A Treatise on Shelling Beans (15 page)

“What do you think, master, does God exist?”

The master had just put out a cigarette in the geranium pot, and he lit another. It was about the fourth since we’d put the light out. The whole time he’d not
opened his mouth, it was like he wasn’t even listening. We waited intently to see what he’d say, as if it depended on him whether God existed. The one who’d asked him repeated his question.

“What do you say, master? Does He exist or not?”

“Who?” he finally said.

“God.”

He didn’t answer right away, first he crushed his cigarette out.

“Why are you asking me? Why are you asking them? You don’t need to take a vote. You should ask yourself. Me, all I can tell you is that where I was, He wasn’t there.”

He lit up yet again. Everyone went quiet, no one dared ask any more questions. No one said anything at all to anyone else. A moment later they started falling asleep. Here you could hear a whistling sound, over there someone breathing more loudly. I was wondering if the master was asleep, because no sound came from his bed. But he also hadn’t lit another cigarette.

As for me, I couldn’t get to sleep. My head was spinning with thoughts from the conversation, because for me all the things they’d been talking about were kind of beyond the bounds of my imagination. And the thing that troubled me the most was where the master could have been, that God wasn’t there.

The next day I went to him for advice because the fuses kept blowing when I’d turn on this three-way switch. And I asked him:

“Where were you?”

He gave me a suspicious look.

“I hope you never have to go there.” After which he grunted: “Get back to work. You know what you need to do.”

As far as the saxophone was concerned, I was managing to put more and more aside every month. I never missed the chance for overtime. In addition, in the evenings or on Sundays there was work on the side. I wouldn’t take moonshine in payment, only money. I preferred getting paid less but that it be in cash. I could wait, but let it be cash. In pretty much every village there was
always someone wanted us to put in a second switch, a second outlet, and for each switch or outlet you’d have to do the wiring. According to the regulations, which is to say, at the lower cost, they were only allowed one switch and one outlet per room. And hallways, pantries, attics weren’t allowed, or anywhere else. The attics you could understand, in most of the houses the attic was under a thatched roof, if there’d been a short circuit the house would have gone up like kindling. But for example, why should you have to walk down the hallway in darkness, groping for the door handle? Or take an oil lamp to the pantry, when there’s electricity in the house?

So we’d install things wherever people wanted them. Privately, it goes without saying. If someone wanted it in the hallway, in their pantry, over the front door, say the word and it’ll be done. For so and so much. Someone wanted to have an extension out to their cattle shed, why not, that could be done. It was rare, but some people asked for that. In one village someone even wanted us to put in an extension to his barn, because he’d bought an electric motor on the cheap, and he wanted to convert his thresher and winnowing machine to electricity instead of keeping on using the treadmill. We did it. He just had to wait a bit till we were able to siphon off some of the materials from the official allocations. But we also did installations in attics under the thatch if people wanted. You’d wrap the cable in an additional layer of insulating tape, feed it through an insulated tube that was made of metal, but properly lined, and attach it on elevated brackets at the necessary distance from the thatch, along a beam, while the switch would be put in on the chimney flue. And nothing untoward would happen. With private work there were no restrictions. As you know, things that were not possible officially were possible unofficially.

Not everyone was in favor of electricity, though, far from it. Some folks wouldn’t even give permission for a pole to be put up outside their house. What, I’m supposed to stare at a pole for the rest of my life? The hell with that! It’s my land up to the middle of the road. There were times they came after us with pickaxes, we had to call the police. They wouldn’t let us into their homes, they’d
drive us off like thieves. Especially because with the houses, they weren’t being forced. If someone didn’t want electricity, that was their business. How did they explain it? In different ways. That there’d be another war soon, just you wait. And in wartime oil lamps are your best bet. If you run out of kerosene you can burn linseed oil. You just had to plant flax. Of all the different kinds of light, the most reliable were the sun, as long as God was willing, and oil lamps. It doesn’t need to be as bright in the night as during the day. It’s enough if it’s light during the day, nighttime is for sleeping. Were we trying to turn the world upside down? With all these poles and wires? What if the sparrows and the swallows sit on them? They’ll get burned to cinders. It’ll draw lightning. Sickness too, maybe. The sicknesses we already have are more than enough. You wouldn’t earn anything extra from those kinds of people, of course. But in general you didn’t do too badly with the private jobs. For millers, for example, before the government took over the mills. In the presbyteries and churches. Though with the priests you could never be sure. They’d always get away with a God bless you.

So one time when I counted up again how much I’d put aside for the saxophone, it seemed like it might actually be enough. I had no idea of the price of a saxophone. I started asking around among the musicians in the villages. They could tell me the price of a harmonica or fiddle or clarinet, but most of them had never even heard of a saxophone. Well, I took one day off and headed for the nearest town. There was a music shop, but they didn’t have any saxophones, nor did they know how much one might cost, especially now after the war. So some time later I took myself to another town, a bigger one. They didn’t have one either, but they promised to find out how much one might be, they might even try to order one if they could. They’d also ask around privately, maybe someone would have one, because from time to time people brought them instruments to sell. I gave them my name. I wanted to leave a down payment but they wouldn’t take it. They said to try back in a month or two. If one came in they’d set it aside.

You have no idea how much each night before I fell asleep I’d imagine hanging that saxophone around my neck, putting the mouthpiece between my lips,
running my fingers over the keys. I even decided that when I finally got it, I’d throw a drinking party to celebrate and get drunk myself.

All of a sudden, out of the blue one day, someone heard on the corn cob that there was going to be a change of currency. What’s the corn cob? Not the airplane, they also gave that name to the radio speakers that were put in people’s homes, only if they wanted of course, where they already had electricity. And the new currency, you know what that was about? Not just that there were going to be different banknotes. It was that with the new ones you could buy three times less. You never heard of a change like that? Where were you then? Though never mind that. In any case, a saxophone was out of the question now. To be honest, I didn’t even feel angry. I didn’t feel anything at all. The only thing I felt was that I had no reason to go on living. So I decided to hang myself.

That day we were working on a transformer pole. Transformer poles look like giant As. They’re made of two poles that come together at the top, while lower down they’re reinforced by a linking horizontal crossbeam. I was going to use that beam. The previous day I borrowed a halter from one of the farmers. Towards evening, when I was through with work I put my tools away in the toolbag and dropped it to the ground. I tied one end of the halter to the crossbeam and made a noose in the other end. I put the noose around my neck and I was about to pull my spiked boots clear of the pole when I glanced down at the ground and I saw Uncle Jan. He was standing with his head tipped back, watching what I was doing. No, it wasn’t an illusion. I saw him plain as I see you now.

“Don’t do it,” he said. “I hanged myself, and I don’t see any difference.”

No, I stopped saving up for a saxophone. Besides, pretty soon I starting working on a building site, and when I got my first wages I bought myself a hat. Why a hat? I don’t know. Maybe I had to buy something so I wouldn’t be tempted to save up for a saxophone again. And maybe it was a hat because when I was still in school I’d made up my mind to buy a hat once I had a saxophone. Saxophone and hat, I used to like to see myself that way when I imagined myself.

They once brought this film to show at the school. There’s a big hat shop, a man and a woman come in, his name is Johnny and she’s Mary, and the guy wants to buy a hat. He starts trying them on, while Mary sits down in an armchair and buries herself in a magazine. It was the first film I’d ever seen in my life. So when he was trying on all those hats I had the impression that he wasn’t trying them on on the screen, but that he was with us in the rec room. Or that we were all in the shop where he was trying on hats.

He tried hat after hat, while Mary, who by the way was a stunner, was sitting in the armchair like I said, her nose in the magazine. She was wearing furs, her legs were crossed, she wore a chic pair of pumps.

I don’t know if you’ll agree with me on this, but a woman’s legs make or break the whole. And as long as she’s wearing nice shoes, everything else can even be
very plain. Her face can be plain if the legs are OK. But she has to be wearing nice shoes. You rarely see legs like that anymore. Most all women go around in pants, and even if they’re in a dress they often wear the kind of shoes that remind you of wartime. Plus, these days hardly any of them can walk the way a woman ought to walk. Have you seen how women walk today? Take a look some time. They jerk their legs, stomp their feet. They’re more like soldiers than women. Even here, they’re in bathing suits and barefoot but most of them still walk around that way. And not on concrete but on earth, on grass. A movie director abroad once told me he couldn’t find an actress to play the part of a princess in a movie. The faces were right but not the walk.

So anyway, Mary was so engrossed in her magazine that she wasn’t paying any attention whatsoever to the man. And he kept trying on hats. In each one he would stand longer and longer in front of the mirror, and seemed less and less sure whether he should say, this one might work, or take it off and ask for another one, or study himself in the mirror a bit longer. He’d tried quite a few already, but he evidently didn’t like himself in any of them because he kept asking to see something else. And the clerk, he didn’t bat an eyelid and just kept bringing one new hat after another. Also, each time he brought a new hat he’d smile and give a half-bow. And even though the man could see himself full length in the mirror, the clerk still went around him with a hand mirror, holding it up to one side then the other, now in front of his face, now from behind so he could see how he looked in the reflection of the hand mirror in the big mirror in front of him. Each time, he’d sing the praises of each hat equally while the man was trying it on:

“Take a look now, sir. And now. Tip it forward a little over the forehead. Tip it back a little. A little to the side, a little this way, a little that way. Perfect, just perfect. It goes ideally with your face, sir. With your forehead, your eyes, eyebrows, and so on. Perfect.”

In retrospect I’m sure it must have been a comedy. But at the time it didn’t make me laugh in the slightest. Every hat that Johnny took off and handed back
to the clerk was a personal loss for me. Evidently laughter doesn’t depend on what you see and hear. Laughter is people’s ability to protect themselves from the world, from themselves. To deprive them of that ability is to make them defenseless. And that’s how I was. I simply didn’t know how to laugh. It even seemed strange to me that anyone could ever laugh at anything. Most of us who’d found ourselves in that school were the same. Though not all of us, it goes without saying. Some of them were able to laugh even when they were in lockup.

So at the film, some boys were laughing their heads off. But it wasn’t just laughing. Behind the laughter you could sense a growing rage, a resentment. With every hat the man tried on, amid the laughter there were oaths, insults directed at him, at the clerk, and above all at Mary, for losing herself in her magazine and not helping the man. She was just sitting there like me or you. If she’d at least have raised her eyes, said he looked good or didn’t, that that one was worse, the other one was better. Then she could have gone back to her reading.

The rec room was packed, you can imagine what was going on. The moment the guy didn’t like himself in one of the hats there were shouts, whistles, stamping of feet. It was getting louder and louder, more and more bitter, especially because it made no impression on him at all. He even hesitated a tad longer before saying no to this one after all, for some reason or other. The clerk continued to bend in a half-bow, with the same smile on his face, agreeing with the man.

“You’re absolutely right, sir. It really is a little too dark. Really is a little too light. The shade isn’t quite right. The style isn’t quite right. The brim’s a little too wide. With your face, this hat isn’t quite right. Never mind. Let’s see what else there is.”

By this point the room was in uproar. To be honest I was even starting to be a bit afraid. Meanwhile the clerk was going off and bringing a new hat, with the same hope that for sure the man would like this one.

The whole countertop was piled high with the hats he’d tried on, since the clerk set all the hats there in a heap so the man wouldn’t have to wait too long.
If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I’d never have been able to imagine so many hats in one place. And all for the head of some guy named Johnny. If he’d at least have been someone. But he was no one in particular. He was just like you or me. I mean I’m sorry, I’m not trying to insult you, but the clerk wouldn’t have known who you are if you’d gone in and said you wanted to buy a hat. All the more if it had been me. Though you he might have recognized. Hat shop clerks are smart people. I knew a guy like that.