and holidays, extra hours, overtime, working all hours of the night. The cities were waiting for windowpanes, the villages were waiting, factories, schools, hospitals, government offices, as if everything was to be built out of glass. While here they still hadn’t delivered this thing or supplied that, something was wanting and the work kept getting held up.

  So anyway, on that site there was a clerk in the warehouse. He didn’t look like a warehouse keeper, let me tell you. If you’d seen him, you wouldn’t believe that’s what he did. He stooped, he had trouble turning his head on his neck. When he walked it was more like he was shuffling his feet than taking steps. People said it was from the war, from being interrogated. Though apparently he never gave anyone up, never admitted to anything. I don’t know if that was true or not. I never asked him about it, and he didn’t say anything either. In those times people didn’t like to reveal things. Also, his left arm was partially paralyzed, in rainy weather he’d often rub it. He never explained that either, though that particular thing looked like rheumatism. When someone asked him, he’d say it was nothing. His right arm wasn’t all that good either. When he wrote you a chit, he’d press his indelible pencil down with all the strength in his arm to stop it from shaking. The pencil itself was no more than a stub, you could barely see it between his fingers.