Wieslaw Mysliwski - A Treatise on Shelling Beans

She leaped in. Like a colorful blur, that’s how I remember her. All the colors were in her. I’ve never found her since in any painting. I don’t remember her face anymore, but I can still see the blur of her body.

“Come on, jump in!” she repeated, emerging from the water. “Let’s swim to the other side! Don’t be afraid, I’ll be right by you!”

I wasn’t afraid, I was a pretty good swimmer. I’d swum many times in the Rutka, downstream, or against the current. She swam by me, and when we got near the other side she asked:

“Are you tired? Let’s climb out and sit awhile.”

We got there, sat on the shore and gazed out.

“The lake’s even more beautiful from this side,” she said. “It would be beautiful to die in it.” She lost herself in thought, then a moment later she said: “Look at me. Don’t turn your eyes away. I want you to remember me. Will you remember me? Tell me you will. You’ll survive for certain. Because us—” She broke off. I looked at her. I thought I was seeing things, but no, tears were streaming down her cheeks. “I’m not crying,” she said, though I hadn’t said anything. “My face is wet from the water, that’s all. Yours is too. I could just as well say you’re crying.”

But I actually was crying. Not on the outside. I felt somehow as if the tears were flowing inside of me, on the other side of my eyes. Have you ever known tears like that? For me, it was only that once. And for the first time since she’d found me in the cellar, I felt words in my mouth.

“Sister …,” I said. I got stuck. Then: “I’ll …” Then: “always …”

She didn’t let me finish. She burst out in joy:

“You’re talking! You’re talking!” She wiped the tears from her cheeks. “Let’s swim back! We’ll tell everyone you’re talking!”

What was I trying to say then? I don’t recall. Perhaps it wasn’t anything important. But for me those had been the most important words of my whole life that I’d wanted to say but hadn’t said. If you sat down and thought about it, how many unspoken words like that must have disappeared forever? And they may have been more important than all the ones that were spoken. Don’t you think?

There was only one thing I couldn’t understand: why she hadn’t wanted to admit she was crying. And she was, I could have sworn she was.

At that age, there are a lot of things you maybe don’t understand, but you feel things deeper than if you’d understood them. Plus, you see everything, you see it through and through. Life can’t be concealed from anyone, least of all a child. There’s no curtain you can use to hide it. A child will even see through a curtain. Sometimes I wonder if children aren’t our conscience. Later you see less and less. The world’s no longer willing to be reflected in people’s eyes. Although a child doesn’t even have to look. The world pushes under his eyelids of its own accord. The world is still transparent at that age. Unfortunately, you grow out of it. Today I find it hard to believe I was once a child. I used to graze the cattle, but what proof is that of anything. Before that I minded the geese. Then grandfather took over the geese, and I took the cows from him. And I imagined that we’d just keep swapping like that the whole time. Grandfather would take over the cows from me, and I’d take the geese again. Then he’d mind the geese once more, and I’d mind the cows. And it would always be like that, cows to geese, geese to cows. I was convinced that since grandfather had always been grandfather from the beginning, I’d also always be a child.

Though if you ask me, geese are harder to mind. Yours get mixed up with other people’s, they’re all white, and afterwards there’s no way of telling which are yours and which aren’t. Not to mention that they often fight till they bleed, they latch onto each other so hard you can’t pull them apart, especially the ganders.

We kept a lot of geese, to have down to stuff quilts, and pillows for Jagoda and Leonka for when they got married. Mother wanted them to have down bedding, and for that you need lots and lots of geese. And you’ll be plucking away for years. It takes a huge amount of down to make a feather quilt, and there’s not that many feathers on a goose.

So I always preferred minding the cows. To make a long story short, I’ll tell you one thing. Mother would sometimes despair over me:

“You were such a good child when you minded the geese.”

The pasture was the road that led directly to adulthood. Whoever graduated from the pasture was no longer a child, even if they were called one. And the sister always treated me like a child. From the first moment of surprise when I emerged from the cellar. Lord, you’re nothing but a child! And so on till the very end. Maybe that’s why it was OK for me to look while she was bathing, whereas she was afraid of letting all the others see? I don’t know, that’s exactly what I don’t get, especially after what happened one night. So I stood there and kept guard to make sure they didn’t peep.

Oh yes, almost all of them. When one of them saw she was going down to the lake, he’d sneak off immediately and follow her at a distance, hide behind a bush or a tree, or even climb a tree if there was one nearby on the shore. Sometimes even the wounded would drag themselves down to the lake. Some of them would back off when they saw me standing guard. But not everyone. A good few of them, it made no difference whether I was standing there or not. Many of them would give me an earful. Or tell me to keep my trap shut and sit tight. One guy, he had binoculars, he’d lie down right next to me, by a bush or under a tree, and it was like I wasn’t even there. When I moved he’d say, Stay still or I’ll shoot you. He was a huge guy, with a nasty look in his eye, as if he didn’t even like himself that much. For a guy like that, shooting someone was like eating a slice of bread. I was terrified of him. So I’d stand there stock still whenever he came to watch.

One time he told me to stand and not say a word, while she had undressed on the shore and it looked like she had no intention of going into the water, she was just enjoying the sun. He lay down, put the binoculars to his eyes and watched and watched. My heart was beating harder than ever before. All of a sudden he smashed his fist against the ground, rested his head on the earth and groaned:

“Dear Christ, dear Christ.” He turned his face upwards. “What I’d give to be between her legs. A guy would know what he was fighting for.” He wiped his eyes from the binoculars. “They’re going to kill us all anyway, what difference would it make to her.” He held the binoculars out towards me. “Wanna look?” I shrugged. “Right, maybe it’s best you don’t.”

As it happened, a few days later there was a muster in the middle of the night, the men formed two lines, it was, count off, they all shouldered arms and marched off. The sister went with them. I stayed back with the wounded and some sentries. The others only came back three days later, around daybreak. They looked like a hounded pack of wolves. Several of them were wounded, two were being carried on stretchers made from branches. And the one I was so afraid of had the sister in his arms. She was dead. He himself had a head wound, his hair was caked with blood, blood was running down inside his collar. He’d refused to let anyone else carry her the whole way. They’d wanted to make another stretcher and carry her on it, but he wouldn’t allow them. Four others had died too, but they’d been left behind. He’d risked heavy rifle fire to retrieve her body. That was when he’d been injured. She’d died dressing the wounds of one of the men who had fallen. It had been pointless. The man had only been able to open his eyes and say, There’s no point, sister. Then he was dead. Who heard it? You ask like you didn’t know there’s always someone who hears. There’s no situation in which there isn’t someone who hears.