Wieslaw Mysliwski - A Treatise on Shelling Beans

She grew sad when I told her that. To cheer her up I said that all the cakes she’d told me about were for sure the best. I asked if she’d like to have one more. I’d give her a free pass. She smiled through her sadness and said the only thing she would have been tempted by would be a piece of the Eastertime babka. In that case, perhaps she’d have a glass of wine, I asked. She said yes at once. As we were drinking our wine, lifting the glass to our lips over and again, she gave me a look as if she finally remembered me. For myself, I no longer had any doubts that it was her. I don’t mean from the train, or the park bench, or anywhere in particular. By then, none of that was of any significance.

You probably think that you have to meet a person first to be able to remember them later. Have you ever thought that sometimes it’s the opposite? So you think it all depends on the memory, yes? In other words, first something has to happen, and then, even if it’s years later, memory can bring it all back? If you ask me, though, there are things that it’s best for memory not to meddle with. I agree with you that in the cases you’re talking about, that’s how it is. But we don’t always need help from our memory. There are times when our greater need is to forget. It’d be hard to live perpetually in thrall to memory. So sometimes we have to mislead it, trick it, run away from it. I mean, when it comes down to it we don’t even need to remember the fact that we’re here on this earth. Despite what you think, not everything has to happen according to how it’s organized by memory.

Why was it that when she came into the cafe and looked around for a free place, I was certain that even if someone had vacated a table at that moment, she still would have come up to mine and asked:

“Would you mind if I sat at your table? All the other seats are taken.”

“You’re welcome to,” I would have said, as I actually did say.

And the rest you know. I’m not hiding anything. Why would I? I’ve not brought happiness to women. I don’t know a whole lot more than that. Besides, you can read a book, watch a film and it’d be the same. It’s always the same. There aren’t any words that would make it different. Yes, if you ask me, everything depends on words. Words determine things, events, thoughts, imaginings, dreams, everything that’s hidden deepest inside a person. If the words are second-rate the person is second-rate, and the world, even God is second-rate.

If I tell you that I loved her, it still won’t tell you anything, because it doesn’t tell me anything. Today I only know as much as I knew back then. Or rather, it’d be better to say that I don’t know now just as much as I didn’t know then. Because what does it mean to love? Please, tell me if you know. And since I loved her like I loved no one else on earth, why didn’t we know how to be with one another? Actually, to say I loved her isn’t enough. I sometimes felt that she was the one who had finally given me life. As if it wasn’t that she was made from my rib but that I was made from her rib, the opposite of how it is in the Bible. When I’m dying I’ll see her coming into the cafe, looking around for a free table, then coming up to mine and asking:

“Would you mind …?”

“You’re welcome to.”

She sits down, but we don’t feel like talking anymore. Not even about cakes. Not because we’ve said everything already to each other, since we’ve hardly said anything. We’d have needed an eternity to say everything to one another, not just the short moment we’ve lived through. I don’t know, maybe by now we’re afraid of words, even words about cake. Maybe there are no more words for us. And without words there’s no telling what any of the cakes were like, and all the more which one was the best.

We weren’t good together the way you might have expected. But we were even worse without each other. We split up, came back together, split up again, came back together again. Each time we swore we’d never part. After which it was the same thing. Then when we got back together, every time it was like we were back in the cafe that first day.

I can’t remember if I told you that one time I happened to go back to the same sanatorium, and after taking a walk one day I dropped by the cafe. I was sitting there drinking my coffee and reading the newspaper. At a certain moment I look up over the paper and I see her coming in. By then we’d separated for good. There were free tables, but she came up to me and asked:

“Would you mind …?”

“You’re welcome to.”

“Oh no, your hands don’t look good.”

“How’s your heart?”

And once again we decided never to part. But soon we did. Tell me, was that love? If you ask me, love is an unsatisfied hunger for existence. Whereas the two of us had been hurt by existence. Neither of us was young anymore. She was a few years younger than me, it’s true, but it was a long time since she’d been young. I often had to ask her not to be ashamed of her body. She’d always look over anxiously to check I wasn’t watching when she undressed. It was always:

“Turn the light off.”

“Why?”

“Please, turn it off.”

“But why?”

“Don’t you get it?”

I didn’t get it. She probably never suspected that as I watched her undressing I had the feeling I was being enriched by all her hurt, all her pain, by the way time was passing her by. I’d lived through a great deal myself, but it wasn’t as important to me as what she had been marked by. No, it wasn’t that I felt sympathy for her. Besides, does love require sympathy? What I’m trying to say is that I experienced her existence as my own existence. You ask what that means? It’s like you desire to take the entire burden of someone else’s existence upon yourself. As if you wished to relieve that person entirely of the necessity of existing. As if you wanted to die in their place too, so they wouldn’t have to experience their own dying. That’s something different than sympathy the way it’s usually understood. At the very possibility of such a thing, even if I was only imagining it, I felt a renewed desire for life. You say that isn’t possible. It’s possible that it isn’t possible. But in that case, what should be the measure of love? If you and I understand the same thing by this word that has no meaning? In accordance with what do we supposedly experience it? The appetites of the flesh? The flesh has its limits, and they’re reached much, much sooner than death.

Do you know if she’s still alive? Did I take you by surprise? Who on earth else other than you could tell me? I thought I’d at least learn that much from you. Because if I knew she was no longer alive, I’d not want to live anymore either.

Sometimes I think to myself that maybe if I could still have played. Or perhaps I was afraid to involve her in my life. Or I no longer had the strength to take on that love on top of everything else. You have no idea what it means to love when you’re not young anymore. It’s the hardest challenge. When you’re young, ceasing to exist doesn’t seem so terrifying. But you see, me, I always lived on the boundary between existing and not existing. Even when I seemed to be there, it was like I was only passing through, only there for a short while, visiting someone, though I don’t know who, because I have no one.

You think that’s why I came back here? But this isn’t my place either. So what if you came to buy beans? You could have gone anywhere, and not necessarily for beans. If you hadn’t found me you’d always have found someone. What difference does it make? For you none at all, I don’t think. I’m not mixing you up with someone else. Though for a long time I kept thinking about where and when it had been. At one point, right at the beginning, I even wondered if you might be him. Oh, no one. It just occurred to me. But no. If you’d been him, you wouldn’t have come to me for beans. How would you have known that someone like me exists.