Wieslaw Mysliwski - A Treatise on Shelling Beans

A few days later, after my walk I stopped by a cafe. I was sitting there drinking my coffee and reading a newspaper when something made me glance up. The cafe was packed, all the tables were taken, and here I see her coming into the place the way she’d come into the compartment in the train. She took a few steps, looking around for a free table. Without thinking I followed her gaze, but it didn’t seem as if any table would be available for a while. It didn’t occur to me to invite her to sit at my table. I was probably afraid she’d say no, since on the bench in the park she hadn’t seen fit to even smile, let alone ask if we hadn’t once shared a train compartment. That’s right, I remember you, she could have said. I buried myself in my newspaper again. All at once I heard her voice right next to me:

“Would you mind if I sat at your table? All the other seats are taken. One might free up soon, so it won’t be for long.”

“You’re welcome to,” I said, perhaps a little too stiffly. It was just that I resented the fact that back then, on the bench, she hadn’t recognized me as the person she’d shared a compartment with. Now it would have been easier to start a conversation. Yet I couldn’t for the life of me think of anything to talk about with her, while it would have been wrong to continue reading my paper. As you know, though, women have a preternatural gift for seeing through things, even when you hide it deep down. Before sitting she hesitated and asked:

“Or perhaps you’re expecting someone? If that’s the case …”

“You’re welcome to sit,” I repeated, much more warmly this time. And in the way of the few words one has to utter at such moments, and which as it happened she’d already put in my mouth, once she took her seat I added half-jokingly: “Though the truth is, we may always be expecting someone, even if we’re not always fully aware of it.”

She was visibly embarrassed.

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry.” She was all set to jump up again.

“Please, sit here,” I said to stop her. “I was just talking in generalities.”

“In that case, I’ll have some cake and be going,” she said. “Sometimes I can’t help myself, though I shouldn’t,” she added apologetically.

In order to set her completely at ease, I said:

“In any case please don’t pay any attention to what I said, because you might not enjoy the cake, and I wouldn’t want that to be my doing. I was just talking.”

“That’s how I took it,” she said.

She still seemed uneasy, though. It showed in the nervous way she looked for the waitress, who a moment ago had disappeared into the back.

“Don’t worry, she’ll be out any minute.”

“I’m not worried,” she replied abruptly. “Why would I be …”

I had the feeling I’d touched a nerve, though I’d only meant to talk about the waitress. It may have been in an effort to make up for my faux pas, or for some other reason, that I said:

“Though we can never be sure in any situation that chance isn’t making use of us.”

“What do you mean, chance?” she asked with a start.

“For example, the fact that when you came into the cafe there weren’t any free places. Thanks to which, we’re sitting together at the same table.”

“Chance?” she repeated, as if pondering.

“Years ago, another man and I nodded to each other on the street by mistake, he took me for someone he knew and I did the same, but it turned out we didn’t know one another. I apologized to him, saying it had just been by chance. But he disagreed, and invited me to have a coffee with him.”

“Can it be that cafes turn chance into destiny? Is that what you mean?” Her tone was bantering.

“It’s possible,” I replied, giving my own voice a hint of irony, though I had no intention of being ironic. “It all depends on what we take things to be. So why should we not take it that you came here because I was expecting you.”

“Really?” She feigned surprise, but a certain wariness had appeared in her eyes.

“Would that be so impossible? So much against common sense? All the more since we actually already know one another.”

“Really?” Her eyes widened. I thought she’d burst out laughing. Yet instead she quieted down a little, as if she were thinking about it. “You must have me confused with someone else,” she said after a moment. “I don’t remember you at all.”

“Surely you must. We traveled together in the same train, in the same compartment. You got on, wait a moment, what station was that …”

“That can’t be. I came here by car.”

“By car?” I wasn’t exactly surprised so much as troubled. “But you were sitting opposite me, in the seat next to the door. You had a large black suitcase. I was going to help you put it up on the shelf, but somebody else got there first.”

“I’m sorry. I never travel by train. I can’t stand trains. Coming here by train would have been too much for me. That hopeless space rushing past outside the window. Besides, I have unpleasant associations with trains.”

She had shaken my confidence a little. Yet I didn’t believe her. I sensed that she recognized me, that she was sure it was me. Perhaps she was only playing a game, the rules of which I didn’t know. Or protecting herself from something. What, though?

“But you remember that a few days ago I was sitting on a bench in the park smoking a cigarette. You came up and asked if you could join me because you also felt like smoking.”

She burst out laughing:

“I don’t smoke! Never did. You really do have me mixed up with someone else.”

“What? You mean you don’t remember?” I refused to give up. “You said that no one else on any of the benches was smoking. As you left you thanked me.”

“Perhaps after all you’d be so kind as to ask the waitress to come over,” she said with a hint of impatience. “I’d like to have my cake, then take myself off your hands.”

She gave me no hope. I wondered if I shouldn’t turn the whole thing into a joke, say, I’m sorry, I was just kidding. Sometimes I like to see how someone will react in certain situations. But there was no doubt in my mind that it was her. I beckoned the waitress, who had just reappeared. She came up to the table.

“We’d like to see what cakes you have.”

She returned a moment later with a tray of cakes. As she held it in front of us, I asked:

“Which one would you like?”

Her eyes filled with an almost childlike delight at the sight of the cakes.

“Which do you recommend?”

I suggested the one that I usually took.

“You won’t hold it against me if I pick a different one?”

And she did. So I asked for the same one she selected. At that point she seemed to get it, a moment of musing flashed in her eyes. She smiled, though her smile seemed artificial. With a similarly artificial nonchalance, as she ate her cake with relish, she said casually:

“I’m so grateful you let me sit at your table. I had such a craving for cake today.”

“And that particular kind,” I added.

“How did you know? You couldn’t know, since you suggested a different one.”

“Out of contrariness,” I said. “Just like out of contrariness you refuse to remember that we shared a train compartment, that you sat down next to me on a bench in the park to have a cigarette. And wherever else we might have met before, you’d deny it, I know. Even if I told you you’d appeared to me in a dream, you’d deny that too, you’d say it wasn’t possible.”

“Now that, that’s possible, though it’s corny.”

“But how is it possible, since you claim we’ve never met before?”

“Maybe that’s the only way you could have remembered me.” She looked at me with a fixed gaze, as if the life had suddenly gone out of her eyes. For a moment we stared at one another in this way, till her smile began to return.