A Treatise on Shelling Beans (12 page)

After that we go see what’s up with the cabins. Then it can be this or that. It varies depending on the day, though it’s mostly the same. Sometimes I’ll hop in the car and go get some groceries. That’s right, I have a car. I have to run errands from time to time. Swing by the post office or the bank once in a while. Other than that I don’t go anywhere. I don’t have anyone to visit, any place to go, any reason. Plus, there’s always something needs doing around here. The laundry, the ironing, the dishes; sweep the place out, tidy up. And even when I don’t have any other jobs, there are always the nameplates. They take up a lot of my time. Though I don’t work on them every day. Some days my hands work well, other times they hurt. I don’t have a regular daily schedule.

I start each day like I don’t expect anything of it, that it’ll bring what it brings. Though I don’t expect it to bring anything. Honestly, keeping an eye on the cabins is the only thing that gives any kind of order to the day. It’s only from the cabins that I can see the day isn’t standing still.

It’s fall now and you’d think the days would be getting shorter and shorter, but for me they get longer and longer. Often, when I wake up in the morning and think that I have to live through till evening, I feel it’s like living from birth to death all over again. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt anything like that, but it’s as if it’s harder and harder to live through the day. No, it’s not that it’s long.
How shall I put it. Well, like today. It’s a day like any other, but at the same time it’s the whole of life.

In the evenings I read a bit, or listen to music. No, I hardly ever watch television. The dogs don’t like it. When I turn it on their hackles rise and they start growling. So I have to switch it off. Maybe if I played. If you ask me, nothing binds life and death together the way music does. Believe me, I played all my life, I know. That’s right, I even have three saxophones, I brought them with me. Soprano, alto, tenor. I played all three. They’re through there in the living room. You want to see? Maybe we can take a look later. Let’s finish with the beans first. I have a flute as well, and a clarinet. Sometimes I’d play piano too, when someone was needed to step in. But my instrument was the sax. Did I go to school? Depends what you mean by school. By my book I went to several, though I can’t say I have any diplomas. But do you need to sit at a desk for years to know how to do something? It’s enough that you want to know how to do it. And I wanted to ever since I was a kid.

I started on the harmonica. Got it from my Uncle Jan. One time we were sitting at the edge of the woods, under an oak tree, and uncle was playing. He was really good. He could even play tunes from the operettas. All of sudden an acorn fell on his head.

He stopped playing, looked upwards and said:

“Maybe even from this oak.”

“What about the oak?”

“That I’ll hang myself,” he said. “But for now don’t say anything to anyone.”

He put the harmonica back to his lips, but he only passed it across them without a sound, then he lost himself in thought. After which he gave me the harmonica and said:

“Here. I won’t need it anymore. It’d be a pity for it to go to waste. It was a good one.”

I asked him:

“Why don’t you want to live?”

“What can I tell you. You wouldn’t understand. You should play me something instead.”

“I don’t know how yet, uncle.”

“That doesn’t matter. I’ll know if you’re going to be able to learn.”

I started blowing and moving the harmonica back and forth across my lips. I couldn’t get the sounds to match up. But uncle evidently heard something:

“You’ll be able to play. Just make sure you practice.”

And that was how I began. Does that count as the start of school in your eyes? Let’s say that was only preschool. Back then they called it nursery school, not preschool. But since that oak tree I started to play. Actually, I was really determined. I played for days on end. I wanted uncle to hear me play before he hanged himself. On the pasture the cows wandered wherever they wanted, but I kept playing. When they sent me out of the house, I ran off into the woods and played there. When it was raining they’d kick me out because they couldn’t take my music any longer, so I’d just go stand under the eaves and keep playing. I’d climb trees, go as far up as I could, so they wouldn’t be able to reach me and make me come down. I’d get in a boat, drift down the Rutka, and play. I’d even go to the outhouse, latch the door shut, take out my harmonica and play. They couldn’t understand how anyone could take so long in the outhouse. Luckily the outhouse was behind the barn and they couldn’t hear me playing.

No, Uncle Jan was still alive then. It was like he was waiting to be able to hear me play. One time I saw him sitting under the same oak tree at the edge of the woods and I went up to him.

“Will you listen to me play, uncle?”

“Absolutely.” Then, as he listened he said: “I see the harmonica won’t be enough for you much longer. When the time comes you should choose the saxophone. No one here has even seen a saxophone, you’ll get asked to play all the dances and weddings. Maybe even further, higher. Saxophones are in these days. And a saxophone is the whole wide world. I’ve got nothing against fiddles, but the fiddle is a Gypsy instrument. You have to have Gypsy blood, a Gypsy
soul. Roam like the Gypsies, steal like the Gypsies. A non-Gypsy will never be able to play that way. There are people in the villages play the fiddle, but they’re not real musicians. Fiddle and accordion and drums, they get together and they play everything all in the same style. One two three, one two three. They’ll never play any differently, that was always how it was here. That was how they lived, how they played, and they’d die that way. One two three, one two three. For it to change, a saxophone has to come along. Maybe when that happens they’ll start to dance differently, live differently. One time I went to a dance in the town, in the band there was a saxophone, and I’m telling you … Then I saw one just like it on display in a shop window. Next to it there was a fiddle. If I’d had the money, which I didn’t, I’d have bought it. I’d have taught myself. You can learn anything if you just set your mind to it. It cost the earth. Much more than the fiddle next to it. I don’t know how much you could get for this land of ours … I’ll leave you my share, maybe that’ll be enough. If not, then save up. Perhaps if I’d been younger … But you need to be your age to start.”

It happened that after the war I found myself in this school. It wasn’t an ordinary school. The best proof of this was the fact that the rec room, which took up a whole hut, was crammed with musical instruments. You wouldn’t believe what all they had in there. Music school? No, nothing of the sort. But trumpets, flutes, trombones, oboes, bassoons, clarinets, violins, violas, cellos, double basses. There were instruments whose names we only learned from the music teacher, once he was brought in.

There was a saxophone too, an alto. True, it was missing two keys, but you could cover the holes with your fingers and more or less play it.

Some instruments were in even worse shape. Bent, cracked, torn, they had holes from bullets and shrapnel, as if they’d fought in the war too.

But there were also ones that were perfectly fine, or at any rate that all that was needed was to solder something together or fix it back on, or stick on an extra part, or take bits from two or three of them to make one whole one,
transfer something from one to another, strings for example, on something else switch out the mouthpiece, and you could play. There were shops there, so you could mess around with little repairs like that.

It turned out some people already knew how to play a little on one instrument or another. But most of them had never touched a musical instrument in their lives. Me for example, all I’d known was uncle’s harmonica. But when the music teacher showed up a short while later, he said right away that he’d make us into a band. Apparently that was the pedagogical task the school had assigned him. Fortunately he soon seemed to forget about it.

In general he didn’t make much of an effort. It was another thing that I don’t know if anyone at all could have made a band out of the ragbag of kids there were at that school. Most of the time he went around half cut, there were days he could barely stand upright. Sometimes he’d fall asleep in class. Or whenever he picked up an instrument to show us how it was played, he’d play and play, often till the end of the lesson.

We also had practice with him in the evenings in the rec room, depending on whether he showed up more or less drunk. If it was more, he’d get all sentimental about one broken instrument or another, ask how someone could have hurt it like that. Barbaric was what it was. An instrument like that suffered the way a person does. Every bullet hole, every snapped string, every chipped neck, was a wound. According to him some of the instruments had ended up in the school by mistake, they ought to have been in a museum.

But it may have been that they were brought from a museum, that they needed to be moved somewhere and it happened to be to our school. I’m sure you remember, back then everything was transported here and there and everywhere, back and forth. Not just instruments. Machinery, animals, people. Furniture, bedding, pots and pans. Sometimes we’d go down to the station and there’d be one goods train after another standing there, each one of them stuffed with all kinds of belongings. You rarely saw a passenger train, just freight trains one
after another. Maybe it’s like that after every war, that everything goes back to its place, even though the war alters places too, swaps them around, while some places there’s no point looking for even, they don’t exist anymore.

One time a truck arrived and brought a harp, a harpsichord and a viola da gamba. We didn’t know what they were and we asked him, but he started crying. The harp was missing half its strings, the harpsichord only had a few keys left, and the viola da gamba looked like someone had used it for target practice. From that moment on we took a liking to him. Him alone of all the teachers. Even though like I said, usually he was tipsy or straight up drunk.

He always carried a kind of flat bottle. Here in his breast pocket. It never bothered him that he was the teacher, he’d pull it out and take a swig in front of us.

“Sorry boys, I just have to.”

All the teachers behaved like they were military, and they treated us like recruits. Aside from him they all wore uniforms without stars but with epaulettes and crossed military straps. Word had it they even carried pistols in their pockets. The students also had uniforms that were a sort of black or dark blue color, and they wore hobnailed boots, side caps, and on the side caps metal insignia with a kind of rising sun in a semicircle of rays. Which, as was explained to us in homeroom, was meant to symbolize a better new world that was rising. And that that new world was ahead of us. We just had to learn to have faith, unbreakable faith. And it was for learning faith that we were here in school.

Aside from that, we learned trades. Bricklayer, plasterer, joiner, roofer, metalworker, millworker, welder, mechanic, electrician, a few others. Everyone could choose what trade they wanted to learn. Though not entirely. In the end it came down to how many places the school had for one trade or another.

We lived in barracks, and we were divided into teams. Each team had a team leader, the oldest and strongest boy, and above him every team had its own homeroom teacher.

To begin with I learned the trumpet a bit and for a year I played reveille in
the morning. After reveille we’d get washed and have breakfast – black ersatz coffee, bread and jam. Then it was assembly on the parade ground, standing in line two deep, roll call, orders. Usually a couple of kids getting reported for some wrongdoing. Then off to class, each team to a different room, or to shop. And twice a week we’d be marched off to do physical labor, carrying shovels and pickaxes, singing.

What labor did we do? There was no lack of work to be done. Especially because for several months the front had been situated in the area where the school was. We filled in bunkers and trenches and bomb craters, some of them you can’t imagine how huge. You’ve seen that kind of thing? There you go. We patched roads, at least roughly, so cars could drive there. Or we broke rocks to build more roads. We demolished ruined buildings that were in danger of collapsing. Or bridges over rivers if they were beyond being repaired. We fixed embankments that had been crushed by tanks or dug up to allow trucks and artillery through. The way it always is after a war. Come rain or shine, because as they told us, we needed to be toughened up. In winter too, it goes without saying. We cleared snow from the roads and the railroad tracks.

As far as lessons were concerned, some of the boys had attended underground school during the war. Some had even completed seventh grade. But most couldn’t either read or write. Some, even if they’d been able to once, they’d forgotten because of the war. War can make you forget lots of things, not just reading and writing. You can forget yourself. And that’s what had happened to them. They didn’t know where they were from, what they were called, where they were born, when. They were all just this postwar hodgepodge, like I said, with no homes, no fathers, mothers, and a good few with unclean consciences. Plus we were all different ages, older, younger, including some really young children. Though truth be told, no one was a child anymore. You couldn’t be a child however much you longed for your childhood.

So we weren’t entirely a school, we were part school, part youthful army. We were held accountable the way you are in the army, and for the slightest offense
we’d have to run to some tree way the hell off somewhere, often carrying weights. Or wade into water up to our neck, in full uniform and boots. Or do x number of pushups. Or if it was something worse, lockup with nothing but bread and water. You’d have to report to the teachers, and you didn’t say please sir to them like in school, instead you addressed them as citizen teacher, and the commandant was citizen commandant. So we didn’t exactly feel like school students. Not many people even wanted to be promoted from one class to another. Though getting promoted didn’t make much difference. The people in charge reduced us all to the same level, they probably thought the war had set all of us back to the beginning, so they taught us from the beginning.