Wieslaw Mysliwski - A Treatise on Shelling Beans

The results of the tests weren’t particularly good, so I did what he told me to do, especially as he’d left me some room for hope. Aside from taking the medication he urged me to be patient, to keep my spirits up. And to go to a sanatorium. I subjected myself to all kinds of procedures, massages, baths. I tried to do it all as conscientiously as I could. But how effective could it be when all you’re thinking about is the fact that you’re no longer playing, and may never play again. If your thoughts are going one way and your treatment the other, you’re not going to see any effects. I even avoided getting to know anyone there, it was good morning, good morning, nothing beyond that. I never went anywhere except on walks. The only thing I did was before or after a walk, I’d sometimes stop in at a cafe for coffee or tea. Other than that I didn’t go anyplace. Not to concerts, though there were some pretty good orchestras that played there, opera singers and popular singers, often really fine ones. The spa park was large so there were plenty of places to walk. There were avenues and paths, you could easily turn off if someone was coming towards you and you wanted to avoid them. There were benches everywhere, sometimes I’d sit down, but even if someone else so much as sat down at the other end of the bench I’d walk away at once. I didn’t feel good around people. Truth be told, I didn’t feel good around myself.

It was only when the squirrels would scamper up to me for nuts that I’d forget about myself for a moment. I always carried a bag of hazelnuts. It was like they knew. The moment I sat down they’d come hopping. Can you imagine? Why were the squirrels so trusting with people? You think people in a sanatorium are different? If that’s the case, everyone should be sent to a sanatorium. Except that even there it happened that someone for example left a dog behind. There were quite a few dogs like that, wandering in search of their owner.

Not at that sanatorium but at another one a long time before — I don’t recall if I told you about my beginnings abroad? Well, so back then, at one sanatorium I picked a spot on the main avenue, put a basket next to me on the ground, and started to play. As people passed by they threw money into the basket. Sometimes they’d sit on the nearby benches to listen. Occasionally someone would request a particular tune, those kinds of people generally gave more. It wasn’t easy to begin with, not at all. But I had good luck.

One time one of the convalescents, a guy on crutches, took a seat by me on a bench. He listened and listened, then he got up and threw a bill into my basket. Then he asked me to play something else for him, then something else again, then he asked me to move the basket closer, because it was hard for him to bend down, and he tossed in an even bigger banknote. From that time on he came almost every day. He’d sit down, listen, request this or that, then ask me to pass him the basket, and throw in a banknote.

At some point he told me to come sit by him and he started asking me where I’d learned to play, whether I had any qualifications. No, I didn’t lie to him. I told him the whole truth, that I’d gone to such and such a school, then that I’d been taught by the warehouse keeper on the building site, and of course that I’d played in the works band. He nodded, but I had the impression he didn’t really believe me. I still didn’t know the language properly, I could barely express myself, but he seemed to understand everything.

Some time later he asked me again to sit by him. He didn’t ask me any questions, he just started complaining that the sanatoria weren’t doing much good, and it was looking like he might end up in a wheelchair. He’d been a dancer, he loved dancing. Now he owned a club. He gave the name, said where it was, and he asked if I wouldn’t be interested in playing in the band at his club. He was leaving, he’d come to say goodbye. He left me the exact address, gave me money for the ticket, and we agreed when I should come. And that was how it all began.

So you can imagine how I felt now. At one time I’d played for money thrown into a basket, but still I’d been playing. Now I was throwing money into other people’s baskets, while I myself had no hope. Plus, I could see him before me, inching along on his crutches, facing the prospect of being in a wheelchair. Yes, he was already in a wheelchair when I played in his club. Let me tell you, I felt like I was waiting for a sentence to be passed, especially since for the longest time there was no improvement. I even seemed to be worse. So you can understand that I had to forget about the saxophone. It goes without saying that I kept visiting the sanatorium just as the doctor had instructed, but by then I was afraid to drive a car, so I used to take the train.

One year I was traveling to the sanatorium, the train pulled up at some small station, and a moment later a woman appeared in the doorway. Normally it made no difference to me who sat in my compartment, but she riveted my attention from the first. I jumped up to help her put her suitcase on the shelf, though at that time, with those hands of mine that had no strength in them, I might not have managed. I myself had to get other people to help me. Luckily someone closer to the door beat me to it. She was more or less middle-aged, though as you know, that age is the hardest to pin down. She was dressed smartly and with good taste. She radiated a mature beauty that was beginning to wane. Or the impression may have come from an intensity of being that suffused her beauty and drew out its depths. Faces, even young ones, that are merely good-looking are only so on the outside as it were, till the intensity of being reveals that extra something in them. But that wasn’t what took possession of me, though it wouldn’t have been surprising if it had been that alone. The thing was, the longer I looked at her, surreptitiously of course, the more certain I was that we’d met once before. But where and when — I racked my brains. It even occurred to me that she might have been the woman in the black veil covered in tiny knots of lace like little flies, as we were standing around the pile of dry potato stalks in the dream. I spent the whole of the rest of the journey trying to remember.

She got off at the same station as me. On the platform I nodded goodbye, investing the gesture with all of my feeling of regret that we’d probably never meet again. I doubt she read it that way. She nodded back without the faintest smile. So I was all the more certain that was the last time I’d see her.

Then one day, would you believe it, I was sitting on a bench in the park smoking a cigarette, I look up and all of a sudden I see her coming towards me. She was dressed differently, more the way you do at a sanatorium, more casually, but with equally good taste. I recognized her from far off. She’d been constantly in my thoughts since the time we’d shared a compartment on the train. Often, in between procedures I found myself wondering where we could have met and when, that I should know her at once like that. She came up to the bench I was sitting on. She didn’t so much as smile to show she remembered me. She simply asked if she could sit down, because she felt like a cigarette, and she saw I was smoking.

“No one else is smoking on any of the other benches,” she said. After she finished her cigarette, as she was about to leave she said: “Thank you.”

That was all. Again I tried to figure out where I knew her from. Because by now I had no doubt it had been a long, long time before the train. In the park, in the sunshine you could see a lot more clearly, you could see as if from the most distant time. But how long ago it could have been, I strained to recall. I smoked one cigarette after another. One by one, as if looking through a photo album I went through all the women I’d ever known, but I didn’t find her. Perhaps she’d been much younger then, perhaps she’d changed a lot. Yet that intensity of being must have marked her beauty even back then, because that must have been how I remembered her.