Wieslaw Mysliwski - A Treatise on Shelling Beans

“You know, I think that today of all days I’ll allow myself another cake.” She signaled to the waitress. When the latter came back with the tray of cakes, she first had me choose. Then she asked for the same kind that I picked. “You see what a pig I’m being?” she said. “I really shouldn’t. I never let myself have more than one … It’s all because of you. You’re awful. If only I’d known …” She glared at me in a mock sulk, and I saw something like a hint of alarm in her eyes. But she immediately said: “Whenever I can’t resist something, I always regret it later. I’ll have to punish myself for the second cake.”

“Punish yourself? What will your punishment be?”

“I haven’t decided yet. I’ll think of something. Oh, I know. If I come here again I’ll just order tea or coffee, I won’t have any cake at all. I’ll teach myself a lesson so I remember in the future.” She began almost savoring her self-imposed punishment. “Or no, I won’t have tea or coffee either. I’ll have them bring me a glass of water. Or I’ll be even harsher. I’ll order a cake, but I won’t eat it. I’ll leave it. Or two cakes. Yes, that’s it, two cakes, as if I were expecting someone else. And since the other person won’t come, I’ll leave both cakes uneaten.” She started to laugh, as if the punishment she was going to inflict on herself amused her greatly. “I mean, you yourself said a moment ago that we’re always expecting someone, we just don’t always know it. This way I’ll at least know. Two cakes, and I’ll leave both of them.”

I was on the point of telling her that she shouldn’t punish herself at all, what was one extra cake, it wasn’t going to hurt her. She was slim. When she came into the cafe and was standing there looking for a free table, it even struck me that she looked like an Easter palm branch. But I realized she might not know what an Easter palm branch is, and I asked if she wouldn’t like some tea or coffee, apologizing for not having thought of it before.

“No, no thank you,” she said, still laughing. “It’d spoil the taste of the cake. I never drink tea or coffee with cake, not ever.” Laughing all the time, she reached for a paper napkin. As she did so, the sleeve of her blouse pulled back and under the hem of her cuff, above the wrist, about here or a bit higher, I caught a glimpse of numbers written on her skin as if in ink or indelible pencil. It lasted a split second. She snatched a napkin from the stand on the table and pulled down her sleeve before she put the napkin to her lips.

I ought not to have noticed it, because you shouldn’t notice everything, especially a man looking at a woman. Even in themselves people don’t always like everything. There are many things we’d like to change in ourselves. We’re at odds with many things in ourselves. We’d like to improve things in ourselves, as we would in others. But since that isn’t possible, you must admit that at least it’s less troublesome when we don’t notice it. But she evidently saw that I’d noticed, and felt obliged to say:

“Oh, that’s from when I was just a child.” She was embarrassed, or perhaps unsettled, because her eyes turned away to look around the cafe. Only after a moment did she return to her cake, taking a tiny piece on the tip of her spoon. “You know what I used to dream of most often as a child?” she said, holding the spoon at her mouth. “Of one day eating my fill of cake.”

I laughed. It must have seemed insincere, because no shadow of a smile appeared on her face.

“I never imagined that when my dream could come true, I’d have to deny myself the pleasure.” Once again her eyes drifted away to the cafe, she stared at something or other, and when she went back to eating her cake, or rather picking at it, her gaze seemed buried in her plate. All at once she livened up and, clearly looking for a fight, she declared: “I have to say the first cake, the one I chose, was better.”

We began to argue about which was the better cake, the one she’d selected or my one. And you know what it means to argue about cake. It was like we were debating something of the utmost importance. Like it was ourselves we were submitting to a test, not just some cake. In this way we got onto the topic of the best cake we’d ever eaten in our lives. It was mostly her who remembered which cake and when and where, and each one was the most delicious. Even though the previous one had been the most delicious, the next one was even better, and the one after that was so delicious it canceled out all the preceding ones. I even tried to picture her as the child whose dream was being fulfilled, because she was thoroughly engrossed in remembering all those best cakes.

Myself, I didn’t really have much to recall as far as cake was concerned. At any rate I couldn’t have said which was the best one I ever ate. In response to all those best cakes of hers, I said that at Eastertime my grandmother used to make a babka that to this day I could taste in my mouth. Though I couldn’t say if it was actually the best cake I’d ever had. That didn’t matter. Sometimes I buy a babka for Easter, in one cake shop then in another for comparison, but so far I’ve never found one that tasted the same as my grandmother’s. Not to mention that babkas from the store go dry after two or three days, whereas the ones my grandmother baked could sit there for months, then when you cut it it would still be moist with butter. Plus, they were so plump. Have you ever had a babka like that? Then you’ve missed out on one of the best things there is. You should have come at Eastertime. Or right after, or even a few days later. We used to take the babka up to the attic and leave it there. We wouldn’t eat more than a slice each a day. You could have tried it.

When I was married my wife decided to find a recipe for babka like that, because at Easter she was sick of hearing about how my grandmother baked babkas and all that. She even wrote to some well-known pastry chef. He actually sent her a recipe and she made it, but it wasn’t the same. Grandmother would usually make a dozen or more babkas at a time. The kneading trough would be brimming with dough. She’d fill the earthenware baking dishes about half full, then when the cakes rose, they virtually bubbled. They looked like mushrooms. We’d usually each have a piece for afternoon tea. Grandmother would divide it up so it lasted as long as possible. Thanks to that, it felt like Easter went on and on.

No, she hadn’t had Eastertime babka. She asked me to tell her about it. But how can you tell someone about babka. You can describe the shape, say that it had notches in it from the earthenware dishes it was baked in, that it was broader at the top and narrower at the bottom. But none of that amounts to anything. It’s the taste that matters, not the shape. And how can you describe a taste? You tell me. Any taste. Let’s say, something sweet. What does sweet mean? There can be a million kinds of sweetness. As many kinds as there are people. One person puts a spoonful of sugar in their coffee and it’s already sweet enough for them, someone else needs two or three spoonfuls for it to be sweet. During the war for example there was no sugar, so people would boil up a syrup out of sugar beets, you’d have been disgusted if you’d tried it, but everyone found it sweet like before the war. There’s sweet and sweet, no two sweetnesses are alike. Sweet today, sweet once upon a time, sweet here or there — each one is a different kind of sweetness.

So I told her it was made of flour and eggs and cream, because that was all I knew, the rest my grandmother took with her to the grave. She may have taken the whole mystery of those babkas with her. All that remained was the fact that they melted in your mouth.