Wieslaw Mysliwski - A Treatise on Shelling Beans

The animals around here have gotten so tame that the deer sometimes come right up to the cabins. Not for food. Food they have in the woods, everything they need. The squirrels hop about on the decks and peek into the cabins. It’s another matter that the people here spoil them rotten. They bring them bagfuls of nuts. More than the squirrels could ever eat, or bury in the ground. You walk along and at every step there are nuts crunching under your feet. I was even thinking of adding to the signs, saying, Do not feed the squirrels. Because so what if they eat from people’s hands during the season? The season doesn’t last forever. Sometimes a wild boar comes through here. Sometimes you see a hare scooting between the cabins. You can see weasels, martens. Often you’re more likely to see them here than in the woods.

One time a moose appeared. And it didn’t just stop for a moment on the bank. It walked right between the cabins, stopped here, stopped there. People started shouting, there was a bit of a panic. Some people took shelter in their cabins, others jumped into boats and canoes or hopped into the water, someone nearly drowned because they didn’t know how to swim. Someone fainted — luckily some of the cabin owners are doctors. The moose went down to the lake, had a drink, bellowed, and calmly went its way. Even a moose sometimes has a yen to be among people.

Or if you were to get up before sunrise, when the birds wake up. If you got to breathe that fresh early morning air, you’d feel your lungs opening up, and what good air really is. In other places people are quite unaware they’re breathing, or of what they’re breathing. If you thought too much about it, you could lose the will to breathe altogether. I already told you about the mushrooms, the blueberries, wild strawberries, cranberries. But best of all is just to go into the woods and not pick anything, not think anything. When it’s just you and the woods.

I don’t even like to take the dogs. They get distracted by every rustle and off they rush. Then try calling them back, Rex! Paws! One time they chased a deer. I kept calling them, looking for them. In the woods the trees deaden your voice. In the end I got ticked off and came back alone, without them. They didn’t come back home till the evening. Their muzzles were covered in blood. So now I had a deer on my conscience. Have you ever seen a deer’s eyes when it’s dying? Like in a snare or a trap, for instance. You’ll never see such terror in any other eyes.

Let me tell you, when crowds of people start arriving here in high season, I sometimes have the feeling that I live in a different world from them. I won’t deny it, their world is pleasant, cheerful, maybe even happy, I can’t say, but I don’t think I’d be capable of living in it. You’re convinced that I actually do live in it? But how can I be sure of that? I mean, even with the sun, everyone has to have their own, their own sunrises and sunsets. I lived abroad for all those years, but wherever I was living, whenever I wanted to have a sunrise or sunset I always had to have it according to the sunrises and sunsets here. That was always the measure of any sunrise or sunset. The only measure, wherever I was.

It’s another matter that especially in the big cities you can live your whole life and not see a sunrise or a sunset. How does the day begin? It just gets light. Then when night falls, a million lights are lit. It’s not really night at all. They just call it that. True, here too I no longer know where the sun used to come up or where it went down. It doesn’t rise in the same place, or set in the same place it used to. I get up with it, but I’m never sure, it didn’t used to rise in that place. That’s why I don’t know how you found me, since I can never seem to find myself. Admittedly, finding yourself is no easy task. Who knows if it isn’t the hardest of all the tasks people face in the world.

No, Mr. Robert’s cabin isn’t for sale, I already mentioned that. At least not until Mr. Robert tells me so. If I were you, I’d go for number thirty-one. There aren’t many cabins as nice as thirty-one. It has a fireplace, electric heating, double-glazed windows, insulated walls, you can even live there in the winter. Two bathrooms, one upstairs and one down, both tiled, with boilers. And it’s all in oak. Carpeted floors. There used to be antlers, but fortunately the guy took them with him.

I’d advise against antlers. You couldn’t live with them. The walls were covered in antlers. Wherever you turned there were antlers. In the main rooms, the kitchen, the bathrooms. Over the front door there was the head of a wild boar with tusks this big. Not one single wall was empty. Whenever I went over there to check everything was in order I had to be careful not to get jabbed by an antler, because some of the bigger ones stuck out all the way into the middle of the room. I’m telling you, every now and then I’d sit down in an armchair, because sometimes I like to sit awhile in one or other of the cabins, he had these nice big leather armchairs, but something made me want to leave right away. He built the cabin as a place to keep the antlers. Apparently his wife had made him remove them from their apartment because there was no more room to put anything else up. No, she never came here. Whereas him, he’d be here every Saturday and Sunday. He didn’t go sunbathing or swimming, he rarely even went on a walk, he’d just sit for days on end in his cabin. He often came in the winter too. And the strangest thing of all, imagine this, was that he didn’t hunt. Those weren’t hunting trophies. He did have a shotgun. Though what he needed it for I couldn’t say. How can you enter someone’s soul through antlers?

Then all at once, I couldn’t tell you what had happened, one day he arrived in a truck with two hired guys, took the antlers away, and put the cabin up for sale. Some people said he’d found a good buyer for the antlers, others that he’d thrown them on the trash heap. The truth may have been something else again, though I can’t imagine what.

You should think about it. He’s not asking much. A cabin like that is worth twice the price. What would you do here? Well, what do I do? Especially if you were to come here once or twice a year, in the off-season. I could even plant more beans. If we didn’t feel like shelling beans we could go for a walk in the woods. We could listen to music, I brought a lot of records. No, I don’t play chess. You like to play? I somehow never learned. I had no patience for it. When I lived abroad I sometimes used to play bridge, but for bridge you need four people. When I worked on building sites, when we weren’t drinking vodka, once in a blue moon we’d play cards. We’d play one thousand, durak , sixty-six, also blackjack or poker.

Before that, at school we’d play the matchbox game. Do you know it? You’ve never even heard of it? It’s very simple. You take a matchbox, it has to be full, and you put it on the edge of the table, lying flat, so it sticks out over the edge, though not too far or it’ll fall off. Then you flip it up with your index finger. You get points depending on how it lands on the table. The most number of points is when it lands upright, in other words on the smallest side, where you take out the matches. We’d always say that was worth ten points, though you can agree on a different score. Five points for the scratchboard, on either side. You know what the scratchboard is? Where you strike the match. And no points if it landed on its big side.

Oh, the game wasn’t as innocent as you imagine. There are no innocent games. Everything depends not on what you’re playing, but what you’re playing for. We played innocently when our homeroom teacher would come by. At those times we didn’t even write down the points. He collected matchboxes and almost every evening he came to see if we’d used up all the matches from yesterday’s box. Later I’ll tell you why he collected them. Sometimes he’d just sit there endlessly. There were times when we’d have to pretend we were getting ready for bed, otherwise he’d have stayed forever. One of us would start unbuttoning his shirt, another untied his shoes, someone else turned his bed down. Then when he finally went, probably thinking we were all about to get into our beds, we’d check the hallway one more time to make sure he’d left the building, and only then would we start to play for real.