Wieslaw Mysliwski - A Treatise on Shelling Beans

‘Look at him laughing his head off, and over there people are being killed.’

My mother was embarrassed. She pulled me to my feet and dragged me after her. ‘Don’t look back.’ We walked down from the hill.”

“The graves are over that way.” He pointed in the direction of the woods. A moment later he said abruptly: “I have to do it … Maybe I’ll go with the installment guy. Five payments, ten, it’s all the same to me.”

To tell the truth, when I saw you coming out of Mr. Robert’s cabin I thought you might be the guy that was going to pay in installments. Though you must have already paid the last installment. Otherwise you wouldn’t have gone into his cabin. How would you have known where to find the key? Not till I have the last installment in my hand, that’s what he said back then on the deck.

Oh, he’s still alive. Why wouldn’t he be? Who else would be sending me money to mind the place. One time I raised the fee for each cabin, and the next envelope that arrived had the new amount. Though I hadn’t intended for Mr. Robert to pay more. No one lives in the place, none of his friends ever visit, why should he have to pay extra? The only thing was that last fall the roof started leaking a bit. It began at the end of summer, the leaves were already off the trees and it just kept on raining. The sun was nowhere to be seen all day long. It chucked it down day and night. I don’t remember a fall like it. The lake rose all the way up to the closest cabins. Fortunately they’re built on concrete pillars, like you saw. I like the rain, but that time it went on way too long. The leak was upstairs, in Mr. Robert’s bedroom. I figured I’d wait for the rain to stop then go mend it. But it didn’t ease up even for a moment. So I had to do it in the rain. I put some new tarpaper down on a part of the roof. Not long ago I replaced a couple of rotten planks in the deck. I oiled all the locks in the doors, the hinges of the windows, I checked all the outlets and switches and cables. They can just as easily go wrong in an unoccupied cabin. If I’d had his address I would’ve written to him. I often think of him, please let him know. I know, I know, you said you don’t know him. But maybe one day, you can never tell.

The thing that worries me most is how he’s doing after his operation. That’s right, he was going in for an operation. No, it wasn’t then that he told me. It was during my next visit, the one with all the fog I was telling you about before. I didn’t see him in person, we just talked on the phone. But he was still living in his old place. As to whether he still had the shop, that I couldn’t tell you.

After he moved I made inquiries with his neighbors. They told me he’d first sold the shop, then the apartment. But where he’d moved to, no one knew. Everyone said they didn’t really know him that well. And more from the shop than from the neighborhood. In general, though, they didn’t see him that often, sometimes just as he was leaving or coming home, good morning, good morning, that was all. He wasn’t a big talker.

The guy that bought the shop from him had no idea either. He even seemed to resent it when I asked if he maybe knew anything.

“How should I know? I paid what he was asking. Didn’t even haggle. It’s a good location. What do you want from me, mister? I don’t sell souvenirs. Fruit and veg, like you see. He moved away and now he’s gone, that’s all there is to it.”

It was the same at the lake, no one knew a thing. Some of them hadn’t even noticed that his cabin had been standing empty for a couple of seasons already. They raised their eyebrows as if they were surprised he’d stopped coming. Mr. Robert, you say? Wait, what season was that? What season was it? Oh yes, I remember now, you’re right. And you say he also left the city?

I called him up before he moved to say I wanted to come for a visit. He didn’t seem the least bit pleased.

“Now, in the fall?” His voiced sounded dry, irritated even.

“Is it a bad time for you?”

“No, it’s just I wasn’t expecting it. You should have come in the summer.”

“I couldn’t make it in the summer, Mr. Robert. Also, I wanted to see what it’s like in the fall.”

“Winter’s right around the corner. The leaves are almost all off the trees. It’ll be snowing before you know it. Why are you so drawn to the place, eh? You might end up regretting it.”

I wondered if there was maybe something the matter with him, and I asked:

“How’s your health?”

“What you’d expect for my age,” he answered tersely. “I have an operation coming up.”

“Is it anything serious?”

“That remains to be seen. For the moment I’m waiting for an available bed in the hospital. They’ve promised me there’ll be one. It could even be tomorrow or the next day. They’re going to let me know. I already have a bag packed. I wouldn’t be able to drive down there with you. I haven’t sold the cabin yet. You can stay there.”

He told me where to find the key. Under the deck, on a nail in one of the beams. He said I should just put it back there when I left. He told me where to turn the electricity on so I’d have light and hot water. And heating of course, since it was already cold there. Where the bedding was, towels, this and that.

“When do you reckon you’ll be back from the hospital?” I asked.

“How should I know?” he retorted almost rudely, as if he wanted to bring the conversation to a close.

“Maybe I could come visit you if you’re still …?”

“What for? A hospital’s no place for a visit. Besides, I don’t like that sort of thing.”

“Perhaps I could be of help in some way?”

“You, help me? How do you like that.” His tone was so ironic it left a really unpleasant impression.

“Still, I hope we’ll meet again some time.”

“We already did meet.”

Those were his last words.

Haven’t we met before? But where and when? As I look at you, your face seems somehow familiar. Actually, I thought so the moment you walked in. Though maybe you just look like someone I must have met at some time. I don’t know who it could have been. If I could remember who it was I might also remember when and where. I mean, it can happen that people resemble one another, that one person can sometimes be mistaken for someone else. Especially if you were close with someone then you never see them again, you want to meet up with them again even in a stranger. Though when it comes down to it, what difference does it make whether someone looks like somebody else. As the years pass we resemble our own selves less and less. Even our memory isn’t always willing to remember us the way we once were. Let alone when it comes to other people.

I often experience that here as well. I know everyone, I have it all written down, who lives in which cabin, but at the beginning of the season when they start arriving, with some of them I have to remind myself all over again whether or not they’re the same people. I sometimes wonder, can a human face have changed so very much from one season to the next? True, there are faces that seem in general to escape your memory. With a face like that, you can look at it every day, then it’s enough not to see it till the next season and you can’t say anymore whether it’s new or whether you’ve seen it before. But there are also faces that you barely catch a glimpse of, and already they’re fixed forever in your memory.

Oftentimes I’ve been walking down some crowded city street, a throng of people, you’re constantly bumping into someone or other, and I might be seeing nothing at all, none of the buildings, advertisements, shop windows, cars, and people’s faces are just flashing by for a brief second, then suddenly amid all those glimpses there’s one face, why this particular one I couldn’t say, but it bores into my memory and remains there for good. Actually I carry inside me an infinite number of those faces that were conceived in those short flashes, as it were. I don’t know whose they are, I don’t know where or when, I don’t know anything about them. But they live in me. Their thoughts, their expressions, their paleness, their sorrows, grimaces, bitternesses — it all lives in me, fixed as if in a photograph. Except that these aren’t regular photographs where once someone’s captured, they stay that way forever. Then years later they themselves may not even recognize that it’s them. And even if they know it’s them, they’re not able to believe it. No — in the photographs taken by my memory, even from a passing glance, over the years all those faces develop wrinkles and furrows, their eyelids begin to droop. So if someone used to have big wide eyes, for example, now they’re narrowed to slits. Someone else would smile and show a row of even white teeth, now all they have left is their open mouth. Frankly, they ought not to smile any more. Or a beautiful woman, it was her beauty that struck me in the flash of seeing her face, and now you wouldn’t want to meet her. I’ve known a number of beautiful women and let me tell you, whenever my memory brings back their image to me, I wonder whether beautiful women shouldn’t die before their time.