Wieslaw Mysliwski - A Treatise on Shelling Beans

For instance, since last season they’re not allowed to take children out into the deep water. They’re not my kids, but I couldn’t stand to see some father or mother taking a child into deep water to teach them to swim. Don’t be scared, don’t be scared. That’s not how to stop a kid from being afraid. One time a little one nearly drowned. The father accidentally swallowed a mouthful of water, and he let go of the child. Before anyone could have swum out there it would have been all over. Luckily Rex and Paws jumped in and pulled it out.

I’ve stopped allowing adults just the same, if they’re not good swimmers. I was even thinking of requiring everyone to get a swimming certificate. How else can you know if someone really can swim when they say they can. I mean, I can’t stand in front of everyone and check. Maybe one day I’ll organize races and everyone can show whether they’re a good swimmer or not. You can’t mess around with water. Water, fire, destiny.

But there’s one thing I haven’t been able to do anything about. I haven’t been able to stop them having fights and beating up on their wives. I say wives, it makes no difference whether it’s their wife or not. There are guys that bring a different woman here every season. But I know my boundaries. There’s others have someone different with them every weekend. Last time it was an older woman, this time he’s with someone much younger. You can’t help seeing. Some of them even swap women among the cabins. You can’t help noticing that one of them was staying in one cabin and now she’s in a different one, then two or three weeks later she’s in one of the very furthest ones. I don’t pry. It’d never even occur to me to ask one guy or another, So is this your new wife? And I won’t listen when other people come and complain about these wives or whatever they are.

One time they came to tell me that in one of the cabins, forgive me for not saying which one, the man was always beating his wife or non-wife. It was always in the middle of the night. And that I should do something about it. But what was I supposed to do? I can’t just go there and say, stop beating her. I don’t even have the right to say, your wife or your non-wife, whichever it is. Myself, I’d never strike a woman. But how can you explain it to a type like that? What am I to him? I just take care of the place, I let myself be hired. Or if I wanted to write it on the signboards, what am I supposed to write? Beating of wives and non-wives prohibited? There are things that don’t belong on signboards.

Then one night I was woken by a shout. Or maybe I wasn’t asleep? I jumped out of bed and ran outside, the dogs followed. I couldn’t see lights on in any of the cabins. It was quiet as it usually is around here. Maybe I dreamed it, I thought to myself. I sometimes dream something that wakes me up. Even from a deeper sleep. Afterwards I find it hard to believe that I only dreamed it. Like what? I won’t tell you, dreams can’t be told. When they’re told, they stop being a dream. It’s like you wanted to tell about God. Would God still exist? Besides, can anything actually be told? Things told are just things told, nothing more. Usually they have little in common with what was or is or will be. They live their own lives. And they don’t settle down for good, but instead they keep on moving, growing, getting further and further away from what was or is or will be. Though who knows, maybe in that way they draw closer to the truth?

Try and reach down deep, try if you can to touch the world with the very first thought, that’s still untainted by anything. You’ll admit then that it’s what’s told that establishes what was or is or will be, not the other way around; that it fills it out, determines whether it’s bound for oblivion or resurrection. And what is told is the only possible eternity. We live in what is told. The world is what is told. That’s why it’s harder and harder to live. And perhaps only our dreams determine who we are. Perhaps only our dreams are ours.

To be honest, mostly I don’t dream that much. Less and less. Plus, when I wake up I don’t remember anything. In general I sleep badly. Often I’ll be dead beat, but when I go to bed I can’t get to sleep. Then if I do, I can’t tell if I’m sleeping or not, whether I’m sleeping in a waking state or dreaming of being awake. This doctor that has one of the cabins gave me some foreign sleeping pills, he told me they’d for sure send me to sleep. He sometimes comes and gives me a checkup, listens to me with his stethoscope, checks my blood pressure. I tell him, what for, doc? I don’t need to live so very long. What I’ve already lived is enough. Let’s say I take a pill, and I’m sound asleep, and during that time something happens in one of the cabins. If I take a pill the dogs might not even be able to wake me up, and they can’t go off and help all on their own. They can’t even open the door, I always keep it locked. I’ve never taken sleeping pills, and I’m not going to start now.

How long have I had trouble sleeping? As long as I can remember. Except it’s getting worse and worse. Who knows, it could be that death is already getting me used to not sleeping. They say the closer you get to it, the more you sleep. But with me it’s evidently the opposite. I’ll die when I stop wanting to sleep at all. Maybe I’ll see Death. I’ll ask him, why didn’t you come for me back then? That way it would all have been over long ago.

So as you can see, I don’t even have time to dream. Besides, my dogs protect me from having dreams. I don’t know if they don’t like it when I have a dream, or whether they don’t want dreams to add to my difficulties. Whenever I start having a dream they come up right away and start licking my hands and my face, tugging the blanket off of me, or yelping as if someone was breaking into one of the cabins. Then when they finally manage to wake me up they jump for joy that they’ve woken me. Something tells me they know about my dreams. Because I sometimes dream something that makes it really hard to even get up afterwards. It’s like I’m still wandering about inside the dream, helpless, I can’t tell whether it’s me or someone in my place. Everything around seems to still be the dream.

In the middle of the night I’ll take the dogs and go check up on the cabins, and I have the feeling I’m walking in the dream. The air is like now, in autumn, it’s sharp, it pinches your cheeks, or even more in winter, and I can’t be certain that I’ve woken up, or if I’m only dreaming the lake and the cabins and my dogs trotting beside me. And to tell you the whole truth, sometimes I’m not even certain it’s my own dream. No, you didn’t mishear. I’m not sure if it’s my dream, or if someone else is dreaming me. Who? I don’t know. If I did …

I remember my grandmother used to say that you don’t always dream your own dreams. For instance you can dream the dreams of the dead, that they didn’t manage to dream in their lifetime. Or the dreams of people who haven’t yet come into the world. Not to mention that according to my grandmother dreams can sometimes pass from person to person, house to house, village to village, town to town and so on. Sometimes they can even get lost. One person in some house was supposed to have a particular dream, but actually someone else had it. Someone in the village was supposed to have a dream, but it ended up being dreamed by someone in the town. Someone in this country, but it was dreamed by someone in a distant place. So it’s quite possible I’m having someone else’s lost dreams, and that’s why the dogs sense it right away and wake me up when I’m having that kind of dream.

I should tell you too that my grandmother was known to be an expert on dreams. There wasn’t a dream whose meaning she couldn’t explain. Not just in the family. Neighbors came from near and far, from both sides of the Rutka. They came from other villages. Old folks, young ones. Unmarried women, wives, Doubting Thomases. They’d seen the world, but they came when one of them had had a dream that was too much for them. And grandmother would explain everybody’s dreams. When she explained them, every dream became clear as waking life, as if it were simply something the person had lived through but overlooked. She’d have them provide some small detail, because people don’t pay enough attention to details. And that detail would sometimes alter the meaning of the dream from one thing to another, from good to better or from bad to not so bad at all. Or even that the dream was meant to have been dreamed by somebody else, because one detail was from someone else’s life.