A Treatise on Shelling Beans

by Wieslaw Mysliwski

  The train was so packed you’d have thought there was no more room for anyone else. But here at the next station there were more bundles and bags and suitcases and baskets, and so on. And the people that came with them. You might find it hard to understand if you’ve never ridden a train like that. Did the trains stretch and get bigger, or did the people get smaller? Yes, people can become anything, a tiny dot if necessary. I had to use my arms to fend off the newcomers. I couldn’t squeeze any further into the bench. I curled my feet under me as far as they would go, but still folks kept stepping on my toes, often so hard it made me wince. On top of that, all the curses that burst into the train along with the people seemed aimed at me, because I was sitting by one of the doors. And as if out of spite the train mostly stopped so my side of the compartment was next to the platform.

  “The hell with all this!” the first person to come in would mutter, looking at me.

  Everyone that followed, man or woman, without exception would be saying in my direction:

  “Dear God, how can they do this to people! First the war, now this!”

  “I thought this train would never arrive! We were waiting and waiting …”

  “You have to wait for everything these days, why would trains be any different?”

  “Why on earth is it running so late?”

  “Did one ever come on time? I take the train almost every day, and I’ve never seen it come in on time yet. I mean, for fuck’s sake!”

  “Mind your language. God hears everything. Though it’s like he’s abandoned us too …”

  “What’s God got to do with any of this? God isn’t the stationmaster or the dispatcher. It’s those bastards in the red caps with the little paddles.”

  And I’d take it all as if it were directed at me, because I didn’t have any problem with the train. My hat was on the shelf, I was in no hurry, what problem could I have? Actually it wasn’t only the ones who’d just joined the train who were cursing, they also stirred up the people who’d gotten on earlier and who seemed to have come to terms with it all.

  At one station a small man with a small suitcase who I helped to get on, because he’d been pushing and pushing into the already crammed compartment, suddenly asked me:

  “Do you know if there’s a problem?” I shrugged. “Does anyone else know?” No one answered him, so he turned to me again. “You’re the youngest one here, right?”

  “Give it a rest,” the huge woman standing over me scolded him. “And keep your head out of my way.”

  “Oh, sorry, I do apologize, I was just asking if they’re maybe repairing the tracks near here,” he started to explain. “Or a bridge perhaps.”

  “They’re not repairing anything, the train’s moving the whole time.”

  “It’s moving but it’s still running late?” He found it hard to believe. “Even during the war the trains –”

  “You should ask whoever’s been on it since it first set out,” someone interrupted him. He took this up:

  “Has anyone been on the train since the start?”

  People began looking around at each other as if they were searching for a guilty party. I said nothing. So they reminded themselves of who had gotten on at which station and who was already in the compartment. That gentleman? That lady? I could have sworn it was her. Or him. It wasn’t you, ma’am? I remember you being here already. You were sitting right where you’re sitting now. No, this gentleman was standing here even earlier. He was here when I got on. That lady over there was here too. Me? The nerve. You were the one who was here then. I was even wondering if you’d offer me your seat. But who gives up their own seat these days, even to a woman. Good lord, what’s happened to people since the war? What’s happened to them?

  It was building up to be a scene.

  Luckily the train stopped at the next station. Only one new passenger forced his way into the compartment, but he was groaning under the weight of enough luggage for several people. He started by throwing in his bags directly onto the people there, and only then got on himself. He basically pushed all the standing people toward the other side of the compartment, because otherwise there wouldn’t have been room for him. He didn’t swear or curse, he just gave everyone an angry look as if he thought it was their fault the train was running late. The shelves were already piled to the ceiling with people’s luggage, but he started putting his things on top of theirs, flattening the other luggage and moving it around, putting one case on top of another. He was pretty much rearranging the whole compartment. But no one said anything, they didn’t even tell him he shouldn’t put this on top of that. Everyone quieted down, and, it goes without saying, they stopped accusing one another of having been first in the compartment. No one so much as whispered anything to anyone else. Maybe they knew him from the same route. I couldn’t say. I don’t know how he figured out that the package wrapped in paper and tied with string was a hat.

  “Whose hat is this?” he asked in a menacing voice.

  “Mine,” I let on after a moment.

  “Why is it here? You should have it on your side. Your belongings are supposed to be where your seat is.”

  He moved the hat to my side of the compartment, putting it up by the ceiling on top of someone’s suitcase. He finally stowed all his things and then told people on the seat to move up, as he had no intention of standing the whole way. It was hard to do, but people squeezed closer without a word. When he finally sat down, he moved from side to side to give himself more room. He squashed the lady to his right and the gentleman to his left, they squashed their neighbors, and still no one said anything. At that moment the train moved off.

  “We’re on our way,” he said. “And if we’re on our way, we’ll get where we’re going.” At that he settled more firmly into the bench and spoke again as if to himself:

  “I used to have a hat before the war. A brown felt one. Cost a pretty penny. I joined the resistance and it got blown away by machine gun fire. We fired at them, they fired back, and that was the end of the hat.” He cast a somewhat milder look around the compartment, as if he was absolving us of blame for the delayed train.

  He rested his head against the back of the seat, closed his eyes, and a moment later his breathing became a little deeper. The train jolted and rattled, clattering over the joints between the rails as if it were going over potholes; it rumbled across switches. So you still couldn’t hear his breathing. His lips were together, and it was only that they seemed to crack open with each outbreath pushing from inside. But I knew what was coming. Every great snoring has exactly that sort of innocent beginning. I was virtually cowering.

  As I told you, I’ve loathed snoring ever since I was a child. True, everyone loathes it. But there’s loathing and loathing. You can loathe it because you can’t get to sleep when someone’s snoring. Or let’s say you’re already asleep, then in the middle of the night you’re woken by someone snoring and you can’t get back to sleep till morning. Those are the usual aches and pains of sleeping in the same room as someone else. Husbands and wives put up with it their whole lives, assuming they stay together that is. Though as far as that’s concerned, a change of husband or wife is no solution. You never know who you’ll end up with next. But for me it wasn’t just that I couldn’t get to sleep when someone was snoring. Or that if I woke up, I couldn’t fall back asleep. When someone was snoring, I’d feel like the pain from his whole life was rising into his throat, but he was unable to shout out and say what was hurting him. You might not agree, but if you ask me there are kinds of pain that only reveal themselves in snoring. There are endless kinds of pain in people. In any case, I would feel the other person’s weakness as my own. And with them I’d seem to be choking on that weakness, on my own inability to shout out the pain. As if I couldn’t break out of his sleep, yet at the same time I was fending off my own waking state. You don’t hear your own snoring, of course, so there’s no issue with it. There were times I’d be stifled by someone else’s snoring, to the point where
I’d have to get up and go outside for some fresh air.

  Even at school some of the other boys snored, though only softly, and it wasn’t many of them. Life was already painful for some of them, but the pain melted away through their whole sleep instead of pushing its way into their throat. Plus, back then we slept much deeper and our sleep could still hold back any kind of pain. Though I’d still sometimes wake up, even if someone was only snoring ever so slightly.

  Later on, after I started working and I was mostly living with much older men, snoring became a nightly torment. Honestly, I was afraid of every coming night. We’d be getting ready for bed, but me, instead of starting to feel sleepy I’d be gripped by fear. Of course, I could wake one guy or another if his snoring got really unbearable. But he’d just turn over from his back to his side, or from one side to the other, and a short while later he’d be snoring again. I tried thinking about something, hoping it might stop me from hearing so intently, but I didn’t have a thought in my head. I’d lie there like I was in a torture chamber. Hell could well be like that – not any of the stuff the priests frighten you with, but rather you’re just lying there being tortured by someone else’s snoring. It fills your ears, your lungs, your throat, your powerlessness, so you’re unable to call out a single word. On top of that, it’s as if you yourself were snoring, though it’s not you who’s doing the snoring. That’s how it is – there are times when other people’s pain is worse than your own.

  In fact, at times I lived with guys you might call powerhouses of snoring. In waking life a guy like that was tiny, like a little dried-up pear. Anything that weighed a bit, you’d have to pick it up and carry it for him. If a screw got stuck you’d have to unscrew it for him because he didn’t have the strength. But when it came to snoring he was a powerhouse. It felt like the ceiling was about to lift off and the walls were collapsing, that any minute now the whole place would come crashing down around us as we slept. In other men it was like gelatin boiling, and I’d be boiling along with it. Actually, there were lots of different ways they snored. Some moaned, some squeaked, some gurgled, some rumbled, and once in a while there’d be one who would keep exploding like a shell. You’d jerk awake thinking another war was starting.

  In the lodgings the men were always older than me, like I said. Sometimes a lot older. They hadn’t slept properly all through the war, they were still filled to bursting with war, so it was hardly surprising. Sometimes, over vodka one of them would tell a story that in itself stopped you from sleeping, and as if that weren’t bad enough, the other guys would be snoring away. I tried plugging my ears with cotton wool or plasticine, or I’d put my head under my pillow instead of on top of it. None of it did much good. The snoring seemed not to be coming in through my ears, it felt as if it was flowing from someone else’s sleep directly into mine. It was like somebody else’s sleep took over the rhythm of my own. What, you didn’t know that sleep has its rhythm? Everyone’s is different. But everybody sleeps to a rhythm, the same way we live to a rhythm. You can’t separate sleep from life. Things’d be a whole lot easier if you could, if life was here and sleep was over there. Life here, sleep there.

  Pardon me for asking, but do you snore? You don’t know. You’ve never shared a bed with anyone who could tell you. I’m sorry to bring up such a question, but it’s a normal human thing. A woman would tell you most honestly. Women sleep differently. Not to mention that they can hear in their sleep.

  One time I was living with four older guys in the house of this widow; they put me in there as a fifth. The oldest of them could have been more than three times my age, or so I thought at the time. He was gray as a pigeon. True, much younger men went gray during the war. Often, at a meeting of the workforce I’d look around at everyone’s heads and it was like a field of cabbage that had been blighted by frost. Why is it that most often it’s a person’s hair that shows what they’ve lived through? As I look at you, I don’t see a single gray hair. I wonder how you’ve gone through life. You can see what happened with my hair. These days men go bald instead. And that too, there’s no telling why. Even really young guys. Here in the cabins, you wouldn’t believe how many young men are already bald, or balding. And there hasn’t been a war in a long time, hardly anyone remembers the last one.

  At the widow’s place all the men had hair, but they were all going gray, and the oldest one was totally gray. And all four of them snored like the blazes, and when the four of them started up at the same time the widow would pound on the wall from her room. Especially when they’d been drinking.

  One time I was so set on edge by it that I thought the only thing to do was smother them. But I got up and went outside instead. I sat on the stoop and lit a cigarette. It was summertime, the air was warm, dawn was beginning to break. I was intending to just sit there till it was time to get ready for work. The widow joined me outside. She hadn’t been able to sleep either, even though there was a thick wall with plastering on both sides between her room and ours, not just a thin partition.

  “They’re snoring, huh?” she asked. “Yeah, they woke me up too. In the war I’d even sleep through the bombings. But I’m sensitive to snoring. Do you snore?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “No one ever told me.”

  “You’re so young, at the most you might make a little bit of noise when you’re dreaming. Give me a cigarette. I don’t smoke, but I feel like one right now.”

  “I left them inside.”

  “Too bad. On a close night like this I feel like smoking.” She fanned herself with her nightshirt, she’d come out in the nightshirt with a kind of shawl thrown over it.

  “You can finish mine if you like, ma’am,” I said. “There’s enough for a few drags. If you don’t mind.”

  “Why should I mind?” she retorted. “Women kiss men and they don’t mind that.” She drew on the cigarette and coughed so violently her breasts almost fell out of her nightshirt. “Ugh, these cigarettes are disgusting. How can you smoke them? Don’t they make you sick? You’re not even a full-grown man yet. And you work too much. I see when you go to work and when you come back. Plus, you never get a decent night’s sleep from all their snoring. At your age you need more sleep. Later on you won’t need as much. Today I can see you’re going to go to work tired. And you work with electricity. Just be careful you don’t get a shock. I admit it is pretty convenient with the electricity, but when I turn it on I’m always afraid.”

  “There’s no reason to be afraid,” I said.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” she said.

  I crushed my cigarette butt under my shoe and I was about to get up when she leaned down from where she was standing over me and stroked my hair.

  “Come on, you can get some sleep in my bed. There’s no point going back to their room. I don’t snore. As it is you’ll have to get up soon to go to work, but even an hour or two will do you good. My bed’s nice and wide. There was plenty of room with my husbands, when we didn’t feel like it we didn’t even bump into each other. You shouldn’t have to hang around out here till morning. Don’t worry, you won’t be late. I’ll wake you up.”

  She took me by the hand and helped me up. Perhaps all those sleepless nights had suddenly overpowered me; in any case, I put up no resistance. While I was smoking I was somehow able to stay awake, but once I’d finished, my eyes started to close of their own accord. Maybe if I’d had another cigarette …

  “You can barely keep your eyes open, I see,” she said. “You really are short on sleep. Even an hour or two will help.”

  She was quite a lot older than me, though today I’d say she was still young. You know how it is. As you grow older, everyone around you gets younger. All the more so in memory. You often catch yourself thinking that back then someone seemed old, while at the time they were a lot younger than you are now. Or perhaps she seemed much older then because she’d already had two husbands. One of them she kicked out for drinking not long after they got married, the other one died from drink. And she
was just thinking about whether to get married a third time. He drank too, but he was a widower like her, he had two small children, and that way she’d at least have children, she said. Because she’d have hated to get pregnant with a drunk, God forbid. Never with a drunk, she told herself. It would have been too much for her to see them born into unhappiness. She’d seen those kinds of kids. With this new husband she’d have a purpose in life, because it’s hard to live with the thought that life comes to an end with you. And whether it’s your own kids or someone else’s, either way you never know what’s going to come of them. Someone else’s child could even be more caring later because you gave him your heart when the heart of his own mother failed. He might turn out to be a good husband, who knew? He only turned to drink when his wife left him with the two children. He didn’t know what to do. A man’s always drawn to vodka. But when he got drunk he’d sometimes come to her and weep at having gotten drunk. And he would beg her, help me, help me. So sometimes she’d weep with him.

  He was completely different in his drinking from the other two. The first one, when he drank he slept like a log. And he drank almost every day, so every day she had a log in bed – or rather, every night. The second one, when he came home drunk he’d start by beating her. It was only once he’d beaten her that he’d make a move on her. He liked to make love with a woman like that, with her beaten and crying. Now this third one … Should she marry him or not?

  “What do you think?” she asked, when we were already in bed. “Though never mind, you go to sleep. I’m not going to go back to sleep. I don’t want you being late for work because of me. I don’t know what to do, I go over it night after night in my thoughts. I might end up being too old for a fourth husband, if I take this third one. The older a woman is, the worse the guys that come along. The fourth one, I might have to make him take the cure. Or I’d kill him. And make no mistake, at times there’s nothing you can do. True, even among older men you occasionally meet a decent guy that doesn’t drink. But he could take to drink after he’s married, or he’d feel closer and closer to dying, and I’d feel it too. And try dying with a drunk. Suffering for his drinking afterwards. By then it’s too late to be thinking about a new husband. So you see how it is – you marry one person, but afterwards you have to live with a different one.” She sighed so deeply a wave of warmth hit me. “But you should go to sleep. You have to get up soon.”