Wieslaw Mysliwski - A Treatise on Shelling Beans

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 history 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.