Wieslaw Mysliwski - A Treatise on Shelling Beans

I was breathless, my legs shook under me, but I ran back toward the dispatcher. He was still on the platform. He may have been kept there by curiosity as to whether I’d make it back on the train. But he’d probably guessed what would happen, because he greeted me scoldingly:

“I bet you had a ticket to here and you were planning to continue on for free, eh?”

“No, I left my hat on the train,” I gasped.

“What kind of hat?”

“A brown felt one. Please stop the train.”

“Stop the train? You must be mad!” He turned around and set off toward the station building.

I blocked his path.

“Please stop it.”

“Out of my way!” He tugged his cap tighter over his head and tried to push me aside.

I grabbed him by the lapels and shook him till he went as red as his service cap.

“Stop the train! Stop the train!” I shouted in his face.

“Let go of me!” he bellowed, trying to twist free from my grip. “Let go, goddammit! This is assault! You over there!” he shouted in the direction of a railroad worker with a long hammer who was tapping the rails. “Call the men! This lunatic won’t let go of me!”

But before the other man could clamber up onto the platform, several railroad workers came running out of the station building.

“Don’t let him go! Keep hold of him!” they were shouting.

“He’s the one holding me!” the dispatcher yelled back furiously. “Son of a bitch won’t let go!” he exclaimed to the men running up, as if out of hurt pride. “Just won’t let go!”

One of the men grabbed my hands and tried to release my grip on the dispatcher’s jacket. It did no good, it was like I was holding him with claws.

“Damn but he’s strong. Little squirt like that.”

The guy with the long hammer put in:

“One whack with this and he’ll let go. Shall I?” He started to swing the hammer.

“Hang on,” growled the dispatcher, still furious. “He’ll let go himself. He’ll calm down and let go. He left his hat.”

“Where?” asked one of the men.

“In the compartment,” replied the dispatcher. “He wanted me to stop the train.”

They all exploded in laughter, while my hands dropped from his uniform by themselves.

“Stopping a train is like stopping the earth turning,” one of them said as his laughter died away.

“He couldn’t have stopped it anyway,” added the worker with the hammer, peering after the disappearing train. “It had already passed the flagman’s hut.”

They all burst out laughing again. The laughter carried across the platform, it felt like it was drifting far above me.

“Where’s his head?”

“Maybe he left his head there as well.”

They laughed as if nothing as entertaining as this had ever happened on the railroad, except for crashes.

One of them must have felt sorry for me and said:

“Maybe we should call ahead? They could tell the conductor to go look through the cars.”

The dispatcher retorted as he straightened his uniform:

“How’s he supposed to make his way through the crowd? They’re not even checking tickets on that train.”

Did it start from the dream or from the laughter? No, it’s no big deal, I just wonder about it sometimes. I see that surprises you. I’m not surprised you’re surprised, because I’m surprised myself — what was it for? Especially as I don’t even know what it was that supposedly started. I’m not looking for a beginning. Besides, does anything like a beginning ever actually exist? Even the fact that a person is born doesn’t mean that that’s their beginning. If anything had a beginning, it might continue in the right order. But nothing seems willing to go in the right order. One day won’t march after another in an orderly fashion, one keeps pushing in front of the other. Same with the weeks, the months, the years — they don’t follow each other one by one in single file, they charge at you in extended file as they say in the army.

No, I’m not a military man. When I was of an age to do my military service, my workplace got me out of it. The fact that I was an electrician wasn’t enough of a reason. In those days I played in the company band, like I told you. I was the only saxophonist who’d come forward. They would have brought someone else in from another building site, but they’d never come across anyone that played the sax on those sites either.

The thing is, though, that when I sometimes try and make sense of my life, and who doesn’t do that … Obviously I don’t mean my whole life, but this or that part, it goes without saying that no one is capable of grasping their entire life, even the most meager one. Not to mention that it’s always debatable whether any life is a whole. Each one is more or less broken into pieces, and often the pieces are scattered. A life like that can’t be gathered back together, and even if it could, what whole would you make out of it? It isn’t a teacup, or even some larger container. Perhaps it can be imagined as a whole after you die. But then, who’s going to be around to do that? Each person is the only one that can imagine himself to himself. Not in all things, you’re right. But as much as you can. There is no other truth.

Besides, am I really wondering about this life of mine? Why would I do that? It won’t serve any purpose, nothing will be reversed or changed. If anything, it’s life that wonders about me, I don’t feel any such need. Why wouldn’t life wonder about a person living it? It doesn’t even need our consent. Just like with dreams. You dream things even if you’d prefer not to. Sometimes you have dreams you simply don’t want to have, though they’re your own dreams. Also, you have no influence over whether someone else dreams about you. How is life different from that?

What was the dream? How can I tell you briefly … I really don’t know. It’s not important. And even though I dreamed it much, much later, it sort of opened up the memory of that laughter, it singled it out from a series of many different events, and sent other, often more important ones toward oblivion. That much would be understandable. It’s just that at the same time it was as if the laughter led to the dream I had decades later. To other things too, but for sure to that dream. Why don’t you think a mutual influence like that is possible? I mean, I did say it isn’t me wondering about my life, so it isn’t me who’s establishing a two-way symbiosis between one thing and another. It may simply establish itself. The more so because that often happens at the least appropriate moment, for instance when I’m walking through the woods looking for wild strawberries underfoot, or taking the dogs’ bowl out with their dinner. Or sitting by the window staring at the lake. There’s a swarm of people on this side, on the far shore, boats, kayaks, floating mattresses, heads in the water, like the water lilies and lotuses that used to grow in the bends of the river … That’s right, I told you about that already. Shouts, squeals, laughter. So all my attention is concentrated on the wild strawberries, or on the dogs, or making sure no one’s in trouble out in the water, no one’s calling for help. You have to admit those are not the best moments for someone to be wondering about something else. And yet …

But I’m sorry — I interrupted you. Please, do go on. You think so? No, you can never go back to the same place. The truth is, that place doesn’t exist anymore, going back there isn’t even possible. Why not? Because if you ask me, places die once they’ve been left.

It only seems that they long for us. You shouldn’t believe that. When I was living abroad, when I’d go for a walk in the woods it would be a foreign woods, with foreign trees, foreign bushes, trails, foreign birds, but I’d always feel like I was walking through these woods, along these trails, passing these trees, hearing these birds. So I stopped going for walks in the woods there. When a person’s gone, it’s no longer the same place. A person’s only place is inside themselves. Regardless of whether they’re here, there, wherever. Now or at any time. Everything that’s on the outside is only illusion, circumstance, chance, misunderstanding. A person is their own place, especially the last place.